How the World Was One


Arthur C. Clarke - 1992
    From submarine cables to fiber optics to neutrino and tachyon (faster than light) communications, he traces the global changes these innovations left or will leave in their wake.

Logolounge: 2,000 International Identities by Leading Designers


Bill Gardner - 2002
    Logolounge features the work of superstar artists and firms such as Michael Vanderbyl and Sibley Peteet Design and includes both new campaigns and never-before-seen projects. With 2,000 logos from a variety of sources, this visually compelling volume will become the go-to resource for inspiration from the best in the field.

Fire Force: A Trooper's War In The Rhodesian Light Infantry


Chris Cocks - 2000
    This book is not for the squeamish. It blends the intrinsic pathos and humor peculiar to war with face-to-face combat in the bush and death at point-blank range. Now, here is your chance to read what several critics have called the best book on the Rhodesian War ever written.

Design Crazy: Good Looks, Hot Tempers, and True Genius at Apple


Max Chafkin - 2013
    is one of the most successful—and influential—companies of our time, the transformational innovator that made computers not just personal but beautiful everyday objects. Technology met design, and our culture was altered forever.And yet very little is known about life inside Apple. The company is pathologically secretive—even with its own designers—about how it comes up with its groundbreaking products: iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, and the next “insanely great” thing on the horizon. Here, for the first time, the men and women who worked for and alongside Steve Jobs share their remarkable, nearly forty-year-old story. How Apple survived nearly catastrophic failure early on. How Jobs and his team came to understand and execute design like no one else. And how their philosophy ultimately changed the world.This Fast Company/Byliner Original is unlike any other book about Apple. Author Max Chafkin led a team of “Fast Company” reporters that spent months interviewing more than fifty former Apple execs and insiders, many of whom had never spoken publicly about their work. The result is a compelling and deeply revealing oral history of how design evolved at the most creative enterprise of our time, the company that one entrepreneur says “taught the world taste.”In these interviews, former colleagues describe Jobs at his most brilliant and bombastic—hurling unsatisfactory products across the lab and insulting employees, yet also singling out and celebrating craftsmanship and original work. Without a doubt, Jobs is the single most important figure in the company’s history. But overlooked in Apple’s carefully cultivated mythology are the other ingenious men and women who’ve left an indelible mark on Apple, some of whom think they deserve much more of the credit. At Apple, the stakes were big, and so were the egos.“Design Crazy” takes us behind the mystique and reveals Apple to be a deeply misunderstood company. And the greatest business story of the past two decades is far from over. Two years after the death of Steve Jobs, with many of his former colleagues now at startups like Tesla, Evernote, and Nest Labs, some think the end of Apple’s dominance is only a matter of time. The company has risen to the challenge before, but still the question lingers: Can Apple be Apple without Jobs?ABOUT THE AUTHORMax Chafkin is a contributing writer with “Fast Company.” His work has also been published in “Inc.”, “Vanity Fair,” “The New York Times Magazine,” and “The Best Business Writing 2012.” He lives in Brooklyn.

We All Live In a Perry Groves World: My Story


Perry Groves - 2006
    Perry Groves spent over a decade in the footballing spotlight. Sometimes he was at the top, often he was at the bottom and that's half the reason the fans loved him so much--and still do. This is the most truthful and hilarious book about professional football you will ever read. Perry Groves was the first signing by the legendary Arsenal manager George Graham, and that unmistakeable figure with his Tin-Tin haircut and cheeky grin was a player in one of the Gunners' greatest sides. Now he has decided to tell all about his rollercoaster years of booze binges, girl-chasing and gambling sprees. He's a nonstop fund of of hilarious anecdotes, recounting top-flight games played with a hangover, 125 mph motorway chases with international stars, visits to a brothel with an England World Cup hero and revealing how one drunken escapade ended with a group of internationals beting questioned over an attempted murder charge. This is a unique chance to find out what top-flight footballers really get up to off the field and how they behave when the dressing room door is closed.

How to Render: communicating form and rendering a wide range of materials


Scott Robertson - 2012
    He then explains the subject of visually communicating the form of an object in easy to understand step-by-step lessons through the use of drawings, photography and even 3D digital imagery that will enlighten and empower an artist.Written as an introductory book of rendering strategies and techniques as applied to a range of professions, this book will appeal to entertainment designers, industrial designers, graphic designers, architects and illustrators.Certain to become a required textbook for many university and high school rendering courses taught around the world, this book builds upon not only Scott’s 17+ years of teaching experience at the highest college level but also what he has shared within his previous bestselling books The Skillful Huntsman, Start Your Engines, Lift Off, DRIVE, BLAST and How to Draw Cars the Hot Wheels Way.

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work


Mason Currey - 2013
    Thomas Wolfe wrote standing up in the kitchen, the top of the refrigerator as his desk, dreamily fondling his “male configurations”. . . Jean-Paul Sartre chewed on Corydrane tablets (a mix of amphetamine and aspirin), ingesting ten times the recommended dose each day . . . Descartes liked to linger in bed, his mind wandering in sleep through woods, gardens, and enchanted palaces where he experienced “every pleasure imaginable.” Here are: Anthony Trollope, who demanded of himself that each morning he write three thousand words (250 words every fifteen minutes for three hours) before going off to his job at the postal service, which he kept for thirty-three years during the writing of more than two dozen books . . . Karl Marx . . . Woody Allen . . . Agatha Christie . . . George Balanchine, who did most of his work while ironing . . . Leo Tolstoy . . . Charles Dickens . . . Pablo Picasso . . . George Gershwin, who, said his brother Ira, worked for twelve hours a day from late morning to midnight, composing at the piano in pajamas, bathrobe, and slippers . . . Here also are the daily rituals of Charles Darwin, Andy Warhol, John Updike, Twyla Tharp, Benjamin Franklin, William Faulkner, Jane Austen, Anne Rice, and Igor Stravinsky (he was never able to compose unless he was sure no one could hear him and, when blocked, stood on his head to “clear the brain”). Brilliantly compiled and edited, and filled with detail and anecdote, Daily Rituals is irresistible, addictive, magically inspiring.

History of the Moors of Spain


M. Florian - 2007
    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

Blowing My Way to the Top: How to Break the Rules, Find Your Purpose, and Create the Life and Career You Deserve


Jen Atkin - 2020
    But Jen’s success didn’t arrive overnight. Her glamorous, jet-setting lifestyle came from years of hard work, humility, and hustle. In Blowing My Way to the Top, Jen shatters the illusion of effortless, instant success that permeates social media to reveal the sweat, dedication, and drive it really takes to make it.In this inspiring, insightful, and laugh-out-loud funny book, Jen chronicles her remarkable journey and shares what she’s learned along the way. From growing up in a conservative Mormon community where girls were discouraged from pursuing their ambitions, to striking out on her own and finding success on the celebrity style circuit, to building the cult-status brand OUAI—Jen reveals with refreshing candour the lessons, mistakes, and memorable moments that have paved her road to success.Jen also offers insight into the values that have allowed her to thrive in the modern, digital landscape, including the importance of creating authentic content, investing in the community, and building social consciousness into the ethos of a business. And as a trailblazer in a male-dominated industry, Jen speaks frankly about the challenges she’s faced and provides crucial advice for other women, from the importance of running your business like a feminist to building camaraderie amid the competition to learning to navigate the work and life issues that impact women most.At the end of the day, Jen has one simple message: If I can do it, you can too. Blowing My Way to the Top is destined to become the must-read career guide for a new generation, empowering readers everywhere with the permission to dream big—and the tools to make those dreams a reality.

Mastermind: How Dave Brailsford Reinvented the Wheel


Richard Moore - 2013
    Leading cycling writer Richard Moore's profile of Dave Brailsford, the head of Team Sky and the man who masterminded the British Cycling revolution, gives a unique insight into the psychology of one of the most fascinating figures in world sport.

To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders


Bernard Bailyn - 2003
    Using visual documentation—portraits, architecture, allegorical engravings—as well as written sources, Bailyn, one of our most esteemed historians, paints a complex picture of that distant but still remarkably relevant world. He explores the powerfully creative effects of the Founders’ provincialism and lays out in fine detail the mingling of gleaming utopianism and tough political pragmatism in Thomas Jefferson’s public career, and the effect that ambiguity had on his politics, political thought, and present reputation. And Benjamin Franklin emerges as a figure as cunning in his management of foreign affairs and of his visual image as he was amiable, relaxed, and amusing in his social life. Bailyn shows, too, why it is that the Federalist papers—polemical documents thrown together frantically, helter-skelter, by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay in a fierce political battle two hundred years ago—have attained canonical status, not only as a penetrating analysis of the American Constitution but as a timeless commentary on the nature of politics and constitutionalism. Professor Bailyn concludes, in a wider perspective, with an effort to locate the effect of the Founders’ imaginative thought on political reformers throughout the Atlantic world. Precisely how their principles were received abroad, Bailyn writes, is as ambiguous as the personalities of the remarkably creative pro-vincials who founded the American nation.

Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far


Stefan Sagmeister - 2008
    And we need constant reminders to keep us on the right path.With the support of his clients, Sagmeister transformed these sentences into typographic works, from billboards in France to sign-toting inflatable monkeys on the streets of Scotland. Accompanied by essays from design historian Steven Heller, Guggenheim chief curator Nancy Spector, and UK psychologist Daniel Nettle, as well as Sagmeister's own words, the series is revealed as a complex blend of personal revelation, art, and design--an eclectic mix of visual audacity and sound advice.This book consists of 15 unbound signatures in a laser-cut slipcase. Shuffling the sequence of the signatures will produce 15 different covers.

U2 Show


Diana Scrimgeour - 2004
     Everything about U2 is huge-from their music to their tours to their influence on popular culture and politics worldwide. They are cultural icons as well as multimillion-album-selling pop stars. Underpinning the band's popularity, from the beginning, is their passion for touring. For more than twenty years, U2 has been primarily a live band-hardly ever off the road. Performing live is what they love to do best. And it is their touring that defines their creativity and reflects the direction of the band. From the first bare-bones Tick Tock Tour of 1980 through the massive, seminal Joshua Tree and ZooTV tours of the eighties and nineties to the most recent, more intimate Elevation Tour of 2001, it is their live shows that have set U2's agenda. For the first time, the band has agreed to chronicle this vital part of its creative energy. More than 500 photos from hundreds of performances have been handpicked from a twenty-five-year archive. Many of these photos are behind-the-scenes shots that have never been published before. The book includes commentary by Diana Scrimgeour, the official photographer on recent tours, as well as first-person accounts from band members, the core creative team, friends, and associates. "U2 Show" is the music publishing event of 2004.

The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun


Merrill D. Peterson - 1987
    Calhoun represented the foremost statemen of their age. In the decades preceding the Civil War, they dominated American congressional politics as no other figures have. Now Merrill D. Peterson, one of our most gifted historians, brilliantly re-creates the lives and times of these great men in this monumental collective biography. Arriving on the national scene at the onset of the War of 1812 and departing political life during the ordeal of the Union in 1850-52, Webster, Clay, and Calhoun opened--and closed--a new era in American politics. In outlook and style, they represented startling contrasts: Webster, the Federalist and staunch New England defender of the Union; Clay, the war hawk and National Rebublican leader from the West; Calhoun, the youthful nationalist who became the foremost spokesman of the South and slavery. They came together in the Senate for the first time in 1832, united in their opposition of Andrew Jackson, and thus gave birth to the idea of the Great Triumvirate. Entering the history books, this idea survived the test of time because these men divided so much of American politics between them for so long. Peterson brings to life the great events in which the Triumvirate figured so prominently, including the debates on Clay's American System, the Missouri Compromise, the Webster-Hayne debate, the Bank War, the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, the annexation of Texas, and the Compromise of 1850. At once a sweeping narrative and a penetrating study of non-presidential leadership, this book offers an indelible picture of this conservative era in which statesmen viewed the preservation of the legacy of free government inherited from the Founding Fathers as their principal mission. In fascinating detail, Peterson demonstrates how precisely Webster, Clay, and Calhoun exemplify three facets of this national mind.

Rumble Road: Untold Stories from Outside the Ring


Jon Robinson - 2010
    If you liked Are We There Yet?, then you'll love Rumble Road.