About this product: A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives.
Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.”
For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. Now, in this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don’t know. He offers surprisingly simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them.
Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications The Black Swan will change the way you look at the world. Taleb is a vastly entertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory. The Black Swan is a landmark book–itself a black swan.
About this product: The bestselling author of The Areas of My Expertise also known as The Daily Shows Resident Expert and the PC in the iconic Mac adspicks up exactly where his first book left off. Exactly.
Like its predecessor, MORE INFORMATION THAN YOU REQUIRE compiles incredibly handy made up facts into brief articles, overlong lists, frighteningly complex charts, and beguiling narratives on new and familiar themes such as: THE PAST (because there is always more) THE FUTURE (because they say there is still some left to discuss) THE METHOD BY WHICH WE ELECT OUR PRESIDENTS (as this will be happening soon) THE STRANGE OKAPI (an actual animal) GAMBLING: THE SPORT OF THE ASTHMATIC MAN (includes hermit crab racing) HOW TO BE A FAMOUS MINOR TELEVISION PERSONALITY (hint: go on television) PLUS: 700 MOLE-MAN NAMES (and their occupations)
Yes. HODGMAN MAY HAVE BEEN BRIEFLY ABSENT FROM YOUR LIFE, but with this volume he is ready to pick up exactly where THE AREAS OF MY EXPERTISE left offspecifically AT PAGE 237.
"One mark of a great book is that it makes you see things in a new way, and Mr. Friedman certainly succeeds in that goal," the Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz wrote in The New York Times reviewing The World Is Flat in 2005. In this new edition, Thomas L. Friedman includes fresh stories and insights to help us understand the flattening of the world. Weaving new information into his overall thesis, and answering the questions he has been most frequently asked by parents across the country, this third edition also includes two new chapters--on how to be a political activist and social entrepreneur in a flat world; and on the more troubling question of how to manage our reputations and privacy in a world where we are all becoming publishers and public figures.
The World Is Flat 3.0 is an essential update on globalization, its opportunities for individual empowerment, its achievements at lifting millions out of poverty, and its drawbacks--environmental, social, and political, powerfully illuminated by the Pulitzer Prize--winning author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree.
About this product: For a world of devoted readers, a much-awaited new volume of absorbing stories and inspirational wisdom from one of our best-loved writers.
Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter reveals Maya Angelou’s path to living well and living a life with meaning. Told in her own inimitable style, this book transcends genres and categories: guidebook, memoir, poetry, and pure delight.
Here in short spellbinding essays are glimpses of the tumultuous life that led Angelou to an exalted place in American letters and taught her lessons in compassion and fortitude: how she was brought up by her indomitable grandmother in segregated Arkansas, taken in at thirteen by her more worldly and less religious mother, and grew to be an awkward, six-foot-tall teenager whose first experience of loveless sex paradoxically left her with her greatest gift, a son.
Whether she is recalling such lost friends as Coretta Scott King and Ossie Davis, extolling honesty, decrying vulgarity, explaining why becoming a Christian is a “lifelong endeavor,” or simply singing the praises of a meal of red rice–Maya Angelou writes from the heart to millions of women she considers her extended family.
Like the rest of her remarkable work, Letter to My Daughter entertains and teaches; it is a book to cherish, savor, re-read, and share.
“I gave birth to one child, a son, but I have thousands of daughters. You are Black and White, Jewish and Muslim, Asian, Spanish speaking, Native Americans and Aleut. You are fat and thin and pretty and plain, gay and straight, educated and unlettered, and I am speaking to you all. Here is my offering to you.”
About this product: The much anticipated 75th anniversary edition of Irma Rombauer's kitchen classic Joy of Cooking promises to be as indispensable as past editions of this generational favorite. In addition to hundreds of brand-new recipes, this Joy is filled with many recipes from all previous editions, retested and reinvented for today's tastes.
Take the new Joy for a test-run in the kitchen with these featured recipes for Roast Brined Turkey and Apple Pie, and watch a video demonstration for their recipe for 10-in-One Cookies. And read on for celebrity chef "Odes to Joy," Joy timeline, and Joy trivia.
1930: The United States stock market crashes creating the great depression. 1931: Irma Rombauer takes $3,000, the modest legacy her husband leaves at his death, and she self-publishes the first Joy of Cooking. She is 54 years old. 1932: Irma tries to sell her book to a commercial publisher, Bobbs-Merrill of Indianapolis, IN, and is rejected. 1933: Prohibition is repealed and Adolf Hilter becomes to Chancellor of Germany. 1935: Bobbs-Merrill receives another submission of the Joy of Cooking from Irma. This version is not the self-published book but a revision, typed and bound in 15 notebook binders. 1936: March 26 is the publication date for the first commercial Joy of Cooking. The first print run is 10,000 copies and the book costs $2.50. 1937: The Golden Gate Bridge is completed in San Francisco and Gone with the Wind, a Scribner book, wins the Pulitzer Prize. 1939: Bobbs-Merrill publishes Irma Rombauer's book Streamlined Cooking, a cookbook dedicated to convenience foods. The book is not a commercial success. 1940: Freeze-drying is invented. 1941: Pearl Harbor is attacked and America enters World War II. 1943: The bestselling "wartime" edition of Joy of Cooking is published which includes how to creatively deal with the food rationing during World War II. 1946: A "post-war" edition is printed with very few changes. 1947: The microwave oven is invented. 1951: Marion Rombauer Becker joins her mother Irma as co-author of this edition. 1955: Gunsmoke debuts on CBS. 1961: John F. Kennedy is inaugurated as the President of the United States. 1962: Irma Rombauer dies in her native St. Louis. The sixth edition of Joy of Cooking is published. 1963: The French Chef with Julia Child debuts on public television. 1969: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first to walk on the moon. 1970: The Beatles break up. 1974: President Nixon resigns and Stephen Kings Carrie is published. 1975: The first--and last--edition of Joy of Cooking that is completely Marion Rombauer Becker's work is published. 1979: Margaret Thatcher becomes the Prime Minister of Great Britain. 1980: The median household income in the United States is $19,074 and it seems the entire country is playing PacMan. 1981: The first genetically engineer plant--the Flavr Savr tomato--is approved for sale. 1984: Coca-Cola changes its 99-year-old formula and launches New Coke. 1990: East and West Germany unite. 1997: After a more than a two decade hiatus, the eighth edition of Joy of Cooking is published by Scribner with Ethan, Marion's son, at the helm. 2006: A new edition of Joy of Cooking, based on the writing and structure of the 1975 edition, is published to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Irma Rombauer's self-published cookbook.
Joy Trivia
For the 75th anniversary edition, 4,500 recipes were tested that used a total of 400 pounds of butter, 300 quarts of milk, 485 pounds of red meat, and 275 pounds of fish and shellfish.
The average age of a recipe tester working on the 75th anniversary edition was 46.7 years.
Recipe testers spend 8,798 hours testing recipes and techniques for the latest edition.
The knife was the first cutlery invented, followed by the spoon, and, much later, the fork (11th century A.D.).
Caffeine is the most widely used behavior-changing chemical ingested worldwide.
Eating cheese slows the decay of teeth.
A light coating of oil speeds cooking and improves flavor of most grilled foods.
Some of the most requested recipes from past Joy of Cooking editions include Chicken Marengo, Chocolate Cake (also known as the "Rombauer Special"), and Golden Glow Gelatin Salad.
Ice is considered one of the most important ingredients in making drinks.
Popsicles, baby back ribs, smoothies, and power bars are just a few of the recipes making their debut in the 2006 anniversary edition.
The 2006 Joy of Cooking has instructions on using natural ingredients to color Easter eggs: beets for pink; chopped red cabbage for blue; tumeric for yellow; and the skins of 12 red onions for orange to burnt orange.
Slow cooker recipes are included in the 2006 Joy for the first time.
About this product: Class is in session, and Martha Stewart is your instructor! This amazingly informative cookbook features over 200 delicious recipes with step-by-step photographs that don't just teach you what to cook, but how to cook it.
The subprime mortgage crisis has already wreaked havoc on the lives of millions of people and now it threatens to derail the U.S. economy and economies around the world. In this trenchant book, best-selling economist Robert Shiller reveals the origins of this crisis and puts forward bold measures to solve it. He calls for an aggressive response--a restructuring of the institutional foundations of the financial system that will not only allow people once again to buy and sell homes with confidence, but will create the conditions for greater prosperity in America and throughout the deeply interconnected world economy.
Shiller blames the subprime crisis on the irrational exuberance that drove the economy's two most recent bubbles--in stocks in the 1990s and in housing between 2000 and 2007. He shows how these bubbles led to the dangerous overextension of credit now resulting in foreclosures, bankruptcies, and write-offs, as well as a global credit crunch. To restore confidence in the markets, Shiller argues, bailouts are needed in the short run. But he insists that these bailouts must be targeted at low-income victims of subprime deals. In the longer term, the subprime solution will require leaders to revamp the financial framework by deploying an ambitious package of initiatives to inhibit the formation of bubbles and limit risks, including better financial information; simplified legal contracts and regulations; expanded markets for managing risks; home equity insurance policies; income-linked home loans; and new measures to protect consumers against hidden inflationary effects.
This powerful book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how we got into the subprime mess--and how we can get out.
No matter who you are-investor, trader, homeowner, 401(k) holder, or CEO-you are bound to feel the impact of Alan Greenspan's �Age of Ignorance� for years to come.
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According to MSN Money columnist William A. Fleckenstein, Greenspan's nearly 19-year career as Federal Reserve Chairman is even worse than anyone imagined. Labeled �Mr. Bubble� by the New York Times, Greenspan was nothing less than a serial bubble blower with a long history of bad decision-making. His famous �Greenspan Put� fueled the perception of a Goldilocks economy-but, as this explosive expos� reveals, the bear has finally caught up with Goldilocks.
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Using transcripts of Greenspan's FOMC meetings as well as testimony before Congress, this eye-opening book delivers a timeline of his most devastating mistakes and weaves together the connection between every economic calamity of the past 19 years:
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The stock market crash of 1987.
The Savings And Loan crisis.
The collapse of Long Term Capital Management.
The tech bubble of 2000.
The feared Y2K disaster.
The credit bubble and real estate crisis of 2007.
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Fleckenstein explains just how far-reaching Greenspan's mess has been flung, and presents damning evidence that contradicts the former Fed chief's public naivet� concerning shifts in the market and economy. He also points to a disturbing fact, that throughout his career, Greenspan not only made costly mistakes, but made the same ones-over and over again. And not only was he never able to recognize or admit to those mistakes, he constantly rewrote his own history to justify them.
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Greenspan's Bubbles offers a lock-stock-and-barrel portrait of a flawed but fascinating man whose words and actions have led a whole generation astray, and whose legacy will continue to challenge us in the years ahead.
About this product: In the summer of 2007, the subprime empire that Wall Street had built all came crashing down. On average, fifty lenders a month were going bust-and the people responsible for the crisis included not just unregulated loan brokers andcon artists, but also investment bankers and home loan institutions traditionally perceived as completely trustworthy.
Chain of Blame chronicles this incredible disaster, with a specific focus on the players who participated in such a fundamentally flawed fiasco. Authors Paul Muolo and Mathew Padilla, well-regarded journalists for National Mortgage News and the Orange County Register respectively, reveal the truth behind how this crisis occurred, what individuals and institutions-from lenders and brokers to some of the biggest investment banks in the world-were doing during this critical time, and who is ultimately responsible for what happened.
BOOK
"Great cookbooks are not just collections of interesting recipes. They are, first and foremost, books that tell a story, the story of how people lived and cooked at a particular point in time. They reveal, to borrow an expression from James Beard, their delights and prejudices, their view of the social order, their appetite for serving others food that meets the expectations of their social class. Food can be anything and everything from fuel to an object of intellectual curiosity to full-bore hedonism that transports the mind and body far from the dinner table with just one overwhelming bite. 
"I'm often asked to pick my favorite cookbook. Considering that there are over 3,000 cookbooks published each year, it's a daunting task to try to narrow them down. Speaking as a chef who never went to cooking school, I've been enthralled by certain cookbooks, immersing myself from cover to cover and learning about exotic cuisines from all over the world. But for just plain basic information, both the original and revised Joy of Cooking are still my bibles. I can't tell you how many times my wife Jackie and I have thumbed through the stained and broken-backed copy of Joy in our home kitchen, looking for our favorite angel food cake recipe, our favorite skillet corn bread, our favorite fluffy biscuits, and crisp waffles, and on and on. It's tough to picture my family table--or, in fact, the American table--without a well-worn copy of Joy of Cooking in the background." " --Tom Douglas, author of I Love Crab Cakes! 
"I highly recommend this book as a must-have in your kitchen. Chock full of great information, this book takes all of the guess work out and leaves no stone unturned." --Paula Deen, author of Paula Deen Celebrates! 
"In our kitchen, Joy of Cooking is a tool as indispensable as the chef's knife, the scale, the whisk. We actually own two copies--a shelf-copy for reading, and one whose sauce-splattered, dog-eared pages bear witness to just how much joy we get from Joy." " --Matt Lee and Ted Lee, authors of The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook 
"Joy of Cooking is the ultimate reference guide that I have been using for years. It's timeless and packed with perfect recipes for the home cook that stands up to the test of time." --Tyler Florence, author of Tyler's Ultimate 
"Joy of Cooking is a book I turn to whenever I have a question about food or cooking. The new edition is the combined effort of some of the best cooks writing today; I know I can trust its information. And trust is, to my mind, the essential quality of all great cookbooks." --Sally Schneider, author of The Improvisational Cook 
"When Andrew first contemplated becoming a chef in the 1980s, he asked two Boston chefs of his acquaintance what books he should read. Each independently recommended Joy of Cooking as THE classic with reliable recipes for just about everything. (The second chef urged him to look for an early copy for the sheer entertainment value of reading how to cook a possum.) A decade later, when we interviewed 60 of Americas leading chefs for our first book Becoming a Chef, we asked them the same question--and again Joy was one of their five most recommended books. In fact, we recommend buying two copies, like we did: we keep our chocolate-smudged copy of Joy in our kitchen, and a reading copy on our bookshelves." --Andrew Dorenburg and Karen Page, authors of What to Drink with What You Eat 
"Our Joy of Cooking is dog-eared, flour dusted, chocolate smudged, oil spattered, and easily the most used cookbook on the shelf. The staggering amount of information in the book taught us the basics when we were in our teens and has informed our cooking for the decades since. We wish we had written it!" --Johanne Killeen and George Germon, authors of On Top of Spaghetti 
"I received a copy of Joy of Cooking in my late teens. I have treasured the cookbook ever since and still use it frequently as a reference. In the late 80's I was asked to represent American Cooking in Italy. I cooked all over the country for 2 months. The only book I took was Joy of Cooking. When ingredients that I had ordered did not show up and I had to totally wing it, I used this book to get me out of a few jams--like what the proportions are to make your own baking powder! If I could have only one cookbook--other than my own of course!--it would be Joy of Cooking-as it is the bible of American cooking" --Kathy Casey, author of Kathy Casey's Northwest Table 
"I have purchased Joy of Cooking for all my restaurant libraries as well as my own. The recipes always work--always--and the informational chapters are accurate, to the point, and incredibly helpful--couldnt live with out it!!" --Cindy Pawlcyn, author of Big Small Plates 
