Easton Studio Press LLC

In How to Invest in Commercial Real Estate, authors Dowell and Stachenfeld have created the ultimate guide for anyone interested in getting smarter quickly on the complicated world of commercial real estate.

In an easy-to-read format, the authors dissect nearly every aspect of commercial real estate investment, from the basic to the more complex, including asset segmentation, market analysis, deal structuring, promote mechanics, capital stack construction, commercial underwriting best-practices, risk assessment and mitigation, joint venture dynamics, and best-in-class investment processes just to name a few.

But this book isn’t just for beginning investors. Even seasoned professionals will benefit from reading it, especially from the authors’ insights into the more intricate elements of the market.

The authors, a commercial real estate investor and a commercial real estate attorney, have over seventy years combined of invaluable industry experience. Their love for their subject is palpable, and they pass along their passion and enthusiasm to the reader.

So, whether you are taking those first steps into commercial real estate investment or want to upgrade your existing expertise, How to Invest in Commercial Real Estate will prove to be a much needed and frequently referenced resource.

Since we imagine something intentional about a community both in its formation and its function as a new entity, there is something both baffling and attractive about the idea of a “plant community.” Do plants know what they’re doing? Some claim our attention: good to eat, good to smell, get stuck to your clothes. For a majority, plants or plant communities arouse a restricted admiration: lawn. A lawn can be a plant community, an atrocious one to be sure. But I’m thinking of plant communities in the eyes of God, where the plants foregather in ancient times and set out toward infinity. These deserve the word community, and the individuals who make them up are original in the extreme, as they must be: they live in a tough town.

It is our luck that the eternal aspects of these daredevils have fallen to the eye of artist Lindy Smith who has used the sun in ways known best to her to reveal the souls of plants as lives, as archetypes, as semaphore. Their shapes seem to belong to dreams while for all their unexpectedness they are no more accidental than dreams. What we see emerges from the lives they’ve lived in deep time; their importance hangs over them as an aura. 

We long to say their names: milkweed, mullein, bulrush, fescue, rush, yarrow. Or, on the other hand, sumpweed, pigweed, spurge. They belong to the things we see for the first time while recognizing we’ve known them always, hence the longing to absorb their eternal forms. Creation—we have it by our fingertips, just. Smith’s images Smith has discovered the souls of so many plants I thought I knew and left their essential signatures on my mind that I will never see them in the same way again, or more to the point, forget them again. I wish I knew enough about the process to understand what help the sun has been in finding these plants out. But here they are, seen by an artist, and what help it is.—from the Preface by Tom McGuane

Sixty percent of Americans live with at least one chronic health condition and over a lifetime, many people will face multiple surgeries or life-changing diagnoses. A scary diagnosis can be overwhelming, launching patients and their loved ones into a world of fear, uncertainty, and complexity. Scary Diagnosis is a uniquely compassionate and empowering book that helps patients, families, and caregivers navigate the emotional and practical challenges that follow a serious medical diagnosis.

Author Edward Rogoff draws on his own experience with chronic illness and shares compelling stories from others who have faced similar journeys. Through these narratives, he reveals how individuals can move from fear to strength, advocate for themselves, and navigate the healthcare system, while maintaining their sense of control and dignity.

Scary Diagnosis is filled with real-life examples and valuable perspectives to help readers approach the challenges ahead with resilience and determination.

Dramatic changes in the business world are creating new opportunities for personalized experiences. With no fixed pathways towards success, maneuvering the complexity of this new environment calls for further immersion into that which energizes and empowers you. This book is a journey through inner experiences, emotional development, and the dynamics that shape one’s worldview, values, and guided actions, creating a foundation for a purposeful and satisfying career.

Wagner Denuzzo, a Latino immigrant from Brazil, became a licensed psychotherapist and later held global executive roles in Fortune 500 companies. His experiences allow him to establish connections between psychology and workplace social dynamics, as well as the unique experiences of individuals navigating rigidly hierarchical businesses. At its heart, the book shows that leadership skills are vital for all members of the organization—from individual contributors to executives—to prepare them well for the new era of work.

Denuzzo helps the reader understand the “Essential Leadership Expressions” required for a balanced life, integrating character, community, and career. It is particularly relevant for the early-in-career individual entering a transformed world of work, experiencing historic technological advancements and a global economy that must address ESG and global social concerns, while satisfying shareholders and customers.

LEADING TO SUCCEED is a must read for members of the new workforce. It defines the key leadership skills imperative for success in tomorrow’s workplace, independently from positions, roles, and titles within an organization.

Organizational leaders will benefit from learning to understand the human dynamics in workplace performance, and HR practitioners will enhance their understanding of the employee experience, allowing them to address situations with greater empathy and compassion.

In Legal Briefs: The Ups and Downs of Life in the Law, editor Roger Witten takes us behind the scenes of some of the most fascinating court cases of the last few decades, while introducing us to the sometimes strange, and sometimes comical situations these lawyers have experienced during their long careers.

This collection features twenty lawyers of varying backgrounds and expertise writing with pizzazz, humor, and passion about such significant events as the Watergate break-in; the 9/11 Commission; the Iranian hostage crisis, and more. They write of tackling issues concerning money in politics and Citizens United; same-sex parental custody rights; and the contempt charge against Martin Luther King Jr. And we are also treated to intimate portraits of some unique clients and towering figures in the legal world.

This book will delight all readers, not just those with a specific interest in the law. As Roger Witten writes in the introduction, these stories “reveal the ups and downs of a life in the law by telling stories that are dramatic, moving, and/or amusing Some are tongue-in-cheek. Others are serious but never dull.”

Piasecki’s upbringing was laced with poverty and trauma. He began reading at an early age, seeking out the wisdom and relevance from the “magical clan of writers” who helped him strengthen his writing muscle and feed into his creative hunger. Bruce’s journey to becoming a writer is spiritual and practical, as he discovers and uncovers what is truly valuable in a life. As well as being a writer, Piasecki is also an environmentalist, a speaker on climate and society, and AHC Group founder. He has also founded the family-endowed Creative Force Foundation. 

Doing More with One Life can be read as biography, or inventive memoir, or even as magical realism. Piasecki leaves that choice up to his reader. Readers and followers of Piasecki’s expansive career in environmental and community issues will be deeply moved by his tales of loss and his determination to make himself—and his world—into something profoundly better.

Becoming Forest opens with Aishling—the young Irish woman at the heart of this story—as she visits her grandmother in California following her grandfather’s death. Aishling finds her grandfather’s journal and reads about a trip he made to India years ago to visit the original Bodhi Tree, the place where the Buddha found enlightenment.

At the end of the journal, she finds a letter addressed to her from her grandfather asking for her help passing along his message of “deep security” to her generation as they deal with the climate crisis and the uncertain future ahead. Aishling goes to India to follow in her grandfather’s path to find a way of responding to his request. There she meets and falls in love with a young Buddhist monk, who is also on a quest. As they walk together along the roads of India, they gather unexpected and invaluable insights from each other and come closer to the answers they both seek.

Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned for five months in the summer of 1920 in a modest gray house in Westport, Connecticut. It was an experience that had a more profound impact on both of their collective works than any other place they lived.

It was, for Scott and Zelda, their honeymoon. Having just gotten married and after being kicked out of some of New York city's finest hotels, they were, for the first time, in their very own place, albeit for only five months. It was a time that Scott Fitzgerald called "the happiest year since I was eighteen."He had, after all, just achieved success with his first novel, This Side of Paradise, and was suddenly awash with money.

The Fitzgeralds lived a wild life of drinking, driving and endless partying while living in suburban Connecticut. As it happens, living near the beach, they were neighbors to a larger-than-life reclusive multi-millionaire, F.E. Lewis.

Historian Richard Webb grew up in Westport a few doors down the street from where the Fitzgeralds had lived some forty years earlier. Fascinated with the Fitzgeralds, when Webb learned that author Barbara Probst Solomon, who grew up across the river from the F.E. Lewis estate, proposed in the New Yorker that Westport was the real setting for Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby, he was stirred to actively researching her claim.

Boats Against the Current tells the real story behind the famous novel and its tragic hero, debunking the long-held belief that the book was solely inspired by the Fitzgerald’s time in Great Neck, across the Sound in Long Island, and lays out enough information about the fascinating Mr. Lewis that it is difficult not to believe that author Webb has located the true inspiration for one of the most captivating and iconic characters in American literature, the great Gatsby himself.

Illustrated with a fantastic array of never-before-seen photos from the Lewis family, as well as the scrapbooks of the Fitzgeralds, period newspaper clippings, and a myriad of compelling stories about Scott, Zelda and their fantastically wealthy neighbor.

A companion book to the documentary Gatsby in Connecticut: The Untold Story, Boats Against the Current also recounts Webb’s own journey of making the film with fellow Westporter and filmmaker, Robert Steven Williams.

The Great Gatsby may be one of America's essential novels. Boats Against the Current is an essential document for anyone who has read the book and wondered at the fantastical world whose story it tells.

Edith Wharton in France chronicles Edith Wharton’s dogged efforts to penetrate the Byzantine levels of French high society, her love for the French and Italian countryside, and her consuming passion for the Mediterranean garden. While Lesage is initially skeptical of Wharton’s ability to “become French,” this work ultimately portrays a woman of indomitable spirit who ultimately succeeds in fashioning a French home of her own making in her beloved adopted country.

Lesage’s work illuminates the intertwined characters and important relationships of Wharton’s life in France, many of them overlooked or minimized in earlier biographies. Prominently featured in the account are the French novelist Paul Bourget and his wife Minnie, whose meticulous diary entries over a 35-year period provide a fresh look at Wharton’s active social life both in Paris and on the French Riviera.

A still more intimate look into Wharton’s French circle is provided by her extensive correspondence with the Frenchman Léon Bélugou, a widely travelled mining engineer, writer and well-known figure in Parisian high society. Spanning more than 25 years, the letters portray a mutual intellectual kinship and devoted friendship. Other newly discovered highlights include letters presented as evidence in Wharton’s French divorce proceedings, a mysterious autobiographical essay written by Wharton’s lover, American journalist Morton Fullerton, and numerous photographs never before published.

The author of multiple works of translation, as well original French texts on Wharton and Conrad, Lesage had access to unexamined and untranslated French sources. She presents Wharton’s life from the perspective of a native French woman, capturing a unique view of Wharton trying to navigate through the ancient layers of French society and master its often maddeningly obscure rules, all the while commenting on the horrors of World War I and the cataclysmic changes in the arts and culture of Paris.

The Paris Herald, narrative historical fiction, tells the story of the world’s most famous newspaper, focusing on the key years of the 1960s, when the fates of the newspaper and of the regime of Charles de Gaulle became curiously intertwined.

The story centers on intrigue and rivalry among the New York Herald Tribune, New York Times and Washington Post. When the Herald Tribune ceased operations in New York in 1966, the Times, which had started its own European Edition in 1960, expected the Paris Herald to close, too, giving the Times victory in Paris as well as New York. But Herald Tribuneowner Jock Whitney wouldn’t sell to the Times, preferring to join with Katharine Graham, who’d taken charge at the Post after her husband’s death.

Within months, the Times came, hat-in-hand, offering to close its European edition and asking to buy into the new Herald/Post partnership. The Times neither forgave nor forgot its humiliation.

The Paris Herald is the story of many people: of Frank Draper, who fought in the Lincoln Brigade; Byron Hallsberg, who joined the Hungarian uprising; Dennis Klein, researching the Nazi occupation of Paris; Suzy de Granville, searching for family roots; Wayne Murray, escaping homophobia; of Steve and Molly Fleming, living the high life; Sonny Stein and Al Lodge and Connie Marshall and Ben Swart and Eddie Jones, paperboy, all finding themselves at the Paris Herald for their own reasons and ending up in the fight to keep the newspaper alive.

The 1960s was a tumultuous decade. The conflict in America over race and the Vietnam War spread to Europe, setting off terrorism, riots and revolt across the continent and threatening already shaky regimes. Nowhere was the risk of collapse greater than in France, where the revolt of 1968 nearly toppled the government and led to the resignation of President Charles de Gaulle the following year. Throughout those difficult times, the Paris Herald was at the center of events

Since being founded in 1887 by James Gordon Bennett, Jr., the Paris Herald has been essential to American expatriate life in Europe. In France, many Americans put down roots, married into French families and became permanent expatriates, in some cases exiles, like Bennett himself. The tense events of the 1960s touched the lives of every American in Paris, including many well-known artistic exiles: James Baldwin, Art Buchwald, William Saroyan, James Jones, Bud Powell, Dexter Gordon, Kenny Clarke, Joe Turner, Memphis Slim.

As the crisis deepened, one shadowy man became the link between de Gaulle and the troika of newspaper owners, Whitney, Graham and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. This man, Henri de Saint-Gaudens, a high French official in the Elysée Palace, understood the Herald’s historical importance to Paris.
The Paris Herald, a novel, is riveting historical drama, as relevant today as yesterday. It is a story never before told.