Average customer rating:
- Fabulous Henry Kaiser or Kaiser Henry the Sordid.
|
Mr. Kaiser Goes to Washington: The Rise of a Government Entrepreneur (Luther Hartwell Hodges Series on Business, Society, and the State)
Stephen B. Adams
Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
 General
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
Business
| Professionals & Academics
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Popular Economics
| Business & Investing
| Subjects
| Books
Production & Operations
| Management & Leadership
| Business & Investing
| Subjects
| Books
Entrepreneurship
| Small Business & Entrepreneurship
| Business & Investing
| Subjects
| Books
Federal Government
| Levels of Government
| Political Science
| Social Sciences
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0807823589
Release Date: 1997-10-15 |
Book Description
In the 1940s, the name Henry J. Kaiser was magic. Based on the success of his shipyards, Kaiser was hailed by the national media as the force behind a 'can-do' production miracle and credited by the American public with doing more to help President Roosevelt win World War II than any other civilian. Kaiser also built an empire in construction, cement, magnesium, steel, and aluminum—all based on government contracts, government loans, and changes in government regulations.
In this book, Stephen Adams offers Kaiser's story as the first detailed case study of 'government entrepreneurship.' Taking a fresh look at the birth of modern business-government relations, he explores the symbiotic connection forged between FDR and Kaiser. Adams shows that while Kaiser capitalized on opportunities provided by the growth of the federal government, FDR found in Kaiser an industrial partner whose enterprises embodied New Deal goals. The result of a confluence of administration policy and entrepreneurial zeal, Kaiser's dramatic rise illustrates the important role of governmental relations in American entrepreneurial success.
Customer Reviews:
Fabulous Henry Kaiser or Kaiser Henry the Sordid........2005-08-24
Mr. Adams remarkable book exposes H. Kaiser as a sociopath, war profiteer, and con-man. Reading his treatment of workers at Boulder Dam in the early 1930s where 110 people died, cases of carbon monixide poisoning and heat exhaustion written off as 'non-industrial' by (guess who)Sidney Garfield, the project's medical director. kaiser lost 100 claims by workers, settled out of court, that shook kaiser awake that he is not above decency and morality, that the 'rules' actually applied to him in the only way he could understand: monetarily. Out of this sordid, disgusting begining came Kaiser 'Permanente', and its step-child managed care.
Average customer rating:
|
Tears in the Snow: A True Story of Love, Courage and Danger
Arnie Wilson
Manufacturer: Blake Pub
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
General
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Biographies
| Sports
| Subjects
| Books
Downhill
| Skiing
| Winter Sports
| Sports
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Skiing
| Winter Sports
| Sports
| Subjects
| Books
General
| British
| World Literature
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 1857821548 |
Customer Reviews:
Marching to the Beat of Their Own Drums.......2004-05-09
December Bride offers a glimpse into the psyche of Ulster people in the past and today. Sam Hanna Bell perfectly catches the nuances of Ulster Scots dialect and people in this novel. We begin and end the novel in the meeting house, and indeed the harsh austerity of Presbyterianism is a key theme in the book. When Sarah Gomartin enters the house of the Echlin brothers as a servant and advances to be the mistress of both the house and the two brothers - bearing them two "by-blows", or illegitimate children, we see events unfold that unsettle the the close knit purtianical commumity. Strangford Lough and the surrounding pladdies and drumlins are also characters in the book in their own right, with the land showing a brutal indifference to human frality and emotion. The stubborn, stoic nature of the Ulster Scots is displayed in its many varities, from the desire to go their own way, to the Lambeg drums and finally to the close knit loving family. Although this book is set in the nineteenth century, its themes reach across the years and still have relevance now. I urge anyone with an interest in Ireland and particulary the north of Ireland to read this book.
A Northern Irish classic of love, lust, loathing + the land........2002-01-12
'December Bride' begins grimly with a wedding between two middle-aged farmfolk in an empty church. Outside, a curious band of onlookers lurk in the cemetary. In this opening sequence, the novel's Big Themes are set up - The Land, Family, Death, Religion, Community. Bell than switches back a quarter of a century to chart how this scanario came to be. Andrew Echlin, benevolent patriarch of a large lake-side farmstead in turn-of-the-20th-century Northern Ireland, widower father of two sons (silent Hamilton and impetuous Frank), hires labouring tenant Martha Gomartin and her 30-year-old daughter Sarah as domestic servants. After Andrew's death in a boating accident, both men enjoy Sarah's favours, producing a baby of uncertain parentage. Despite the ineffectual efforts of a disapproving clergy, and the scandalised hostility of the community, Sarah refuses to marry either brother, and effectively takes over the running of the household. This menage-a-trois is seen as a direct affront to Puritan Protestant Ulster values; as minister Sorleyson muses: 'One had obligations to one's fellow-men. Of what avail was virtue if lust and irresponsibility were to be crowned with contentment?'
Bell uses as an epigraph a verse by Thomas Hardy, and it is to the latter's novels that 'Bride' bears most resemblance, with its focus on austere agricultural life, on the influence of the weather and the land on characters, on the confict between the eternal cycle of the seasons and the brutal transience of individual lives. Dialect (in this case Ulster-Scots) is richly employed, both in dialogue and in the detailed descriptons of farming life; the transgressive behaviour of individuals and families are contrasted with the norms of the wider community. As in Hardy, Bell favours dramatic set-pieces, often self-contained; he is also alert to the shifting emotions and contradictions of characters. Although the book's pleasures pertain to the 19th century novel, the writing is tauter; 'Bride' is ultimately not as relentlessly bleak or fatalistic as Hardy, despite that opening scene, the brooding or portentous atmosphere of many sequences, and the shattering violence or accidents that break out.
'Bride' is a canonical text in Irish literature, looked at for insight into the bitter history of Northern Ireland and the 'Ulster mentality', with the Troubles breaking out less then two decades after its publication (1951). And it is true that the tensions between Protestants and Catholics are a feature, that the issue of land and its control is crucial, that events seem to take place around important historical dates. But to reduce this novel to its academia-friendly bones not only misses the subversive, non-nationalist narrative of a servant girl and her disruptive sexuality taking control of a powerful farmstead, but also minimises Bell's gifts as a novelist, his psychological acuity, the visual and verbal poetry of his scene-setting, and the power of extended sequences, such as that of a near-senile widower lost in the crowded Belfast streets with his beloved dog.
Average customer rating:
|
Ash/22 Brides #1 Vol. 1 December 1996
Fabian Nicieza
Manufacturer: Event Comics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Comic
General
| Comic Strips
| Comics & Graphic Novels
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Graphic Novels
| Comics & Graphic Novels
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: B000RFT1FI |
Product Description
"Something Butt-Ugly This Way Comes!"
Average customer rating:
|
December Bride
VHS
Manufacturer: Not Avail
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
ASIN: 5554677746 |
Average customer rating:
- Study of how a book became a film, full of modish theory.
|
December Bride (Ireland into Film)
Lance Pettitt
Manufacturer: Cork University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Adaptations
| Movies
| Entertainment
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Movies
| Entertainment
| Subjects
| Books
History & Criticism
| Movies
| Entertainment
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Foreign Languages
| Reference
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Arts & Photography
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Performing Arts
| Arts & Photography
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 1859182909 |
Book Description
Sam Hanna Bell's debut novel (1951), about life in a tight-knit Presbyterian community in turn-of-the-century Northern Ireland, was adapted for the screen by David Rudkin and directed by Thaddeus O'Sullivan in 1990. Both as a novel and as a film, December Bride is a remarkable combination of passion and politics set against a rural backdrop of communal constraint and individual action. Visually and thematically, the film is a timely reinvestigation of Ulster Protestant history and culture, and in particular reclaims a tradition of radical independent thought exemplified by the work of Sam Hanna Bell. Drawing on previously unpublished archival material and new interviews, Lance Pettitt explores the intricate relationship between novel, screenplay and the wider film culture. December Bride is a consummate and provocative challenge to the politics of Irish society, its cinematic representations, and to the very process of film adaptation itself.
Customer Reviews:
Study of how a book became a film, full of modish theory........2002-01-21
Although it doesn't proclaim itself as such, Lance Pettit's study of the Thaddeus O'Sullivan film 'December Bride' is the perfect text for teachers and lecturers of cinema. Using the film as a starting point, it deals with such topics as cinematic adaptations of literature; the concepts of national and independent cinema; the funding and marketing of non-Hollywood films; and the collaborative process involved in making films and the validity of the auteur process. Pettit employs (very selectively) various theoretical frameworks, from Barthesian structuralism to feminism to new-historicism to post-colonialism, and the film becomes an extended case study with which to test them.
The book is part of the 'Ireland into Film' series, which seeks to examine representations of the auld sod in the cinema. With syllogistic predictability, Chapter 1 deals with Sam Hanna Bell's source novel (a background to Irish history as context for book and film; Bell as an Ulster Protestant, as a regional writer, as a Scottish emigre, as a socialist hostile to the bellicose Orange bluster hijacking Protestant identity; his efforts as both writer and broadcaster to record the culturally marginalised Protestant ways of life; the novel's importance as a way of understanding and revealing Protestant experience); Chapter 2 charts the film's production process, from turning the novel into a script to acquiring finance (potted histories of the director and screenwriter (playwright David Rudkin); a valuable discussion of the process of literary adaptation; the importance of creating a sense of the landscape, consciously avoiding the banal trouist-trap romanticism of most films about Ireland); Chapter 3 analyses the film itself (the ommissions from and compressions of the novel, and the making 'radical' its apparently less progressive elements; a look at key scenes; the thematic and aesthetic influence of European directors (Varda, Truffaut, Axel, Dreyer, Bergman), employed to avoid the cliches of Irish, British and American cinema).
Throughout, Pettit is eager to show that literary adaptations in film are not necessarily diminutions; he concludes that the film is a 'creative commentary' on the novel, an 'echo', a remembrance of reading it, all located in its own 'historical moment' of the late 1980s. He sees its creative and commerical heterogeneity - a novel by a Scotsman, made by two Irishmen living in England with British money and European personnel, marketed as a 'European' art-film, but concerned very much with Irish themes - as a way of breaking and critiquing tired old images and conceptions of what it is to 'be' Irish (this apparently bothers some people). The menage a trois at the centre of the film is turned into a metaphor for Northern Ireland, squeezed between the attentions of Ireland and England.
This is all very well, and the book is informative enough. But its reliance on hoary old, half-digested 'frameworks'; its recourse to jargon, buzzwords and critical inanities; its often clumsy style and lack of any real empathetic passion for the cinema; its preference for the politically correct over the aesthetically inspired (works that fit the theory rather than those that resist it) is all very dispiriting.
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Irish Literary Supplement, published by Irish Studies Program on March 22, 2003. The length of the article is 1354 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: Ireland's silver screen.(Book Review)
Author: Robert Savage
Publication:
Irish Literary Supplement (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 22, 2003
Publisher: Irish Studies Program
Volume: 22
Issue: 1
Page: 26(2)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Mississippi Magazine, published by Thomson Gale on January 1, 2007. The length of the article is 940 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: Winter white: a bride's artistic vision of a Delta wedding in December comes true on a starry night.
Author: Nancy Elizabeth Goodman
Publication:
Mississippi Magazine (Magazine/Journal)
Date: January 1, 2007
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 25
Issue: 3
Page: 130(6)
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Customer Reviews:
Great for College Sports Fans........2001-03-12
I really enjoyed this book as I am a big fan of both college football and college basketball. It has the stories behind the nicknames of most of the major schools and some of the smaller ones as well. I thought it was well written and extremely interesting. I have also loaned it to many friends after they have seen it at my house and they enjoyed it as well.
Average customer rating:
|
Mascot Mania
Manufacturer: Texas Review Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Popular Culture
| Social Sciences
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Education
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
Elementary School
| Education
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
| General
| Reading
Statistics
| Education Theory
| Education
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
History of Sports
| Miscellaneous
| Sports
| Subjects
| Books
Texas
| State & Local
| United States
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 1881515729 |
Average customer rating:
|
Murder at the Bridge Table
Manufacturer: Granovetter Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000H7LU4Q |
Amazon.com Reviews
How much do we humans enjoy our current status as the most intelligent beings on earth? Enough to try to stop our own inventions from surpassing us in smarts? If so, we'd better pull the plug right now, because if Ray Kurzweil is right we've only got until about 2020 before computers outpace the human brain in computational power. Kurzweil, artificial intelligence expert and author of The Age of Intelligent Machines, shows that technological evolution moves at an exponential pace. Further, he asserts, in a sort of swirling postulate, time speeds up as order increases, and vice versa. He calls this the "Law of Time and Chaos," and it means that although entropy is slowing the stream of time down for the universe overall, and thus vastly increasing the amount of time between major events, in the eddy of technological evolution the exact opposite is happening, and events will soon be coming faster and more furiously. This means that we'd better figure out how to deal with conscious machines as soon as possible--they'll soon not only be able to beat us at chess, but also likely demand civil rights, and might at last realize the very human dream of immortality.
The Age of Spiritual Machines is compelling and accessible, and not necessarily best read from front to back--it's less heavily historical if you jump around (Kurzweil encourages this). Much of the content of the book lays the groundwork to justify Kurzweil's timeline, providing an engaging primer on the philosophical and technological ideas behind the study of consciousness. Instead of being a gee-whiz futurist manifesto, Spiritual Machines reads like a history of the future, without too much science fiction dystopianism. Instead, Kurzweil shows us the logical outgrowths of current trends, with all their attendant possibilities. This is the book we'll turn to when our computers first say "hello." --Therese Littleton
Book Description
The national bestseller by the "ultimate thinking machine" (Forbes) whose predictions for the future are startling, provocative--and closer to fruition than you think.
Ray Kurzweil is the inventor of the most innovative and compelling technology of our era, an international authority on artificial intelligence, and one of our greatest living visionaries. Now he offers a framework for envisioning the twenty-first century--an age in which the marriage of human sensitivity and artificial intelligence fundamentally alters and improves the way we live. Kurzweil's prophetic blueprint for the future takes us through the advances that inexorably result in computers exceeding the memory capacity and computational ability of the human brain by the year 2020 (with human-level capabilities not far behind); in relationships with automated personalities who will be our teachers, companions, and lovers; and in information fed straight into our brains along direct neural pathways. Optimistic and challenging, thought-provoking and engaging, The Age of Spiritual Machines is the ultimate guide on our road into the next century.
"The Age of Spiritual Machines will blow your mind. . . . Kurzweil lays out a scenario that might seem like science fiction if it weren't coming from a proven entrepreneur."-- San Francisco Chronicle
The Age of Spiritual Machines appeared on national bestseller lists, including the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle
Kurzweil's first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, won the Association of American Publishers Award for the Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990
Customer Reviews:
optimestic and yet not too far fetched.......2007-06-08
Ray did good inventions and he writes good books too.
In this book, Ray describes an evolution path that will lead us ( human on earth) to
a 'digitalized' (not necessarily completely digital) world where humanity transcend
the universe. Too bold? too big? too crazy? Maybe not. However, I do think he is a bit over optimestic on the time line. We could possibly change our descedant greatly in the next 100 years through our understanding about gene, protein, and cellular interaction. They could be immortal (in general, and live as long as the univese could provide humanily livable space) Nano technology could spring into life (puns intended) in the next 100 years, as for how much change will be made, it's hard to precisely predict but it will definitely fundamentally change human civilization and culture. As for computational intelligence matches human's will happen in mid 2020,
I think it is a bit early, perhaps, add another five years but who knows, it might just happen that way.
Is Ray really far fetched? no, but probably optimestic and I don't mean the overly one but hey... that is part of the reason why scientist keeps doing what they are doing and create a good impact to the world.
Now, whoever has read this perhaps should start reading "The singularity is near".
A Book that everybody should read........2007-05-15
Since I get into contact with the Vinge's singularity concept I developed a very great attraction for the matter.
Ray Kurzweil explains it in a easy, not alarming and optimistic way.
After reading The Age of Spiritual Machines and his later book the Singularity is near I can not understand how somebody can live without knowing about this potential threat and at the same time potential solution to mankind problems.
A half-baked masturbatatory science fiction sourcebook.......2006-11-11
I had this book recomended to me (repeatedly) over the course of my reading of Radical Evolution. I was underimpressed by Ray's endless wanking at the idea of replacing human interaction with computer interaction, and the substition of the mortal coil with the superiortity of the T-800. If you are non-proficient with the subtlety of human mechinations, then the promise of escape via virtual reality, nano-orgasm machines, and techno-immortality can seem like the stuff of dreams. As a list of "bold predictions" this sketchbook of sci-fi cliches lacks the hard science to suggest the wildly optomistic timelines the author suggests.
As an artifact from the heady, euphoric days before the dot com burst, one can see how this book was published, and subsequently purchased by a great many people. By the time the author was defending previousely made statements about the actualization of his earlier predictions, I saw a pattern of half-truths that paints a techno-eutopia which here, in 2006, hardly exists in the labs of MIT, let alone for purchase as Best Buy, as the author so desperately hopes for.
This book summarizes a decade's worth of Popular Science articles (that decade being the 1990's) and the most enticing fantasies of the transhumanists, but is not actually fun to read. The dialogues with "Molly," the author's internal dialouge about the future of the toys he wishes will save him, borders on embarrassing.
There are a dozen books about exactly these subjects, which should be read first.
Awesome, megalomaniacal, and fantastic........2006-10-29
Ray Kurzweil is my best writer. I love his books. He writes in a clear way and he is really persuasive. This book is the best book I have read about the future of artificial intelligence. It teaches you so many interesting topics on computational neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience. This book has been written in 1999 and some of its first predictions are about to become true in 2006. I believe in all of the Kurzweil's theories because I am writing and programming my undergraduate thesis on computational neuroscience. I am sure you will enjoy the book. It is worth the price!
Judge By The Evidence.......2006-08-11
I read SINGULARITY before SPIRITUAL which, of course, is exactly the wrong order. In the time since this book was published he has had an opportunity (in SINGULARITY) to reflect, confirm and gloat if you will. Unlike Drake, who promised we would receive confirmation of extraterrestrial life by the year 2000, Kurzweil is amazingly accurate. He forecast an extremely short discovery period for the Human Genome (confounding the "experts" who predicted 100s of years). He stated that Big Blue would defeat a human - this after a devestating defeat. He correctly predicted the exponential rate of computer power and all that this implies for our future.
When he says "spiritual" - a word I am uncomfortable with - he is not assigning theological or mystical characteristics. More accurately he is describing a "human" machine, a machine with its philosophical underpinnings as human but yet it is more than human. The Age of Human Machines would be a more apt title. The book is not straight forward (perhaps by design) making the reader browse, go back, skip, etc.
Many readers take their eye off the mark and get stuck in local or current events - starvation in Africa, war in the Mideast, ethnic cleansing, ecology, global warming, etc. Yet none of these has had any effect on the rate of the acquisition of knowledge. We have reached a point where progress is almost self-sustaining - the more we discover, the more we know how much we don't know. Like a boulder rolling down a hill, the rush to research, experiment and design shows no sign of slowing. I was less than impressed with the discussion about consciousness and the future of the universe. Does a machine that is aware that it is learning "conscious"? Is consciousness simply a function of having enought nodes operating in parallel? If spiritual machines come to fruition history will veer into new directions we cannot conceive.
Books:
- Muscletown USA: Bob Hoffman and the Manly Culture of York Barbell
- My Life As a Gay Man in a Straight Woman's Body: An Autobiography
- My Reggae Journey: Music's Rough, Tough Road
- Napa Valley: The Ultimate Winery Guide--Revised and Updated, Fourth Edition
- Nothing's Impossible: Leadership Lessons from Inside and Outside the Classroom
- Now Hear This: The Life of Hugh S. Knowles, Acoustical Engineer and Enterpreneur
- Obituary Cocktail: The Great Saloons of New Orleans (2nd Edition, Expanded)
- Other Side of Advertising
- Ottmar Mergenthaler: The Man and His Machine : A Biographical Appreciation of the Inventor on His Centennial
- Pan Am Pioneer: A Manager's Memoir from Seaplane Clippers to Jumbo Jets
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- American Politics and the African American Quest for Universal Freedom
- Ayurvedic Cooking for Self Healing
- Before She Kills
- America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It
- A Thinker's Damn: Audie Murphy, Vietnam, and the Making of the Quiet American
- Analog and Digital Signal Processing
- Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person's Answer to Christian Fundamentalism
- Untitled
- 101 Stupid Things Business Travelers Do To Sabotage Success
- Wild Flower Guide, Northeastern & Midland United States
