Stunningly so, the economist and historian Deirdre McCloskey argues in the concluding volume of her trilogy celebrating the oft-derided virtues of the bourgeoisie. The poorest of humanity, McCloskey shows, will soon be joining the comparative riches of Japan and Sweden and Botswana.   Why? Most economists—from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to Thomas Piketty—say the Great Enrichment since 1800 came from accumulated capital. McCloskey disagrees, fiercely. “Our riches,” she argues, “were made not by piling brick on brick, bank balance on bank balance, but by piling idea on idea.” Capital was necessary, but so was the presence of oxygen. It was ideas, not matter, that drove “trade-tested betterment.”  Nor were institutions the drivers. The World Bank orthodoxy of “add institutions and stir” doesn’t work, and didn’t. McCloskey builds a powerful case for the initiating role of ideas—ideas for electric motors and free elections, of course, but more deeply the bizarre and liberal ideas of equal liberty and dignity for ordinary folk. Liberalism arose from theological and political revolutions in northwest Europe, yielding a unique respect for betterment and its practitioners, and upending ancient hierarchies. Commoners were encouraged to have a go, and the bourgeoisie took up the Bourgeois Deal, and we were all enriched.   Few economists or historians write like McCloskey—her ability to invest the facts of economic history with the urgency of a novel, or of a leading case at law, is unmatched. She summarizes modern economics and modern economic history with verve and lucidity, yet sees through to the really big scientific conclusion. Not matter, but ideas. Big books don’t come any more ambitious, or captivating, than Bourgeois Equality.

    Written by a seasoned journalist who witnessed the Balkan conflagration and its aftermath, it presents an analysis of the origins of the Serb-Albanian conflict, the course of the battle, the issues and personalities, and options for the future. In this second edition Tim Judah updates the story to, and beyond, the fall of Milosevic.

    Economists deal with the closed system of a national economy, whereas executives live in the open-system world of business. Moreover, economists know that an economy must be run on the basis of general principles, but businesspeople are forever in search of the particular brilliant strategy. Krugman's article serves to elucidate the world of economics for businesspeople who are so close to it and yet are continually frustrated by what they see. Since 1922, Harvard Business Review has been a leading source of breakthrough management ideas-many of which still speak to and influence us today. The Harvard Business Review Classics series now offers readers the opportunity to make these seminal pieces a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world-and will have a direct impact on you today and for years to come.

    The name of the remote New Hampshire town where representatives of forty-four nations gathered in July 1944, in the midst of the century's second great war, has become shorthand for enlightened globalization. The actual story surrounding the historic Bretton Woods accords, however, is full of startling drama, intrigue, and rivalry, which are vividly brought to life in Benn Steil's epic account.Upending the conventional wisdom that Bretton Woods was the product of an amiable Anglo-American collaboration, Steil shows that it was in reality part of a much more ambitious geopolitical agenda hatched within President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Treasury and aimed at eliminating Britain as an economic and political rival. At the heart of the drama were the antipodal characters of John Maynard Keynes, the renowned and revolutionary British economist, and Harry Dexter White, the dogged, self-made American technocrat. Bringing to bear new and striking archival evidence, Steil offers the most compelling portrait yet of the complex and controversial figure of White--the architect of the dollar's privileged place in the Bretton Woods monetary system, who also, very privately, admired Soviet economic planning and engaged in clandestine communications with Soviet intelligence officials and agents over many years.A remarkably deft work of storytelling that reveals how the blueprint for the postwar economic order was actually drawn, The Battle of Bretton Woods is destined to become a classic of economic and political history.

    These few decades following the Civil War brought America its greatest boom-and-bust cycle until the Depression, the invention of the assembly line, and the dawn of the conservation movement. It inspired legends, such as that icon of rugged individualism, the cowboy. Yet this extraordinary time and its import have remained unexamined for decades.Cattle Kingdom reveals the truth of how the West rose and fell, and how its legacy defines us today. The tale takes us from dust-choked cattle drives to the unlikely splendors of boomtowns like Abilene, Kansas, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. We venture from the Texas Panhandle to the Dakota Badlands to the Chicago stockyards. We meet a diverse array of players—from the expert cowboy Teddy Blue to the failed rancher and future president Teddy Roosevelt. Knowlton shows us how they and others like them could achieve so many outsized feats: killing millions of bison in a decade, building the first opera house on the open range, driving cattle by the thousand, and much more. Cattle Kingdom is a revelatory new view of the Old West.

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    So hold your nose, kiss the babies, and just think how good you would look on a stamp.Now, before we go into your media responsibilities, you must understand the true history of political power, so you don't accidentally act on the naive idealism you are required to project to the general public.The reality of political power is very simple: bad farmers own crops and livestock -- good farmers own human beings...

    Axelrod looks at this much-studied figure in a way nobody has before: he explores 25 key facets of Churchill’s leadership style and decision-making from his early years as a junior cavalry officer and journalist to his role throughout WWII and demonstrates how he was able to overcome near-impossible obstacles. Fluidly and engagingly written, each lesson is enlivened with a vivid vignette from Churchill’s life. As always, Axelrod’s penetrating analysis will instruct, inspire, and encourage those who lead business enterprises, large and small.

    The Asylum is a stunning exposé by a seasoned Wall Street journalist that once and for all reveals the truth behind America’s oil addiction in all its unscripted and dysfunctional glory.In the tradition of Too Big to Fail and Liar’s Poker, author Leah McGrath Goodman tells the amazing-but-true story of a band of struggling, hardscrabble traders who, after enduring decades of scorn from New York’s stuffy financial establishment, overcame more than a century of failure, infighting, and brinksmanship to build the world’s reigning oil empire—entirely by accident.

    Ten men of the 19th century, all inventors, pioneers and creative problem solvers, who significantly affected the world economy into the 20th century. Using material discovered in his in-depth research, the Swiss writer Alex Capus elegantly traces the life stories of these men. In 1886, mill owner Julius Maggi, who for years experimented with quickly prepared health foods, came up with a recipe for bouillon extract. To this day the recipe, unchanged and confidential, is known throughout the world as Maggi Wrze. Alex Capus follows the career of Julius Maggi from his beginning as a tirelessly working businessman up to his final years. Capus describes how the German Heinrich Nestle became the Swiss Henri Nestl, and how a pair of chic Parisian womens boots that Carl Franz Bally brought his wife in 1850 were the impetus for building the worlds largest shoe factory. The drug manufacturer Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche and the confectioner Rudolph Lindt all of them were impetuous, persistent and cosmopolitan. With a keen instinct for impending changes and innovation, they devoted their lives to a single idea and did not become discouraged by years of failure. They accepted no limits governmental, social or moral and never allowed themselves to be unduly influenced by politics, religion, or family. He writes subtly, wittily, and clearly, moving dextrously between personal circumstances, social conditions, business ventures and human adventures. What results is the panorama of an epoch in which freedom, curiosity andcourage triumphed over subjection, restriction, and timidity. Press Alex Capus possesses a wonderful dual talent: he not only researches accurately and in-depth, but he can also write incredibly well. Under his pen, dry biographical facts become people of flesh and blood. With quick yet precise strokes, he encapsulates in but a few paragraphs whole life stories and fates. Hessischer Rundfunk Alex Capus is a superior storyteller. Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung Alex Capus is a wonderful writer for whom the world is something to read and everything has a story. Wherever Capus follows a clue, he finds something of significance, and then in a light and elegant manner, he relates his discovery to us. Sddeutsche Zeitung Capus is a very shrewd writer. One can read his book on Stevenson with pleasure and profit, even without needing to follow his thematic speculations. Neue Zrcher Zeitung What is typical Swiss? Alpenhorns, chocolate, Max Frisch, Friedrich Drrenmatt, and of course Alex Capus Buchkultur Wien Author Alex Capus, born in 1961 in France, studied history and philosophy in Basel. Today he is a journalist and author. Thus far he has had seven books published, all of them receiving high critical praise. Most recently published by Knaus is Travelling by the Light of the Stars Reisen im Licht der Sterne].

    She claimed the police had inserted a stick inside her… Swaranpreet realised that she had been cruelly violated; He spoke a single sentence but repeated it twice in chaste Punjabi: ‘Please give me a turban? I want nothing else…’ These are voices begging for deliverance in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination in October-November 1984 in which 2,733 Sikhs were killed, burnt and exterminated by lumpens in the country. Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay walks us through one of the most shameful episodes of sectarian violence in post Independent India and highlights the apathy of subsequent governments towards Sikhs who paid a price for what was clearly a state-sponsored riot. Poignant, raw and most importantly, macabre, the personal histories in the book reveal how even after three decades, a community continues to battle for its identity in its own country.

    The Christians have broken the truce and the Fifth Crusade has begun, the irate Saracens are expelling Christians and Jews from their lands, and desperate refugees are pouring into Jerusalem's port city of Acre which is expected to fall. There are coins to be earned carrying those most favoured by God to safety, meaning those with the most coins to pay for a place on one of the company's galleys. And the French governor of Acre wants to leave his young wife behind and flee with the chests of coins he collected from the city's Saracen merchants before he expelled them despite the bribes they paid him. It is a rollicking good story and a very good read.

    

     A secret cargo is headed for Japan. The Japanese High Command has entrusted it to a veteran destroyer captain - the best in the Imperial Navy - and he will stop at nothing to see that it reaches its final destination... Carrier-based dive bombers could not stop it, nor could the guerilla-commandos of the Philippine Islands. Now, the submarine Wolffish is the last ditch hope of the Allied Command. Still shaken by a recent tragedy, and desperately low on fuel, torpedoes, and morale, the war-weary submarine and her eighty-man crew must pull together to track down and destroy the cargo before it reaches Japan, and changes the course of the war...

    Ever since the bankruptcy, there has been heated debate about why the Federal Reserve did not rescue Lehman in the same way it rescued other financial institutions, such as Bear Stearns and AIG. The Fed's leaders from that time, especially former Chairman Ben Bernanke, have strongly asserted that they lacked the legal authority to save Lehman because it did not have adequate collateral for the loan it needed to survive. Based on a meticulous four-year study of the Lehman case, The Fed and Lehman Brothers debunks the official narrative of the crisis. It shows that in reality, the Fed could have rescued Lehman but officials chose not to because of political pressures and because they underestimated the damage that the bankruptcy would do to the economy. The compelling story of the Lehman collapse will interest anyone who cares about what caused the financial crisis, whether the leaders of the Federal Reserve have given accurate accounts of their actions, and how the Fed can prevent future financial disasters.