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Tolkien A Biography
Brief Summary
There are few writers who can claim the popularity and enduring appeal of J.R.R. Tolkien. His celebrated novels have sold in excess of 160 million copies, and are in large part responsible for seeding the entire genre of fantasy fiction.
Now, renowned biographer Michael White looks back over the little-known life of this most treasured of writers. In absorbing and revealing detail, he chronicles Tolkien's childhood years and the tragic early death of his parents; his burgeoning romance with Edith Brett; his many years as an Oxford academic; his friendship with C.S. Lewis and the founding of 'The Inklings' group.
White describes why Tolkien's writing took off so spectacularly - and how The Lord of the Rings became the must-read of the late Sixties counter-culture. Informed and fascinating, Tolkien is the fascinating story of how the man who created The Hobbit became one of the giants of modern literature.
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ISBN:9781422351376
Author:Michael White
Tips and Traps for Writing an Effecti...
Brief Summary
In only 30 days, entrepreneurs can craft business plans that make their goals a reality.
A concrete business plan is essential when assessing a business's earning potential or when applying for financing. Tips & Traps for Writing an Effective Business Plan uses the popular Tips & Traps format to guide you step by step through the process of creating an effective plan that will work with a developing business.
You'll learn how to assemble information and write each part of your plan, with the goal of having a ready-to-go, working strategy in just 30 days. The book also provides specific advice for crafting plans that apply to different industries and also includes detailed instructions for writing a financial plan.
ISBN:9780071467513
Author:Greg Balanko-Dickson
The War of the World
Brief Summary
The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West
The beginning of the twentieth century saw human civilization at its most enlightened, well-educated, globalized and wealthy. What turned it into a bloodbath?
Niall Ferguson re-tells the story of history's most savage century as a continual war that raged for 100 years. From the plains of Poland to the killing fields of Cambodia, he reveals how economic boom-and-bust, decaying empires and, above all, poisonous ideas of race led men to treat each other as aliens. It was an age of hatred that ended with the twilight, not the triumph, of the West. And, he shows, it could happen all over again.
ISBN:9781594201004
Author:Niall Ferguson
The Weekenders
Brief Summary
The Weekenders: Travels in the Heart of Africa
What would happen if you took some of Britain's best writing talent, put them on a plane and flew them to one of the most extraordinary and inaccessible places on the planet?
What would happen if you took Irvine Welsh from the streets of Edinburgh and showed him a remote, dangerous village in Africa? Or if you flew Alex Garland into one of the world's most hazardous war zones?
And how would Tony Hawks react if you dragged him away from his tennis and asked him to write a song with a Sudanese tribesman? With Victoria Glendinning, Andrew O'Hagan, Giles Foden and WF Deedes, these writers have experienced for themselves one of the most beautiful and yet troubled lands in the world - Sudan.
This remarkable collection of short stories and evocative travel writing is their response - as diverse and unpredictable as the country itself.
ISBN:9780091881801
Author:W.F. Deedes,Sue Ryan,Alex Garland,Tony Hawks, Andrew O'Hagan,Irvine Welsh,Giles Foden and Victoria Glendinning
What a Husband Needs from His Wife
Brief Summary
What a Husband Needs from His Wife: *Physically *Emotionally *Spiritually
What do men really need from their wives? And what is the best way for wives to meet those needs? This engaging and thoroughly biblical guide demonstrates that a woman meets her husband's needs most effectively by maintaining her own vibrant personal relationship with Christ. Filled with useful tools that will help women understand their husbands better, this enlightening resource includes...
• ideas for dealing with addictions, infidelity, and financial challenges
• explanations of personality types and love languages
• Resources that offer help for the helper
A study guide at the end of the book makes this a perfect tool for individual or small group use.
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The Ten Commandments for Business Fai...
Brief Summary
Don Keough—a former top executive at Coca-Cola and now chairman of the elite investment banking firm Allen & Company—has witnessed plenty of failures in his sixty-year career (including New Coke). He has also been friends with some of the most successful people in business history, including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Jack Welch, Rupert Murdoch, and Peter Drucker.
Now this elder statesman reveals how great enterprises get into trouble. Even the smartest executives can fall into the trap of believing in their own infallibility. When that happens, more bad decisions are sure to follow.
This light-hearted "how-not-to” book includes anecdotes from Keough’s long career as well as other infamous failures.
His commandments for failure include:
• Quit Taking Risks;
• Be Inflexible;
• Assume Infallibility;
• Put All Your Faith in Experts;
• Send Mixed Messages; and
• Be Afraid of the Future.
As he writes, "After a lifetime in business I’ve never been able to develop a step-by-step formula that will guarantee success. What I could do, however, was talk about how to lose. I guarantee that anyone who follows my formula will be a highly successful loser.”
ISBN:9781591842347
Author:Donald R. Keough
How To Survive Your Doctorate
Brief Summary
If you are doing, thinking about doing, or know someone who is doing a doctorate, then this is the survival kit you need! Rather than focusing on the technical side of the doctorate, this book looks at all the other crucial skills that are part of everyday doctoral life.
This candid book provides real insight into what it's like to do a doctorate and offers practical advice on: The application process Sources of financial support Motivational issues Student-supervisor relationships Departmental and university politics Publishing, conferences and networking Career strategies Written by recent doctoral graduates, the book also includes real examples and case studies from current doctoral students and recent graduates across a range of disciplines and universities.
By demystifying the doctoral process How to Survive Your Doctorate prepares you for life as a doctoral student like no other book. See for yourself and be a survivor!
ISBN:9780335234448
Author:Jane Matthiesen
Managing Your Career
Brief Summary
Wondering how the most accomplished leaders from around the globe have tackled their toughest challenges? Now you can find out—with Lessons Learned. Concise and engaging, each volume in this new series offers 12-14 insightful essays by top leaders in industry, the public sector, and academia on the most pressing issues they’ve faced. The contributors share surprisingly personal anecdotes and offer authoritative and practical advice drawn from their years of hard-earned experience.
The series launches with three volumes, each of which centers on a timely topic:
• Leading by Example
• Managing Your Career
• Managing Change
A crucial resource for today’s busy executive, Lessons Learned gives you instant access to the wisdom and expertise of the world’s most talented leaders.
50 Lessons’ digital library holds more than 500 individual lessons from over 100 high-profile leaders from industry, the public sector, and academia from companies and institutions around the world.
ISBN:9781422118610
Author:Fifty Lessons
We Are a Muslim Please
Brief Summary
For Zaiba Malik, growing up in Bradford in the '70s and '80s certainly has its moments - staying up all night during Ramadan with her father; watching mad Mr Aziz searching for his goat during Eid; dancing along to Top of the Pops (so long as no-one's watching). And, of course, there's her mother - whether she's writing another ingratiating letter to the Queen or referring to Tom Jones as 'Thumb Jone'.
But Zaiba's story is also one of anxiety and seemingly irreconcilable opposites. Growing up she is constantly torn between two identities: 'British' and 'Muslim'. Alienated at school and confused at home, the racism she encounters as a child mirrors the horrors she experiences at the hands of Bangladeshi interrogators as a journalist years later.
Five years after the 7/7 attacks galvanized debates about Muslim-British identity, We Are A Muslim, Please is a stirring and enchanting memoir. We see, through Zaiba's childhood eyes, the poignancy of growing up in a world whose prejudices, contradictions and ambiguities are at once distressing and utterly captivating.
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ISBN:9780434018475
Author:Zaiba Malik
War and Conflict in Africa
Brief Summary
After the Cold War, Africa earned the dubious distinction of being the world's most bloody continent. But how can we explain this proliferation of armed conflicts? What caused them and what were their main characteristics? And what did the world's governments do to stop them?
In this fully revised and updated second edition of his popular text, Paul Williams offers an in-depth and wide-ranging assessment of more than six hundred armed conflicts which took place in Africa from 1990 to the present day - from the continental catastrophe in the Great Lakes region to the sprawling conflicts across the Sahel and the web of wars in the Horn of Africa.
Taking a broad comparative approach to examine the political contexts in which these wars occurred, he explores the major patterns of organized violence, the key ingredients that provoked them and the major international responses undertaken to deliver lasting peace.
Part I, Contexts provides an overview of the most important attempts to measure the number, scale and location of Africa's armed conflicts and provides a conceptual and political sketch of the terrain of struggle upon which these wars were waged.
Part II, Ingredients analyses the role of five widely debated features of Africa's wars: the dynamics of neo-patrimonial systems of governance; the construction and manipulation of ethnic identities; questions of sovereignty and self-determination; as well as the impact of natural resources and religion.
Part III, Responses, discusses four major international reactions to Africa's wars: attempts to build a new institutional architecture to help promote peace and security on the continent; this architecture's two main policy instruments, peacemaking initiatives and peace operations; and efforts to develop the continent.
War and Conflict in Africa will be essential reading for all students of international peace and security studies as well as Africa's international relations.
ISBN:9781509509058
Author:Paul D. Williams
Do not say yes when you want to say no
Brief Summary
Don't Say Yes When You Want to Say No: Making Life Right When It Feels All Wrong
Yes, you can learn to say what you mean and mean what you say. This best-selling guide has already transformed thousands of lives--and can change your as well.
The authors' pioneering Assertiveness Training Technique can help you gain recognition and promotion on the job, renew your marriage, put more zing in your sex life, deal with your children more effectively, and make new friends.
Change your life as you learn how to:
• Target your own assertiveness difficulties and set your own goals.
• Follow your progress with a workshop that gives you step-by-step reinforcement.
• Visualize and actualize through exercises designed to perfect new behavior patterns.
• Develop self-control that comes from within.
• Change habits that keep you from getting what you want in every area of your life.
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ISBN:9780440154136
Author:Herbert Fensterheim and Jean Baer
Valley of the Casbahs
Brief Summary
Valley of the Casbahs: A Journey across the Moroccan Sahara
The four-hundred-and-fifty-mile long Draa River Valley in the Moroccan Sahara contains some of the most sumptuous oases and searing desert of the Arab world, starting in the moonscape gorges of the Anti-Atlas Mountains through to a green sea of date palms over which rise the many-towered casbahs of ochre coloured clay, medieval in aspect and sheltering a life medieval in character.
It is a region richer historically and ethnically than anywhere else in North Africa. The river stretches to the mosaic of dunes and parched land known as hammada - the domain of Bedouin and Blue Men and isolated Berber tribes - and pours through the desert into the Atlantic, where it ends its course. Jeffrey Tayler follows the Draa by foot and on camel, recounting stays in casbah homes, weddings, visits to mosques and marabouts and nights in hashish dens.
It is a journey marked with extremes - of weather, as Tayler survives intense heat and sandstorms and potentially lethal local tribesmen - and one which he only narrowly escapes to tell this tale.
ISBN:9780349115368
Author:Jeffrey Tayler
The Utility of Force
Brief Summary
The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World
"War no longer exists," writes General Sir Rupert Smith, powerfully reminding us that the clash of mass national armies, the system of war since Napoleon, will never occur again. Instead, he argues in this timely book, we must be prepared to adapt tactics to each conflict, or lose the ability to protect ourselves and our way of life.
General Smith draws on his vast experience as a commander in the 1991 Gulf War, in Bosnia, Kosovo and Northern Ireland, to give us a probing analysis of modern war and to call for radically new military thinking. Why, he asks, do we use armed force to solve our political problems? And how is it that our armies can win battles but fail to solve the problems?
From Iraq to the Balkans, and from Afghanistan to Chechnya, Smith charts a stream of armed interventions that have failed to deliver on promises of resolution. He demonstrates why today's conflicts must be understood as intertwined political and military events.
He makes clear why the current one-size-fits-all model of total war, fought out on battlefields, that politicians still cling to must be abandoned in favor of new strategies that take into account the fact that wars are now fought among civilian populations. And he offers a compelling new model for how to fight these battles and secure our world.
Clear, incisive and provocative, The Utility of Force will fundamentally change the way we understand war
ISBN:9780307265623
Author:Rupert Smith
What Happens When Women Pray
Brief Summary
What Happens When Women Pray is a practical and biblical book about prayer? Its teachings have been tested in hundreds of prayer seminars all over the world, as both men and women have learned to pray in more personal and believing ways.
What Happens When Women Pray will show you how to move into the dynamic that occurs when people pray? It just might change your life or the life of someone you know and love.
Since 1968, Evelyn Christenson has led prayer seminars worldwide. Millions of readers have enjoyed Evelyn's books, which include, "Lord, Change Me" and "Praying God's Way." Evelyn lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.
ISBN:9780896939752
Author:Evelyn Christenson
What Made Jack Welch Jack Welch
Brief Summary
What Made jack welch JACK WELCH: How Ordinary People Become Extraordinary Leaders
Surprisingly, it’s not about education or pedigree or even native smarts. Most of us are like jack welch, who started life as a lowercase guy, the son of a railroad conductor, but went on to become the most celebrated and successful executive of recent years. Sure, Jack Welch—and lots of other people like him—are smart and talented, but there are countless people even smarter and more talented who stall out on the way up. Something else is going on. What is it, and what can the rest of us learn from such people to improve our own chances of accomplishment?
Stephen Baum uncovers not only the business secrets of prominent CEOs but their inner stories as well. He ferrets out the real men and women behind the public personas, learning about life-shaping experiences they all have in common that turn out to be the foundation for true success in career and in life. Baum has gotten them to recall key moments that they hadn’t thought about for years, as well as the fears, emotions, and learning they’ve experienced during moments of challenge and doubt.
These seminal events are "archetypal shaping experiences”—critical and often unexpected learning moments when future leaders take advantage of challenges thrown in their path:
• When you take calculated personal risks without the safety net of specific instructions on how to proceed.
• When you are clueless about how to solve a knotty problem but dive in and prepare yourself to work through it.
• When you learn to swim in water over your head, make the tough choice, get good on your feet, or
are forced to take a hard look in the mirror.
These character-building moments engender an inner core of toughness and confidence that is the real key to leadership in any business or endeavor—they are what made jack welch . . . JACK WELCH.
Stephen Baum provides an entirely new way of thinking about how to fulfill your dreams and aspirations. You’ll come away with the feeling that "if they can do it, so can I” . . . and that is the first step on the journey to becoming extraordinary, awakening the JACK WELCH that lives in each of us—just waiting to take us further than anyone could have predicted
ISBN:9780307337207
Author:Stephen H. Baum and Dave Conti
Zulu
Brief Summary
Zulu: The Heroism and Tragedy of the Zulu War of 1879.
Saul David's Zulu: The Heroism and Tragedy of the Zulu War of 1879 is a fascinating look at the most controversial and brutal British imperial conflict of the nineteenth century.
The real story of the Anglo-Zulu war was one of deception, dishonour, incompetence and dereliction of duty by Lord Chelmsford who invaded Zululand without the knowledge of the British Government. But it did not go to plan and there were many political repercussions. Using new material from archives in Britain and South Africa, Saul David blows the lid on this most sordid of imperial wars and comes to a number of startling new conclusions.
'Saul David's brilliant and magisterial account must now be regarded as the definitive history of the Zulu War' Frank McLynn, Literary Review
'This meticulously detailed book...give[s] a fully rounded and judicious account of this dismal conflict Guardian
'Fascinating, thrilling, convincing... reads like a novel' Economist
Saul David is Professor of War Studies at the University of Buckingham and the author of several critically acclaimed history books, including The Indian Mutiny: 1857 (shortlisted for the Westminster Medal for Military Literature), Zulu: The Heroism and Tragedy of the Zulu War of 1879 (a Waterstone's Military History Book of the Year) and, most recently, Victoria's Wars: The Rise of Empire.
ISBN:9780141015699
Author:Saul David
Youtility
Brief Summary
Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hype
The difference between helping and selling is just two letters
If you're wondering how to make your products seem more exciting online, you're asking the wrong question. You're not competing for attention only against other similar products. You're competing against your customers' friends and family and viral videos and cute puppies. To win attention these days you must ask a different question: "How can we help?"
Jay Baer's Youtility offers a new approach that cuts through the clut¬ter: marketing that is truly, inherently useful. If you sell something, you make a customer today, but if you genuinely help someone, you create a customer for life.
ISBN:9781591846666
Author:Jay Baer
The World Until Yesterday
Brief Summary
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?
The bestselling author of Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steelsurveys the history of human societies to answer the question: What can we learn from traditional societies that can make the world a better place for all of us?
Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem unbridgeably wide, we can glimpse much of our former lifestyle in those largely traditional societies still or recently in existence.
Societies like those of the New Guinea Highlanders remind us that it was only yesterday—in evolutionary time—when everything changed and that we moderns still possess bodies and social practices often better adapted to traditional than to modern conditions.
The World Until Yesterday provides a mesmerizing firsthand picture of the human past as it had been for millions of years—a past that has mostly vanished—and considers what the differences between that past and our present mean for our lives today.
This is Jared Diamond’s most personal book to date, as he draws extensively from his decades of field work in the Pacific islands, as well as evidence from Inuit, Amazonian Indians, Kalahari San people, and others. Diamond doesn’t romanticize traditional societies—after all, we are shocked by some of their practices—but he finds that their solutions to universal human problems such as child rearing, elder care, dispute resolution, risk, and physical fitness have much to teach us. Provocative, enlightening, and entertaining, The World Until Yesterday is an essential and fascinating read.
ISBN:9780670024810
Author:Jared Diamond
The Writing on the Wall China and the...
Brief Summary
The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century
China constitutes a fifth of the world's population. Over the last twenty years its economy has doubled to make it the fifth largest economy in the world; if the pace is repeated over the next twenty it is set to become second only to the US.
The speed of its development is stunning, a combination of cheap labor and commitment to science and technology that has never been matched by a developing country. The Pearl River Delta, Shanghai and Beijing have become city-regions whose growth and embrace of modernity strike the visitor with awesome force.
This is a continent on the move, recovering the world position and wealth it once had. The re-emergence of China as a superpower constitutes the biggest challenge the world has had for more than a century. Never before in modern times has the financial, trade, economic and diplomatic world pecking order been so profoundly reconstituted with the challenger country itself in the grips of incredible ideological and political change.
This is a transition both internally in China and externally in the world beyond beset by hazard and risk. The world's peace and prosperity depends upon it being executed successfully.
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ISBN:9780349118826
Author:Will Hutton
Maos Last Dancer
Brief Summary
From a desperately poor village in northeast China, at age eleven, Li Cunxin was chosen by Madame Mao's cultural delegates to be taken from his rural home and brought to Beijing, where he would study ballet. In 1979, the young dancer arrived in Texas as part of a cultural exchange, only to fall in love with America-and with an American woman.
Two years later, through a series of events worthy of the most exciting cloak-and-dagger fiction, he defected to the United States, where he quickly became known as one of the greatest ballet dancers in the world. This is his story, told in his own inimitable voice.
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ISBN:9780425201336
Author:Li Cunxin