The reader is caught up in the day-to-day lives of women like Sharifa, Latifa and Marzia, sharing their problems, dramas, the tears and the laughter: whether enjoying a good gossip over tea and fresh nan, dealing with a husband’s desertion, battling to save the life of a one-year-old opium addict or learning how to deliver babies safely. Mary Smith spent several years in Afghanistan working on a health project for women and children in both remote rural areas and in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif. Given the opportunity to participate more fully than most other foreigners in the lives of the women, many of whom became close friends, she has been able to present this unique portrayal of Afghan women – a portrayal very different from the one most often presented by the media.

    The mistakes people make with their money are basic, and avoidable, and unless you understand what they are, you're probably going to repeat them. What you need is someone who can shed light on the obstacles we face and show you how to avoid getting tripped up by them.Financially Stupid People Are Everywhere shows how society is rigged to take as much of your wealth as possible, and simple ways you can resist. It investigates, explains, and offers advice for all those who have fallen into debt, taken a second mortgage, been trapped by credit cards, or found themselves unable to get ahead.Discusses what you can do to stop the destructive cycle of borrowing and spending Illustrates the four major tenets of getting money right Highlights how to avoid the many ways that government, banks, and big business try to trap you with debt To secure your financial future, you must break the dangerous cycle of borrowing and spending, and learn how to guard your wealth against corporate ploys. Financially Stupid People Are Everywhere leads you down the only proven path to financial freedom.

    Policies governing everything from trade and investment to energy and exchange rates are wielded as tools to win diplomatic allies, punish adversaries, and coerce those in between. Not so in the United States, however. America still too often reaches for the gun over the purse to advance its interests abroad. The result is a playing field sharply tilting against the United States.In a cogent analysis of why the United States is losing ground as a world power and what it can do to reverse the trend, War by Other Means describes the statecraft of geoeconomics: the use of economic instruments to achieve geopolitical goals. Geoeconomics has long been a lever of America’s foreign policy. But factors ranging from U.S. bureaucratic politics to theories separating economics from foreign policy leave America ill prepared for this new era of geoeconomic contest, while rising powers, especially China, are adapting rapidly. The rules-based system Americans set in place after World War II benefited the United States for decades, but now, as the system frays and global competitors take advantage, America is uniquely self-constrained. Its geoeconomic policies are hampered by neglect and resistance, leaving the United States overly reliant on traditional military force.Drawing on immense scholarship and government experience, Robert Blackwill and Jennifer Harris show that if America’s policies are left uncorrected, the price in American blood and treasure will only grow. What geoeconomic warfare requires is a new vision of U.S. statecraft.

    Why you should be a commercial investor, where the biggest pitfalls are, which types of properties are best for those just getting started, how to analyze any commercial deal quickly, how to speak the language of commercial real estate, the 4 guiding principles of commercial investment and much, much more. Let the author of Commercial Real Estate Investing for Dummies walk you through how to get started in Commercial Real Estate in this incredibly informative book.

    Buffett has managed to rise to the top of the ranks in stellar fashion, confounding the critics and earning the adulation of millions.As a leader, entrepreneur, potential investor, student, or whatever your calling may be, you stand to learn from the many life lessons of one of the most successful investors of all time, and one who is still very active and at the top of his game. The wisdom in this book can literally change your life.43 of his most valuable and inspiring life lessons relating to investment, human relationships and overall betterment have been de-constructed and explained including actionable information as to how you can implement the lessons into your day-to-day life.The aim of this book is to be educational and inspirational with actionable principles you can incorporate into your own life straight from the great man himself. Don't wait - grab your copy today!

    This is not in dispute. By exactly what mechanism has China managed to grow so fast? There is more room for debate on this question. A widespread view is that private entrepreneurship, financial liberation, and political reforms played a minor role in explaining China's economic takeoff. Based on archival research and survey data, this book offers an alternative view: Private entrepreneurship, facilitated by access to capital and microeconomic flexibility, was at the center of China's takeoff in the 1980s. The political system, then as now, was authoritarian, but it was moving in a liberal direction. China lacked well-specified property rights, but it substantially improved security of proprietors. But given this initial success, how then to explain the substantial distortions in Chinese economy today? The key to getting the China story right is to recognize the existence of two Chinas - an entrepreneurial rural China and a state-controlled urban China. In the 1980s, rural China gained the upper hand, and the result was rapid as well as broad-based growth. In the 1990s, urban China triumphed when the Chinese state reversed many of the productive rural experiments of the previous decade. While this reversal does not show up in the GDP numbers, it shows up in the welfare implications of growth. Since the early 1990s, household income has lagged behind economic growth and the labor share of GDP has fallen. Social performance has deteriorated. The directional liberalism of China in the 1980s and the emerging India miracle today debunk the widespread notion that democracy is automatically anti-growth. As the country marks its 30th anniversary of reforms in 2008, China faces some of its toughest economic challenges and vulnerabilities. The long overdue political reforms are required to improve governance and accountability and to put China on a sustainable path of development.Professor Yasheng Huang teaches political economy international management at the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He previously held faculty positions at the University of Michigan and at the Harvard Business School and as a consultant at the World Bank. He has published Inflation and Investment Controls in China (1996), FDI in China (1998), and Selling China (2003; Chinese version in 2005). His work on FDI in China has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Bloomberg, Businessworld, Le Monde, Economic and Political Weekly, and Economic Times, as well as in Chinese publications such as Nanfang Zhoumo, Nanfang Dushibao, Economic Observer, Global Entrepreneur, China Entrepreneur, Fortune Weekly, 21st Century Business Herald, Liangwang, and Xinhuanet. In addition to academic journal articles, he has written for Financial Times, Foreign Policy, and New York Times. In collaboration with other scholars, Professor Huang is conducting research on education and human capital in China and India, and non-performing loans, privatization, and entrepreneurship in China. At MIT, Professor Huang runs a "China Lab" and an "India Lab" that help entrepreneurial businesses in China and in India improve their management."Yasheng Huang is an insightful scholar of China's political economy. In this important book, he shows how China's rural economy took off in the 1980s, led by 'township and village enterprises' that were essentially private, only to be ignored in the 1990s by state-led development that focused on urban regions such as Shanghai. The 'Shanghai miracle,' he argues - and as any businessman who has worked there knows - was not the simple triumph of capitalism but of a stronger and more intrusive (and effective) state. If one wants to understand the policy origins of China's growing divide between rich and poor, urban and rural, one need look no further than this book." - William Kirby, Harvard University"Sure to generate a lively debate, Professor Huang's study provides a provocative and well-researched challenge to much current thinking on China's economic development. The widely shared gains of the 1980s have not been matched in more recent years. Danger signs include the stagnation in household incomes, growing inequality and illiteracy, and heightened governance problems. Huang argues that China will not be able to continue to grow unless the benefits of growth are widely shared through fundamental political and legal reforms." - Susan Rose-Ackerman, Yale Law School

    Punishments. Prices. The Nobel Prize. Candy Crush. Incentives take more forms than you might expect and they can be hard to spot, but they shape our lives in ways that we rarely examine.Some incentives are obvious, like for example, publicly committing to doing something you dislike in order to motivate you to do something difficult, like lose weight. But, many of the most powerful incentives are accidental, and invisible even to those who designed them. Some are tame – and some are most definitely not. Whether it’s bounties for criminals or Instagrammable meals, training your dog or saving the planet, incentives regularly backfire, go missing, mutate and evolve. Without oversight, their unintended consequences can have very global effects. In Incentivology, economist Jason Murphy uncovers the huge incentive systems we take for granted and turns them inside out. In lively, entertaining prose he explores the mechanisms behind many tremendous successes and spectacular failures in our history, culture and everyday lives, and shows us how to use (or lose) incentives in our world at large.

    With Iris and Matthew as my guides, I would virtually and literally go anywhere." —Becky Selengut, author of Shroom: Mind-bendingly Good Recipes for Cultivated and Wild Mushrooms Seattle food writer Matthew Amster-Burton grew up on Chinese-American food. One day, he decided to take his ten-year-old daughter out for Chinese…in Hong Kong. Join two adventurous eaters as they explore night markets, hawker centers, gargatuan malls, and a fancy dim sum palace, all while living out their food fantasy: spending a week without having to eat anything other than Chinese food. Along with Matthew and Iris, you’ll: • Ride the world’s most exhilarating form of public transportation • Eat crispy rice, egg tarts, Hong Kong French toast, and a spicy chicken dish with more chiles than chicken • Hang out with locals (human and feline) • Discover Iris’s supervillain lair, high above the city Featuring two dozen color photos, Child Octopus is the first installment in a new series of short ebooks about Asian food and travel. We’re not experts. We just got here. And we’re hungry.

    Covering almost seventy years of conflict, it chronicles the events leading up to Partition, reflects on the consequent strife, and provides a fresh, discursive perspective on the figures who have shaped the story of this land—from Lord Louis Mountbatten and Muhammad Ali Jinnah to Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh.Covering historical, diplomatic and military perspectives, Where Borders Bleed is intrepid, engaging with a range of contentious issues that have shaped Indo-Pak relations—water sharing, Kashmir and Article 370. Equally, it is speculative. It asks: would terror have affected the world the way it has, if ‘PakIndia’ had been a benign single entity? What if India and Pakistan were to reunite, much like East and West Germany? As the now-largest nation in the world, would the mammoth PakIndia radically change the globe’s geo-political framework?These questions—combined with the author’s own diplomatic access to rare archival material and key leaders across borders—make this a one-of-a-kind book on the story of India and Pakistan.

    

    Now, James Scurlock engages, educates, and entertains readers with the captivating story of DHL co-founder and billionaire Larry Hillblom.King Larry begins with an early biography of Larry Lee Hillblom, a mercurial young man who grew up on a peach farm outside of Fresno, California. Hillblom co-founded DHL in 1969 (three years before FedEx), and it became the fastest-growing corporation in history. Hillblom’s expatriate life began in 1981, when he retreated to a small tax haven in the Western Pacific. There he led the resistance to American meddling in the Marianas Islands. Hillblom’s voracious appetite for underage prostitutes is another facet of his unusual story. In 1995, Hillblom’s amoral, thrill-seeking nature caught up to him when his seaplane disappeared off the coast of Anatahan, leaving behind an estate worth billions. Weeks later, five impoverished women and their attorneys came forward to challenge Hillblom’s will in a legal battle for his fortunes that continues to this day. Meticulously researched and thoroughly engaging, King Larry will satisfy fans of such bestsellers as Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and The Accidental Billionaires .

    What time is the 3:00 parade? Why does a child need to be 40 inches tall to ride a roller coaster? What happens when the president of France gets lost inside Pirates of the Caribbean? A former employee, or "cast member", at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom answers these and other questions while sharing humorous stories about working inside the world's most popular theme park."Stories from a Theme Park Insider" takes you inside the park's famous tunnels and backstage for a look at how theme parks really work, and the funny moments and embarrassments that can happen when your work is someone else's vacation.

    Rajesh Soin is the epitome of Indian-American success. He is an inspiring figure, much honored and much-touted when it comes to entrepreneurial vision and success. He is well-known as the founder of Modern Technologies Corporation (MTC), a billion-dollar company, which he started with a capital of $1700.He grew up in straitened circumstances. In his childhood, he faced a devastating tragedy. He arrived in America with only 75 cents in his pocket and no place to stay. When he started college, he had to subsist on $30 for a whole month, and in grad school, he got robbed at gunpoint.When he started his company, there was a time when all his credit cards were maxed out to make payroll, and his finances were in dire straits. At a point in his professional life, he was so down that he felt like he was done for.But Dr. Soin fought all this and emerged a winner in life. Today, he has multiple companies in his portfolio, an enviable net worth, and investments all around the globe. He is a brand in himself, having many schools, colleges, and hospitals named after him, and being the recipient of so many business and philanthropic awards. But every success has its price. Everybody tends to see the shining part, overlooking the darker side, which has so much sweat, blood, hard work, perseverance, insecurities, and failures. In this book, we have covered Dr. Soin’s journey from ordinariness to extraordinariness. How does he see the world? What is his vision? What are his aspirations? You will get all the answers in this book, and in this process, you may find a new perspective on life too.

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    This text offers an exciting insight into the human story behind the money in our pockets, and reminds us that making a living is about exactly that - living.