I decided to invite a guest blogger to comment.

In an editorial entitled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” in this morning’s New York Times, ex-presidential contender and ex-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney writes, “If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.”

Citing his dad’s experiences in the 50’s as an auto chief exec (George Romney saved American Motors from the brink of collapse, and then went on to become governor of Michigan), he goes on to offer several points of prescription for how to fix the ailing industry.

After reading Romney’s piece, I emailed my You Call the Shots coauthor Cameron Johnson, currently in London shooting a TV show, to invite his take on it. Aside from being an incredibly astute businessman, Cameron is also a fourth-generation Ford dealer, and knows this scene from the inside out. Here’s his reply:

# # #

I think Romney’s very smart, and I also disagree with the bailout — but for different reasons.

Freeing up credit and selling cars needs to be the focus — so let’s make it easier to sell cars. That will save the automakers and the taxpayers. — C.J.

# # #

What do you think?

Those of you who saw our wedding pictures (or, an admittedly smaller number, who saw the actual wedding) may have noticed my two groomsmen, Tall Guy and Short Guy.

Let me introduce these two gentlemen to you: Tall Guy is actually Scott Ohlgren…

… whose writings and doings I’ve reported on this blog in times past (here and here and here).

And Short Guy is none other than my old friend Steve Gagné…

… Scott’s Colorado neighbor, one of my oldest friends — and author of the just-released, stunning new edition of the definitive book on the soul and spirit of food.

Steve is a sort of whole-foods Indiana Jones. If that sounds like a mixed metaphor, you haven’t yet seen Steve’s work. Steve has traveled ’round the globe a fistful of times, digging into ancient ruins and remote cultures, uncovering mysteries of plant genetics and ancient human origins.

Food Energetics is a sweeping tour de force — 562 jam-packed (pun intended) pages of mesmerizing information about the personality, character and impact of dozens and dozens of different specific foods and what impact they have not only on your health but also on your consciousness.

Check out Steve’s new book here, or go to the “My Work” section of this site.

The person who transcribed the recording (the excellent Sandi White, my favorite transcriptionist on the planet) understandably transcribed it this way:

“In a very pasteurized, non-threatening way…”

I love it when Bob heats up his words so as to destroy any stray bacteria, molds, fungus or yeasts. Makes for much safer listening.

Which reminds me of something that happened with my dad.

For a few years before his death, we were working on a project to translate the complete correspondence between Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann (which covered decades, and has never been fully translated into English). He would translate each letter by hand onto a yellow legal pad. Then twice a week, we would get on the phone together, and he would read me his latest installment. I would type it as he read, then later clean up his English a bit and email the result to his secretary.

One day he was reading me his translation of a letter in which Brahms told Clara about a concert he had attended. He reported that when he heard a certain piece by Felix Mendelssohn, “. . . it brought me to tears.”

For the normally gruff and sardonic Brahms, I thought this was a pretty touching comment.

A few days later my dad called, laughing so hard he could hardly get the words out. Turns out, what Brahms had actually written was that while sitting through the Mendelssohn, “. . . it bored me to tears.”

I guess the Mendelssohn was just a little too pasteurized for Brahms.

The day of its release, the book hit #1 on Amazon in three categories: “Islam,” “Church and State,” and “Comparative Religion” and was in the top 200 (all books).

Mark has spoken on twenty-six radio interviews and is doing his best to book major media appearances—but with the two-headed media juggernaut of economic crisis and presidential politics, it’s all but impossible to get a word in edgewise right now.

The biggest impact happening is with influential individuals, who are writing to us even before finishing the book to tell us how moved they are. Here are two examples:

“I am very impressed by Mark’s forays into Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic and his determination to get to the bottom of these knotty problems. This book is a unique gift to people of deep faith and good will — a potent antidote to the prevailing deadly misunderstanding that threatens to envelope us all. I couldn’t put it down, and finished it in one sitting!” — Hon. Ali Khalif Galaydh, former Prime Minister of Somalia

“I’ve just started it and can already tell what an important and timely book this is. I hope a copy was sent to every Congressman, Senator, Cabinet member and candidates. I believe this is one of the most important issues our world is facing right now, because it has ramifications in so many areas besides just foreign policy, i.e., homeland security, energy policy, and more.” — Scott Allen, About.com “Entrepreneur’s Guide” and coauthor of The Virtual Handshake

What you can do to help:

• Once you’ve read the book, go onto Amazon.com and BN.com and share your personal views. Equally important as sheer sales is the enthusiasm of those who have read it.
• If your local bookstore is not carrying it on their shelves, ask them to. (Many stores will let you order a book without paying for it up front.) Libraries too!
• Share the book with influence-leaders in your community — authors, speakers, political leaders, pastors, imams and other religious leaders, media figures . . . anyone you know who is in a position to help influence dialogue on this vital issue.
• Explore Mark’s web site to follow events as they unfold over the weeks and months ahead!

And yes: 535 copies of the book have been bought (by the Bridges Foundation) and are being distributed to each member of the U.S. Congress.

Will that change the world? Hard to say – but it’s a place to start. It could turn out that the person you give a copy to has more influence than anyone in Congress.

Networking is like that.

My dad was born in Germany and emigrated to the United States during the war. Before leaving his homeland at the age of nineteen, he had published his first book in German: a translation of an eighteenth-century classic text of music composition that had been used by Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and scores of illustrious others. The original text was in Latin; my dad’s translation was, of course, into German.

After arriving here, he was eventually drafted into the American army and shipped overseas, ending up back in Europe as a counterintelligence agent tasked with debriefing citizens. The war’s close found him in a town near the mountain whereupon sat the castle occupied by the legendary composer Richard Strauss (of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” fame — you know, that dramatic music that plays in the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001” when the apes discover the big thingamajig).

So my dad goes up the mountain to interrogate Strauss, and finds the old man teaching his own grandnephew composition, using . . . (wait for it) . . . my dad’s book.

After returning to the States, my dad eventually translated the book again, this time into English, and it was published here by W.W. Norton as The Study of Counterpoint.

My dad taught me composition from it when I was a teenager. It’s still used in schools today.

By now, I’ll bet you’ve figured out how this all ties back in to that $404.79 I just received. If you guessed that the check is from W.W. Norton, you’re right: it represents my portion of this royalty period’s proceeds (a “royalty period” typically being six months) — proceeds from a book my dad began as a teenager in the 1930s and started translating into English before I was even born.

After depositing the check, I went out with my son Chris and bought an LCD monitor he’s been wanting. I doubt very much that my dad ever imagined, when he was nineteen, that someday his efforts would end up paying for a computer monitor for his future twenty-year-old grandson, some years after my dad had himself moved on from this earthly existence — but that’s exactly what happened.

Residual income is like that, and so is love. They both defy the entropy of time.

They last.

There is such a way, and you can read about it in my latest book—which launches tomorrow.

In the spring and summer of 2006, I spent several days visiting with former U.S. Congressman and U.N. Ambassador Mark Siljander, listening to him recount his amazing spiritual odyssey, as he metamorphosed from anti-Muslim Christian arch-conservative to cultural-political pioneer and diplomatic trailblazer.

During our meetings, Mark described his often hair-raising experiences over the past few decades in such dangerous places as Beirut, Libya, Iraq, Sudan, Pakistan, and perhaps that scariest place of all, Washington D.C. Even more remarkable was his chronicling of his own internal journey and the extraordinary discoveries and realizations behind it.

The result is this book, A Deadly Misunderstanding: A Congressman’s Quest to Bridge the Muslim-Christian Divide.

When you click on that link, scroll through the list of people who have endorsed the book: from the Secretary-General of the U.N. and James Baker III to Cal Thomas and T. Davis Bunn; three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee Tony Hall and former attorney general Ed Meese; Ergun Caner, the dean of the Divinity School at Liberty University and Sayyid Syeed, director of the Islamic Society of North America. Talk about a who’s who of religious and ideological diversity!

I have personally watched Mark in action. This is no abstract theory or fluffy idealism: Mark is an extraordinary man, and the path he describes in these pages is powerful and substantial. As our publisher, HarperCollins, puts it, “Siljander’s seemingly implausible path to peace dismantles the engine of terror without firing a single shot.”

This memoir-cum-political-thriller is perhaps the most fascinating writing project I’ve ever undertaken. I genuinely believe it could change the world.

I want to personally invite you to read the book and help support Mark’s tremendously important work, in three ways:

1) Buy your own copy on the book’s release date, tomorrow, Tuesday, October 7, by going to Amazon.com or clicking here.

2) Consider buying additional copies for friends, family and influential people and opinion-leaders at your place of worship and other organizations. You can purchase multiple copies from 800-CEORead by calling 800-236-7323 or clicking here.

3) Pass the word to anyone you know with an interest in promoting the cause of peace and stability in our troubled world. Share a link to the book’s web site, www.adeadlymisunderstanding.com on your own web site, MySpace, Facebook, blog, and however else you communicate with your world.

It could make a powerful difference.

There’s so much new material in here, it’s essentially a brand new book. Here’s a peek inside the process of how Success for Teens came to be:

First, there was The Slight Edge, which is based on Jeff Olson’s training. To create that book, I spent time with Jeff on the phone in the fall of 2004, transcribed CDs of his training, and expanded on his basic message. John Fogg had done some work with the material years earlier, and I also built on some of the pieces John had brought to the table. Jeff went over everything I’d written (as did editors at Momentum Media, the book’s publisher), and eventually that collaboration became this enormously popular book, published in 2005. And then …

Last November, at the request of the Success Foundation, I sat down with The Slight Edge manuscript and began completely “reimagining” it as raw material for a new book for teens. I adapted some passages, threw others out, wrote brand new stuff, rearranged the ideas and codified a new set of core principles (I blogged a bit about this process here) … and eventually turned over a manuscript to Success Foundation staff —

which in turn became raw material for the immensely talented Al Desetta, who further adapted Jeff’s and my stuff to make it more teen-accessible and brought together the dozens of stories, vignettes and examples from the lives of real teens (along with the help of Keith Hefner and staff at Youth Communication in New York) that bring the text alive and really make the book what it is. And there you go: a new book.

You can follow this link to read more about the book (and the Success Foundation), and find out how to buy copies (singly or in bulk).

Note: The Success Foundation is also making the book available at no cost to qualifying organizations; to see if your group qualifies, follow the instructions at the bottom of the linked page.

Lisa also writes for The Huffington Post, rated #1 by Technorati on its “Top 100 Blogs” — making it the single most influential English-language blog in the world.

Recently Lisa reported on our conversation in a wonderful Huffington Post review of The Go-Giver.

Pinch me: am I dreaming?

I wrote Lisa to thank her, and included the URL for my wedding pictures. She wrote back:

“I love wedding pictures; weddings themselves are a bit of a pain, unless you’re just a drunken guest of course, but the pictures are great, and these are particularly beautiful.

“I must say, for a geeky writer, it looks like you caught yourself one heck of a good lookin’ woman.”

And you know, she’s quite right. I did, didn’t I?

(Okay: so the Huffington Post didn’t officially say I have a beautiful wife. But I’m pretty sure it meant to.)

Here are my bride and me, in the church…

… and on our way …

… into the sunset.

The entire album is worth viewing — our intrepid team of photographers, led by the redoubtable John Fitzpatrick, are excellent at what they do!

And yes, the sky really did look like that.