The structure of global politics is shifting rapidly. After decades of rising, China has entered a new and critical phase where it seeks to turn its economic heft into global power. In this deeply informed book, Geoff Dyer makes a lucid and convincing argument that China and the United States are now embarking on a great power–style competition that will dominate the century. This contest will take place in every arena: from control of the seas, where China’s new navy is trying to ease the United States out of Asia and reassert its traditional leadership, to rewriting the rules of the global economy, with attempts to turn the renminbi into the predominant international currency, toppling the dominance of the U.S. dollar. And by investing billions to send its media groups overseas, Beijing hopes to shift the global debate about democracy and individual rights. Eyeing the high ground of international politics, China is taking the first steps in an ambitious global agenda. Yet Dyer explains how China will struggle to unseat the United States. China’s new ambitions are provoking intense anxiety, especially in Asia, while America’s global influence has deep roots. If Washington can adjust to a world in which it is no longer dominant but still immensely powerful, it can withstand China’s challenge. With keen insight based on a deep local knowledge—offering the reader visions of coastal Chinese beauty pageants and secret submarine bases, lockstep Beijing military parades and the neon media screens of Xinhua exported to New York City’s Times Square—The Contest of the Century is essential reading at a time of great uncertainty about America’s future, a road map for retaining a central role in the world.

    Complete with real-life examples from importers and exporters, it helps you every step of the way, from targeting a market and preparing a business plan to dealing with foreign currencies, shipping procedures, customs requirements, and more. It also shares tips to help you take advantage of NAFTA and other trade pacts, plus online resources to help you start and grow your business.

    Drawing on exclusive access to J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and a tightly bonded team of bankers known on Wall Street as the "Morgan Mafia," as well as in-depth interviews with dozens of other key players, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Tett brings to life in gripping detail how the Morgan team's bold ideas for a whole new kind of financial alchemy helped to ignite a revolution in banking, and how that revolution escalated wildly out of control.The deeply reported and lively narrative takes readers behind the scenes, to the inner sanctums of elite finance and to the secretive reaches of what came to be known as the "shadow banking" world. The story begins with the intense Morgan brainstorming session in 1994 beside a pool in Boca Raton, where the team cooked up a dazzling new idea for the exotic financial product known as credit derivatives. That idea would rip around the banking world, catapult Morgan to the top of the turbocharged derivatives trade, and fuel an extraordinary banking boom that seemed to have unleashed banks from ages-old constraints of risk.But when the Morgan team's derivatives dream collided with the housing boom, and was perverted -- through hubris, delusion, and sheer greed -- by titans of banking that included Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, and the thundering herd at Merrill Lynch -- even as J.P. Morgan itself stayed well away from the risky concoctions others were peddling -- catastrophe followed. Tett's access to Dimon and the J.P. Morgan leaders who so skillfully steered their bank away from the wild excesses of others sheds invaluable light not only on the untold story of how they engineered their bank's escape from carnage but also on how possible it was for the larger banking world, regulators, and rating agencies to have spotted, and heeded, the terrible risks of a meltdown.A tale of blistering brilliance and willfully blind ambition, "Fool's Gold" is both a rare journey deep inside the arcane and wildly competitive world of high finance and a vital contribution to understanding how the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression was perpetrated.

    L. Mencken's astonishing career as the premier American social critic of the twentieth century. Gathered by Mencken himself before he died in 1956, this second chrestomathy ("a collection of selected literary passages," with the accent on the tom) contains writings about a variety of subjects - politics, war, music, literature, men and women, lawyers, brethren of the cloth. Some of his essays have beguiling titles - "Notes for an Honest Autobiography," "The Commonwealth of Morons," "Le Vice Anglais," "Acres of Babble," "Hooch for the Artist." All of them are a pleasure to read, and we are reminded that what Mencken wrote in the early years of this century remains applicable to a very different America.Publishers WeeklyThis book's precursor, A Mencken Chrestomathy (collection), was a bestseller in 1949; this anthology of 238 short excerpts from a range of works, selected and annotated by Mencken but unfinished, lay undisturbed in a Baltimore library until Teachout, an arts columnist for the New York Daily News, found it in 1992, while working on a Mencken biography. Teachout considers Mencken's work still immediate. Indeed, quotable lines abound: ``His public life is an endless series of evasions and false pretenses,'' writes Mencken on ``the politician under democracy.'' Baltimore's bard can be magnificent and maddening in the same passage, damning American idiocies while disparaging immigrants. But what impresses most about this collection is Mencken's breadth; few contemporary writers would assume such a broad brief, writing not only about politics, law and the clergy but also about geography, literature, music and drink. To apply a Mencken sobriquet, he was no lesser eminento. (Jan.)Library JournalSelected as a continuation of the original chrestomathy by the Baltimore iconoclast himself before his death, this logically organized sampling of his pre-Depression credos (mostly from The Smart Set and American Mercury) suggests why Mencken was to a whole generation of American youth not just a witty newspaperman with a dazzling style but a force gleefully battering America's deep-rooted Puritan inhibitions. An early champion of Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, and Theodore Dreiser, Mencken ridiculed America's institutions, from Rotary Clubs to Harvard professors to the Senate. Sometimes wrongheaded in his judgments, he was unschooled but self-educated in music and politics. His views are sometimes racist and sexist, but they're seldom dull and-in an age of self-conscious "niceness"-never polite. Well worth dipping into.-Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, Mo.Gilbert TaylorFollowing My Life as Author and Editor" (1993) and Fred Hobson's biography , the Menckenian revival continues apace with this sparkling successor to the first chrestomathy, which was a best-seller in 1949. More than an anthology, the second volume represents pieces (some previously unpublished) that Mencken himself selected and revised before his stroke aborted the project; another proposal to publish came to nought in 1963. Over 60 percent of the 238 items, many from Mencken's magazines Smart Set" and American Mercury", are not available elsewhere, which in itself makes the publication of this title something of a literary event. That it parades again the sage of Baltimore in his incisive, if often irksome, eloquence only confirms him as one of the better belletrists of the century. The job of discriminator of taste exists to be seized in any age, and in the teens and twenties, Mencken extolled and excoriated with idiosyncratic abandon. The books and music he reviewed have faded from memory, but his satirical exfoliations remain fresh, for example, in praise of a bartender's memoir of the bibulous arts or in contempt for a Rotarian's history of his organization. Edited by New York critic Terry Teachout, who is preparing his own biography of the provocateur, this entertaining, exasperating collection captures Mencken's gloomy view of human nature and his bright delight in stripping from it all cant and concealment.

    Renowned economist Nouriel Roubini electrified his profession and the larger financial community by predicting the current crisis well in advance of anyone else. Unlike most in his profession who treat economic disasters as freakish once-in-a-lifetime events without clear cause, Roubini, after decades of careful research around the world, realized that they were both probable and predictable. Armed with an unconventional blend of historical analysis and global economics, Roubini has forced politicians, policy makers, investors, and market watchers to face a long-neglected truth: financial systems are inherently fragile and prone to collapse. Drawing on the parallels from many countries and centuries, Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm, a professor of economic history and a "New York Times Magazine" writer, show that financial cataclysms are as old and as ubiquitous as capitalism itself. The last two decades alone have witnessed comparable crises in countries as diverse as Mexico, Thailand, Brazil, Pakistan, and Argentina. All of these crises-not to mention the more sweeping cataclysms such as the Great Depression-have much in common with the current downturn. Bringing lessons of earlier episodes to bear on our present predicament, Roubini and Mihm show how we can recognize and grapple with the inherent instability of the global financial system, understand its pressure points, learn from previous episodes of "irrational exuberance," pinpoint the course of global contagion, and plan for our immediate future. Perhaps most important, the authors-considering theories, statistics, and mathematical models with the skepticism that recent history warrants explain how the world's economy can get out of the mess we're in, and stay out. In Roubini's shadow, economists and investors are increasingly realizing that they can no longer afford to consider crises the black swans of financial history. A vital and timeless book, "Crisis Economics" proves calamities to be not only predictable but also preventable and, with the right medicine, curable."

    He argues that these turning points in the country’s history were not the result of foresight or careful planning but were rather the accidental consequences of major crises that had to be resolved at any cost.

    It's cheaper than our current model, and most Americans (and their doctors) already want it. So what's the deal with our current healthcare system, and why don’t we have something better?In Health Justice Now, Timothy Faust explains what single payer is, why we don't yet have it, and how it can be won. He identifies the actors that have misled us for profit and political gain, dispels the myth that healthcare needs to be personally expensive, shows how we can smoothly transition to a new model, and reveals the slate of humane and progressive reforms that we can only achieve with single payer as the springboard.In this impassioned playbook, Faust inspires us to believe in a world where we could leave our job without losing healthcare for ourselves and our kids; where affordable housing is healthcare; and where social justice links arm-in-arm with health justice for us all. Single payer is the tool—health justice is the goal!

    Naturalist. Warrior. President. There are so many sides to Theodore Roosevelt that it is easy to overlook one of his most enduring contributions to American public life: the use of fame to fuel his political career.In this concisely written, enlightening book, presidential historian Lewis L. Gould goes beyond the bully pulpit stereotypes to reveal how Roosevelt used his celebrity to change American politics. Based on research gleaned from the personal papers of Roosevelt and his contemporaries, TheodoreRoosevelt recaptures its subject's bold activism and irrepressible, larger-than-life personality. Beginning with his privileged childhood in New York City, the narrative traces his election to the New York Assembly, where he quickly rose through the ranks of the Republican Party. It is here that hefirst applied his shrewd ability to keep himself in the spotlight--a skill that served him well as commander of a volunteer regiment (dubbed Roosevelt's Rough Riders) in the Spanish-American War. Gould shows how Roosevelt rode a wave of popular acclaim at the war's end, assuming the governorshipof New York and serving as president from 1901 to 1909. While covering his major accomplishments as chief executive, including his successes as a trust-buster, labor mediator, and conservationist, Gould explains how fame both sustained and limited Roosevelt when he ran for president in 1912 andopposed Woodrow Wilson's policies during World War I.Theodore Roosevelt delivers the most insightful look yet at a pioneer of political theater--a man whose vigorous idealism as a champion of democracy serves as a counterpoint to the cynicism of today's political landscape. The book will coincide with the 100th anniversary of Roosevelt's third partyrun for the Progressive or Bull Moose Party.

    The story of its final, brutal collapse in the autumn of 2008, and its controversial sale to JPMorgan Chase, is an astonishing account of how one bank lost itself to greed and mismanagement, and how the entire financial industry—and even the entire country— lost its way as well. Kirsten Grind’s The Lost Bank is a magisterial and gripping account of these events, tracing the cultural shifts, the cockamamie financial engineering, and the hubris and avarice that made this incredible story possible. The men and women who become the central players in this tragedy— the regulators and the bankers, the home buyers and the lenders, the number crunchers and the shareholders—are heroes and villains, perpetrators and victims, often switching roles with one another as the drama unfolds. As a reporter at the time for the Puget Sound Business Journal, Grind covered a story set far from the epicenters of finance and media. It happened largely in places such as the suburban homes of central California and the office buildings of Seattle, but Grind covered the story from the beginning, and the clarity and persistence of her reporting earned her many awards, including being named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Gerald Loeb Award. She takes readers into boardrooms and bedrooms, revealing the power struggles that pitted regulators at the Office of Thrift Supervision and the FDIC against one another and the predatory negotiations of investment bankers and lawyers who enriched themselves during the bank’s rise and then devoured the decimated bank in its final days. Written as compellingly as the finest fiction, The Lost Bank makes it clear that the collapse of Washington Mutual was not just the largest bank failure in American history. It is a story of talismanic qualities, reflecting the incredible rise and the precipitous collapse of not only an institution but of trust, fortunes, and the marketplaces for risk across the world.