V. Wood. Three Years in Wonderland presents the never-before-told, full story of -the happiest place on earth.- Using information from over one hundred unpublished interviews, Todd James Pierce lays down the arc of Disneyland's development from an idea to a paragon of entertainment.In the early 1950s, the Disney brothers hired Wood and his team to develop a feasibility study for an amusement park Walt wanted to build in southern California. -Woody- quickly became a central figure. In 1954, Roy Disney hired him as Disneyland's first official employee, its first general manager, and appointed him vice president of Disneyland, Inc., where his authority was exceeded only by Walt. A brilliant project manager, Wood was also a con man of sorts. Previously, he had forged his university diploma. A smooth-talker drawn to Hollywood, the first general manager of Disneyland valued money over art. As relations soured between Wood and the Disney brothers, Wood found creative ways to increase his income, leveraging his position for personal fame. Eventually, tensions at the Disney park reached a boiling point, with Walt demanding he be fired.In compelling detail, Three Years in Wonderland lays out the struggles and rewards of building the world's first cinematic theme park and convincing the American public that a $17 million amusement park was the ideal place for a family vacation. The early experience of Walt Disney, Roy Disney, and C. V. Wood is one of the most captivating untold stories in the history of Hollywood. Pierce interviewed dozens of individuals who enjoyed long careers at the Walt Disney Company as well as dozens of individuals who--like C. V. Wood--helped develop the park but then left the company for good once the park was finished. Through much research and many interviews, Three Years in Wonderland offers readers a rare opportunity to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the men and women who built the best-known theme park in the world.

    Just having satisfied customers isn't good enough anymore. If you really want a booming business, you have to create Raving Fans."This, in a nutshell, is the advice given to a new Area Manager on his first day--in an extraordinary business book that will help everyone, in every kind of organization or business, deliver stunning customer service and achieve miraculous bottom-line results.

    

    And in his multi-million download podcast, High Performance, he teams up with Professor Damian Hughes to examine the secrets of the world's highest-performing people.Now, Jake and Damian reveal how we can all become high performers. Drawing on interviews with leading sportspeople and entrepreneurs, they uncover the eight hidden principles that drive high performers to success: from taking absolute responsibility for their situation, to working out their non-negotiable 'trademark behaviours', to getting the very best out of their teammates. And they draw on cutting-edge psychology to reveal how to apply these principles in our day-to-day lives - whether on the pitch, in our careers, or at home.You too can harness the secrets of high performance. This book explains how.Drawing on interviews with: Ben Ainslie | Steven Bartlett | Lily Cole | Tom Daley | Rio Ferdinand | Steven Gerrard | Kelly Holmes | Steph Houghton | Chris Hoy | Eddie Jones | Kelly Jones | Siya Kolisi | Frank Lampard | Jo Malone | Matthew McConaughey | Ant Middleton | Tracey Neville | Phil Neville | Robin Van Persie | Nims Purja | Mauricio Pochettino | Jonny Wilkinson | Clive Woodward | and many more . . .

    Schirripa, The Sopranos’ own Bobby Bacala, exposes the inner mysteries of this unique Italian-American hybrid in A Goomba’s Guide to Life so that anyone can walk, talk, and live like a guy “from the neighborhood.”Über-goomba Steve Schirripa shows how being a goomba made him what he is today, offering lessons learned on his own journey from Bensonhurst to Vegas, and to his current gig as Bobby Bacala on one of TV’s most popular shows. Along the way, he shares secrets that will help you get in touch with your own inner goomba. You’ll learn what music to enjoy (Sinatra, yes; Snoop Dogg, no), what movies to watch (Raging Bull, yes; Titanic, never), which sports to follow (baseball is good; golf and tennis, fuhgeddaboudit), and even tips on goomba etiquette. Ever wonder how a real goomba gets the best seat in the house? (Hint: It involves tipping, jewelry, and intimidation.) Schirripa even includes goomba do’s and don’ts (never, ever criticize a goomba’s mother or her gravy; always wear more jewelry than you think you need).With knockout photographs of Schirripa and his compares, and insider information on how to think goomba, speak goomba, cook and eat goomba, and even how to behave at goomba weddings and funerals, A Goomba’s Guide to Life will show any wiseguy wannabe how to sing like a Soprano.

    Like Apple, it was an innovation machine that cranked out one must-have product after another. Led by its own visionary genius founder, Edwin Land, Polaroid grew from a 1937 garage start-up into a billion-dollar pop-culture phenomenon. Instant tells the remarkable tale of Land's one-of-a-kind invention-from Polaroid's first instant camera to hit the market in 1948, to its meteoric rise in popularity and adoption by artists such as Ansel Adams, Andy Warhol, and Chuck Close, to the company's dramatic decline into bankruptcy in the late '90s and its unlikely resurrection in the digital age. Instant is both an inspiring tale of American ingenuity and a cautionary business tale about the perils of companies that lose their creative edge.

    And this may sound weirdly obvious, but every single one of those pieces of software was written by a programmer. Programmers are thus among the most quietly influential people on the planet. As we live in a world made of software, they're the architects. The decisions they make guide our behavior. When they make something newly easy to do, we do a lot more of it. If they make it hard or impossible to do something, we do less of it.If we want to understand how today's world works, we ought to understand something about coders. Who exactly are the people that are building today's world? What makes them tick? What type of personality is drawn to writing software? And perhaps most interestingly -- what does it do to them?One of the first pieces of coding a newbie learns is the program to make the computer say "Hello, world!" Like that piece of code, Clive Thompson's book is a delightful place to begin to understand this vocation, which is both a profession and a way of life, and which essentially didn't exist little more than a generation ago, but now is considered just about the only safe bet we can make about what the future holds. Thompson takes us close to some of the great coders of our time, and unpacks the surprising history of the field, beginning with the first great coders, who were women. Ironically, if we're going to traffic in stereotypes, women are arguably "naturally" better at coding than men, but they were written out of the history, and shoved out of the seats, for reasons that are illuminating. Now programming is indeed, if not a pure brotopia, at least an awfully homogenous community, which attracts people from a very narrow band of backgrounds and personality types. As Thompson learns, the consequences of that are significant - not least being a fetish for disruption at scale that doesn't leave much time for pondering larger moral issues of collateral damage. At the same time, coding is a marvelous new art form that has improved the world in innumerable ways, and Thompson reckons deeply, as no one before him has, with what great coding in fact looks like, who creates it, and where they come from. To get as close to his subject has he can, he picks up the thread of his own long-abandoned coding practice, and tries his mightiest to up his game, with some surprising results.More and more, any serious engagement with the world demands an engagement with code and its consequences, and to understand code, we must understand coders. In that regard, Clive Thompson's Hello, World! is a marvelous and delightful master class.

    Bear Stearns was about to announce profits of $115 million for the first quarter of 2008, had $17.3 billion in cash on hand, and, as the company incessantly boasted, had been a colossally profitable enterprise in the eighty-five years since its founding.Ten days later, Bear Stearns no longer existed, and the calamitous financial meltdown of 2008 had begun.How this happened – and why – is the subject of William D. Cohan’s superb and shocking narrative that chronicles the fall of Bear Stearns and the end of the Second Gilded Age on Wall Street. Bear Stearns serves as the Rosetta Stone to explain how a combination of risky bets, corporate political infighting, lax government regulations and truly bad decision-making wrought havoc on the world financial system.Cohan’s minute-by-minute account of those ten days in March makes for breathless reading, as the bankers at Bear Stearns struggled to contain the cascading series of events that would doom the firm, and as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, New York Federal Reserve Bank President Tim Geithner, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke began to realize the dire consequences for the world economy should the company go bankrupt. But HOUSE OF CARDS does more than recount the incredible panic of the first stages of the financial meltdown. William D. Cohan beautifully demonstrates why the seemingly invincible Wall Street money machine came crashing down. He chronicles the swashbuckling corporate culture of Bear Stearns, the strangely crucial role competitive bridge played in the company’s fortunes, the brutal internecine battles for power, and the deadly combination of greed and inattention that helps to explain why the company’s leaders ignored the danger lurking in Bear’s huge positions in mortgage-backed securities.The author deftly portrays larger-than-life personalities like Ace Greenberg, Bear Stearns’ miserly, take-no-prisoners chairman whose memos about re-using paper clips were legendary throughout Wall Street; his profane, colorful rival and eventual heir Jimmy Cayne, whose world-champion-level bridge skills were a lever in his corporate rise and became a symbol of the reasons for the firm’s demise; and Jamie Dimon, the blunt-talking CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who won the astonishing endgame of the saga (the Bear Stearns headquarters alone were worth more than JP Morgan paid for the whole company). Cohan’s explanation of seemingly arcane subjects like credit default swaps and fixed- income securities is masterful and crystal clear, but it is the high-end dish and powerful narrative drive that makes HOUSE OF CARDS an irresistible read on a par with classics such as LIAR’S POKER and BARBARIANS AT THE GATE.Written with the novelistic verve and insider knowledge that made THE LAST TYCOONS a bestseller and a prize-winner, HOUSE OF CARDS is a chilling cautionary tale about greed, arrogance, and stupidity in the financial world, and the consequences for all of us.

    Instead, the mild warming seems to be part of a natural 1,500-year climate cycle that goes back at least one million years. Here, the authors present their case for this claim.

    What started as a game of Pong, with little blips dancing across a computer screen, has evolved into a multi-billion-dollar industry that is changing the future, making inroads into virtually all aspects of our culture.Who are the minds behind this revolution? How did it happen? Where is it headed? In Smartbomb, journalists Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby take the reader behind the scenes at gaming conventions, into powerhouse think tanks where new games are created, into the thick of the competition at cyberathlete tournaments, and into the homes of gamers for whom playing a role in a virtual world has assumed more relevance and reality than life in the real world.

    It is not a compilation of research written in a stuffy, academic way, nor is it a hook to buy an elaborate and expensive calendar or software. It is, quite simply a highly-readable, powerfully motivating book you?ll find difficult to put down.? The man who helps Americans do their housework 75% faster and better now shows how you can apply this magic to every area of your life. This is the book Don wrote to answer the thousands of people who have asked him, ?How do you get so much done, Don?? There have been many books on time management, but here is a refreshingly different one that really delivers (readers agree!). A book that will show you how to achieve the impossible dream, how to ?stretch? the clock and DOUBLE your usable time, every day.

    With equal parts humanity, insanity, and profanity, Frank Stepnowski, a twenty year veteran of the academic wars, offers unique insight into a world everybody knows about but very few understand. "Step" as he was re-christened by his students, pulls no punches in the classroom, and takes no prisoners in his writing debut. The title, which comes from a line that the author heard many times throughout his career, is both a confession and a confirmation. "I wanted a book," he explains, "that would make people laugh out loud but also open their eyes to just how insane the teaching profession can get. With that in mind, the book is a riotous success, providing searing insight into the classroom and giving an iconoclastic voice to a profession that often goes unheard. Why Are All the Good teachers Crazy? is a wake up call for some, a rallying cry for others, and an invitation to laugh and learn for everyone.Based on actual events, the vivid imagery, colorful characters, and incendiary dialogue of this nuclear powered novel will take readers on a roller coaster ride that they will be talking about long after the ride is over.

    Feared, loathed, and admired in equal measure, early on he drew the wrath of many fans, who literally wore their emotions on their sleeve, donning tee-shirts that read: I hate warm beer, cold women, and Darrell Waltrip. As the decade progressed, he won over their hearts and was voted NASCAR's most popular driver in 1989 and 1990-and his popularity has continued to soar ever since. Waltrip retired in 2000, tied for third all-time with eighty-four career victories, and immediately began attracting new fans with his folksy style as a color commentator for FOX Sports' NASCAR coverage. Now, with that same inimitable charm, he shares his memories of his life in racing. It's the tale of a man who lived his dream every time he stepped into a race car, and whose dreams got better every time he climbed out in Victory Lane. But it's also the story of NASCAR, as Waltrip serves as a bridge between its earlier days and its explosion into one of the world's most popular sports. Having raced against immortals like Richard Petty and David Pearson, modern-day legends Dale Earnhardt and Jeff Gordon, and rising stars Tony Stewart and Dale Earnhardt, Jr., Waltrip provides a knowing look at the evolution of the sport and its greatest drivers and personalities.

    He was resident director of Chicago's famed Second City and house metaphysician for Saturday Night Live, a talent in his own right, and one of the brightest and wackiest theater gurus ever. Jeff Griggs was a student of Close's at the ImprovOlympic in Chicago when he was asked to help the aging mentor (often in ill health) by driving him around the city on his weekly errands. The two developed a volatile friendship that shocked, angered, and amused both of them--and produced this hilarious and ultimately endearing chronicle of Close's last years. With all the elements of a picaresque novel, Guru captures Close at his zaniest but also shows him in theatrical situations that confirm his genius in conceptualizing and directing improvisational theater. Between comic episodes, Jeff Griggs gives the reader the essentials of Close's biography: his childhood in Kansas, early years as an actor, countercultural exploits in the 1960s (he toured with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and designed light shows for the Grateful Dead), years with the Compass Players and then with Second City, and continuing experimentation with every drug imaginable, which pretty much cost him his health and ultimately his life. He was comedian, director, teacher, writer, actor, poet, fire-eater, junkie, and philosopher. Being a really good actor does not necessarily guarantee that you will be a very good improviser, Close liked to say. Being an actual, complete, hopeless, wretched geek in real life doesn't disqualify you from being a solid improviser, either. He approached improv the same way he conducted his life--in bizarre, dark, and dangerous fashion. Guru captures it.

    Yet over and over again they found a significant percentage are able to overcome their life circumstances and achieve spectacular success.  How is it that individuals who are not “supposed” to succeed manage to overcome the odds? Are there certain traits that such people have in common? Can the rest of us learn from their success and apply it to our own lives?  In Succeeding When You’re Supposed to Fail, Rom Brafman, psychologist and coauthor of the bestselling book Sway, set out to answer these questions. In a riveting narrative that interweaves compelling stories from education, the military, and business and a wide range of groundbreaking new research, Brafman identifies the six hidden drivers behind unlikely success. Among them:  •The critical importance of the Limelight Effect—our ability to redirect the focus of our lives to the result of our own efforts, as opposed to external forces •The value of a satellite in our lives—the remarkable way in which a consistent ally who accepts us unconditionally while still challenging us to be our best can make a huge difference •The power of temperament—people who are able to tunnel through life’s obstacles have a surprisingly mild disposition; they don’t allow the bumps in the road to unsettle them By understanding and incorporating these strat-egies in our own lives, Brafman argues, we can all be better prepared to overcome the inevitable obstacles we face, from setbacks at work to chall-enges in our personal lives.