Word: salesmanship
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Woodstock '94 becomes a triumph of salesmanship over spirit, blame it on the curious times in which we now live. Hipness has become a national paradox, a special condition almost everyone seems to aspire to. And one that, thanks to a lot of shrewd marketing, almost everyone can fancy having achieved...
...performance. There are also moments when Wills strains mightily to make a case, notably in the chapter on Perot. Wills argues that Perot, who built Electronic Data Systems into a multibillion-dollar enterprise before peddling it to GM, improved on the theories of two corporate legends who made salesmanship a near science: John Henry Patterson of National Cash Register and Thomas Watson of IBM. Perhaps so, but even by Wills' narrow definition of business leadership -- that it mostly has to do with selling -- someone like Bill Gates of Microsoft, who had much more originality than Perot and built a much...
...when they weren't dreaming about those slave-girls they bought in Cairo). At the same time, he knows his surroundings well enough to misrepresent them subtly: Damascus appears slightly trated up for the Western reader, slightly more quaint and foreign than it actually is. A sly native salesmanship pervades the book, turning everyday Syrian banalities into a world of mystery and intrigue...
...again, Schami's narrative tactic seems more like salesmanship. He uses this structure not for any purpose so much as to revel in it for its sake. Modern authors like Calvino use a similar framework to lay bare all the peculiar social and intellectual conventions of reading , to strike at the very heart of our understanding of narrative, to unravel the fabric of reality-to bring the universe of perception to its knees. Schami uses it because it's cool and exotic...
...Weight Watchers Super Start program infomercial. Mel Harris joins Victoria Principal to pitch skin-care products; Dionne Warwick offers us psychic phenomena; Ali McGraw hawks more beautifiers, all in program-length commercials. This month Joan Rivers converted her daytime talk show into a new program combining gab with salesmanship, aptly titled Can We Shop. Even Roseanne and Tom Arnold have found time for a potentially lucrative sideline: in April they will begin appearing on a new home-shopping channel called ViaTV, promoting their line of his-and-hers large-size clothing (including the Roseanne After Eight collection...