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The Last Male Bastion: Gender and the CEO Suite in America’s Public Companies
by Douglas M. BransonNot until 1997 did a female become chief executive officer of a Fortune 500 corporation (Jill Barad, at Mattel Toy Co. Women’s progress since that time has been in fits and starts, exceedingly slow. The number of women CEOs reached 4 in 1999 only to slide back to 2 in 2001. Meanwhile, while not reaching anything approaching parity, women made significant strides in politics (as senators, cabinet secretaries and governors), in not-for-profit spheres (as CEOs of health care and hospital organizations or of United Way chapters, with budgets of billions of dollars), and at colleges and universities (23 % have female presidents or chancellors). Currently, 3%, or 15, of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. After examining in detail the educations, career progressions, pronouncements and observations, as well as family lives, of the 19 women who have risen to the top (sitting and former CEOs), this book asks, and attempts to answer, two questions: Why haven’t more women reached the CEO suite?How might women in business better position themselves to ascend to the pinnacle?
Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase
by Duff McdonaldIn the midst of the most disastrous economic climate of Wall Street's history, one executive has weathered the storm more deftly than any other: Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase. In 2008, while Dimon's competitors watched their companies crumble, JPMorgan not only survived, it made an astonishing $5 billion profit. Dimon's continued triumph in the face of an industry-wide meltdown has made him a paragon of finance. In Last Man Standing, award-winning journalist Duff McDonald provides an unprecedented and deeply personal look at the extraordinary figure behind JPMorgan's success. Using countless hours of interviews with Dimon and his full circle of friends, family, and colleagues, this definitive biography is by far the most comprehensive portrait of the man known as the Savior of Wall Street. Now, in an updated prologue, McDonald offers insight into the future of Wall Street and how Dimon will overcome the challenge of aggressive new regulation from Washington--and how he plans to continue to thrive as the world's preeminent banker.
The Last Mile: Turning Public Policy Upside Down (Innovations, Practice and the Future of Public Policy in India)
by Amarjeet SinhaThe Last Mile explores the gaps and dichotomy between drafted policies and their implementation, and the last mile challenges which often make public services inaccessible to the poorest and most vulnerable sections of society. It provides an in-depth overview of the dynamics between communities, research and consultation and the implementation of policies for development. Rich in empirical data and case studies from different government programmes and reports, this book examines the implementation of government service programmes for poverty reduction, women’s empowerment, and income generation for the poor, among others, from a people’s perspective. It highlights the need for policies and institutions to align their methods to community needs. Offering guidelines for redesigning as well as solutions to counter challenges related to lack of trust and effective communication, human resource management, capacity development, redressal mechanisms, and facilitating the last mile connection, the author delineates effective ways for integrating new technologies in policy implementation. The book also addresses legacy issues in institutions and re-orienting policy for better governance, transparency, and building trust. Part of the Innovations, Practice and the Future of Public Policy in India series, this book, by a senior practitioner, will be an essential resource for students and researchers of development studies, sociology, public policy and governance, economics, and South Asian studies. This book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
The Last Mile
by Dilip SomanMost organizations spend much of their effort on the start of the value creation process: namely, creating a strategy, developing new products or services, and analyzing the market. They pay a lot less attention to the end: the crucial "last mile" where consumers come to their website, store, or sales representatives and make a choice.In The Last Mile, Dilip Soman shows how to use insights from behavioral science in order to close that gap. Beginning with an introduction to the last mile problem and the concept of choice architecture, the book takes a deep dive into the psychology of choice, money, and time. It explains how to construct behavioral experiments and understand the data on preferences that they provide. Finally, it provides a range of practical tools with which to overcome common last mile difficulties.The Last Mile helps lay readers not only to understand behavioral science, but to apply its lessons to their own organizations' last mile problems, whether they work in business, government, or the nonprofit sector. Appealing to anyone who was fascinated by Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's Nudge, or Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow but was not sure how those insights could be practically used, The Last Mile is full of solid, practical advice on how to put the lessons of behavioral science to work.
The Last Mile in Ending Extreme Poverty
by Laurence Chandy Homi Kharas Hiroshi KatoThe past quarter century has witnessed a stunning reduction in the number of people around the world living on less than $1.25 a day, the marker for extreme poverty. This has led to a new sense of hope that extreme poverty can be eradicated within a generation. Yet optimism is tempered by the unique circumstances facing those who remain left behind and new challenges that weaken traditional paths to prosperity. The Last Mile in Ending Extreme Poverty explores what it will take to finish the course. It identifies three critical challenges that define the last mile: securing peace, creating jobs, and strengthening resilience. These are issues that development experts have largely overlooked, on which cutting-edge knowledge is blunt and best-practice solutions feel decidedly underwhelming.By uncovering evidence and approaches to address these issues--and while pointing out the knowledge gaps that remain--The Last Mile outlines an agenda to inform development research and poverty reduction strategies for governments, international organizations, donors, charities, and foundations around the world.Contributors: Michael Carnahan (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Government of Australia), Raj M. Desai (Georgetown University and Brookings), Shane Evans (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Government of Australia), Akio Hosono (JICA), Bruce Jones (Brookings), Marcus Manuel (Overseas Development Institute), John McArthur (Brookings and UN Foundation), Alastair McKechnie (Overseas Development Institute and University of Otago), Gary Milante (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute), Yoichi Mine (JICA and Doshisha University), Ryutaro Murotani (JICA), John Page (Brookings), Go Shimada (University of Shizuoka, JICA, Columbia University, and Waseda University), Stephen C. Smith (George Washington University and Brookings)er disasters, Go Shimada, JICA-RI Social protection and the end of extreme poverty, Raj Desai, Georgetown University and Brookings
The Last Mile in Ending Extreme Poverty
by Laurence Chandy Homi Kharas Hiroshi KatoViewed from a global scale, steady progress has been made in reducing extreme poverty-defined by the $1.25-a-day poverty line-over the past three decades. This success has sparked renewed enthusiasm about the possibility of eradicating extreme poverty within a generation. However, progress is expected to become more difficult, and slower, over time. This book will examine three central changes that need to be overcome in traveling the last mile: breaking cycles of conflict, supporting inclusive growth, and managing shocks and risks. By uncovering new evidence and identifying new ideas and solutions for spurring peace, jobs, and resilience in poor countries, The Last Mile in Ending Extreme Poverty will outline an agenda to inform poverty reduction strategies for governments, donors, charities, and foundations around the world.ContentsPart I: Peace: Breaking the Cycle of Conflict External finance for state and peace building, Marcus Manuel and Alistair McKechnie, Overseas Development Institute Reforming international cooperation to improve the sustainability of peace, Bruce Jones, Brookings and New York University Bridging state and local communities through livelihood improvements, Ryutaro Murotani, JICA, and Yoichi Mine, JICA-RI and Doshisha University Postconflict trajectories and the potential for poverty reduction, Gary Milante, SIPRIPart II: Jobs: Supporting Inclusive Growth Structural change and Africa's poverty puzzle, John Page, Brookings Public goods for private jobs: lessons from the Pacific, Shane Evans, Michael Carnahan and Alice Steele, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Government of Australia Strategies for inclusive development in agrarian Sub-Saharan countries, Akio Hosono, JICA-RI The role of agriculture in poverty reduction, John McArthur, Brookings, UN Foundation, and Fung Global InstitutePart III: Resilience: Managing Shocks and Risks Environmental stress and conflict, Stephen Smith, George Washington University and Brookings Toward community resilience: The role of social capital after disasters, Go Shimada, JICA-RI Social protection and the end of extreme poverty, Raj Desai, Georgetown University and Brookings
Last Mile Internet Access for Emerging Economies (Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems #77)
by Wynand Lambrechts Saurabh SinhaThis book presents an investigative approach to globalization-driving technologies that efficiently deliver ubiquitous, last-mile, broadband internet access to emerging markets and rural areas. Research has shown that ubiquitous internet access boosts socio-economic growth through innovations in science and technology, and has a positive effect on the lives of individuals. Last-mile internet access in developing countries is not only intended to provide areas with stable, efficient, and cost-effective broadband capabilities, but also to encourage the use of connectivity for human capacity development. The book offers an overview of the principles of various technologies, such as light fidelity and millimeter-wave backhaul, as last-mile internet solutions and describes these potential solutions from a signal propagation perspective. It also provides readers with the notional context needed to understand their operation, benefits, and limitations, and enables them to investigate feasible and tailored solutions to ensure sustainable infrastructures that are expandable and maintainable.
Last Minute Retirement Planning
by Stephen M. RosenbergIt's time to get serious about all that's been going over your head for the past 20 years about things like Roth IRAs, 401(k)s, and mutual funds. You're lucky; you have options, and you're planning ahead. What you need is an objective source that can explain those options in terms you can understand. What you need is Last Minute Retirement Planning. More than 10 years till you retire? You've still got plenty of time to make good decisions, but it's time to get going because you have lots to decide. You have to put away as much as you can, and you have to make it grow. You need a practical and effective way to minimize your expenses and maximize your investments. You need Last Minute Retirement Planning. Less than 5 years till you retire? Your day is getting close. Now is the time to make some important decisions about what you want for your retirement, where you will live, and what you will do. Will you really retire, or continue to work? Hopefully, you've already built up a fund for retirement. But you need to know how to make it last for the length of your retirement. You need Last Minute Retirement Planning. Steve Rosenberg, CFP, is an investment advisor and president of Rosenberg Financial Group. He is the author of Last Minute Estate Planning and co-author of Every Woman's Guide to Financial Security. In the introduction to this book, he says, "You can make your retirement as wonderful as you want It only requires that you make smart decisions with your money. As investment advisor to hundreds of retirees, I know exactly what it takes to secure the retirement of your dreams."
The Last of the Imperious Rich
by Peter ChapmanOn September 11, 1844, Henry Lehman arrived in New York City on a boat from Germany. Soon after, he moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where he and his brother Emanuel established a modest cotton brokering firm that would come to be called Lehman Brothers. On September 15, 2008, Dick Fuld, the last CEO of Lehman Brothers, filed for corporate bankruptcy amid one of the worst financial crises in American history. After 164 years, one of the largest and most respected investment banks in the world was gone, leaving everyone wondering, "How could this have happened?" Peter Chapman, an editor and writer for The Financial Times, answers this question by exploring the complete history of Lehman Brothers between those two historic Septembers. He takes us back to its early days as a cotton broker in Alabama, and then to its glory days as one of the leading corporate financiers in America. He also provides an intimate portrait of the people who ran Lehman over the decades-from Henry Lehman, the founder, to Bobbie Lehman, who led the company into the world of radio, motion pictures, and air travel in first part of the 20th century, to Dick Fuld, who allowed it to morph into a dealer of shoddy securities. Throughout his account of this imperiously rich firm, Chapman examines the impact Lehman Brothers had not only on American finance but also on American life. As a major backer of companies like Pan American Airlines, Macy's, and RKO, Lehman helped lead the country into major new industries and helped support some of its most intrepid entrepreneurs. He then shows how, starting in the 1980s, Lehman's increased focus on short-term gain investments led the firm down the dangerous path that would eventually lead to its demise. In the end, the story of Lehman Brothers is not only the story of a truly important American company but a cautionary tale of what happens when leaders lose sight of their core mission in their quest for something too good to be true. .
Last Paper Standing: A Century of Competition between the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News (G - Reference,information And Interdisciplinary Subjects Ser.)
by Ken J. WardLast Paper Standing chronicles the history of competition between the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News—from both newspapers’ origins to their joint operating agreement in 2001 to the death of the News in 2009—to tell a broader story about the decline of newspaper readership in the United States. The papers fought for dominance in the lucrative Denver newspaper market for more than a century, enduring vigorous competition in pursuit of monopoly control. This frequently sensational, sometimes outlandish, and occasionally bloody battle spanned numerous eras of journalism, embodying the rise and fall of the newspaper industry during the twentieth century in the lead up to the fall of American newspapering. Drawing on manuscript collections scattered across the United States as well as oral histories with executives, managers, and journalists from the papers, Ken J. Ward investigates the strategies employed in their competition with one another and against other challenges, such as widespread economic uncertainty and the deterioration of the newspaper industry. He follows this competition through the death of the Rocky Mountain News in 2009, which ended the country’s last great newspaper war and marked the close of the golden age of Denver journalism. Fake news runs rampant in the absence of high-quality news sources like the News and the Post of the past. Neither canonizing nor vilifying key characters, Last Paper Standing offers insight into the historical context that led these papers’ managers to their changing strategies over time. It is of interest to media and business historians, as well as anyone interested in the general history of journalism, Denver, and Colorado.
The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities
by Frank Donoghue“What makes the modern university different from any other corporation?” asked Columbia’s Andrew Delbanco recently in the New York Times. “There is more and more reason to think: less and less,” he answered.In this provocative book, Frank Donoghue shows how this growing corporate culture of higher education threatens its most fundamental values by erasing one of its defining features: the tenured professor.Taking a clear-eyed look at American higher education over the last twenty years, Donoghue outlines a web of forces—social, political, and institutional—dismantling the professoriate. Today, fewer than 30 percent of college and university teachers are tenured or on tenure tracks, and signs point to a future where professors will disappear. Why? What will universities look like without professors? Who will teach? Why should it matter? The fate of the professor, Donoghue shows, has always been tied to that of the liberal arts —with thehumanities at its core. The rise to prominence of the American university has been defined by the strength of the humanities and by the central role of the autonomous, tenured professor who can be both scholar and teacher. Yet in today’s market-driven, rank- and ratings-obsessed world of higher education, corporate logic prevails: faculties are to be managed for optimal efficiency, productivity, and competitive advantage; casual armies of adjuncts and graduate students now fill the demand for teachers.Bypassing the distractions of the culture wars and other “crises,” Donoghue sheds light on the structural changes in higher education—the rise of community colleges and for-profit universities, the frenzied pursuit of prestige everywhere, the brutally competitive realities facing new Ph.D.s —that threaten the survival of professors as we’ve known them. There are no quick fixes in The Last Professors; rather, Donoghue offers his fellow teachers and scholarsan essential field guide to making their way in a world that no longer has room for their dreams.First published in 2008, "The Last Professors" have largely had its arguments borne out in the interim, as the percentage of courses taught by tenured professors continues to dwindle. This new edition includes a substantial Preface that elaborates on recent developments and offers tough but productive analysis that will be crucial for today's academics to heed.
Last Resort: The Financial Crisis and the Future of Bailouts
by Eric A. PosnerThe bailouts during the recent financial crisis enraged the public. They felt unfair—and counterproductive: people who take risks must be allowed to fail. If we reward firms that make irresponsible investments, costing taxpayers billions of dollars, aren’t we encouraging them to continue to act irresponsibly, setting the stage for future crises? And beyond the ethics of it was the question of whether the government even had the authority to bail out failing firms like Bear Stearns and AIG. The answer, according to Eric A. Posner, is no. The federal government freely and frequently violated the law with the bailouts—but it did so in the public interest. An understandable lack of sympathy toward Wall Street has obscured the fact that bailouts have happened throughout economic history and are unavoidable in any modern, market-based economy. And they’re actually good. Contrary to popular belief, the financial system cannot operate properly unless the government stands ready to bail out banks and other firms. During the recent crisis, Posner agues, the law didn’t give federal agencies sufficient power to rescue the financial system. The legal constraints were damaging, but harm was limited because the agencies—with a few exceptions—violated or improvised elaborate evasions of the law. Yet the agencies also abused their power. If illegal actions were what it took to advance the public interest, Posner argues, we ought to change the law, but we need to do so in a way that also prevents agencies from misusing their authority. In the aftermath of the crisis, confusion about what agencies did do, should have done, and were allowed to do, has prevented a clear and realistic assessment and may hamper our response to future crises. Taking up the common objections raised by both right and left, Posner argues that future bailouts will occur. Acknowledging that inevitability, we can and must look ahead and carefully assess our policy options before we need them.
The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit, and Peril at the Beach
by Sarah StodolaA captivating exploration of beach resort culture—from its roots in fashionable society to its undervalued role in today’s world economy—as the travel industry approaches a climate reckoningWith its promise of escape from the strains of everyday life, the beach has a hold on the popular imagination as the ultimate paradise. In The Last Resort, Sarah Stodola dives into the psyche of the beachgoer and gets to the heart of what drives humans to seek out the sand. At the same time, she grapples with the darker realities of resort culture: strangleholds on local economies, reckless construction, erosion of beaches, weighty carbon footprints, and the inevitable overdevelopment and decline that comes with a soaring demand for popular shorelines.The Last Resort weaves Stodola’s firsthand travel notes with her exacting journalism in an enthralling report on the past, present, and future of coastal travel. She takes us from Monte Carlo, where the pursuit of pleasure first became part of the beach resort experience, to a village in Fiji that was changed irrevocably by the opening of a single resort; from the overdevelopment that stripped Acapulco of its reputation for exclusivity to Miami Beach, where extreme measures are underway to prevent the barrier island from vanishing into the ocean.In the twenty-first century, beach travel has become central to our globalized world—its culture, economy, and interconnectedness. But with sea levels likely to rise at least 1.5 to 3 feet by the end of this century, beaches will become increasingly difficult to preserve, and many will disappear altogether. What will our last resort be when water begins to fill the lobbies?
The Last Safe Investment
by Michael Ellsberg Bryan FranklinThe case for investing in your own career before anything elseMichael Ellsberg and Bryan Franklin think you've been fed a lie: that if you save for decades and invest in 401(k)s, IRAs, and a home, these investments will grow steadily over decades, allowing twenty to thirty years of secure, peaceful retirement.This might have been true at some point in the last century, but it is not true any longer. If you want to get ahead and enjoy a life of prosperity, the authors argue that you must invest in the most powerful source of wealth you'll ever know: your own earning power.Ellsberg and Franklin reveal how investing in yourself in various ways can guarantee a return much higher than the stock market or real estate. Boosting your skills, leadership, persuasion ability, and your network enriches the quality and meaning of your life at the same time that it enriches your wallet. Why wouldn't you bet on yourself?
The Last Seat in the House: The Story of Hanley Sound (American Made Music Series)
by John KaneKnown as the "Father of Festival Sound," Bill Hanley (b. 1937) made his indelible mark as a sound engineer at the 1969 Woodstock Music and Arts Fair. Hanley is credited with creating the sound of Woodstock, which literally made the massive festival possible. Stories of his on-the-fly solutions resonate as legend among festivalgoers, music lovers, and sound engineers. Since the 1950s his passion for audio has changed the way audiences listen to and technicians approach quality live concert sound. John Kane examines Hanley’s echoing impact on the entire field of sound engineering, that crucial but often-overlooked carrier wave of contemporary music. Hanley’s innovations founded the sound reinforcement industry and launched a new area of technology, rich with clarity and intelligibility. By the early seventies the post-Woodstock festival mass gathering movement collapsed. The music industry shifted, and new sound companies surfaced. After huge financial losses and facing stiff competition, Hanley lost his hold on a business he helped create. By studying both his history during the festivals and his independent business ventures, Kane seeks to present an honest portrayal of Hanley and his acumen and contributions. Since 2011, Kane conducted extensive research, including over one hundred interviews with music legends from the production and performance side of the industry. These carefully selected respondents witnessed Hanley’s expertise at various events and venues like Lyndon B. Johnson’s second inauguration, the Newport Folk/Jazz Festivals, the Beatles' final tour of 1966, the Fillmore East, Madison Square Garden, and more. The Last Seat in the House will intrigue and inform anyone who cares about the modern music industry.
Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest To Save A Troubled Planet
by Todd WilkinsonEntrepreneur and media mogul Ted Turner has commanded global attention for his dramatic personality, his founding of CNN, his marriage to Jane Fonda, and his company's merger with Time Warner. But his green resume has gone largely ignored, even while his role as a pioneering eco-capitalist means more to Turner than any other aspect of his legacy. He currently owns more than two million acres of private land (more than any other individual in America), and his bison herd exceeds 50,000 head, the largest in history. He donated $1 billion to help save the UN, and has recorded dozens of other firsts with regard to wildlife conservation, fighting nukes, and assisting the poor. He calls global warming the most dire threat facing humanity, and says that the tycoons of the future will be minted in the development of green, alternative renewable energy. Last Stand goes behind the scenes into Turner's private life, exploring the man's accomplishments and his motivations, showing the world a fascinating and flawed, fully three-dimensional character. From barnstorming the country with T. Boone Pickens on behalf of green energy to a pivotal night when he considered suicide, Turner is not the man the public believes him to be. Through Turner's eyes, the reader is asked to consider another way of thinking about the environment, our obligations to help others in need, and the grave challenges threatening the survival of civilization.
Last Stand of the Louisiana Shrimpers
by Emma Christopher LiretteIn recent years, shrimpers on the Louisiana coast have faced a historically dire shrimp season, with the price of shrimp barely high enough to justify trawling. Yet, many of them wouldn’t consider leaving shrimping behind, despite having transferrable skills that could land them jobs in the oil and gas industry. Since 2001, shrimpers have faced increasing challenges to their trade: an influx of shrimp from southeast Asia, several traumatic hurricane seasons, and the largest oil spill at sea in American history. In Last Stand of the Louisiana Shrimpers, author Emma Christopher Lirette traces how Louisiana Gulf Coast shrimpers negotiate land and blood, sea and freedom, and economic security and networks of control. This book explores what ties shrimpers to their boats and nets. Despite feeling trapped by finances and circumstances, they have created a world in which they have agency. Lirette provides a richly textured view of the shrimpers of Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, calling upon ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, interdisciplinary scholarship, and critical theory. With evocative, lyrical prose, she argues that in persisting to trawl in places that increasingly restrict their way of life, shrimpers build fragile, quietly defiant worlds, adapting to a constantly changing environment. In these flickering worlds, shrimpers reimagine what it means to work and what it means to make a living.
The Last Stone: A Masterpiece Of Criminal Interrogation
by Mark BowdenThe true story of a cold case, a compulsive liar, and five determined detectives, from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author and &“master journalist&” (The Wall Street Journal). On March 29, 1975, sisters Katherine and Sheila Lyons, ages ten and twelve, vanished from a shopping mall in suburban Washington, DC As shock spread, then grief, a massive police effort found nothing. The investigation was shelved, and the mystery endured. Then, in 2013, a cold case squad detective found something he and a generation of detectives had missed. It pointed them toward a man named Lloyd Welch, then serving time for child molestation in Delaware. The acclaimed author of Black Hawk Down and Hue 1968 had been a cub reporter for a Baltimore newspaper at the time of the original disappearance, and covered the frantic first weeks of the story. In The Last Stone, he returns to write its ending. Over months of intense questioning and extensive investigation of Welch&’s sprawling, sinister Appalachian clan, five skilled detectives learned to sift truth from determined lies. How do you get a compulsive liar with every reason in the world to lie to tell the truth? The Last Stone recounts a masterpiece of criminal interrogation, and delivers a chilling and unprecedented look inside a disturbing criminal mind. &“One of our best writers of muscular nonfiction.&” —The Denver Post &“Deeply unsettling . . . Bowden displays his tenacity as a reporter in his meticulous documentation of the case. But in the story of an unimaginably horrific crime, it&’s the detectives&’ unwavering determination to bring Welch to justice that offers a glimmer of hope on a long, dark journey.&” —Time
The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America's First Superhighway
by Steven HartAn investigative history of Depression Era power brokers and labor wars in the construction of the Pulaski Skyway across the New Jersey Meadowlands. In the 1930s, as America&’s love affair with the automobile began, cars and trucks leaving the nation&’s largest city were dumped out of the Holland Tunnel onto local roads winding through New Jersey swampland. The Pulaski Skyway, America&’s first &“superhighway,&” would change all that by connecting the hub of New York City to the rest of the country. But the corrupt and violent path to its completion would change much more for Jersey City&’s residents and labor unions. Jersey City mayor Frank Hague—dictator of the Hudson County political machine and a national political player—was a prime mover behind the ambitious transit project. Hague&’s nemesis in this undertaking was union boss Teddy Brandle. Construction of the last three miles of the Pulaski Skyway, then simply known as Route 25, marked an epic battle between big labor and big politics, culminating in a murder and the creation of a motorway so flawed it soon became known as &“Death Avenue&”—appropriately featured in the opening sequence of HBO&’s hit series The Sopranos. A book in the tradition of Robert Caro&’s The Power Broker and Henry Petroski&’s Engineers of Dreams, The Last Three Miles brings to vivid life a riveting and bloodstained chapter in the heroic age of public works. &“A revealing look into how local politics can affect the design and construction of our national infrastructure, sometimes with disastrous results. Hart uses his considerable narrative talent to tell an engaging human story about what might seem otherwise to be but an enormous black steel structure.&” —Henry Petroski, author of Engineers of Dreams and Success Through Failure
Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean
by Les StandifordThe story of the crazy idea to build a railroad over open ocean in the Florida Keys, its completion, and its complete destruction 22 years later in a hurricane is well told by author and Florida resident Standiford. Though the central protagonist is the oil tycoon Henry Flagler, who was a pivotal figure in the development of Florida's coast, Standiford never loses sight of the experience of the railroad's less well-known engineers and workers. Annotation c. Book News, Inc. , Portland, OR (booknews. com)
The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères and Co.
by William D. CohanA grand and revelatory portrait of Wall Street's most storied investment bank Wall Street investment banks move trillions of dollars a year, make billions in fees, pay their executives in the tens of millions of dollars. But even among the most powerful firms, Lazard Frères & Co. stood apart. Discretion, secrecy, and subtle strategy were its weapons of choice. For more than a century, the mystique and reputation of the "Great Men" who worked there allowed the firm to garner unimaginable profits, social cachet, and outsized influence in the halls of power. But in the mid-1980s, their titanic egos started getting in the way, and the Great Men of Lazard jeopardized all they had built. William D. Cohan, himself a former high-level Wall Street banker, takes the reader into the mysterious and secretive world of Lazard and presents a compelling portrait of Wall Street through the tumultuous history of this exalted and fascinating company. Cohan deconstructs the explosive feuds between Felix Rohatyn and Steve Rattner, superstar investment bankers and pillars of New York society, and between the man who controlled Lazard, the inscrutable French billionaire Michel David-Weill, and his chosen successor, Bruce Wasserstein. Cohan follows Felix, the consummate adviser, as he reshapes corporate America in the 1970s and 1980s, saves New York City from bankruptcy, and positions himself in New York society and in Washington. Felix's dreams are dashed after the arrival of Steve, a formidable and ambitious formernewspaper reporter. By the mid-1990s, as Lazard neared its 150th anniversary, Steve and Felix were feuding openly. The internal strife caused by their arguments could not be solved by the imperious Michel, whose manipulative tendencies served only to exacerbate the trouble within the firm. Increasingly desperate, Michel took the unprecedented step of relinquishing operational control of Lazard to one of the few Great Men still around, Bruce Wasserstein, then fresh from selling his own M&A boutique, for $1. 4 billion. Bruce's take: more than $600 million. But it turned out Great Man Bruce had snookered Great Man Michel when the Frenchman was at his most vulnerable. The LastTycoonsis a tale of vaulting ambitions, whispered advice, worldly mistresses, fabulous art collections, and enormous wealth--a story of high drama in the world of high finance.
The Last Undercover: The True Story of an FBI Agent's Dangerous Dance with Evil
by Bob HamerA 26-year veteran of the FBI reflects on the challenges he has endured and overcome, as he stared the dark side of humanity in the face and never blinked.
The Last Will and Testament of Alexander the Great: The Truth Behind the Death that Changed the Graeco-Persian World Forever
by David GrantA re-assessment of Alexander the Great's death, exposing a conspiracy by Alexander's generals after his death to undermine his empire.Alexander the Great conquered the largest empire the world had ever seen while still in his twenties but fell fatally ill in Babylon before reaching 33 years old. His wife Roxanne was still pregnant with what would be his only legitimate son, so there was no clear-cut heir. The surviving accounts of his dying days differ on crucial detail, with the most popular version claiming Alexander uttered ‘to the strongest’ when asked to nominate a successor on his deathbed. Decades of ‘civil war’ ensued as Alexander’s hard-won empire was torn asunder by generals in the bloody ‘funeral games’ his alleged final words heralded in. The fighting for supremacy inevitably led to the extermination of his bloodline. But was Alexander really so short-sighted and irresponsible? Finally, after 2,340 years, the mystery is unravelled. In a forensic first, David Grant presents a compelling case for what he terms the ‘greatest succession cover up of all time’. Alexander’s lost Last Will and Testament is given new credibility and Grant deciphers events that led to its erasure from history by the generals who wanted to carve up the empire for themselves.
The Last Word On Power: Executive Re-Invention For Leaders Who Must Make The Impossible Happen
by Tracy GossTips on reinventing your lifestyle and transforming senior executives into another state of being.