What Happens Under Pressure

By PHILIP DELVES BROUGHTON

The Wall Street Journal, SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

"It is a situation we have all witnessed or experienced firsthand. The make-or-break moment arrives. The decisive at-bat, the well-rehearsed concert performance, the public speech. Then suddenly—aaarggh. It all goes wrong. The ball whistles past, the fingers slide all over the keyboard, the voice becomes an inarticulate mumble. You are now a choker. You have failed in the clutch.

... For people in the world of business, Ms. Beilock's recommendations include careful and repeated practice; writing down your worries to make them explicit and to stop them distracting you under stress; and not worrying about what you cannot control. In sports, she recommends distracting yourself so that you don't over-think your mechanics; keeping a steady rhythm; and...

The Non-Economist's Economist

By JAMES GRANT,

The Wall Street Journal,  SEPTEMBER 25, 2010

" ...This new collection of Galbraith's works is the first of its kind. Never before in 207 previous titles had the Library of America chosen to publish an economist. Then, again, Galbraith, who died in 2006, at age 97, was the noneconomist's economist. In these pages you will find the minimum of technical jargon and not one differential equation. Collected are "American Capitalism," first published in 1952; the "Great Crash"; "The Affluent Society," which dates from 1958; and "The New Industrial State," which first appeared in 1967...."

For the rest of the article, click here.

Click here to listen to Sian Beilock, author of CHOKE:  What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To talk  about why we "choke" when stressed. She paints a portrait of how people handle -- successfully or unsuccessfully -- life's daily pressures.

Dear Foreign Publishers and Agents,

Though The Strothman Agency, LLC won’t be attending Frankfurt this year, we would be happy to email you a copy of our rights guides. Please email info(At)strothmanagency(dot)com and specify whether you would like to see the guides for the Children’s or Adult titles, or both. We look forward to seeing you in London.

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The Strothman Agency

Fiction: Mystery/Crime: Stanford Law professor and author of Errors and Omissions, Paul Goldstein's HAVANA RUM, to Thomas LeBien at Farrar, Straus, in a two-book deal, by Wendy Strothman at The Strothman Agency (World English).

Jonathan Hansen’s GUANTANAMO BAY AND THE MAKING OF MODERN AMERICA, the first full history of Guantanamo’s transformation from bay to U.S. naval base to prison camp, Guantanamo’s role in transforming the United States from isolated colonial outpost to global superpower, and Cuba’s attempts to realize its independence from U.S. imperialism, at auction, to Dan Crissman at Hill and Wang, in a very nice deal, by Wendy Strothman of The Strothman Agency.

High Strung

The inexplicable collapse of a tennis phenom

By Tom Perrotta, The Atlantic

"... I asked Sian Beilock, a psychologist at the University of Chicago and the author of the forthcoming book Choke, how world-class athletes like Ivanovic, who have spent thousands of hours perfecting a skill, could flail so helplessly. Her answer was deceptively simple: they’re thinking too much. To hit a 120-mph serve, a player must allow the body to do what it has been trained to do. Thinking mid-serve causes “paralysis by analysis,” an attack on performance by the prefrontal cortex, which, in an attempt to control closely synchronized neural activities and muscle twitches, instead sabotages them. “We all know how to shuffle down the stairs,” Beilock told me. “But if I ask you to think about how your knee is bending while you do it, there’s a good...

How To Raise A Superstar

"Ada Copeland, an African-American woman born in Georgia just months before that state seceded from the Union, moved to New York City in the mid-1880s. There, she met a man named James Todd. He was light-skinned, handsome, had a good job for an African-American man in that time — a Pullman porter.

They hit it off, and eventually married. They had five children and a house in Brooklyn. Their story would be unremarkable if not for one detail: Nothing James had told his future wife was true.

"James Todd was really not black, he was not a Pullman porter, and he was not even James Todd," author Martha Sandweiss tells NPR's Steve Inskeep. "He was in fact Clarence King, a very well-educated white explorer who was truly a famous man in late 19th century America."

Famously connected, too: "Two of his closest friends were Henry Adams — the grandson and great-grandson of presidents — and John Hay,...

Martha A. Sandweiss will be on Morning Edition on Wednesday, Aug. 18 to talk about PASSING STRANGE: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (Penguin, ISBN 9780143116868) and the secret double life of the man who mapped the American West.