Jonathan Goodman – författare

"A much-needed guide to winning in business as a human in an all-too online world." – Entrepreneur

Trying to win the internet is a gloriously inefficient way to build a business.

No matter your goals, The Obvious Choice offers 15 essential lessons on profit and success that are timeless because they prioritize the humans who buy from you and not erratic and temperamental algorithms.

Jonathan Goodman—one of the world''s leading experts on helping people simplify their business—reveals proven frameworks for increasing efficiency, praying to the social media gods less, and mastering the art of finding your customers.

Backed by a wide range of case studies, Goodman shows how modern marketing technology has led us astray. That start-ups and established organizations alike have bought into the misguided idea that they need to become "famous on the internet" just to make a few sales.

If you''re having trouble finding your way, the problem isn''t you. The problem is what you''ve been made to believe it takes to succeed.

This book is for any marketer, business owner, coach, or entrepreneur who wants an easier way to make more money, help more people, and have more freedom by avoiding wasted time and resources on dead-ends and ineffective methods.

Specifically, you''ll learn how to:

Algorithms change, humans don''t.

No matter who you are and no matter what you sell, your customer is a human. And yet, marketing these days feels so inhuman.

Filled with frameworks, entertaining stories, and admittedly bad-Dad jokes, The Obvious Choice is a much-needed recalibration and, at times, a refreshing slap for a business generation that''s lost its way.

Buy this book to learn how to earn more and compete less in this much-needed approach to success in a crowded marketplace.

What would it take for you to wake up excited about the monotony of the mundanity of your day-to-day tasks? To stop feeling guilty about the stuff you’re not doing, and instead be energized by what you’ve chosen to do?

This is the guide to building an awesome, aspirational, and fun life, to reclaiming optimism and meaning when the things we were once so excited to have—the dream job, the family and kids—become tedious obligations, each with a mounting daily task list that we can never seem to fully catch up on. It’s a book for the person who, already exhausted, keeps thinking they can “have it all” if they just work a little smarter or a lot harder.

We are all in a constant struggle to balance the primary competing priorities in our lives. Simplified, those are: Money, Health, and Relationships.  Within each category, there are main elements. Within health, you have fitness, resiliency, and exploration. Within money, there’s guilt, comparison, and work. And within relationships, there’s family, community, and friendship.

The secret to self-improvement is simply a matter of strengthening one arm of the triangle at a time, without letting the others collapse. Over time, the entire structure strengthens.

A witty and informative look at classic American murder cases

On a 6,000-mile train trip across the North American continent from New York City to the West Coast, then back to New York over a southern route, prizewinning English crime historian Jonathan Goodman visited a number of sites where notorious murders occurred—the Kingsbury Run torso murders in Cleveland; the murder by “thrill-killers” Leopold and Loeb, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and the escapades of Al Capone in Chicago; the Henwood-VonPhul-Springer affair in Denver; the murders of Marian Williams and Blanche Lamont in the Emmanuel Baptist Church in San Francisco; and Kate Townsend’s murder in New Orleans. Goodman masterfully fuses two literary genres that reach back into the nineteenth century: the true crime essay fathered by Thomas De Quincy and travel reports popularized by Charles Dickens and Mark Twain.

As a true crime book, Tracks to Murder is witty and informative and enriches these classic American murder cases by placing them within their original settings. Goodman also plays them against their locations as they are today, resulting in a series of character sketches both contemporary and historical. As a travel book, it presents the seasoned reflections of a cultivated English writer on American manners and morals observed during his serendipitous transcontinental journey.

A witty and informative look at classic American murder cases

On a 6,000-mile train trip across the North American continent from New York City to the West Coast, then back to New York over a southern route, prizewinning English crime historian Jonathan Goodman visited a number of sites where notorious murders occurred—the Kingsbury Run torso murders in Cleveland; the murder by “thrill-killers” Leopold and Loeb, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and the escapades of Al Capone in Chicago; the Henwood-VonPhul-Springer affair in Denver; the murders of Marian Williams and Blanche Lamont in the Emmanuel Baptist Church in San Francisco; and Kate Townsend’s murder in New Orleans. Goodman masterfully fuses two literary genres that reach back into the nineteenth century: the true crime essay fathered by Thomas De Quincy and travel reports popularized by Charles Dickens and Mark Twain.

As a true crime book, Tracks to Murder is witty and informative and enriches these classic American murder cases by placing them within their original settings. Goodman also plays them against their locations as they are today, resulting in a series of character sketches both contemporary and historical. As a travel book, it presents the seasoned reflections of a cultivated English writer on American manners and morals observed during his serendipitous transcontinental journey.

Here are ten murder cases of “the old-fashioned sort”—evoking a nostalgia more obviously associated with fiction—that all took place during the festive period from mid-December to Twelfth Night between 1811 and 1933. The settings of these grisly tales range from the Knickerbocker Athletic Club in New York (where a gentleman named Molineux provided a drastic cure for hangovers by putting cyanide in a gift-wrapped bottle of Bromo Seltzer) to an apartment in Glasgow (home of a wealthy Scotswoman whose demise seemed to have been satisfactorily explained by local constables, until Arthur Conan Doyle assumed the role of Sherlock Holmes) and from a builder’s workshop in North London (site of a murder committed by a man called Furnace, who suited his criminal action to his name) to the elegant dwelling of a ménage à trois near the Thames (scene of a puzzling poisoning that, years later, Raymond Chandler tried, unofficially, to solve).

In The Christmas Murders, Jonathan Goodman has collected stories as fascinating and compulsively readable as one would expect from a writer described by Jacques Barzun as “the greatest living master of true-crime literature” and by Julian Symons as “the premier investigator of crimes past.”

Here are ten murder cases of “the old-fashioned sort”—evoking a nostalgia more obviously associated with fiction—that all took place during the festive period from mid-December to Twelfth Night between 1811 and 1933. The settings of these grisly tales range from the Knickerbocker Athletic Club in New York (where a gentleman named Molineux provided a drastic cure for hangovers by putting cyanide in a gift-wrapped bottle of Bromo Seltzer) to an apartment in Glasgow (home of a wealthy Scotswoman whose demise seemed to have been satisfactorily explained by local constables, until Arthur Conan Doyle assumed the role of Sherlock Holmes) and from a builder’s workshop in North London (site of a murder committed by a man called Furnace, who suited his criminal action to his name) to the elegant dwelling of a ménage à trois near the Thames (scene of a puzzling poisoning that, years later, Raymond Chandler tried, unofficially, to solve).

In The Christmas Murders, Jonathan Goodman has collected stories as fascinating and compulsively readable as one would expect from a writer described by Jacques Barzun as “the greatest living master of true-crime literature” and by Julian Symons as “the premier investigator of crimes past.”

Sure to capture the imagination of devotees of true crime and the occult

This anthology of thirteen true crime stories includes the mysterious slaying of Charles Walton, who was found slashed and pierced to death in an area notorious for its associations with black magic; the murder of Eric Tombe, whose body was located because of a recurring dream in which his mother saw Eric down a well; the terrorizing of Hammersmith, London, in the early nineteenth century by the nocturnal appearance of a “ghost”; the Salem witchcraft trials; the murder of Rasputin, who was believed by some in Russia to be a miracle worker and by others to be a dangerous charlatan; a Scottish tale in which evidence given by the ghost of the victim was allowed at the murderer’s trial; and the bizarre goings-on at 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, New York, where Ronnie DeFeo Jr. murdered his entire family—the new occupants were subjected to all manner of sinister events, including the presence of poltergeists, or were they?

Sure to capture the imagination of devotees of true crime and the occult

This anthology of thirteen true crime stories includes the mysterious slaying of Charles Walton, who was found slashed and pierced to death in an area notorious for its associations with black magic; the murder of Eric Tombe, whose body was located because of a recurring dream in which his mother saw Eric down a well; the terrorizing of Hammersmith, London, in the early nineteenth century by the nocturnal appearance of a “ghost”; the Salem witchcraft trials; the murder of Rasputin, who was believed by some in Russia to be a miracle worker and by others to be a dangerous charlatan; a Scottish tale in which evidence given by the ghost of the victim was allowed at the murderer’s trial; and the bizarre goings-on at 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, New York, where Ronnie DeFeo Jr. murdered his entire family—the new occupants were subjected to all manner of sinister events, including the presence of poltergeists, or were they?

The brutal murder of Julia Wallace in 1931 became one of Britain’s great unsolved murders. People began arguing about the case almost immediately and continue to do so to this day.

Julia was the middle-aged wife of a mild-mannered Liverpool insurance agent, William Herbert Wallace. By all accounts they were a quiet, unassuming, devoted couple. In January 1931 William Wallace received a telephone message to come to an address in Liverpool the following evening to discuss an insurance policy. Unable to find the house after searching for hours, Wallace determined there was no such address and returned home. There he found Julia bludgeoned to death on the parlor floor. In addition to the terrible shock and his unbearable loss, Wallace was accused of the crime and ultimately convicted.

Using original sources, Jonathan Goodman re-creates Wallace’s trial, witness by witness. Through his meticulous reconstruction, it becomes evident that the police and the medical examiner went out of their way to twist and even manufacture evidence. Their attention to proving Wallace guilty ignored a lead to a likely suspect given to them by Wallace. The man was a fellow insurance agent, whom Goodman identifies in the book as Mr. X. The police ignored the suggestion.

In 1969, when The Killing of Julia Wallace was first published in the United Kingdom, Goodman had picked up on the lead the police disregarded.

As a result, he was convinced that Wallace was unjustly convicted. In 1981 Goodman revealed the name of the suspect, who was by then deceased. The suspect had a long record of criminal charges that had been dropped or dismissed due to his family connections—his father and uncle were local officials; his father’s secretary was the daughter of the police superintendent.

True crime fans will welcome the return of this classic unsolved mystery by the inimitable Jonathan Goodman.