"For anyone interested in the world behind the business-page headlines, this is the book to read." --Publishers Weekly With the same breadth of vision and narrative élan he brought to his monumental biographies of the great financiers, Ron Chernow examines the forces that made dynasties like the Morgans, the Warburgs, and the Rothschilds the financial arbiters of the early twentieth century and then rendered them virtually obsolete by the century's end. As he traces the shifting balance of power among investors, borrowers, and bankers, Chernow evokes both the grand theater of capital and the personal dramas of its most fascinating protagonists. Here is Siegmund Warburg, who dropped a client in the heat of a takeover deal because the man wore monogrammed shirt cuffs, as well as the imperious J. P. Morgan, who, when faced with a federal antitrust suit, admonished Theodore Roosevelt to "send your man to my man and they can fix it up." And here are the men who usurped their power, from the go-getters of the 1920s to the masters of the universe of the 1980s. Glittering with perception and anecdote, The Death of the Banker is at once a panorama of twentieth-century finance and a guide to the new era of giant mutual funds on Wall Street. "Chernow . . . delivers a sound, accessible account of the forces shaping capital, credit, currency, and securities markets on the eve of a new millennium. " --Kirkus Reviews

Post-war American publishing has been ruthlessly transformed since André Schiffrin joined its ranks in 1956. Gone is a plethora of small but prestigious houses that often put ideas before profit in their publishing decisions, sometimes even deliberately. Now six behemoths share 80% of the market and profit margin is all. André Schiffrin can write about these changes with authority because he witnessed them from inside a conglomerate, as head of Pantheon, co-founded by his father, bought (and sold) by Random House. And he can write about them with candor because he is no longer on the inside, having quit corporate publishing in disgust to set up a flourishing independent house, The New Press. Schiffrin’s evident affection for his authors sparkles throughout a story woven around publishing the work of those such as Studs Terkel, Noam Chomsky, Gunnar Myrdal, George Kennan, Juliet Mitchell, R. D. Laing, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P.Thompson. Part-memoir, part-history, here is an account of the collapsing standards of contemporary publishing that is irascible, acute and passionate. An engaging counterpoint to recent, celebratory memoirs of the industry written by those with more stock options and fewer scruples than Schiffrin, The Business of Books warns of the danger to adventurous, intelligent publishing in the bullring of today’s marketplace.

A panoramic new history of modern Britain, as told through the story of one extraordinary family, and one groundbreaking company. In the early 1800s, Lehmann Gluckstein and his family escaped the pogroms of Eastern Europe and made their way to Whitechapel in London's East End. There, starting with nothing, they worked tirelessly to pull themselves out of poverty, creating a small tobacco factory that grew to become the largest catering company in the world: J. Lyons. For over a century, Lyons was on every high street, in every home, in every coffee and teacup. It was an ascent from rags to riches in the face of many obstacles: poverty, hatred and anti-Semitism stood between this poor immigrant family and the British Dream. Legacy charts the rise and fall of one of the most influential dynasties in British history through the lives of five astonishing generations. Both sweeping and intimate, it is a story of sacrifice and selflessness, betrayal and personal tragedy, and Empire and its cost. It is also an illuminating new exploration of Britain and its place in the world, from the bestselling author of Hanns and Rudolf and The House by the Lake.

This thought-provoking book offers the most insightful critique of the relationship among the press, politics, and public life in decades. Disdain for politics today in the United States is almost universal. Condemnation of the press is rampant as well. Until we understand the modern condition of politics and journalism--and the cultural context in which they interact--says Michael Janeway, there's small hope of either recovering its standing. Drawing on years of experience at the top levels of the news business and in politics and government, Janeway provides an integrated, insider's critique of the profound changes in each of these professional worlds, showing how trends in each have contributed to deepening public alienation. From its confident post-World War Two era of world leadership, the United States entered a difficult period of turbulence and reversals in the 1960s and 1970s. With wit, clarity, and an eye for offbeat cultural indicators, Janeway examines the full complex of forces that have corroded our press, politics, and public life since then. The result, he argues, is a loss of substance and structure in public life as well as citizen connection to it, a vacuum all too easily filled by political entertainers, shallow coverage of "character," and--engulfing the nation in convulsive crisis for a year of its history--the politics of scandal. None of today's proposed remedies for the failings of our press or politcal system is adequate, Janeway argues, for none take full account of the integral relationship between the two spheres. In the absence of recognition of its buried democratic crisis, Janeway concludes, the United States has become a "republic of denial."

The place of poetry in modern democracy is no place, according to conventional wisdom. The poet, we hear, is a casualty of mass entertainment and prosaic public culture, banished to the artistic sidelines to compose variations on insipid themes for a dwindling audience. Robert Pinsky, however, argues that this gloomy diagnosis is as wrongheaded as it is familiar. Pinsky, whose remarkable career as a poet itself undermines the view, writes that to portray poetry and democracy as enemies is to radically misconstrue both. The voice of poetry, he shows, resonates with profound themes at the very heart of democratic culture. There is no one in America better to write on this topic. One of the country's most accomplished poets, Robert Pinsky served an unprecedented two terms as America's Poet Laureate (1997-2000) and led the immensely popular multimedia Favorite Poem Project, which invited Americans to submit and read aloud their favorite poems. Pinsky draws on his experiences and on characteristically sharp and elegant observations of individual poems to argue that expecting poetry to compete with show business is to mistake its greatest democratic strength--its intimate, human scale--as a weakness. As an expression of individual voice, a poem implicitly allies itself with ideas about individual dignity that are democracy's bedrock, far more than is mass participation. Yet poems also summon up communal life.. Even the most inward-looking work imagines a reader. And in their rhythms and cadences poems carry in their very bones the illusion and dynamic of call and response. Poetry, Pinsky writes, cannot help but mediate between the inner consciousness of the individual reader and the outer world of other people. As part of the entertainment industry, he concludes, poetry will always be small and overlooked. As an art--and one that is inescapably democratic--it is massive and fundamental.

Review 47th Street Abc Of Culture Adoration Of The Moon Autobiography Battle Report Beyond The Demonic Element Blue Eyes The Bridge Brooklyn Heights: 1 Brooklyn Heights: 2 City City Portrait Cityscape Combat Comment Cry Of The Small Rabbits Cummings Curtains Cynthia Days And Nights Death Of A Grandmother Ditty Domestic Matters The End Feast Of The Ram's Horn For Delmore Schwartz For The Yiddish Singers In The Lakewood Hotels My Childhood For Wcw From A Chinese Master From An Autobiography From Martin Buber The Gift Of Remembering: 1 The Gift Of Remembering: 2 The Gift Of Remembering: 3 The Heart History In The Room The Intensity Interlude Italy, 1944 A Jerusalem Notebook: 1 A Jerusalem Notebook: 10 A Jerusalem Notebook: 11 A Jerusalem Notebook: 12 A Jerusalem Notebook: 13 A Jerusalem Notebook: 14 A Jerusalem Notebook: 15 A Jerusalem Notebook: 2. Postcard A Jerusalem Notebook: 3 A Jerusalem Notebook: 4. Tourists A Jerusalem Notebook: 5 A Jerusalem Notebook: 6 A Jerusalem Notebook: 7 A Jerusalem Notebook: 8. For C. R. A Jerusalem Notebook: 9. The Old Jewish Poet Floats ... July The Kingdom Last Things May 14, 1978 A Message From Rabbi Nachman Middle Class Monday Mountain Fire, Thornbush Muse Poem Musical Shuttle National Cold Storage Company News Of The World The Night Nightsounds A Notebook Notes At 46 Observations The Old Nostalgia Past Time Power In America The Prophet Announces The Realization Riding Westward Riverside Drive Saul's Progress Sister The Six Hundred Thousand Letters Spirit Of Rabbi Nachman Summer Sunday Morning The Synagogue On Kane Street The Talker Through The Boroughs Tides Tight Like That To The Teacher Two Cornell Deaths Vacation Poetry The Way Where I Am Now -- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® Product description Book by Shapiro, Harvey From Publishers Weekly This collection, which consists of new verse as well as selections from Shapiro's previous books, spans over 30 years, and reveals his evolution as artist and observer. An American urban poet with an informal style that is direct and often colloquial, he captures the essence of life in anxiety-ridden, overstimulating New York: "If you walk by the river, Manhattan / is like a book, the pages turn, / the words march down those pages. / Look back to the lights along the river. / Wait for the dark, wait for the city to come on, / windows and bridges blazing, / Whatever you needed was there, wasn't it?" With haunting insistence Shapiro, former editor of the New York Times Book Review , explores his ambivalence, pain and fascination regarding his Jewish lineage, childhood, women and marriage, fatherhood, and mortality: "I was conceived on the night / of my sister's funeral. / . . . This is family history. / What is unclear is my father's role. / Was the night of my sister's funeral / a suitable time for making love? / Did they both think that? / Or was my father excited by my mother's grief? / Though I honor my mother and father, / I want to ask a few more questions." He describes domestic life candidly and with considerable humor and humility, but his words are serious and linger. The length of the poems varies; many are spontaneous snippets of thought, others are longer, carefully crafted and, richer in texture and content, offer more of Shapiro's seasoned insight and tenacity of spirit. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Meticulous and deceptively simple, Shapiro's poems embody craft and concept. Had William Carlos Williams been Jewish, fought in World War II, and later lived in New York City, he might well have written poems like these. Though Shapiro offers a unique exploration of the American Jewish identity, what stands out in this collection are the love poems: "I believe we came together/ Out of ignorance not love." Shapiro's career in publishing (including editorship of The New York Times Book Review from 1975 to 1983) has overshadowed his poetry, but one comes away from this collection wishing it had inclu