Robert Iger became CEO of The Walt Disney Company in 2005, during a difficult time. Competition was more intense than ever and technology was changing faster than at any time in the company's history. His vision came down to three clear ideas: Recommit to the concept that quality matters, embrace technology instead of fighting it, and think bigger -- think global -- and turn Disney into a stronger brand in international markets. Twelve years later, Disney is the largest, most respected media company in the world, counting Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox among its properties. Its value is nearly five times what it was when Iger took over. Now Iger shares the lessons he's learned while running Disney and leading its 200,000 employees, and he explores the principles that are necessary for true leadership.

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian comes a riveting history of New York's iconic public hospital that charts the turbulent rise of American medicine. Bellevue Hospital, on New York City's East Side, occupies a colorful and horrifying place in the public imagination: a den of mangled crime victims, vicious psychopaths, assorted derelicts, lunatics, and exotic-disease sufferers. In its two and a half centuries of service, there was hardly an epidemic or social catastrophe—or groundbreaking scientific advance—that did not touch Bellevue. David Oshinsky, whose last book, Polio: An American Story , was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, chronicles the history of America's oldest hospital and in so doing also charts the rise of New York to the nation's preeminent city, the path of American medicine from butchery and quackery to a professional and scientific endeavor, and the growth of a civic institution. From its origins in 1738 as an almshouse and pesthouse, Bellevue today is a revered public hospital bringing first-class care to anyone in need. With its diverse, ailing, and unprotesting patient population, the hospital was a natural laboratory for the nation's first clinical research. It treated tens of thousands of Civil War soldiers, launched the first civilian ambulance corps and the first nursing school for women, pioneered medical photography and psychiatric treatment, and spurred New York City to establish the country's first official Board of Health. As medical technology advanced, "voluntary" hospitals began to seek out patients willing to pay for their care. For charity cases, it was left to Bellevue to fill the void. The latter decades of the twentieth century brought rampant crime, drug addiction, and homelessness to the nation's struggling cities—problems that called a public hospital's very survival into question. It took the AIDS crisis to cement Bellevue's enduring place as New York's ultimate safety net, the iconic hospital of last resort. Lively, page-turning, fascinating, Bellevue is essential American history.

"For as long as he has served at the highest levels of business and government, Vice President Dick Cheney has also been one of the world's most prominent heart patients. Now, for the first time ever, Cheney, together with his longtime cardiologist Jonathan Reiner, MD, shares the very personal story of his courageous thirty-five-year battle with heart disease, from his first heart attack in 1978 to the heart transplant he received in 2012. In 1978, when Cheney suffered his first heart attack, he received essentially the same treatment as President Eisenhower had in 1955. Since then, cardiac medicine has evolved in extraordinary ways, and Cheney has benefited from nearly every medical and technological breakthrough along the way. At each juncture, when Cheney faced a new health challenge, the technology was one step ahead of his disease. In many ways, Cheney's story is the story of the evolution of modern cardiac care. Heart is the riveting, singular memoir of both doctor and patient, tracking their relationship as it unfolds over many years and crises. Like no US politician has before him, Cheney opens up about his health struggles, sharing harrowing, never-before-told stories about the challenges he faced during a perilous time in our nation's history. Dr. Reiner provides his perspective on Cheney's case and also gives readers a fascinating glimpse into his own education as a doctor. He masterfully chronicles the important discoveries, radical innovations, and cutting-edge science that have changed the face of medicine and saved countless lives. Powerfully braiding science with story and the personal with the political, Heart is a sweeping, inspiring, and ultimately optimistic book that will give hope to the millions of Americans affected by heart disease"--

Traces the life of the nineteenth-century English woman who followed her calling to work in hospitals and improve the conditions under which the sick were treated.

The untold story of the historic voyage to the moon that closed out one of our darkest years with a nearly unimaginable triumph In August 1968, NASA made a bold decision: in just sixteen weeks, the United States would launch humankind's first flight to the moon. Only the year before, three astronauts had burned to death in their spacecraft, and since then the Apollo program had suffered one setback after another. Meanwhile, the Russians were winning the space race, the Cold War was getting hotter by the month, and President Kennedy's promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade seemed sure to be broken. But when Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders were summoned to a secret meeting and told of the dangerous mission, they instantly signed on. Written with all the color and verve of the best narrative non-fiction, Apollo 8 takes us from Mission Control to the astronaut's homes, from the test labs to the launch pad. The race to prepare an untested rocket for an unprecedented journey paves the way for the hair-raising trip to the moon. Then, on Christmas Eve, a nation that has suffered a horrendous year of assassinations and war is heartened by an inspiring message from the trio of astronauts in lunar orbit. And when the mission is over--after the first view of the far side of the moon, the first earth-rise, and the first re-entry through the earth's atmosphere following a flight to deep space--the impossible dream of walking on the moon suddenly seems within reach. The full story of Apollo 8 has never been told, and only Jeffrey Kluger--Jim Lovell's co-author on their bestselling book about Apollo 13--can do it justice. Here is the tale of a mission that was both a calculated risk and a wild crapshoot, a stirring account of how three American heroes forever changed our view of the home planet.

From “one of America’s smartest political writers” (Glenn Beck) comes a fascinating and accessible history of the United States’ unique and enduring relationship with guns, for fans of Chris Kyle’s American Gun . For America, the gun is a story of innovation, power, violence, character, and freedom. From the founding of the nation to the pioneering of the West, from the freeing of the slaves to the urbanization of the twentieth century, our country has had a complex and lasting relationship with firearms. Now, in First Freedom , nationally syndicated columnist and veteran writer David Harsanyi explores the ways in which firearms have helped preserve our religious, economic, and cultural institutions for over two centuries. From Samuel Colt’s early entrepreneurism to the successful firearms technology that helped make the United States a superpower, the gun is inextricably tied to our exceptional rise. In the vein of popular histories like Salt and Seabiscuit , Harsanyi takes you on a captivating and thrilling ride of Second Amendment history that demonstrates why guns are not only an integral part of America’s past, but also an essential part of its future.

"Pronged ants, horned humans, a landscape carved on a fruit pit--some of the displays in David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology are hoaxes. But which ones? As he guides readers through an intellectual hall of mirrors, Lawrence Weschler revisits the 16th-century "wonder cabinets" that were the first museums and compels readers to examine the imaginative origins of both art and science"

Foreign affairs journalist Kaplan lets readers experience up close the American military worldwide in the air, at sea, and on the ground: flying in a B-2 bomber, living on a nuclear submarine, and traveling with a Stryker brigade on missions around the world. Provided unprecedented access, Kaplan moves from destroyers off the coast of Indonesia to submarines in the central Pacific, from simulated Iraqi training grounds in Alaska to technology bases in Las Vegas. He goes deep into their highly technical and exotic worlds, and tells this story through the words and perspectives of the enlisted personnel and junior officers themselves--men and women who, as he writes, have "had their national identities as Americans engraved in sharp bas-relief." He not only conveys the vast scope of America's military commitments, but also shows us astonishing and vital operations as they unfold--from the point of view of the troops themselves.--From publisher description

"As cyber-attacks dominate front-page news, as hackers displace terrorists on the list of global threats, and as top generals warn of a coming cyber war, few books are more timely and enlightening than Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, by Slate columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Fred Kaplan. Kaplan probes the inner corridors of the National Security Agency, the beyond-top-secret cyber units in the Pentagon, the "information warfare" squads of the military services, and the national security debates in the White House, to tell this never-before-told story of the officers, policymakers, scientists, and spies who devised this new form of warfare and who have been planning--and (more often than people know) fighting--these wars for decades. From the 1991 Gulf War to conflicts in Haiti, Serbia, Syria, the former Soviet republics, Iraq, and Iran, where cyber warfare played a significant role, Dark Territory chronicles, in fascinating detail, a little-known past that shines an unsettling light on our future"--

The gripping and definitive in-the-room account of the revolution that has swept the news industry over the last decade and reshaped our world. The last decade has seen the News industry face unprecedented change. The sometimes-century old institutions which were once the bastions of truth have had their dominance eroded by vast innovations in viral technology and, as millennial appetites force the industry to choose between principles of objectivity and impartiality, the survivors must confront the horrifying cost of their success- sexual scandal, fake news, the election of President Trump and the shaking of democracy. Taking us behind the scenes at four media titans - BuzzFeed , VICE , The New York Times and The Washington Post - Abramson reveals the human drama behind this shift- one involving deal-making tycoons, thrusting reporters, hard-bitten editors, egomaniacs, bullshitters, provocateurs and bullies, with some surfing and others drowning in the breaking wave of change. 'A cracking, essential read... Abramson knows where most of the bodies are buried and is prepared to draw the reader a detailed map' Guardian

Unabridged declassified value reproduction of The Los Alamos Primer by Robert Serber, in full color with all censor markings. This is the booklet given to new workers at Los Alamos during World War II, to catch them up on how to build a practical fission bomb. The Primer was driven by Robert Oppenheimer asking his protégé Robert Serber to summarize all knowledge and possible solutions known as of April 1943 in a series of lectures. Serber did such an excellent job that the notes from the series was turned into The Los Alamos Primer. Serber was known as an expert that bridged theory and reality, and so was also chosen to be one of the first Americans to enter Hiroshima and Nagasaki to assess the atomic damage in 1945. Touch a piece of history in this slim volume with the full text at an affordable price.

"Edward Snowden chose three journalists to tell the stories in his Top Secret trove of NSA documents: Barton Gellman of The Washington Post, Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian and filmmaker Laura Poitras, all of whom would share the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Poitras went on to direct the Oscar-winning Citizenfour. Greenwald wrote an instant memoir and cast himself as a pugilist on Snowden's behalf. Gellman took his own path. Snowden and his documents were the beginning, not the end, of a story he had prepared his whole life to tell. More than 20 years as a top investigative journalist armed him with deep sources in national security and high technology. New sources reached out from government and industry, making contact on the same kinds of secret, anonymous channels that Snowden had used. Gellman's reporting unlocked new puzzles in the NSA archive. And as Snowden's revelations faded somewhat from the public consciousness, the machinations he exposed continue still, with many policies unaltered despite societal outrage. Dark Mirror is a true-life spy tale that touches us all, told with authority and an inside view of extraordinary events. Within it is a chilling personal account of the obstacles facing the author, beginning with Gellman's discovery of his own name in Snowden's NSA document trove. Google notifies him that a foreign government is trying to compromise his account. A trusted technical adviser finds anomalies on his laptop. Sophisticated impostors approach Gellman with counterfeit documents, attempting to divert or discredit his work. Throughout Dark Mirror, the author wages an escalating battle against unknown digital adversaries who force him to mimic their tradecraft in self-defense. With the vivid and insightful style that marked Gellman's bestselling Angler, Dark Mirror is an inside account of the surveillance-industrial revolution and its discontents, fighting back against state and corporate intrusions into our most private spheres. Along the way, and with the benefit of hindsight, it tells the full story of a government leak unrivaled in drama since All the President's Men"--

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Named a Best Book of the Year by Bloomberg (Chosen by Philip Tetlock), Booklist ’s Top 10 Science Books of the Year, and Shortlisted for Physics World ’s Book of the Year A Major Biography of the Nobel Prize–Winning Physicist, Enrico Fermi, a Leading Architect of the Atomic Age Enrico Fermi is unquestionably among the greats of the world’s physicists, the most famous Italian scientist since Galileo. Called “the Pope” by his peers, he was regarded as infallible in his instincts and research. His discoveries changed our world; they led to weapons of mass destruction and conversely to life-saving medical interventions. This unassuming man struggled with issues relevant today, such as the threat of nuclear annihilation and the relationship of science to politics. Fleeing Fascism and anti-Semitism, Fermi became a leading figure in America’s most secret project: building the atomic bomb. An examination of the human dramas that touched Fermi’s life as well as a thrilling history of scientific innovation in the twentieth century, this is the comprehensive biography that Fermi deserves.

Never Leave Well Enough Alone, first published in 1951, is the classic introduction to modern industrial design by the 'father' of the movement - Raymond Loewy. Loewy (1893-1986) was responsible for transforming thousands of everyday objects into streamlined masterpieces, many of which are still popular and in-use in daily life today. Examples include corporate logos; packaging for Lucky Strike cigarettes and Pepsodent toothpaste; Studebaker and Greyhound automotive and bus design; buildings and household furnishings; and appliances such as toasters and refrigerators. This new reprint edition is formatted to Loewy's original design of 6 inches by 7 inches - his first foray into book design; and is illustrated throughout with drawings and photographic examples of his work.

"This biography--perfect for middle-grade readers--tells the life story of Clarence Birdseye, the man who revolutionized the frozen food industry, and is adapted from Mark Kurlansky's adult work Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man. Adventurer and inventor Clarence Birdseye had a fascination with food preservation that led him to develop and patent the Birdseye freezing process and start the company that still bears his name today. His limitless curiosity spurred his other inventions, including the electric sunlamp, an improved incandescent lightbulb, and a harpoon gun to tag finback whales. This true story of an early entrepreneur is as thrilling as the story of Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. Includes an 8-page black-and-white photo insert"--

In the span of a generation, universal military service, universal military training, selective service, a lottery draft, and an all-volunteer armed force have all been either implemented or contemplated seriously in the United States. Why has the United States, unlike every other twentieth-century world power, failed to settle on a durable system of military service? In this informed and even-handed book, Eliot Cohen studies the enduring problems of America's methods of raising an army, seeking to analyze the nature of the many difficulties and the extent to which they can be overcome. A nation's military service must reflect its political and geographical position in the world as well as its ideology. In the case of the United States, Cohen demonstrates, the attempt to satisfy these two types of requirements faces unique and intractable paradoxes. First, the United States must prepare for two completely different kinds of war, large- and small-scale, which for political and military reasons require two different kinds of armies; second, two important traditions?Anglo-Saxon liberalism and democratic egalitarianism?coexist uneasily in American thought and lead to opposing conceptions of citizens' obligations to serve their country. Cohen's book is a long-needed antidote to the myopic preoccupation with short-term trends and fluctuations in recruiting statistics that characterizes the current manpower debate. Lucidly explaining complex issues, Cohen offers a broad comparative view of the historical events, political exigencies, and theoretical arguments that have shaped the military service systems of various countries. His discussion treats many important and timely issues: How shall we select some men?and possibly women?for service, and not others? How will our methods of recruitment affect our foreign policies, our domestic policies, and our forces' performance in battle? What methods have other countries adopted, how well did they work, and could they work here? His thoughtful and objective answers to these difficult questions will interest anyone concerned with contemporary American military policy today.

"In public discourse in the United States, small businesses are lauded as drivers of the economy and keys to economic growth, while "big business" is often vilified. Even in the face of evidence that larger firms are proven to be more likely to stimulate economic growth, American public policy favors small businesses through measures such as lowering taxes or regulatory requirements for firms under a certain number of employees. The authors trace the anti-big business sentiment back to its roots in the early founding of our nation. While the Jeffersonian ideal of every citizen being self-employed made sense for a pre-industrial agrarian society, changes in technology have led to significant economies of scale for big businesses. Now, we see that countries with more self-employed workers are also more likely to be in poverty (think of emerging economies where everyone is an entrepreneur, and compare it to the compensation and benefits packages available to employees of large firms in more advanced economies). Rather than simply taking the opposite view that "bigger is better," the authors argue that a modern capitalist society has room for businesses of all sizes and that we should not be privileging one type of business over another due to size alone, especially when our perception of who creates jobs and grows the economy does not track with reality"--

No Snowflake in an Avalanche goes deep inside the world of religious extremism in America s military and political infrastructure from the perspective of Michael L. Mikey Weinstein proud Academy graduate and father of graduates who single-handedly brought to light the Evangelicals' utter disregard of the constitutional principle of separation of church and state that is so essential to the nations military mission. Weinsteins war pits him and his small band of fellow graduates, cadets, and concerned citizens of varying religious backgrounds against a program of Christian fundamentalist indoctrination that could transform our fighting men and women into right-thinking warriors more befitting a theocracy than a democracy.

""The Indispensable Man: The Story Of Thomas Alva Edison's Life And Inventive Genius"" by David Sarnoff is a detailed biography of one of the most influential inventors of all time. Thomas Alva Edison is known for his inventions that changed the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the electric light bulb. The book explores Edison's life, from his early years as a curious child to his rise as a successful inventor and entrepreneur. It covers his struggles and failures, as well as his many successes, including his development of the first industrial research laboratory. Sarnoff delves into Edison's creative process, examining how he came up with his ideas and how he worked to turn them into reality. The book also explores Edison's personal life, including his relationships with his family and his colleagues. Overall, ""The Indispensable Man"" provides a comprehensive look at the life and work of Thomas Alva Edison, offering insights into his genius and his lasting impact on the world.The Story Of Thomas Alva Edison's Life And Inventive Genius Seen In 130 Photographs, The Most Unusual Collection About The Inventor Ever Assembled. Additional Authors Are Thomas W. Martin, Giorgio Valerio, Sherman R. Knapp, And Walker L. Cisler. Edited By George E. Probst.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

"The 1990s was a decade of extreme change. Shifts in culture, politics, and technology radically altered the way Americans did business, expressed themselves, and thought about their role in the world. At the center of it all was Bill Clinton, the charismatic and flawed baby boomer president, along with his polarizing but increasingly popular wife, Hillary. Although it was in many ways a Democratic Gilded Age, the 1990s was also a time of great anxiety. The Cold War was over. America was stable and prosperous. Yet Americans felt more unmoored and isolated. This was the era of glitz and grunge, when we relished living in the Republic of Everything even as we feared it might degenerate into the Republic of Nothing. Bill Clinton dominated this era, but his complex legacy has yet to be clearly defined. Historian Gil Troy examines Clinton's presidency alongside the decade's cultural changes. Taking the '90s year by year, Troy shows how the culture of the day shaped the Clintons even as the Clintons shaped it, offering answers to two enduring questions about Bill Clinton's legacy: How did such a talented politician leave Americans thinking he accomplished so little when he actually accomplished so much? And to what extent was Clinton responsible for the catastrophes of the following decade, specifically 9/11 and the collapse of the housing market? Even more relevant as we head toward the 2016 election, The Age of Clinton will appeal to readers on both sides of the aisle as it chronicles the wild, transformative decade and the president at its center"--