Miss America 1945: Bess Myerson and The Year That Changed Our Lives

Book Description

A riveting tale of Bess Myerson's life before and during her reign as the only Jewish Miss America. It recalls the post WWII era, a time filled with pride and hope, as well as bigotry and exploitation. Narrated by Bess Myerson herself, along with New York musical star Adam Grupper, with an introduction by TV and theater personality, Hal Linden ("Barney Miller," "The Rothschilds").

Customer Reviews:

A Year Of Change.......2007-06-13

I just finished reading the book "Miss America,1945:Bess Myerson and the year that changed our lives" and i tell you it's very thought provoking book about what Bess Myerson went through during her reign as Miss America with all the prejudices that she went through.Although it's set in 1945,It's still holds true today.You can honestly say that from the end of World War 2 up to the late 1940's was an important period of change in America where a Jewish girl from the Bronx achieved the dream of every girl who wanted to win the crown of Miss America and two years later Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball.Over all it's a great book and it's something that everyone must have for their book collection.

A CROWNING SUCCESS. EVEN AFTER ALL THESE YEARS.......2002-09-29

There she goes, Miss America. And Bess Myerson was America's first (and still only) Jewish Miss America, an groundbreaking achievement that makes for riveting cultural and social history. This is not a new book --- it is the first paperback edition of Susan Dworkin's landmark collaborative biography that was first published in 1987, and it is still an important one. Dworkin weaves together oral histories, research and commentary to present not only a vivid portrait of pre-feminist America in the '30s and '40s, but one of Jews, of women, of the anti-Semitic riddled Miss America pageant and of Myerson's own life. A crowning success. Still.

A superbly produced, highly recommended audiobook........2001-04-05

Ably narrated by Bess Myerson and Adam Grupper, Miss America 1945 is Susan Dworkin's engaging rendition of Bess Myerson's memoirs of her self as a naive Jewish girl from the Bronx, a scheming beauty pageant promoter, and rampant anti-Semitism within the context of a national post-war euphoria. What is particularly fascinating is Myerson's candid revelations of what it was like to be the first (and only) Jewish Miss America and her emergent political activism that resulted from her experiences with the beauty pageant. This abridged-by-the-author audiobook edition features flawless production values and has a running time of 5 hours, 10 minutes. Miss America 1945 is an ardently recommended addition to personal and library audiobook collections.

Fascinating story!.......2000-04-02

Absolutely intriguing portrait of a truly fascinating and remarkable woman, not to mention a unique era in history. Bess Myerson symbolized so much, at a very important time in American history. Well worth reading/listening to!

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Ratz Are Nice (PCP) Is Pure Garbage

Robert "Nerve" Miller

Might Work Better on Film

Ratz Are Nice

Another voice searching for tongue space

Ratz Are Nice
Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite
Manufacturer: Alyson Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 1555835546

Book Description

The Way Things Areâ€¦Or Are Ratz Nice?
a conversation with author Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite

Let's start with the title. Ratz are Nice. What the hell?
Rats survive and adapt; they run together in the lower parts where nobody wants to go, eat what nobody else wants to eat. Like the poor and lower classes, like Edison and the other characters in the book. Since that's the way things are, I say rats are nice.

Your first book, Wigger, was about co-opting someone else's culture, but the characters in Ratz seem more directed toward their own.
Ratz starts the way Wigger did. But this time Edison is deciding on stuff about his life with the "Dumbdumz." He realizes you can be a part of something without it stealing parts of yourself to be there. So it's about kids deciding to make this decision in life. They want to make that adult decision, right or wrong, and deal with the consequences.

Tell us about the world your characters inhabit.
We are in another failed "Reconstruction Period." There was the Civil War and the exploitation and lost hope of civility and equality. Then we had the overhyped civil rights movement followed by the big '80s Pomo divisive cultural revolution. The people in Ratz are the bastard children of all this. The have-nots are the only ones who've never gotten a voice, and everyone keeps saying they're speaking for them. What else could we get from the kids who grew up during this period, but them running a power move on things?

Some of them are pretty evil in a lot of ways.
I do think there is evil out there. They say that Victoria is the occult capital of North America, that it's the center of the pentagram and that there are places here which are right on the crossroads. You can call up evil or goodness in the middle of a crossroads. I think people have called up some wickedness. It's the underlying theme in the novel. The "Dumbdumz" reflect that. How distorted and twisted they have become. Edison knows that we don't have a "Buffy" to slay baddies nor do we have "Hellboy" or a John Constantine. Todd McFarlane is from around here. He created Spawn to fight that stuff but really it's up to an in

Customer Reviews:

Ratz Are Nice (PCP) Is Pure Garbage.......2004-04-06

I started reading "Ratz Are Nice (PCP)" with an open mind right after finishing a great novel entitled "American Skin." That was my biggest mistake. Whereas Don De Grazia's "American Skin" was a cohesive, inventive narrative revolving around finely developed and believable characters within an admittably "fringe" subculture, "Ratz Are Nice" immediately climbs uphill with a narrative style that is incomprehensible, gimmicky and just plain boring. Quite frankly, Braithwaite's writing here is pure gibberish. Often it wasn't even clear to me who was who or why certain "characters" (for lack of a better word) were included in his story at all. The best three things about "Ratz Are Nice (PCP)" are (i) the front cover photo of a group of interacial skins and streetpunks, (ii) the entertaining (although sometimes inaccurate) "Author Notes" and (iii) the fact that the thing is short. Avoid at ALL costs!

Robert "Nerve" Miller.......2001-05-18

In Ratz are Nice (PSP) Braithwaite exposes a generally little known and entirely misunderstood culture existing not in London or Toronto but in Victoria, B.C. Until now best known as the land of the newly wed and nearly dead, one feels as though a rock has been overturned in the pristine rain forest; underneath, a seething, alarming and complex world draws one downward for a closer look, triggering feelings which range from dismay to utter fascination.

Ratz are nice(PSP) is an intelligent, wild and at times unbelievable commentary on sub-society deserving of attention and understanding. Cheers to Braithwaite for taking on such a monumental project and for completing it.

Might Work Better on Film.......2001-04-04

What can I say? As a book, this is awful. The "startling multiethnic lyrical phrasing" that the jacket praises, just doesn't do the trick. And unless you're a glutton for wading through experimental writing, and annoying typography (hey, I used to be a book typesetter, I love innovate type work, this is just lame) it's boring. Somehow, I get the impression I might have actually enjoyed it if it had been a movie. There, I could have gotten into the rythym of the language and the lives a bit more, but on print it's a dud. And the story of two rival skinhead crews is fairly banal. I've yet to read any book about the skinhead subculture that rises above cliche or pulp fiction, and this is certainly no exception. The author's notes are sort of interesting, except that there are some errors and typos throughout (for example, the 2-Tone band is The Selecter, not The Selecters, the famous rocksteady producer is Sonia Pottinger, not Portinger), and the bit about hardcore is seriously flawed. I dunno, maybe Canadians, or homosexuals will get more out of it than I did. I'd be interested in seeing a movie of it though.

Ratz Are Nice.......2001-03-25

Those who read Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite's first novel, the inexplicably overlooked Wigger, will recognize the Victoria writer's performative prose and irascible voice in his latest work. Ratz Are Nice (PSP) is the story of Edison, a black skinhead navigating the mean streets and meaner syntax of the skinhead/rudeboy scene (PSP stands for "pure street punk"). Braithwaite's narrative oscillates between first and third person, sometimes directing Edison's I outward, and at other times presenting us with an omniscient eye watching the various skinhead gangsters scheming and thugging 24/7. The narrative strategy works because the characters themselves exist in a continually shifting subcultural terrain: white skinheads who flirt with neo-Nazism but recognize that the culture they love is derived from Caribbean ska; black skinheads who are surrounded by what have become, to the dominant culture, symbols of white power; militaristic machismo fused with gay male erotics. The effect is something like S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders shoved head-first through the identity politics looking glass; we come out the other side with a text whose hot-blooded postmodernism depicts a violence without the pretense of heroism, and a celebration of disenfranchisement without the clichés of identity-mongering (Braithwaite depicts Edison as shining shoes for a living without once playing the image for pathos). In Braithwaite's hands, skinhead/rudeboy culture becomes an exemplar of the psychic balkanization that comes with being black in British Columbia, a place that bars easy appropriations of Afrocentrism. Braithwaite does with the subculture what Attila Richard Lukacs, a visual artist who also eroticizes skinhead imagery, fails to do: Ratz Are Nice (PSP) offers more than a voyeuristic gaze, but takes seriously the realpolitik of the subculture, including what is at stake culturally, racially and sexually. The comparison to visual art is apt, partly because of the way Ratz Are Nice (PSP) is narrated typographically. Braithwaite's English is not only given to the reclamation of hip-hop phonetics, but font-play, idiosyncratic punctuation, and a layout that tells as much of the story as the words themselves. And like a literary Jean-Michel Basquiat, Braithwaite succeeds in mashing up our too-settled categories of prose and identity.

Another voice searching for tongue space.......2001-02-27

Short and sour. "Ratz Are Nice: (Psp)" is a small book that pushes big buttons. Author Braithwaite obviously knows what he is about and tells a story from the intra-abdominal site. Characters are believeable and he makes us care about them. But the problem with wading through the hieroglyphics and lingo, page layout and punctuation oddities in the end detracts from the idea of the novel. It just becomes kitsch. If you feel you must read this book, I suggest you start with the Author's Notes: this reads with great ease and wit and venom. For the rest, the work involved in getting there doesn't seem to justify the payoff.....at least to this reader.

Book Description

83 card tricks appear: key card tricks, mathematical card tricks, tricks using arranged stacks of cards, sleight of hand, and tricks using two packs of cards, as well as special cards, props, and card novelties. And 66 magic tricks --with coins, silks and handkerchiefs, string and rope, paper, mind games, and mathematical tricks. Worth the price of the book for any beginner are the 30 pages of card handling methods. There's even a section on how to get the truly "magical" effects that will have your audience shaking their heads in disbelief and calling for more. 512 pages (all in 2-color), 4 3/16 x 5 1/4.

Customer Reviews:

EXCELLENT!.......2000-03-31

I think this book is the best! It has everything including slight-of-hand maneuvers and a great deal of card tricks! I would recomened getting this book. Even after four and a half years of being a magician, this book was still useful. GET THIS BOOK

DO YOURSELF A FAVOR AND DON'T BUY THIS BOOK!.......1999-09-09

I am an amateur magicican and I must say this book is lousy at best. This is definately a book that you should judge by its title. (it is actually quite small barely fitting in your hand). As the latter suggests, it is quite difficult to hold on to this book since its really so small in size. As far as the contents, the book does not contain any useful slights. In addition, the tricks are not explained in a whole lot of detail and the pictures don't help at all either. I did learn some tricks which were quite good, but it took considerable time to learn based on the nature of the book. Do yourself a favor and buy Mark Wilson's Complete course in magic.

Magnificent!.......1999-07-12

This book is an excellent guide to those who wish to put on magic shows or just make friends ask you, "how the heck did you do that". While some of the props you have to make yourself, most of these tricks can be done with everyday objects. It also allows you to add your own creativity to the tricks. A great book!

Nicely explained and great for beginners.......1998-11-17

This book is great for those wanting to learn easy to moderately difficult card and magic tricks.

Wonderful Resource For Beginner or Advanced Magicians!!!!.......1998-08-23

This is by far one of the most comprehensive books on magic I have seen. I have been a magician for nearly ten years now, and I still find use for this versatile manual of magic. It has everything from card and rope magic, to amazing parlour tricks!!! If you are beginning in magic or are just looking for a new resource for your repetior, you will find what you need to spice up your act in this book. I love the book and would recommend to anybody!

The Little Giant Encyclopedia of Gambling Games

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The Little Giant Encyclopedia of Gambling Games
Diagram Group
Manufacturer: Sterling Pub Co Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0806981288

The Little Giant Encyclopedia of Card Games

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The Little Giant Encyclopedia of Card Games
The Diagram Group
Manufacturer: Sterling
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0806913304

Book Description

"...a good one, thanks to its clear, concise descriptions. With more than 500 pages, it covers some 250 games, which are arranged in four categories--general card games, gambling games, solitaires, and children's games--and usefully indexed by the number of players."--Games. 512 pages (all in 2-color), 4 1/16 x 5 1/4.

The Little Giant Encyclopedia of Card Games Gift Set

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The Little Giant Encyclopedia of Card Games Gift Set

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Book Description

Not All Knowledge Is Created Equal

Deep smarts are the engine of any organization-as well as the essential value that individuals build over their careers. Distinct from I.Q., this type of expertise consists of practical wisdom: accumulated knowledge, know-how, and intuition gained through extensive experience. How do such smarts develop? And what happens when people with deep smarts leave a particular job-or the organization? Can any of their smarts be transferred? Should they be?

Basing their conclusions on a multiyear research project, Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap argue that cultivating and managing deep smarts are critical parts of any leader's job. The authors draw on examples from firms of all sizes and types to illustrate the connection between deep smarts and organizational viability and continuous innovation.

Leonard and Swap describe the origins and limits of deep smarts and outline processes for cultivating and leveraging them across the organization. Developing an experience repertoire and receiving strategic guidance from wise coaches can help individuals move up the ladder of expertise from novice to master.

Addressing a topic of increasing importance as the Boomer generation retires, Deep Smarts challenges leaders to take a hands-on approach to managing the experience-based knowledge shaping the future of their organizations.

Customer Reviews:

An exciting read for the knowledge management junkie.......2006-09-01

For as long as anyone can remember leaders have been struggling to describe and to manage a mysterious kind of knowledge that people cannot readily pass on to others. It has been called wisdom, tribal knowledge, and tacit knowledge. Authors Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap put this elusive kind of expertise in an organizational context and call it deep smarts.

One of the best ways to describe deep smarts is to provide an example of what it can do. They write, "When knowledge is fragmented, it takes deep smarts to aggregate it, make sense of it, see the relevant patterns, and act on it." So deep smarts is what it takes to define a path through confusion by sensing the connections in a blizzard of information. Wouldn't we all like to have that ability and have it flourish in our organizations?

Deep Smarts, the book, stands out among its peers in the rapidly growing field of knowledge management books on the strength of several virtues that are expressed in the subtitle. The authors show the reader how to cultivate and transfer enduring business wisdom, with `how to' being one of the key elements.

Cultivating deep smarts in an organization requires serious commitment from a manager. The manager must study it enough to understand its nature. It also requires a big investment in other people in order to give them the opportunity to develop deep smarts, which is to say, to move beyond ordinary levels of competence. Finally, the manager must maintain an environment that supports learning rather than stifling it. This means maintaining an environment of candor, fairness, and mutual respect. Anything less stifles learning and discourages the development of deep smarts.

Swap and Leonard provide an abundance of rather specific guidance on the `how' component. They do not leave the reader to invent the implementation process. The tasks they prescribe are not easy, however, and this is why the skillful development of deep smarts is rarely accomplished by organizations.

There are plenty of books on knowledge management, but Deep Smarts fills a unique niche for the working manager who faces the real life challenge of building a smarter organization by virtue of providing a helpful vocabulary, a useful conceptual framework, and real life examples of success and failure in knowledge management. This is a "best-of-class" book for both the scholar and the practitioner who is accountable for the bottom line.

Deep smarts make Good to Great happen.......2006-04-17

This book uses great examples to explain the value of different levels of smarts. In the ancient hunting and gathering age, it's almost impossible for a hunter to get 1000 times of games more than his peer did. But in the Internet age, an expert programmer can easily make 1000 times of IT performance higher than her peer does.

The related critical issues come along: (1) How to distinguish different levels of knowledge? (2) How to find the right knowledge workers with required level of intelligence? (3) How to develop the deep smarts and their knowledge masters? (4) Finally, how to use those deep smarts to accomplish the organization's goals?

In the future editions, I would like to see the authors elaborate more on item (3) and (4) which are lightly exploited at the current version. Even for the item (1): how to distinguish different levels of knowledge? I think more quantitative and qualitative analysis may be introduced for better measurement and clarification. For example, how to measure the productivity of the software programmer is a tough task. (It's certainly not measured by the lines of code written per day.) In the senior corporate management and politics, it becomes extremely hard for rigorous performance measurement.

In a word, the deep smarts make good to great happen. The level 5 leaders in the greatest companies deploy and enable their organizations' deep smarts and constantly out-perform the rest. Therefore, it would be great worth exploring the general mechanism of deep smarts.

Learning Influenced by Beliefs.......2005-12-07

This book is in the area of Knowledge Management. Similar to many other business books, it is based on empirical research performed by the authors.

The authors first define what they mean by "deep smarts" through reviewing different levels of expertise. Then they introduce the main thesis of the book. Expertise is acquired by an individual through active knowledge building. This includes getting first-hand experience and the transfer of knowledge from coaches or through other means. However, in such a process, the amount of knowledge that is actually internalized is also influenced by one's own beliefs and other people via their social influences.

The authors have led me to a significant understanding of why it is so hard for some people to learn, despite the fact that, their need for the relevant knowledge is very obvious already. Important factors include their lack of knowledge receptors and the knowledge to which they are exposed being contrary to their existing beliefs and assumptions.

This book is a great help to coaches, teachers, and consultants in helping them learn more effective methods of transferring knowledge to their students or clients in various situations.

By far the most useful, insightful book I've read in years........2005-05-04

By far the most useful and insightful book I've read in years. It changed the way I think about my organization and my career.

Leonard and Swap have shown that deep smarts, the experienced-based knowledge held by individuals in a firm are vital to an organization's survival as well as to an individual's success. I've heard much about the necessity of "cultivating talent" or "managing knowledge" without any real insight into what constitutes talent or what kind of knowledge is important. The result I've seen has been impractical (but often very expensive) efforts to codify any available organizational information without any sense of how valuable or accessible it is.

Leonard and Swap dig deeper into the real meaning of knowledge. Their research has identified what kind of knowledge creates competitive advantage, and more importantly, how leaders can cultivate and retain this knowledge. I don't know anyone in business who has not been confronted with the realization that vital experience has not been captured or passed on...when someone retires, leaves a position or leaves the company. And most of us have experienced a competitive threat based on superior expertise. But the solutions proposed usually aren't based on an understanding of how people actually learn (rather than how we wish they would) and don't often result in the development of judgment and wisdom. This book gave me a whole new way of thinking about expertise and how to leverage it. Deep Smarts also spoke to me on a personal level. I found their suggestions for how to build personal deep smarts an extremely useful approach to my own career development.

I also appreciate that this book is grounded in rigorous research. Based on hundreds of interviews, it provides the kind of insight that comes from real people, managing real organizations. It is no wonder their suggestions and guidance are so actionable. For once, I feel like a management book has been written for managers! This book is a must for anyone serious about the reality of managing knowledge assets and intellectual capital.

You don't have to be an expert to learn how to share knowhow.......2005-05-03

In Deep Smarts, the authors demonstrate a brilliant capacity for translating complex concepts into practical ideas for managers. Finally, here is book that addresses directly some of the challenges in knowledge transfer at a critical time for professions in all sectors of society. The authors tackle a very difficult problem: how to understand expertise; but then they go the additional step and discuss how to develop useful practices for sharing expertise across organizations. Leonard and Swap show how and why expertise can and should be captured before knowledge 'walks out the door.' The book aggregates and synthesizes years of primary and secondary academic research, but you wouldn't necessarily know that unless you took a close look at the extensive citations. In addition, there are many case examples that tell the story in a compelling and highly readable manner.

Some may see this as a book for HR, training&development, or knowledge management... it is for all three of these domains and the one that ties them together: strategy. As expertise is more greatly valued as the enduring resource for sustainable economic advantage, knowledge-based organizations will turn increasingly to their communities of practice, in which resides the expertise that is the wellspring of innovation.

Are you experienced?(WIP)(Deep Smarts: How To Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom)(Book Review): An article from: Automotive Design & Production

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Are you experienced?(WIP)(Deep Smarts: How To Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom)(Book Review): An article from: Automotive Design & Production

Manufacturer: Gardner Publications, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

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Book Description

This digital document is an article from Automotive Design & Production, published by Gardner Publications, Inc. on February 1, 2005. The length of the article is 890 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Are you experienced?(WIP)(Deep Smarts: How To Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom)(Book Review)
Publication: Automotive Design & Production (Magazine/Journal)
Date: February 1, 2005
Publisher: Gardner Publications, Inc.
Volume: 117 Issue: 2 Page: 26(1)

Article Type: Book Review

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