Mediocrity, Leadership, Persuasion

The trouble with Reid Buckley is that he cannot resist telling a good story…and this essay contains several of them. It is also highly instructive and an indispensable companion to his The Art of Persuasion. ---Edmund L. Zuckerman, President, Permanent Ad Hoc Committee Against Boring Authors
Good Taste Doesn’t Sell
On the other hand
Bad Taste Sells Loads

Reid Buckley at his funniest, describing his misadventures as an entrepreneur in Spain. The picture he paints is of a bemused innocent caught in the cogs and wheels of a maligned destiny that will surely destroy him. Hilarious! ---Edmund L. Zuckerman, President, Permanent Ad Hoc Committee Against Boring Authors
Death and Dominguín
and other tales about bullfighting

“A two-year-old Spanish Fighting Bull is fully armed. Its horns are about as large as they need to get. They are commonly shaped like the two tined wooden pitchforks one still sees on Spanish farms. The points are somewhat blunter than the point of an ice pick. The tips are often a dull, gleaming blue black. The tips are as often colored a dully ivory. They catch the sun. They bounce pebbles of light from the sun.”
The long lead article on doomed bullfighter Dominguín is gripping and at times terrifying. The insights on Ernest Hemingway and his headlong rush to self-destruction are controversial but interesting. The other articles in this collection will mostly interest fans of that sanguinary spectacle, which I, for one, cannot abide. ---Edmund L. Zuckerman, President, Permanent Ad Hoc Committee Against Boring Authors
This distillation of Reid Buckley’s analysis of the art of persuasion (dedicated to Dan Rather) is essential reading for anyone who wishes to prevail in a board meeting, in a committee, on radio or television, before a crowd in a lecture hall or theater, or in the privacy of one’s office, dealing with close colleagues.

How does one actually get under the skin of other people and turn them to your way of thinking? For that answer, read this essay.
This haunting tale concentrates the last fury and malice of Nazi Germany on the pinnacle of a lonely mountain. It is gripping.
This seminal address was delivered first in 1999 at Hillsdale College, then redrafted and delivered at the University of Richmond shortly after 9-11-01. It is incorporated as the first chapter in USA Today, but can be purchased separately.
This is an invaluable pamphlet for women speakers to take with them always and to check carefully before delivering any presentation. As with all Reid Buckley’s work, it is both informative and funny.