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Too Big to Fail
Brief Summary
Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis — and Themselves
Andrew Ross Sorkin delivers the first true behind-the-scenes, moment-by-moment account of how the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression developed into a global tsunami. From inside the corner office at Lehman Brothers to secret meetings in South Korea, and the corridors of Washington, Too Big to Fail is the definitive story of the most powerful men and women in finance and politics grappling with success and failure, ego and greed, and, ultimately, the fate of the world’s economy.
"We’ve got to get some foam down on the runway!” a sleepless Timothy Geithner, the then-president of the Federal Reserve of New York, would tell Henry M. Paulson, the Treasury secretary, about the catastrophic crash the world’s financial system would experience.
Through unprecedented access to the players involved, Too Big to Fail re-creates all the drama and turmoil, revealing never disclosed details and elucidating how decisions made on Wall Street over the past decade sowed the seeds of the debacle. This true story is not just a look at banks that were "too big to fail,” it is a real-life thriller with a cast of bold-faced names who themselves thought they were too big to fail.
ISBN:9780670021253
Author:Andrew Ross Sorkin
Tolkien A Biography
Brief Summary
There are few writers who can claim the popularity and enduring appeal of J.R.R. Tolkien. His celebrated novels have sold in excess of 160 million copies, and are in large part responsible for seeding the entire genre of fantasy fiction.
Now, renowned biographer Michael White looks back over the little-known life of this most treasured of writers. In absorbing and revealing detail, he chronicles Tolkien's childhood years and the tragic early death of his parents; his burgeoning romance with Edith Brett; his many years as an Oxford academic; his friendship with C.S. Lewis and the founding of 'The Inklings' group.
White describes why Tolkien's writing took off so spectacularly - and how The Lord of the Rings became the must-read of the late Sixties counter-culture. Informed and fascinating, Tolkien is the fascinating story of how the man who created The Hobbit became one of the giants of modern literature.
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ISBN:9781422351376
Author:Michael White
Tips and Traps for Writing an Effecti...
Brief Summary
In only 30 days, entrepreneurs can craft business plans that make their goals a reality.
A concrete business plan is essential when assessing a business's earning potential or when applying for financing. Tips & Traps for Writing an Effective Business Plan uses the popular Tips & Traps format to guide you step by step through the process of creating an effective plan that will work with a developing business.
You'll learn how to assemble information and write each part of your plan, with the goal of having a ready-to-go, working strategy in just 30 days. The book also provides specific advice for crafting plans that apply to different industries and also includes detailed instructions for writing a financial plan.
ISBN:9780071467513
Author:Greg Balanko-Dickson
The War of the World
Brief Summary
The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West
The beginning of the twentieth century saw human civilization at its most enlightened, well-educated, globalized and wealthy. What turned it into a bloodbath?
Niall Ferguson re-tells the story of history's most savage century as a continual war that raged for 100 years. From the plains of Poland to the killing fields of Cambodia, he reveals how economic boom-and-bust, decaying empires and, above all, poisonous ideas of race led men to treat each other as aliens. It was an age of hatred that ended with the twilight, not the triumph, of the West. And, he shows, it could happen all over again.
ISBN:9781594201004
Author:Niall Ferguson
The Weekenders
Brief Summary
The Weekenders: Travels in the Heart of Africa
What would happen if you took some of Britain's best writing talent, put them on a plane and flew them to one of the most extraordinary and inaccessible places on the planet?
What would happen if you took Irvine Welsh from the streets of Edinburgh and showed him a remote, dangerous village in Africa? Or if you flew Alex Garland into one of the world's most hazardous war zones?
And how would Tony Hawks react if you dragged him away from his tennis and asked him to write a song with a Sudanese tribesman? With Victoria Glendinning, Andrew O'Hagan, Giles Foden and WF Deedes, these writers have experienced for themselves one of the most beautiful and yet troubled lands in the world - Sudan.
This remarkable collection of short stories and evocative travel writing is their response - as diverse and unpredictable as the country itself.
ISBN:9780091881801
Author:W.F. Deedes,Sue Ryan,Alex Garland,Tony Hawks, Andrew O'Hagan,Irvine Welsh,Giles Foden and Victoria Glendinning
What a Husband Needs from His Wife
Brief Summary
What a Husband Needs from His Wife: *Physically *Emotionally *Spiritually
What do men really need from their wives? And what is the best way for wives to meet those needs? This engaging and thoroughly biblical guide demonstrates that a woman meets her husband's needs most effectively by maintaining her own vibrant personal relationship with Christ. Filled with useful tools that will help women understand their husbands better, this enlightening resource includes...
• ideas for dealing with addictions, infidelity, and financial challenges
• explanations of personality types and love languages
• Resources that offer help for the helper
A study guide at the end of the book makes this a perfect tool for individual or small group use.
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Welcome to Lagos by Chibundu Onuzo
Deep in the Niger Delta, Officer Chike Ameobi deserts the army and sets out on the road to Lagos. He is soon joined by a wayward private, a naive militant, a vulnerable young woman and a runaway middle-class wife. The shared goals of this unlikely group: freedom and new life.
As they strive to find their places in the city, they become embroiled in a political scandal. Ahmed Bakare, editor of the failing Nigerian Journal, is determined to report the truth. Yet government minister Chief Sandayo will do anything to maintain his position. Trapped between the two, they are forced to make a life-changing decision.
Full of shimmering detail, Welcome to Lagos is a stunning portrayal of an extraordinary city, and of seven lives that intersect in a breathless story of courage and survival.
Wages of Rebellion
Brief Summary
Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt
Revolutions come in waves and cycles. We are again riding the crest of a revolutionary epic, much like 1848 or 1917, from the Arab Spring to movements against austerity in Greece to the Occupy movement.
In Wages of Rebellion, Chris Hedges—who has chronicled the malaise and sickness of a society in terminal moral decline in his books Empire of Illusion and Death of the Liberal Class—investigates what social and psychological factors cause revolution, rebellion, and resistance. Drawing on an ambitious overview of prominent philosophers, historians, and literary figures he shows not only the harbingers of a coming crisis but also the nascent seeds of rebellion. Hedges' message is clear: popular uprisings in the United States and around the world are inevitable in the face of environmental destruction and wealth polarization.
Focusing on the stories of rebels from around the world and throughout history, Hedges investigates what it takes to be a rebel in modern times. Utilizing the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, Hedges describes the motivation that guides the actions of rebels as "sublime madness” — the state of passion that causes the rebel to engage in an unavailing fight against overwhelmingly powerful and oppressive forces. For Hedges, resistance is carried out not for its success, but as a moral imperative that affirms life. Those who rise up against the odds will be those endowed with this "sublime madness.”
From South African activists who dedicated their lives to ending apartheid, to contemporary anti-fracking protests in Alberta, Canada, to whistleblowers in pursuit of transparency, Wages of Rebellion shows the cost of a life committed to speaking the truth and demanding justice. Hedges has penned an indispensable guide to rebellion.
ISBN:9781568589664
Author:Chris Hedges
Rules of the Wild by Francesca Marciano
Brief Summary
A mesmerizing novel of love and nostalgia set in the vast spaces of contemporary East Africa.
Romantic, often resonantly ironic, moving and wise, Rules of the Wild transports us to a landscape of unsurpassed beauty even as it gives us a sharp-eyed portrait of a closely knit tribe of cultural outsiders: the expatriates living in Kenya today.
Challenged by race, by class, and by a longing for home, here are "safari boys" and Samaritans, reporters bent on their own fame, travelers who care deeply about elephants but not at all about the people of Africa. They all know each other. They meet at dinner parties, they sleep with each other, they argue about politics and the best way to negotiate their existence in a place where they don't really belong.
At the center is Esmé, a beautiful young woman of dazzling ironies and introspections, who tells us her story in a voice both passionate and self-deprecating. Against a paradoxical backdrop of limitless physical freedom and escalating civil unrest, Esmé struggles to make sense of her own place in Africa and of her feelings for the two men there whom she loves--Adam, a second-generation Kenyan who is the first to show her the wonders of her adopted land, and Hunter, a British journalist sickened by its horrors.
Rules of the Wild evokes the worlds of Isak Dinesen, Beryl Markham, and Ernest Hemingway. It explores unforgettably our infinite desire for a perfect elsewhere, for love and a place to call home. It is an astonishing literary debut.
The Ten Commandments for Business Fai...
Brief Summary
Don Keough—a former top executive at Coca-Cola and now chairman of the elite investment banking firm Allen & Company—has witnessed plenty of failures in his sixty-year career (including New Coke). He has also been friends with some of the most successful people in business history, including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Jack Welch, Rupert Murdoch, and Peter Drucker.
Now this elder statesman reveals how great enterprises get into trouble. Even the smartest executives can fall into the trap of believing in their own infallibility. When that happens, more bad decisions are sure to follow.
This light-hearted "how-not-to” book includes anecdotes from Keough’s long career as well as other infamous failures.
His commandments for failure include:
• Quit Taking Risks;
• Be Inflexible;
• Assume Infallibility;
• Put All Your Faith in Experts;
• Send Mixed Messages; and
• Be Afraid of the Future.
As he writes, "After a lifetime in business I’ve never been able to develop a step-by-step formula that will guarantee success. What I could do, however, was talk about how to lose. I guarantee that anyone who follows my formula will be a highly successful loser.”
ISBN:9781591842347
Author:Donald R. Keough
How To Survive Your Doctorate
Brief Summary
If you are doing, thinking about doing, or know someone who is doing a doctorate, then this is the survival kit you need! Rather than focusing on the technical side of the doctorate, this book looks at all the other crucial skills that are part of everyday doctoral life.
This candid book provides real insight into what it's like to do a doctorate and offers practical advice on: The application process Sources of financial support Motivational issues Student-supervisor relationships Departmental and university politics Publishing, conferences and networking Career strategies Written by recent doctoral graduates, the book also includes real examples and case studies from current doctoral students and recent graduates across a range of disciplines and universities.
By demystifying the doctoral process How to Survive Your Doctorate prepares you for life as a doctoral student like no other book. See for yourself and be a survivor!
ISBN:9780335234448
Author:Jane Matthiesen
Managing Your Career
Brief Summary
Wondering how the most accomplished leaders from around the globe have tackled their toughest challenges? Now you can find out—with Lessons Learned. Concise and engaging, each volume in this new series offers 12-14 insightful essays by top leaders in industry, the public sector, and academia on the most pressing issues they’ve faced. The contributors share surprisingly personal anecdotes and offer authoritative and practical advice drawn from their years of hard-earned experience.
The series launches with three volumes, each of which centers on a timely topic:
• Leading by Example
• Managing Your Career
• Managing Change
A crucial resource for today’s busy executive, Lessons Learned gives you instant access to the wisdom and expertise of the world’s most talented leaders.
50 Lessons’ digital library holds more than 500 individual lessons from over 100 high-profile leaders from industry, the public sector, and academia from companies and institutions around the world.
ISBN:9781422118610
Author:Fifty Lessons
Linchpin by Seth Godin
In bestsellers such as Purple Cow and Tribes, Seth Godin taught readers how to make remarkable products and spread powerful ideas. But this book is about you—your choices, your future, and your potential to make a huge difference in whatever field you choose.
There used to be two teams in every workplace: management and labor. Now there's a third team: the linchpins. These people figure out what to do when there's no rule book. They delight and challenge their customers and peers. They love their work, pour their best selves into it, and turn each day into a kind of art.
Linchpins are the essential building blocks of great organizations. They may not be famous but they're indispensable. And in today's world, they get the best jobs and the most freedom.
As Godin writes, "Every day I meet people who have so much to give but have been bullied enough or frightened enough to hold it back. It's time to stop complying with the system and draw your own map. You have brilliance in you, your contribution is essential, and the art you create is precious. Only you can do it, and you must."
We Are a Muslim Please
Brief Summary
For Zaiba Malik, growing up in Bradford in the '70s and '80s certainly has its moments - staying up all night during Ramadan with her father; watching mad Mr Aziz searching for his goat during Eid; dancing along to Top of the Pops (so long as no-one's watching). And, of course, there's her mother - whether she's writing another ingratiating letter to the Queen or referring to Tom Jones as 'Thumb Jone'.
But Zaiba's story is also one of anxiety and seemingly irreconcilable opposites. Growing up she is constantly torn between two identities: 'British' and 'Muslim'. Alienated at school and confused at home, the racism she encounters as a child mirrors the horrors she experiences at the hands of Bangladeshi interrogators as a journalist years later.
Five years after the 7/7 attacks galvanized debates about Muslim-British identity, We Are A Muslim, Please is a stirring and enchanting memoir. We see, through Zaiba's childhood eyes, the poignancy of growing up in a world whose prejudices, contradictions and ambiguities are at once distressing and utterly captivating.
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ISBN:9780434018475
Author:Zaiba Malik
Waste Uncovering the Global Food Scandal
Brief Summary
The true cost of what the global food industry throws away.
With shortages, volatile prices and nearly one billion people hungry, the world has a food problem—or thinks it does. Farmers, manufacturers, supermarkets and consumers in North America and Europe discard up to half of their food—enough to feed all the world's hungry at least three times over. Forests are destroyed and nearly one tenth of the West's greenhouse gas emissions are released growing food that will never be eaten. While affluent nations throw away food through neglect, in the developing world crops rot because farmers lack the means to process, store and transport them to market.
But there could be surprisingly painless remedies for what has become one of the world's most pressing environmental and social problems. Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal traces the problem around the globe from the top to the bottom of the food production chain. Stuart’s journey takes him from the streets of New York to China, Pakistan and Japan and back to his home in England.
Introducing us to foraging pigs, potato farmers and food industry CEOs, Stuart encounters grotesque examples of profligacy, but also inspiring innovations and ways of making the most of what we have. The journey is a personal one, as Stuart is a dedicated freegan, who has chosen to live off of discarded or self-produced food in order to highlight the global food waste scandal.
Combining front-line investigation with startling new data, Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal shows how the way we live now has created a global food crisis—and what we can do to fix it.
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ISBN:9780393068368
Author:Tristram Stuart
War and Conflict in Africa
Brief Summary
After the Cold War, Africa earned the dubious distinction of being the world's most bloody continent. But how can we explain this proliferation of armed conflicts? What caused them and what were their main characteristics? And what did the world's governments do to stop them?
In this fully revised and updated second edition of his popular text, Paul Williams offers an in-depth and wide-ranging assessment of more than six hundred armed conflicts which took place in Africa from 1990 to the present day - from the continental catastrophe in the Great Lakes region to the sprawling conflicts across the Sahel and the web of wars in the Horn of Africa.
Taking a broad comparative approach to examine the political contexts in which these wars occurred, he explores the major patterns of organized violence, the key ingredients that provoked them and the major international responses undertaken to deliver lasting peace.
Part I, Contexts provides an overview of the most important attempts to measure the number, scale and location of Africa's armed conflicts and provides a conceptual and political sketch of the terrain of struggle upon which these wars were waged.
Part II, Ingredients analyses the role of five widely debated features of Africa's wars: the dynamics of neo-patrimonial systems of governance; the construction and manipulation of ethnic identities; questions of sovereignty and self-determination; as well as the impact of natural resources and religion.
Part III, Responses, discusses four major international reactions to Africa's wars: attempts to build a new institutional architecture to help promote peace and security on the continent; this architecture's two main policy instruments, peacemaking initiatives and peace operations; and efforts to develop the continent.
War and Conflict in Africa will be essential reading for all students of international peace and security studies as well as Africa's international relations.
ISBN:9781509509058
Author:Paul D. Williams
Do not say yes when you want to say no
Brief Summary
Don't Say Yes When You Want to Say No: Making Life Right When It Feels All Wrong
Yes, you can learn to say what you mean and mean what you say. This best-selling guide has already transformed thousands of lives--and can change your as well.
The authors' pioneering Assertiveness Training Technique can help you gain recognition and promotion on the job, renew your marriage, put more zing in your sex life, deal with your children more effectively, and make new friends.
Change your life as you learn how to:
• Target your own assertiveness difficulties and set your own goals.
• Follow your progress with a workshop that gives you step-by-step reinforcement.
• Visualize and actualize through exercises designed to perfect new behavior patterns.
• Develop self-control that comes from within.
• Change habits that keep you from getting what you want in every area of your life.
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ISBN:9780440154136
Author:Herbert Fensterheim and Jean Baer
Valley of the Casbahs
Brief Summary
Valley of the Casbahs: A Journey across the Moroccan Sahara
The four-hundred-and-fifty-mile long Draa River Valley in the Moroccan Sahara contains some of the most sumptuous oases and searing desert of the Arab world, starting in the moonscape gorges of the Anti-Atlas Mountains through to a green sea of date palms over which rise the many-towered casbahs of ochre coloured clay, medieval in aspect and sheltering a life medieval in character.
It is a region richer historically and ethnically than anywhere else in North Africa. The river stretches to the mosaic of dunes and parched land known as hammada - the domain of Bedouin and Blue Men and isolated Berber tribes - and pours through the desert into the Atlantic, where it ends its course. Jeffrey Tayler follows the Draa by foot and on camel, recounting stays in casbah homes, weddings, visits to mosques and marabouts and nights in hashish dens.
It is a journey marked with extremes - of weather, as Tayler survives intense heat and sandstorms and potentially lethal local tribesmen - and one which he only narrowly escapes to tell this tale.
ISBN:9780349115368
Author:Jeffrey Tayler
When the Sun Goes Down
Brief Summary
When the Sun Goes Down and other stories from Africa and beyond
This title When the Sun Goes Down and other stories from Africa and Beyond is an anthology of sixteen short stories by Emilia Ilieva and Waveney Olembo. 16 stories by international writers.
The sixteen short stories gathered in this anthology come from various corners of Africa and the rest of the world. Written over the last half a century – right up to the present day – by both renowned authors and those whose fame is now in the making, some published before, others appearing here for the first time, they represent fascinating examples of this widely beloved genre.
In the wisdom and beauty of their narrative worlds, the readers discover reality in new and stirring ways, and are memorably reminded of what a great gift it is to live – with pain, struggle, learning, love, joy, and all. The carefully selected stories on HIV/AIDS, corruption, gender issues, environmental concerns, dehumanizing and selfish acts of those perpetrating violence, provide the reader with a platform to debate and discuss them, and to positively influence change towards a better world.
These fascinating stories from many parts of the world bring into focus the need to appreciate diverse cultures and embrace the uniqueness that makes us one. Emilia Ilieva is currently an Associate Professor of Literature at Egerton University, Njoro. Her scholarly work has appeared in publications world-wide. Waveney Olembo is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature at Kenyatta University. Her publications are in the areas of poetry, and Caribbean and African Literature.
ISBN:9789966364531
Author:Emilia Ilieva and Waveney Olembo
The Utility of Force
Brief Summary
The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World
"War no longer exists," writes General Sir Rupert Smith, powerfully reminding us that the clash of mass national armies, the system of war since Napoleon, will never occur again. Instead, he argues in this timely book, we must be prepared to adapt tactics to each conflict, or lose the ability to protect ourselves and our way of life.
General Smith draws on his vast experience as a commander in the 1991 Gulf War, in Bosnia, Kosovo and Northern Ireland, to give us a probing analysis of modern war and to call for radically new military thinking. Why, he asks, do we use armed force to solve our political problems? And how is it that our armies can win battles but fail to solve the problems?
From Iraq to the Balkans, and from Afghanistan to Chechnya, Smith charts a stream of armed interventions that have failed to deliver on promises of resolution. He demonstrates why today's conflicts must be understood as intertwined political and military events.
He makes clear why the current one-size-fits-all model of total war, fought out on battlefields, that politicians still cling to must be abandoned in favor of new strategies that take into account the fact that wars are now fought among civilian populations. And he offers a compelling new model for how to fight these battles and secure our world.
Clear, incisive and provocative, The Utility of Force will fundamentally change the way we understand war
ISBN:9780307265623
Author:Rupert Smith
