This Just in: New Non-Fiction Books at the Milton Public Library

The following is a list of non-fiction books, which were recently added to the Milton Public Library’s collection. The descriptions are from the Old Colony Library Network’s website.

Shouting won't help: why I - and 50 million other Americans - can't hear you by Katherine Bouton

For twenty-two years, Katherine Bouton had a secret that grew harder to keep every day. An editor atThe New York Times, at daily editorial meetings she couldn’t hear what her colleagues were saying. She had gone profoundly deaf in her left ear; her right was getting worse. As she once put it, she was “the kind of person who might have used an ear trumpet in the nineteenth century.”

Audiologists agree that we’re experiencing a national epidemic of hearing impairment. At present, 50 million Americans suffer some degree of hearing loss—17 percent of the population. And hearing loss is not exclusively a product of growing old. The usual onset is between the ages of nineteen and forty-four, and in many cases the cause is unknown.

Shouting Won’t Help is a deftly written, deeply felt look at a widespread and misunderstood phenomenon. In the style of Jerome Groopman and Atul Gawande, and using her experience as a guide, Bouton examines the problem personally, psychologically, and physiologically. She speaks with doctors, audiologists, and neurobiologists, and with a variety of people afflicted with midlife hearing loss, braiding their stories with her own to illuminate the startling effects of the condition.

The result is a surprisingly engaging account of what it’s like to live with an invisible disability—and a robust prescription for our nation’s increasing problem with deafness.

The art of the sale: learning from the masters about the business of life by Philip Delves Broughton

When Philip Delves Broughton went to Harvard Business School, an experience he wrote about in his New York Times bestseller Ahead of the Curve, he was baffled to find that sales was not on the curriculum.  Why not, he wondered?  Sales plays a part in everything we do-not just in clinching a deal but in convincing people of an argument, getting a job, attracting a mate, or getting a child to eat his broccoli.  Well, he thought; he’d just have to assemble his own master class in the art of selling.  And so he did, setting out on a remarkable pilgrimage to find the world’s great wizards of sales. 

Great selling is an art that demands creativity, mindfulness, selflessness, and resilience; but anyone who says you can become a great salesperson in 15 minutes is either a charlatan or a fool.  The more Delves Broughton traveled and listened, the more he found a wealth of applicable insight.  In Morocco, he found the master rug merchant who thrives in Kasbah by using age-old principles to read his customers.  In Tampa, he met with Tony Sullivan, king of the infomercial, and learned the importance of creating a good narrative to selling effectively.  In a sold-out seminar with sales guru Jeffrey Gitomer, he uncovered the ways successful selling approaches religion, inspiring faith and even a sense of duty in customers.  From celebrity art dealer Larry Gagosian to the most successful saleswoman in Japan, Broughton tracked down anyone who would help him understand what it took to achieve greatness in sales. 

Though sales is the engine of commerce and industry-more Americans work in sales than in manufacturing, marketing, or finance-it remains shrouded in myth. The Art of the Sale is a powerful beam of light onto the field, a wise and winning tour of the best in show of this endeavor which is nothing less than the means by which all of us, one way or another, get our way in the world.