English Culture

This inside story of WeWork and its CEO tells the remarkable saga of one of the most audacious, and improbable, rises and falls in American business history. Veteran journalist Reeves Weideman dives deep into WeWork and its CEO's astronomical rise, from the marijuana and tequila-filled board rooms to cult-like company summer camps and consciousness-raising with Anthony Kiedis. Billion Dollar Loser is a character-driven business narrative that captures, through the fascinating psyche of a billionaire founder and his wife and co-founder, the slippery state of global capitalism. \

Accomplished outdoor explorer Gregg Treinish loves adventure! Whether it's spending two years hiking the remote and perilously high Andes Mountains or coming face-to-face with wolverines, lynx, and bears, Gregg always knows where the action is. With gripping - and totally true - stories of incredible adventures, extreme excursions, and ultimate survival, this book will have you on the edge of your seat.

Drawing on his experience as a psychiatrist, business consultant, and coach, author Mark Goulston combines his background with the latest scientific research to help listeners turn the "impossible" and "unreachable" people in their lives into allies, devoted customers, loyal colleagues, and lifetime friends. Just Listen provides simple but powerful techniques listeners can use to really get through to people.

Sourdough bread fueled the labor that built the Egyptian pyramids. The Roman Empire distributed free sourdough loaves to its citizens to maintain political stability. More recently, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, sourdough bread baking became a global phenomenon as people contended with being confined to their homes and sought distractions from their fear, uncertainty, and grief. In Sourdough Culture, environmental science professor Eric Pallant shows how throughout history, sourdough bread baking has always been about survival.

For thousands of years, religion has woven its way through societies and people as if it were part and parcel to that society or person. In large measure it was left unexplained and unchallenged, it simply existed. Those who attempted to challenge and expose religion were often persecuted, excommunicated, shunned, or even executed. It could be fatal to explain that which the church, priest, or imam said was unexplainable. Before the germ, viral, and parasite theory of disease, physicians had no tools to understand disease and its propagation.

An exploration, both personal and deeply reported, of how we learn to eat in today's toxic food culture. When her newborn daughter stopped eating after a medical crisis, Virginia Sole-Smith spent two years teaching her how to feel safe around food again - and in the process, realized just how many of us are struggling to do the same thing.

Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture illustrates how the spaces between tiles and the moments between games have fostered distinct social cultures in the United States. This mass-produced game crossed the Pacific, creating waves of popularity over the 20th century. Annelise Heinz narrates the history of this game to show how it has created a variety of meanings, among them American modernity, Chinese American heritage, and Jewish American women's culture.

We may love books, but do we know what lies behind them? In The Book, Keith Houston reveals that the paper, ink, thread, glue, and board from which a book is made tell as rich a story as the words on its pages - of civilizations, empires, human ingenuity, and madness. In an invitingly tactile history of this 2,000-year-old medium, Houston follows the development of writing, printing, the art of illustrations, and binding to show how we have moved from cuneiform tablets and papyrus scrolls to the hardcovers and paperbacks of today.

You shouldn't have to be a privacy expert to understand what happens to your data. April Falcon Doss, a privacy expert and former NSA and Senate lawyer, has seen this imbalance in action. In Cyber Privacy, Doss demystifies the digital footprints we leave in our daily lives and reveals how our data is being used - sometimes against us - by the private sector, the government, and even our employers and schools.

We've reviewed the ideas, insights, and best practices from the past year of Harvard Business Review to keep you up-to-date on the most cutting-edge, influential thinking driving business today. With authors from Michael E. Porter to Katrina Lake and company examples from Alibaba to 3M, this volume brings the most current and important management conversations right to your fingertips.

Jem Coulter thinks his family is just on a sightseeing trip to the big city of Sacramento. Then, armed bandits hold up the stagecoach for the secret stash they’re carrying: gold for the Union Army fighting the distant Civil War! Suddenly, war isn’t so far away; it’s right there on the road to Sacramento, with Jem’s father, the sheriff of Goldtown, fighting against the rebel army’s Knights of the Golden Circle.

Tim Newark’s lively narrative answers the most commonly asked questions about the Dark Ages. Who were the Vandals and the Goths? What were Attila the Hun and Charlemagne really like? From surviving contemporary literature and artifacts now shrouded in myth and legend, Newark reconstructs the battles, campaigns, sieges, and legendary leaders of one of the most mysterious eras of European history.

Since his creation, Batman has been many things: a two-fisted detective; a planet-hopping gadabout; a campy pop-art sensation; a pointy-eared master spy; and a grim and gritty ninja of the urban night. For more than three-quarters of a century, he has cycled from a figure of darkness to one of lightness and back again; he's a bat-shaped Rorschach inkblot who takes on the various meanings our changing culture projects onto him.

After years of working in the beauty industry, Brittany Maher and Cassandra Speer became disheartened by the false, contradictory messages about what defines a woman's worth. They saw women who were lost and wandering, endlessly seeking security and approval. So Maher and Speer made it their mission to help Christian women uncover their valuable identity in Jesus Christ. In Her True Worth, Maher and Speer reveal what God intended your identity to be in the beginning, how sin corrupted it, how Christ has redeemed it, and how to live securely in that identity.

Raising kids in America is difficult—no federally supported parental leave, a lack of mental health support, a crushing combination of workplace pressure and aspirational parental perfection, and the fresh hell that is the playgroup Facebook page. But what if there was another way? Parenting—and specifically motherhood—looks wildly different across nations. Please Yell at My Kids is an around the world journey and a practical guide to rethinking parenting. What can we learn from Brazilian birth parties, Singaporean grandparents, and Danish babies sleeping soundly outside of coffee shops?

Will Guidara was twenty-six when he took the helm of Eleven Madison Park, a struggling two-star brasserie that had never quite lived up to its majestic room. Eleven years later, EMP was named the best restaurant in the world. How did Guidara pull off this unprecedented transformation? Radical reinvention, a true partnership between the kitchen and the dining room—and memorable, over-the-top, bespoke hospitality.

In High Ten: An Inspiring Story About Building Great Team Culture, Martin Rooney draws from his extensive experience developing top-level teams around the world to help leaders of all kinds foster and sustain winning cultures. This engaging parable shows you that every business, sports team, and family has a culture.

Even without the right to vote, members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy proved to have enormous social and political influence throughout the South - all in the name of preserving Confederate culture. Karen L. Cox's history of the UDC, an organization founded in 1894 to vindicate the Confederate generation and honor the Lost Cause, shows why myths surrounding the Confederacy continue to endure.

By the end of on average day in the early 21st century, human beings searching the Internet will amass eight trillion gigabytes of data. This staggering amount of information - unprecedented in history - can tell us a great deal about who we are - the fears, desires, and behaviors that drive us, and the conscious and unconscious decisions we make. From the profound to the mundane, we can gain astonishing knowledge about the human psyche that less than 20 years ago seemed unfathomable.

Nearly a half century into being a feminist and legal pioneer, something funny happened to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The octogenarian won the Internet. Across America, people who weren't even born when Ginsburg made her name are tattooing themselves with her face, setting her famously searing dissents to music, and making viral videos in tribute.