About this product: Meet Mirror Carter, a hood chick from Shady Grove Trailer Park who would die to forget her past, and bask in a more sophisticated lifestyle. Although Mirror gets a small taste of the glamorous life, her appetite for wealth continues to grow as she constantly searches for the next big moneymaker. That is until she meets, Brice Tower, the handsome, and filthy rich owner of the Houston Rockets, and her meal ticket to the millionaire s club. Soon, chaos erupts and Mirror s fairy-tale life turns into a nightmare when she finds out Brice s best kept secret. As Mirror vows to hold on to her spot at the top, Brice struggles to keep her away. When the game of fatal attraction turns hood, Mirror s past is exposed and all hell breaks lose.
About this product: It was the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold.
In 1985, at a heated auction by Christie’s of London, a 1787 bottle of Château Lafite Bordeaux—one of a cache of bottles unearthed in a bricked-up Paris cellar and supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson—went for $156,000 to a member of the Forbes family. The discoverer of the bottle was pop-band manager turned wine collector Hardy Rodenstock, who had a knack for finding extremely old and exquisite wines. But rumors about the bottle soon arose. Why wouldn’t Rodenstock reveal the exact location where it had been found? Was it part of a smuggled Nazi hoard? Or did his reticence conceal an even darker secret?
It would take more than two decades for those questions to be answered and involve a gallery of intriguing players—among them Michael Broadbent, the bicycle-riding British auctioneer who speaks of wines as if they are women and staked his reputation on the record-setting sale; Serena Sutcliffe, Broadbent’s elegant archrival, whose palate is covered by a hefty insurance policy; and Bill Koch, the extravagant Florida tycoon bent on exposing the truth about Rodenstock.
Pursuing the story from Monticello to London to Zurich to Munich and beyond, Benjamin Wallace also offers a mesmerizing history of wine, complete with vivid accounts of subterranean European laboratories where old vintages are dated and of Jefferson’s colorful, wine-soaked days in France, where he literally drank up the culture.
Suspenseful, witty, and thrillingly strange, The Billionaire’s Vinegar is the vintage tale of what could be the most elaborate con since the Hitler diaries. It is also the debut of an exceptionally powerful new voice in narrative non-fiction.
About this product: Master Shots gives filmmakers the techniques they need to execute complex, original shots on any budget. By using powerful master shots and well-executed moves, directors can develop a strong style and stand out from the crowd. Most low-budget movies look low-budget because the director is forced to compromise at the last minute. Master Shots gives you so many powerful techniques that youll be able to respond, even under pressure, and create knock-out shots. Even when the clock is ticking and the light is fading, the techniques in this book can rescue your film and make every shot look like it cost a fortune. Each technique is illustrated with samples from great feature films and computer-generated diagrams for absolute clarity.
Arrogant, self-centered, stubborn, and insecure -- words that most people associate with ego. But in this original, eye-opening work, authors David Marcum and Steven Smith argue that the upside of ego is as powerful as the downside and answer questions about ego that have been a mystery to most people.
In his landmark book, Good to Great, Jim Collins showed that one of two key traits defined leaders who transformed organizations from good to great: humility. But if humility is so powerful, why don't more of us have it? Why does ego allow us to reach good results but never great ones, unless balanced by humility? Why do we need ego to personally succeed, while having it often interferes with the success we pursue?
The Answers
Using five years of exhaustive research, Marcum and Smith provide compelling evidence and matter-of-fact answers on striking the balance between ego and humility to reach the next level of leadership. The authors include case studies to illustrate how ego subtly interferes with success but also how ego sparks the drive to achieve, the nerve to try something new, and the tenacity to conquer adversity.
The Early Warning Signs
We all have moments when ego costs us everything from an honest conversation to a job or promotion. Through cross-disciplinary research, egonomics reveals how to detect four early warning signs that ego is becoming a liability, including how:
• being too competitive makes you less competitive
• defending ideas turns into defending yourself
• winning ideas can be halted by the creator's own intelligence and talent
• desiring respect and recognition can interfere with success
The Keys to Egonomic Health
Three key principles keep ego healthy:
• humility: striking the crucial balance between too much ego and not enough
• curiosity: blending free thinking and discipline without bias
• veracity: removing fear of giving or getting feedback to produce water-cooler honesty
With a clear focus on elevating the way you do business, egonomics is a liberating approach to becoming a rare and respected leader.
About this product: Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. In Expensive People, Oates takes a provocative and suspenseful look at the roiling secrets of America’s affluent suburbs. Set in the late 1960s, this first-person confession is narrated by Richard Everett, a precocious and obese boy who sees himself as a minor character in the alarming drama unfolding around him.
Fascinated by yet alienated from his attractive, self-absorbed parents and the privileged world they inhabit, Richard incisively analyzes his own mismanaged childhood, his pretentious private schooling, his “successful-executive” father, and his elusive mother. In an act of defiance and desperation, eleven-year-old Richard strikes out in a way that presages the violence of ever-younger Americans in the turbulent decades to come.
A National Book Award finalist, Expensive People is a stunning combination of social satire and gothic horror. “You cannot put this novel away after you have opened it,” said The Detroit News. “This is that kind of book–hypnotic, fascinating, and electrifying.”
Expensive People is the second novel in the Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, A Garden of Earthly Delights, them, and Wonderland, are also available from the Modern Library.
About this product: From Havana cigars and hand-made shoes, to hundred-dollar haircuts, from truffles, vintage champagne and stretch limousines to caviare and cashmere, here is every excess one can imagine (and plenty more that one probably can't). By the author of "A Year in Provence" and "Toujours Provence".
About this product: The Fourteen Million-Dollar Poodle - Nancy Warren Labour dispute negotiator Vince Grange has a reputation for being a tough guy. Tough guys hammer out deals, drink beer, and keep their well-muscled, six-foot-four physiques in shape. What they do not do is inherit frou-frou toy poodles named Mimi who only understand French. Good thing Vince was a softy for his late eccentric aunt, and really good thing she left him fourteen million dollars so he can hire a French dog nanny. The World is Too Darned Big - Mary Janice Davidson The name's Dyson. Benjamin Dyson. Genius engineering geek by day and unfortunately, genius engineering geek by night. Ben may work for the CIA, but he's the mild-mannered brainy type who wouldn't know a gun from a gear shift. Enter Tara Marx. She's six feet of big, bad, booty-kicking fearlessness, and she needs Ben on her mission ASAP. Guilty Pleasures - Karen Kelley Computer entrepreneur Alex Cannedy loves women - the way they move, talk, smell...and other things. He'd love to get to show Kagen Yates a good time, but his sister has declared the wealthy designer off-limits. She even makes him pinkie-swear not to so much as wink at the hot babe who's had her heart broken by men just like Alex. But Alex has no idea how his resolve, will be tested. Kagen has plans of her own
About this product: The United States has more people locked away in prison per capita than any other country. Prison building is a multi-billion-dollar industry, and in some states more money is spent on prisons and prisoners than on education. Nearly one quarter of all prison inmates worldwide are housed in U.S. jails or penitentiaries, even though the United States has only five percent of the world’s population. Yet, in spite of the vast amount of resources spent on locking people up and the number of people in prison, the United States leads the developed world in the number of homicides and violent assaults.
For the last eighteen years, Jens Soering has experienced the inside of many different prison environments, from a youth remand center in London to America’s notorious Supermax prisons, to medium-security institutions. What he has seen and experienced has convinced him that not only do prisons not rehabilitate prisoners who may be useful for society once their sentence has ended, but prisons turn petty criminals into hardened convicts—all at enormous expense to society. Meanwhile, other nations control their crime rates at a fraction of the cost of the United States correctional system.
Soering does not argue that prisons should not exist or dispute that there are people who need to be locked away. His book is not an indictment of the legal system that lands many people in prison. Instead, An Expensive Way to Make Bad People Worse offers a mainly monetary analysis of why it is absurd fiscal policy to lock people up so often and for so long.
BOOK
