Free titles by Shepherd Mead

[kg3]

--http://www.amazon.com/The-Admen-A-Novel-ebook/dp/B008JK2CAE

-This was previously published in 1958 by Simon & Schuster. This is the author of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

Book Description:

This is a novel about the men and women who work in the advertising business—not mythical creatures in a world of sincere neckties and gaudy jargon, but ambitious and nervy people who have elected to work in an industry where the pressure is terrific, where the risks and rewards are uncommonly high. Here is how they move to the top, how they stay there, and how sometimes, they don't stay there.

Branch Torrey, the head of the agency, is a big, decent, unsubtle man whose advertising ideas are plain and obvious, what the trade calls "buckeye": the hard sell, the large claim, the headline in heavy black type, with an exclamation point. Through a combination of simple shrewdness and bulldozer drive, he has pushed his agency to the top.

Against a bitingly authentic background of agency-client meetings, "wild blue yonder" sessions, and agency hierarchy, Shepherd Mead tells the story of Branch Torrey and the people whose lives he dominates—Sherwood Ernst, the executive in a perpetual, low-pressure dread of losing his job; Finn Fraser, the copywriter who has been with six agencies in seven years (his ambition now is merely to hang on and not slip back into alcoholism); Grace Darrow, the soap-and-foods copy expert, a sweet and good-natured woman beneath whose impulse to comfort unhappy men is a shy bubble of biology; Jim Wetsel, former almost-All-American tackle, serious-minded and uncomplicated (he is expected to go far in the business); and Chip Sterling, part genius, part man-about-town, the antithesis of Branch Torrey—Sterling hopes to be as successful in his bid for power as he has been in his pursuit of Torrey's wife.

The author of this novel knows the advertising world, its people, and its climate of crisis. In "The Admen," he gives us an exciting view of that world—and, in Branch Torrey, a superb portrait of the powerful businessman whose employees have a measure of hostility for The Boss, but rely on him, when the storm signals are out, to keep everybody afloat.

About the Author:

Shepherd Mead, author of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying that inspired the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical of the same name, was one of those men dogged by success. Born in St. Louis in April 1914, Mead attended Washington University. Upon graduation he went to New York to practice being an intellectual and ended up as a junior executive and then a vice president of Benton & Bowles. His biting attacks against society only gained him greater fame and success, and he finally resigned and fled to Europe with his wife and three children in 1957. He spent a year in Geneva and then went to England in 1958. Mead died in London, England at his flat overlooking the beautiful Hurlingham Club by the Thames on August 15, 1994 at the age of 80.

[LovesMacs]

I just checked this and it is currently $2.99 for purchase, free for Kindle Prime members.

[spindlegirl]

Wow that was quick, I nabbed it for 0.00 this morning, and already the price is back up!

[mitford13]

I picked this up yesterday, so I think kg3 just picked it up late in the 24-hour cycle.
I've seen his books as freebies fairly frequently though (have picked up 4 since May); I'll keep an eye out and post here when I see them again.

[mitford13]

Another Shepherd Mead title is free today:

The Big Ball of Wax: A Novel of Tomorrow's Happy World

Were you disturbed by 1984? Here is what could happen if things turned out the other way.

In the happy world of 1992, breakfast foods are ready-chewed for hurried mornings, human beings smell like pine trees, and the constellation PEPSI COLA wheels around in the sky.

Everything is so wonderful—until a delectable young lady named Molly Blood comes along with something called XP. It stands for Experience, for utter ecstasy for everybody by electrical current. In fact, it's so beautiful that people are terrified and have to take violent action.

[kg3]

FREE at Amazon:

-How to Get to the Future Before It Gets to You - Shepherd Mead (Originally Published in 1974)

Amazon US---Amazon UK

In this challenging book the author of the celebrated best-selling book, How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (which inspired the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical), provides a daring and amusing antidote to those Doomsday prophets who believe that man is destined to destroy himself and planet earth.

Shepherd Mead quickly proves that "natural" isn't necessarily good; demonstrates how to use "population" against people (or just how many can we stand?); and describes how to become a scourge of environment-busters.

Highlighting his narrative with amusing and telling anecdotes, Mr. Mead discusses new energy concepts, sophisticated waste disposal systems that reclaim everything (even the garbage), frozen and instant electricity, multispectral photography, and some far-out ideas of his own in the area of communications and do-it-yourself ecology.

[mitford13]

This one is free on Amazon US & UK today:

"Dudley, There Is No Tomorrow!" "Then How About This Afternoon?"

It is almost impossible to describe the wild and unconventional hilarity of this novel by the author of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. With a Great Gatsby atmosphere and Goonish pace, it tells of a crumbling Long Island Railway station beside the glittering North Shore, where no train stops, or ever will again. Once the station was worthless: now (some say) it is beyond price.

Here is a wide variety of rare fauna: on the one hand a corpse, on the other a very alive ex-wife, to say nothing of two members of an entirely new species of aunt, who will not remind you of any of your relations. Finally, there is a blonde priestess of erotic balneal rites, an ex-long-distance swimming star believed to hold a valuable clue to what's going on, whatever that is.

And through it all—for just six days!—wanders DUDLEY, bringing with him the priceless gift of catastrophe.

"DUDLEY" is prime comic invention—and also a savage satirical portrait of American organization man, at home. You'll find the adventures of Dudley the funniest (and also the most serious) writing to come from one of the wisest and wittiest men, Shepherd Mead.

[mitford13]

Another title free today on Amazon:

How to Succeed at Business Spying by Trying: A Novel About Industrial Espionage

Amazon UK

Spy, counterspy, Casanova, and technological Machiavelli, Mark Price is an agent for big business's latest headache, Industrial Espionage. His exploits as he goes about exposing a monstrous conspiracy against the industrial heart of America are at once wild, hilarious, and deadly serious. Along the way he tangles with an assortment of zany characters, including a trio of engagingly odd and highly sexed charmers and a patriarchal embodiment of the American Dream, before his ingenious sleuthing culminates in a shattering climax in the best comic tradition of the Marx brothers.