"Most of us think that we can change our lives if we just summon the willpower and try even harder this time around," said Alan Deutschman, the former executive director of Unboundary, a firm that counsels corporations on how to navigate change, and the author of "Change or Die," a book that asserts that even though most people have the ability to change, they rarely do.
The alley purchase coincides with the publication of a book by a Harvard professor that asserts Americans need to join clubs, specifically bowling leagues.
Last summer, the contract of another professor, Michael W. Pahl, was not renewed because he had written a book that some critics asserted failed to make strong enough claims for the creation of the world in six days.
Yet, his book opens with a manifesto that asserts the right to "resist the paradigm" and "escape the data stream".
Five years after the tax bill was enacted, David A. Stockman, Mr. Reagan's budget director, asserted in a book that administration officials at the time, if not Mr. Reagan himself, were well aware that the tax cuts would have disastrous budget consequences.
It is hard to take seriously a book which asserts that "the single greatest achievement" of a man who counts the Nobel peace prize among his distinctions was "to get almost everybody to call him 'Doctor'".Mr Hitchens's curtain-raiser deals with Mr Kissinger's role during the run-up to election day in 1968.
"For example, the library contained a book asserting that women are less reliable witnesses," the inspectors reported.
As the chairman of the Republican Governors Association, he has championed states' rights, bashed President Obama and written a book asserting that the federal government had overstepped its bounds on nearly every issue.
An editorial voice in news stories adds credence to the frequent charge that the Times' news reporting often displays a liberal bias — a critique that will not be lessened by the elevation of a woman brought up in a liberal-Democratic household on the West Side of Manhattan who worked for liberal Southern Democrats and wrote a book asserting that Clarence Thomas probably lied.
In the minds of UK publishers, the progenitor of Christie, Pascoe and Omielan's books is less likely to be Fey than Caitlin Moran, whose How to be a Woman established a market for funny books that bolshily assert women's rights.
"A purportedly scholarly book or article that asserted its claims without further qualification," he wrote, "would attract derision as one-sided if not misleading".
