Showing results by narrator "Michael Butler Murray" in All Categories

When it was finally released, Heaven's Gate failed so completely with reviewers and at the box office that it put legendary studio United Artists out of business and marked the end of Hollywood's auteur era. Or so the conventional wisdom goes. Charles Elton delves deeply into the making and aftermath of the movie and presents a surprisingly different view to that of Steven Bach, one of the executives responsible for Heaven's Gate, who wrote a scathing book about the film and solidified the widely held view that Cimino wounded the movie industry beyond repair.

Accounting for Dummies is the perfect place to start, whether you're operating a small business, just need help managing the family budget, or you're a rising star in corporate America. It's a financial blueprint for the everyday person, easy to understand, and full of practical advice.

Basketball is the second-most popular sport in the world - an insanely complicated game built on a combination of athleticism, craftiness, rules, intangibles, and superstardom. However, while it's enjoyable to watch, the real reason it works is because it's a game of culture, art, and all the things that make us human. How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius deconstructs the sport from top to bottom and then puts it back together again, detailing its intricacies through reporting and dozens of interviews with experts.

Coyote Peterson's Brave Adventures: Wild Animals in a Wild World chronicles some of the wildest encounters Coyote Peterson has had over the course of his travels.

The first-ever authorized biography of Jeff Gordon, the four-time champion racing legend. For over a year, Garner interviewed and observed Gordon at races, at special events, and at home. The book is based on extensive interviews with Gordon - as well as in-depth interviews with dozens of family members, friends, competitors, and colleagues, some of whom have never gone on the record before.

Vietnam, 1968—United States Air Force reconnaissance photos appear to show a newly built POW camp close to the DMZ. Special Forces Captain Mack Gerber and Master Sergeant Anthony B. Fetterman are sent into the jungles of North Vietnam to take a closer look. Instead of a POW compound, they discover a Soviet-run training camp for the NVA. American military officials believe a Russian presence could severely undermine the US war effort in Vietnam. The only option is to launch a raid into North Vietnam. Gerber's men now have a new mission: go in with guns blazing . . . and get out alive.

The Deadball Era (1901-1920) is a baseball fan's dream. Hope and despair, innocence and cynicism, and levity and hostility blended then to create an air of excitement, anticipation, and concern for all who entered the confines of a major league ballpark. Cheating for the sake of victory earned respect, corrupt ballplayers fixed games with impunity, and violence plagued the sport. At the same time, endearing practices infused baseball with lightheartedness, kindness, and laughter.

Soon after his 50th birthday, Steven Petrow began assembling a list of "things I won't do when I get old" - mostly a catalog of all the things he thought his then 70-something-year-old parents were doing wrong. That list became the basis of this rousing collection of dos and don'ts, wills and won'ts that is equal parts hilarious, honest, and practical.

As Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch labored to make a place for themselves in a male-dominated world, as they made friendships and families, and as they drifted toward and away from each other, they never stopped insisting that some lives are better than others. Drawing on a cluster of recently opened archives and extensive correspondence and interviews with those who knew them best, Benjamin Lipscomb traces the lives and ideas of four friends who gave us a better way to think about ethics, and ourselves.

In Please Please Tell Me Now, best-selling rock biographer Stephen Davis tells the story of Duran Duran, the quintessential band of the 1980s. Their pretty boy looks made them the stars of fledgling MTV, but it was their brilliant musicianship that led to a string of number one hits. By the end of the decade, they had sold 60 million albums; today, they've sold over 100 million albums - and counting.

There's so much more to the role of culture in business than etiquette and local customs. Recognizing its importance - and providing a clear-eyed look at how it works in real-life scenarios - is why Riding the Waves of Culture became essential learning when it was first published in 1997.

This second edition of the Very Short Introduction on ethics has revised and updated aspects of the original to reflect changing times and mores. It highlights the importance of an understanding of approaches to ethics and its foundations, confronted as we are with a fluid and uncertain world of eroding trust, swirling conspiracy theories, and a dismaying loss of respect in public discourse.

Named one of the world's great blues-rock guitarists by Rolling Stone, Mike Bloomfield (1943-1981) remains beloved by fans nearly 40 years after his untimely death. Taking listeners backstage, onstage, and into the recording studio with this legendary virtuoso, David Dann tells the riveting stories behind Bloomfield's work in the seminal Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the mesmerizing Electric Flag, as well as the Super Session album with Al Kooper and Stephen Stills, Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, and soundtrack work with Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson.

Early in his career, Dan Beaver discovered that people were never taught how to develop an intimate relationship. We are taught how to read, how to write, drive, play sports, and use a computer. But nowhere in our society are we taught how to develop or maintain an intimate relationship. Most of us learned from TV shows. Some generations were taught by Ozzie and Harriet Nelson or Ward and June Cleaver. Other generations learned from their favorite soap operas, or maybe The Waltons, Cliff and Clair Huxtable, Roseanne, Friends, or 7th Heaven.

Everywhere we turn, a new device promises to transfigure our lives. But at what cost? In this urgent and revelatory excavation of our Information Age, leading technology thinker Adam Greenfield forces us to reconsider our relationship with the networked objects, services, and spaces that define us. It is time to re-evaluate the Silicon Valley consensus determining the future. We're told that innovations - from augmented - reality interfaces and virtual assistants to autonomous delivery drones and self-driving cars - will make life easier, more convenient, and more productive.

Twenty years ago the most common cause of death for medical humanitarians and other aid workers was traffic accidents; today it is violent attacks. And the death of each doctor, nurse, paramedic, midwife, and vaccinator is multiplied untold times in the vulnerable populations deprived of their care. In a 2005 report, the ICRC found that for every soldier killed in the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, more than 60 civilians died due to loss of immunizations and other basic health services.

Cannabis for Dummies presents the science behind the use of this amazingly therapeutic plant. In this book, you'll find the hands-on knowledge and education you need to make an informed decision about your cannabis purchase, as a patient and a consumer.

The rise of artificial intelligence is nothing short of a technological revolution. AI is poised to completely transform asset management and investment banking, yet its current application within the financial sector is limited and fragmented. Existing AI implementations tend to solve very narrow business issues, rather than serving as a powerful tech framework for next-generation finance. Artificial Intelligence for Asset Management and Investment provides a strategic viewpoint on how AI can be comprehensively integrated within investment finance.

In the early 17th century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a novel. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from studying too many novels of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures. That story, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the single most-read author in human history.

New York, 1931. The manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages is prohibited by law, but behind this prohibition, organized crime flourishes-so, too, do bank robbers, bootleggers, assassins, and homunculi. Some want money, some are chasing the secret to immortality, and others just want to have a really good time. You know what they say, though: You can't always get what you want.