Risultati letto da "Grover Gardner" in Tutte le categorie

The world’s most trusted guide for leaders in transition. Transitions are a critical time for leaders. In fact, most agree that moving into a new role is the biggest challenge a manager will face. While transitions offer a chance to start fresh and make needed changes in an organization, they also place leaders in a position of acute vulnerability. Missteps made during the crucial first three months in a new role can jeopardize or even derail your success.

Titan is the first full-length biography based on unrestricted access to Rockefeller’s exceptionally rich trove of papers. A landmark publication full of startling revelations, the book indelibly alters our image of this most enigmatic capitalist. Born the son of a flamboyant, bigamous snake-oil salesman and a pious, straitlaced mother, Rockefeller rose from rustic origins to become the world’s richest man by creating America’s most powerful and feared monopoly, Standard Oil. Branded "the Octopus" by legions of muckrakers, the trust refined and marketed nearly 90 percent of the oil produced in America.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner is consistently ranked among the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Set in Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, the book tells of the hapless and tormented Bundren family. Addie, the long-suffering matriarch, is lying on her deathbed, tended by her daughter, Dewey Dell. Outside, her son Cash is crafting the coffin she will soon need.

This semiautobiographical tale features an American ambulance driver, Lieutenant Frederic Henry, stationed on the Italian front, who falls in love with Catherine Barkley, a beautiful English nurse. Set against the horrors of war on the battlefield, with tired, demoralized men facing the German attack on Caporetto, Hemingway unforgettably captures their despair as well as the pain of lovers caught in the harsh realities of war, which threaten to pull them apart.

An explorer tug captain, Alex Racine detects a damaged alien craft drifting into the system. Recognizing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make first contact, Alex pulls off a daring maneuver to latch on to the derelict. Alex discovers the ship was attacked by an unknown craft, the first of its kind ever encountered. The mysterious silver ship's attack was both instant and deadly.

This is the way the world ends: with a nanosecond of computer error in a Defense Department laboratory and a million casual contacts that form the links in a chain letter of death. And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of...

Here, anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: He shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods - that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.

Dee Brown's eloquent, meticulously documented account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian during the second half of the 19th century uses council records, autobiographies, and firsthand descriptions. Brown allows great chiefs and warriors of the Dakota, Ute, Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes to tell us in their own words of the battles, massacres, and broken treaties that finally left them demoralized and defeated.

The lawyer and journalist Matteo Teresi discovers the existence of a secret sect whose members include priests, politicians, and regional VIPs. During the early morning hours, when the town’s churches are closed, the "Sect of the Angels" meets in the sacristy to carry out their holy office: initiating devout virgins into the rites of married life. Preying on their victims’ naivete, the hooded "elect" commit ignominious acts while promising the young women divine grace. In 1901, at a time of immense changes in Sicilian society, the scandal breaks nationwide.

The Rest Is Noise takes the listener inside the labyrinth of modern music, from turn-of-the-century Vienna to downtown New York in the '60s and '70s. We meet the maverick personalities and follow the rise of mass culture on this sweeping tour of 20th-century history through its music.

The famous journalist and author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich documents his front row seat at the pivotal events leading up to World War II. In the second of a three-volume series, William L. Shirer tells the story of his own eventful life, detailing the most notable moments of his career as a journalist stationed in Germany during the rise of the Third Reich. Shirer was there while Hitler celebrated his new domination of Germany, unleashed the Blitzkrieg on Poland, and began the conflict that would come to be known as World War II.

Since its publication in 1960, William L. Shirer’s monumental study of Hitler’s German empire has been widely acclaimed as the definitive record of the 20th century’s blackest hours. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich offers an unparalleled and thrillingly told examination of how Adolf Hitler nearly succeeded in conquering the world. With millions of copies in print around the globe, it has attained the status of a vital and enduring classic.

In this mystical short story, the author recalls frequenting a Broadway cafeteria where he would meet other Polish and Russian immigrants. In the fifties, a woman named Esther became part of their group. Although she had been in a Russian prison camp and now had taken a menial job to support her cripple father, she was cheerful and outgoing. She and the author became good friends, but each time he saw her, she looked more disenchanted; her father died, she was often ill, and she worried about her sanity.

Edward O. Wilson - winner of two Pulitzer prizes, champion of biodiversity, and Faculty Emeritus at Harvard University - is arguably one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. Yet his celebrated career began not with an elite education but from an insatiable curiosity about the natural world and drive to explore its mysteries. Called "one of the finest scientific memoirs ever written" by the Los Angeles Times, Naturalist is a wise and personal account of Wilson's growth as a scientist and the evolution of the fields he helped define.

A contentious Temple conclave brings sorcerer Learned Penric and his demon Desdemona, in support of his superior Princess-Archdivine Llewen of Martensbridge, to the disputed Carpagamon border town of Occo. There, the uncanny pair will tangle with dangerous new intrigues and old histories, that will test their magical skills, their wits, and their hearts.

A seminal and controversial figure in the history of political thought and public relations, Edward Bernays pioneered the scientific technique of shaping and manipulating public opinion, which he famously dubbed the "engineering of consent". During World War I, he was an integral part of the US Committee on Public Information, or CPI, a powerful propaganda apparatus that was mobilized to package, advertise, and sell the war to the American people as one that would "Make the World Safe for Democracy".

A modern classic, Einstein's Dreams is a fictional collage of stories dreamed by Albert Einstein in 1905, when he worked in a patent office in Switzerland. As the defiant but sensitive young genius is creating his theory of relativity, a new conception of time, he imagines many possible worlds. In one, time is circular, and people are fated to repeat their triumphs and failures over and over. In another, there is a place where time stands still, visited by lovers and parents clinging to their children.

1662: Jakob Kuisl, the hangman of a village in the Alps, receives a letter from his sister calling him to the imperial city of Regensburg, where a gruesome sight awaits him: her throat has been slit. When the city constable discovers Kuisl alongside the corpse, he locks him in a dungeon, where Kuisl will experience firsthand the torture he’s administered himself for years.

Naples, 1932. A week before Easter, springtime offers fragrant temptations to the men and women of Naples - but evil also lurks in the sweet-smelling spring air. At the high-class brothel in the center of town known as Paradiso, Viper, the most famous prostitute of all, is found dead after being suffocated with a pillow. Her last client swears that he left her alive and well. But when her next client arrived, he found her dead. Who killed her and why?

A "wild west" tale of two brothers who battle both the state and a mafia empire in 1920s Italy, from famed Italian author Andrea Camilleri. Raffadali, province of Agrigento, 1920s. The Sacco brothers are free men with strong ideas about socialism and the state. Their lives change radically one morning when their father, Luigi Sacco, receives an anonymous letter from the local Mafia demanding protection money and is the victim of a robbery attempt. Luigi tells the police of the extortion letters he received, but the police don't know what to do.