Word: keegan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...says Panera founder, chairman and CEO Ron Shaich. In an environment where even McDonald's, once a recession superstar, is reporting negative same-store sales (down 0.6% in November), Panera's continued growth stands out. "I've never seem restaurants this competitive," says Bob Derrington, an analyst at Morgan Keegan and a 30-year veteran of the industry. "It's a flea market out there. For Panera to keep their prices and still succeed like this - it's an astounding achivement." (See the best business deals...
From The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron. Copyright © 2009 by Rebecca Keegan. To be published by the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House...
...lonely up there at 6 ft. 2 in. and at the pinnacle of athletic achievement--and a writer could spend her whole career trying to craft a line that says so while also being deadpan hilarious. This is Keegan's debut, and she doesn't even hang out at the pool. ("I don't like chlorine," she says in a promotional video clip about the book. "It makes my eyes sting.") Nevertheless, she has written an ambitious and exhilarating novel about a girl for whom swimming is as vital as breathing...
This territory could get mawkish fast but for the muscular energy of Keegan's prose. It works in bursts--short, punchy clauses and chapters--and Pip's voice is wryly comic, even when events turn tragic. When things go well, she's gloriously, darkly intuitive. (Here she is on the Olympic podium: "The national anthem starts to wail, creating a dreaded musical pressure in my chest as the flag slowly rises in a celebrating-the-dead kind of way. Something churns and my mind says: Wow! This is exactly like a giant funeral!") And for a world-class swimmer...
...Keegan is smart about where she roots the suspense in her novel. Pip's Olympic quest may be ripped from Michael Phelps' headlines, but we don't have to sweat a photo finish. We know she'll get gold from the epigraph, a quote from her coach that's another deliciously ironic swipe at the double-edged sword of accomplishment: "If this exceptional athlete wore all the Olympic gold medals she has won in her long career and jumped find a pool, she would sink." What we find out is how much Pip's triumphs cost and how they change...