I’ve got a collection of links to some great blog postings about some of my esteemed coauthors that I’ve been meaning to pass on:

Dave Krueger on TIME Magazine’s “Cheapskate Blog”

A great Q&A on The Secret Language of Money: Dave Krueger answers your questions on Time magazine’s “Cheapskate Blog.”

Cameron Johnson Awarded National Honor

My You Call the Shots coauthor Cameron Johnson was just named one of Ten Outstanding Young Americans by the Junior Chambers (Jaycees), joining a lineup that in the past has included such figures as John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Henry Ford II, Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, and Joe Biden. Oh, and also Ann Bancroft and Elvis Presley.

Cameron Johnson on CNBC

A few weeks ago Cameron spent a few minutes with Mark Haines and Maria Bartiromo.

Mark Siljander on Al Jazeer

While traveling in Dohar, Qatar a few weeks ago, my A Deadly Misunderstanding coauthor Mark Siljander was featured on Aljezeera.net.

The interview is in Arabic — but you can also see a fair-to-middling translation here.

Mark, by the way, is going to be a guest on the highly-rated faith-oriented TBN on September 24 on “Praise the Lord” with Paul Crouch, Jr., at 7 p.m. Pacific time.

Tonight I spent an hour on live radio with Dr. Lisa Allen, with whom I spent a delightful hour a month ago talking about The Go-Giver.

Tonight, though, we were talking about The Secret Language of Money.

I got to talk about:

• why money is like food (hint: it should be simple, but isn’t);
• how we each pack a concealed gun when we enter the ape colony;
• why we think we need to earn twice as much as we do (regardless of how much that is);
• how my mom spending $20 on a piano tuning when all our family had to our name was $22 changed my life;
• the two things you need to do in order to embrace abundance;
• what is the single most important key to creating health in your financial life.

And yes, that last one comes right at the end. ☺

You can hear the whole thing here:

Psst … wanna know a secret?

I just came out with a new book.

It’s called The Secret Language of Money, and it’s all about the secrets you and I are keeping from ourselves—secrets about money, what we think about it, and the crazy things we do with it.

Here’s a quick behind-the-scenes peek at how this book came to be.

When psychiatrist and CEO coach David Krueger, M.D., first started submitting his “Your Story” columns to Networking Times a few years ago, I was intrigued. We connected over a few editorial questions (mostly me writing him and telling him how much I was loving editing his stuff), and got to know each other. Come to find out, Dave was working on this idea for a book and, well, the secret language of money.

You’ve probably guessed the rest.

Fast forward: August 6, 2008, we sign a contract with McGraw-Hill. Two days later I meet Dave face to face for the first time: at my wedding. Rarely has champagne been more aptly timed.

At the wedding Dave also met two other people for the first time: Donna DeGutis, my intrepid agent (of the Margret McBride Literary Agency), who midwifed the deal from start to finish; and Dan Clements, my great friend, one-time screenwriting classmate, and now writing partner. Dan and I worked together on the book, and although I get cover credit and he gets only an “Acknowledgments” credit, he contributed a lot and I honestly don’t think the book would’ve happened without him.

It was one heckuva wedding — and now, a year later, the book is written, edited, designed, printed, and ready for your enjoyment.

Enjoy!

Exactly one year ago, almost to the minute as I write this, Ana and I were being married. Yes, today is our first wedding anniversary — and as fate would have it, we are on opposite sides of the globe!

It couldn’t be helped: Ana’s in Singapore speaking at an international conference on network marketing, and I’m in Massachusetts scribbling away on a new book on leadership due at the publisher’s Sept 1.

Happily, Skype makes full-screen, real-time audiovisual visitation possible.

We had all sorts of plans for renewing our vows — Hawaii? La Jolla? the Caribbean? Kazakhstan? (just kidding on that last one) — but as it turns out, we are renewing our vows in none of those exotic places. Instead, we are renewing them in an even more exotic place:

Right here. Right now.

At the center of our wedding ceremony, at St. James Episcopal Church in Greenfield, Massachusetts on August 8, 2008, Ana and I spoke vows to each other that we had each composed just a few days earlier. Here they are, as we say them all over again:

John to Ana

This week we discovered that a beautiful little cardinal had died at the edge of our yard, and you were grief-stricken. Scripture claims that when any event befalls even the smallest sparrow, God knows it, and while we mortals may not know it, I believe that you feel it. You are the most tender-hearted person I have ever known, and I love you for this more than numbers can calculate or sentences parse.

You are brilliant; you are gorgeous; you are multitalented; you are hilarious; you are a person of deep thought and even deeper thoughtfulness. You are a passionate gardener and delicious writer, an artist in more domains than I can count. I love to cook with you, to shop with you, to walk with you, to talk with you, to laugh with you and — especially — to make you laugh, yes, even when they are laughs of sympathy for my lamest attempts at genuine comic brilliance. I love you for all these things and a myriad more — but more than any of these, I love you for your heart, for the way you feel the world and everyone in it.

And the truly amazing thing in all this, is that you evidently love me.

All my life, I have felt like a radar putting out a beacon signal into the night sky, not knowing whether or not it would ever be returned, or even received. When I met you, to my absolute amazement, I found this beacon signal received and returned. You are the answer to a question I have lived since I was born but never knew how to put into words.

The world is sometimes a large and daunting place, at turns lonely and intimidating, brutal and perplexing, and it is all too easy for us frail humans to feel lost and windblown. But when I look into your face, and you into mine, I am home, I am safe, I am found.

I will forever be grateful to the month of August: it was in August that I met you, and in August that we stand here now and declare the truth of us in the eyes of God and our dearest friends.

Here is my vow:

I want to be your friend, confidante, lover and companion.

I want to grow old with you, holding your hand and feeling your hand holding mine.

I want you to be my wife.

And I promise to love, honor and cherish you all my days.

Ana to John

My dearest sweetheart John,

I love you so dearly. You are the most loving person I’ve ever known. You are kind in ways that surprise me every day. And you are considerate in all things. You have an amazing wit and humor. You are a brilliant artist and writer, and I am in awe of your creativity. You are my best friend, my companion, my love, and the person to whom I truly can let my heart speak. You are the most authentic person I know, and I love that about you. You tell me your truth, you share your inner thoughts, you ask for my advice, and I can always seek your counsel and know that you will hold my deepest fears and most vulnerable feelings.

I love you. I will always love you. I want to be your best friend, your deepest love, the person that you always turn to. I want to cook for you, listen to you, encourage you to realize your dreams, take care of you, love you and cherish you.

I have waited my whole life for you. I thank God for bringing you to me.

Thank you for loving me. You are my greatest treasure.

I vow to be your friend, your confidante, lover and companion.

I want you to be my husband.

And I promise to love, honor and cherish you all my days.

Thanks for joining us in our online renewal of our vows! (Next year, we’ll do it in person!)

In today’s edition of The Washington Times there is a stunning review of A Deadly Misunderstanding by veteran foreign correspondent and three-time Pulitzer nominee Martin Sieff.

While you can go read the full text here, Mr. Sieff’s review is so articulate and impassioned that I feel compelled to reprint it in full below.

Book Review: From Enmity to Friendship
A Deadly Misunderstanding: A Congressman’s Quest to Bridge the Muslim-Christian Divide
By Mark D. Siljander
HarperCollins, New York, $24.95, 260 pages
Reviewed by Martin Sieff | Friday, August 7, 2009
The Washington Times

As the first decade of the 21st century draws to a close, the issues of global war and peace hinge to an unprecedented degree on the vast chasm between the Christian and Muslim faiths. Mark D. Siljander’s remarkable new book, therefore, could not be more timely.

Books preaching interfaith good will and reconciliation, of course, are not new. But when Mr. Siljander’s work wins the enthusiastic pre-publication praise of former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese of the Heritage Foundation, former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Ban Ki-moon, the secretary-general of the United Nations, it is clear that something exceptional has appeared. Mr. Siljander, a Reagan Republican, devout Christian, former Evangelical and former House member from Michigan, does not disappoint. A good and extraordinary man has written a quite extraordinarily good book.

Mr. Siljander’s work is riveting on many levels and in many different ways. It is an autobiographical voyage of discovery about a decent and devout American politician who came to discover that his own faith was far vaster, more profound and more tolerant than he had ever dreamed.

It is also the account of an immense journey in moral and geographical terms that led him to discover men of the greatest good faith and spiritual depth in the Protestant, Catholic Christian and Muslim worlds. Mr. Siljander courageously traveled into the heart of Sudan, Pakistan and Libya, where he describes dozens of his own encounters with Muslim leaders of good will, many of them courageously preaching and teaching under intolerant and mercilessly repressive governments.

Yet Mr. Siljander is no pie-in-the-sky impractical dreamer. As a veteran politician, he understands the nature and danger of the extreme Islamist fundamentalist challenge exceptionally clearly, and his insights on the problem are some of the clearest and most cogent that have yet been published.

He recognizes that the real secret of extreme Islamism’s appeal is its ideology and goal of forging “one gigantic Islamic state under Sharia law, transcending current national boundaries and placing all infidels in subjugation.” He also realizes that “no military force on Earth can defeat an ideology bound together by passion.” But that, in turn, reveals the potentially fatal flaw in the huge Islamist facade: “If you can effectively find a flaw in its ideology and widely expose that flaw, you crack apart the organization’s coherence.”

Mr. Siljander teaches us a usually overlooked profound truth: The great issues of peace and war, love and hate, between nations, peoples and enormous religious faiths are usually in the control of only a handful of people. “In the Middle East and North Africa, there are arguably thirty key Muslim clerics who hold the power to influence the vast majority of Islam’s followers including hundreds of millions in Islamic Asia.”

Mr. Siljander argues that the way to reach such people and turn their potential hatred, fear, ignorance of the Other and enmity into lasting and enduring friendship is to apply the great teachings of the Sermon on the Mount in real, immediate and practical terms. “My friends and I believe that there is at least a handful of such people in every city in the world,” he writes. “In every community, there are but a handful of potential troublemakers — and they can be reached through a handful of influential peacemakers. … We don’t need millions or thousands. We only need a handful in every community.”

This extraordinary idea is at the core of Mr. Siljander’s book, but there are many other remarkable riches there as well. He quotes extensively from George Lamsa’s all-too-little-known 1933 translation into English of the Peshitta, the earliest known Aramaic version of the New Testament, to counter many almost universally-held misconceptions about Jesus’ teachings.

Mr. Siljander’s refutation of the slur of “Christ-killer” against the Jewish people is so cogent and remarkable it is worth the purchase of the entire book in itself: “Ironically, the people who actually performed the trial, sentence and execution [of Jesus] were the forebears not of today’s Jews but of today’s Italians — a people who have over the centuries been among the most committed followers of the carpenter from Galilee. Does anyone seriously think we should label Italians ‘Christ-killers’?” he asks. “The very idea is ludicrous.”

Mr. Siljander has written a book of enormous courage and spiritual power. It is essential reading for every Christian, Muslim and Jew of good will around the world. There are hundreds of millions, probably billions, of such people — and they all need to hear Mr. Siljander’s voice.

Martin Sieff is a veteran foreign correspondent. His most recent book is “The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East.”

Once a month I get a treat in my IN box: a link to the latest Q&A entries to The Chicago Manual of Style Online. You might not think answers to readers’ questions about grammar, syntax and formatting would be much fun.

But they are.

I spend $30 a year for my online subscription to CMOS, in part because I actually consult the thing when I am confused about some particular of grammar, syntax or formatting. But mostly I pony up the thirty bucks each year because I just love that monthly Q&A.

Two examples. Hope you enjoy ’em. (If you do, hey, consider subscribing.)

Q. I read a lot and have been working on a novel of my own for a while now. In most of the materials I read the authors use “had had” and “that that” quite often. For example: “He had had the dog for twelve years and everyone knew that that was the real reason he didn’t want Animal Control to take it.” I doubt there is any actual rule against this, but I find it to be unattractive on a purely aesthetic basis and try to avoid it like the plague when writing. Is there anything to this or am I just weird?

A. As you can see here, correct isn’t always pretty. So you aren’t weird; you’re a writer, and one of the things that makes you a writer is that you’re sensitive to ugliness. Once you’re sensitive to clichés, you’ll be all set.

Q. Hello Grammar Goddesses, After looking through all my style guides (including CMOS, of course), I now know not to split my infinitives but have yet to find some examples of such. Please offer a few juicy examples of correct and incorrect text. Thanks so much and keep up the good work! Grammar Geekess in Portland, OR

A. Dear Grammar Geekess, CMOS has not, since the thirteenth edition (1983), frowned on the split infinitive. The fifteenth edition now suggests, to take one example, allowing split infinitives when an intervening adverb is used for emphasis (see paragraphs 5.106 and 5.160). In this day and age, it seems, an injunction against splitting infinitives is one of those shibboleths whose only reason for survival is to give increased meaning to the lives of those who can both identify by name a discrete grammatical, syntactic, or orthographic entity and notice when that entity has been somehow besmirched. Many such shibboleths—the en dash, for example—are worthy of being held onto. But why tamper with such sentences as the following?

Its five-year mission is to explore new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

His first thought, when something went wrong, was to immediately hit the escape key—even when he was nowhere near a computer.

It seems to me that, at least given these two examples, euphony or emphasis or clarity or all three can be improved by splitting the infinitive in certain situations. It’s one of the advantages of a language with two-word infinitives. One might observe, for that matter, that English infinitives are always split—by a space. Sincerely, Editor (grammar god [or more probably warlock], filling in for the goddesses)