Word: smit
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Sneaker Wars By Barbara Smit Ecco; 383 pages...
What does David Beckham's superstardom have to do with a pair of warring Bavarian brothers in the early 1900s? More than you think, according to this compelling book. Smit tells the story of Adi and Rudi Dassler, partners after World War I in a sports-shoe factory in tiny Herzogenaurach, Germany. The two got their spiked running shoes onto the feet of Olympic star Jesse Owens in 1936, but a bitter family feud soon split their business in half, resulting in the founding of Adidas (Adi's outfit) and Puma (Rudi's company). The whole town got into...
...late 1990s, Tim Smit--an archaeologist turned pop-music producer--decided to build a new Eden. The Dutch-born Englishman envisioned a grand environmental-education park in the depressed southwestern English county of Cornwall--with the world's biggest greenhouses as its centerpiece. All he needed was the money. Smit turned to private funders and gave them a professional pitch. "I told them, 'We are going to build the Eighth Wonder of the World in a clay pit west of Cornwall, it's going to be wonderful, and you'll want to be a part of it,'" he says. "'Also...
...rights, the Eden Project should have been a commercial disaster, as even its founder admits. "All environmental-science centers go bust because they're boring as s___," Smit says. But Eden wasn't boring, and it didn't go bust. The park has pulled in more than 9 million visitors since it opened, and it's still one of Britain's top attractions, more popular than the Tower of London. It helps that Eden is visually stunning. Visitors descend into the former clay hole, now landscaped and studded with native vegetation, to arrive at the main attraction: two honeycombed domes...
...every Briton is ready to join the environmental monkhood. There would go the budget holiday flights to Ibiza, for one thing. But to Smit, it's the spirit that matters, a spirit embodied in his Eden. "It's a horrible cliché, but part of our goal is to remake the world," he says. "We're here to help people realize that if they each do a few things, then times 6 billion, that adds...