Download or read book The Confidence Men written by Margalit Fox and published by Random House. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Great Escape for the Great War: the astonishing true story of two World War I prisoners who pulled off one of the most ingenious escapes of all time. FINALIST FOR THE EDGAR® AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, NPR • “Fox unspools Jones and Hill’s delightfully elaborate scheme in nail-biting episodes that advance like a narrative Rube Goldberg machine.”—The New York Times Book Review Imprisoned in a remote Turkish POW camp during World War I, having survived a two-month forced march and a terrifying shootout in the desert, two British officers, Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, join forces to bamboozle their iron-fisted captors. To stave off despair and boredom, Jones takes a handmade Ouija board and fakes elaborate séances for his fellow prisoners. Word gets around, and one day an Ottoman official approaches Jones with a query: Could Jones contact the spirit world to find a vast treasure rumored to be buried nearby? Jones, a trained lawyer, and Hill, a brilliant magician, use the Ouija board—and their keen understanding of the psychology of deception—to build a trap for their captors that will ultimately lead them to freedom. A gripping nonfiction thriller, The Confidence Men is the story of one of the only known con games played for a good cause—and of a profound but unlikely friendship. Had it not been for “the Great War,” Jones, the Oxford-educated son of a British lord, and Hill, a mechanic on an Australian sheep ranch, would never have met. But in pain, loneliness, hunger, and isolation, they formed a powerful emotional and intellectual alliance that saved both of their lives. Margalit Fox brings her “nose for interesting facts, the ability to construct a taut narrative arc, and a Dickens-level gift for concisely conveying personality” (Kathryn Schulz, New York) to this tale of psychological strategy that is rife with cunning, danger, and moments of high farce that rival anything in Catch-22.
Download or read book The Confidence Game written by Maria Konnikova and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It’s a startling and disconcerting read that should make you think twice every time a friend of a friend offers you the opportunity of a lifetime.” —Erik Larson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Dead Wake and bestselling author of Devil in the White City Think you can’t get conned? Think again. The New York Times bestselling author of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes explains how to spot the con before they spot you. “[An] excellent study of Con Artists, stories & the human need to believe” –Neil Gaiman, via Twitter A compelling investigation into the minds, motives, and methods of con artists—and the people who fall for their cons over and over again. While cheats and swindlers may be a dime a dozen, true conmen—the Bernie Madoffs, the Jim Bakkers, the Lance Armstrongs—are elegant, outsized personalities, artists of persuasion and exploiters of trust. How do they do it? Why are they successful? And what keeps us falling for it, over and over again? These are the questions that journalist and psychologist Maria Konnikova tackles in her mesmerizing new book. From multimillion-dollar Ponzi schemes to small-time frauds, Konnikova pulls together a selection of fascinating stories to demonstrate what all cons share in common, drawing on scientific, dramatic, and psychological perspectives. Insightful and gripping, the book brings readers into the world of the con, examining the relationship between artist and victim. The Confidence Game asks not only why we believe con artists, but also examines the very act of believing and how our sense of truth can be manipulated by those around us.
Download or read book Why Not Me written by Mindy Kaling and published by Crown Archetype. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? and creator of The Mindy Project and Never Have I Ever comes a hilarious collection of essays about her ongoing journey to find contentment and excitement in her adult life. “This is Kaling at the height of her power.”—USA Today In Why Not Me?, Kaling shares insightful, deeply personal stories about falling in love at work, seeking new friendships in lonely places, attempting to be the first person in history to lose weight without any behavior modification whatsoever, and believing that you have a place in Hollywood when you’re constantly reminded that no one looks like you. In “How to Look Spectacular: A Starlet’s Confessions,” Kaling gives her tongue-in-cheek secrets for surefire on-camera beauty, (“Your natural hair color may be appropriate for your skin tone, but this isn’t the land of appropriate–this is Hollywood, baby. Out here, a dark-skinned woman’s traditional hair color is honey blonde.”) “Player” tells the story of Kaling being seduced and dumped by a female friend in L.A. (“I had been replaced by a younger model. And now they had matching bangs.”) In “Unlikely Leading Lady,” she muses on America’s fixation with the weight of actresses, (“Most women we see onscreen are either so thin that they’re walking clavicles or so huge that their only scenes involve them breaking furniture.”) And in “Soup Snakes,” Kaling spills some secrets on her relationship with her ex-boyfriend and close friend, B.J. Novak (“I will freely admit: my relationship with B.J. Novak is weird as hell.”) Mindy turns the anxieties, the glamour, and the celebrations of her second coming-of-age into a laugh-out-loud funny collection of essays that anyone who’s ever been at a turning point in their life or career can relate to. And those who’ve never been at a turning point can skip to the parts where she talks about meeting Bradley Cooper.
Download or read book Men Explain Things to Me written by Rebecca Solnit and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2014-04-14 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author delivers a collection of essays that serve as the perfect “antidote to mansplaining” (The Stranger). In her comic, scathing essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” Rebecca Solnit took on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She wrote about men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don’t, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars works, airing some of her own hilariously awful encounters. She ends on a serious note— because the ultimate problem is the silencing of women who have something to say, including those saying things like, “He’s trying to kill me!” This book features that now-classic essay with six perfect complements, including an examination of the great feminist writer Virginia Woolf’s embrace of mystery, of not knowing, of doubt and ambiguity, a highly original inquiry into marriage equality, and a terrifying survey of the scope of contemporary violence against women. “In this series of personal but unsentimental essays, Solnit gives succinct shorthand to a familiar female experience that before had gone unarticulated, perhaps even unrecognized.” —The New York Times “Essential feminist reading.” —The New Republic “This slim book hums with power and wit.” —Boston Globe “Solnit tackles big themes of gender and power in these accessible essays. Honest and full of wit, this is an integral read that furthers the conversation on feminism and contemporary society.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Essential.” —Marketplace “Feminist, frequently funny, unflinchingly honest and often scathing in its conclusions.” —Salon
Download or read book The Distance Home written by Paula Saunders and published by Random House. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Paula] Saunders skillfully illuminates how time heals certain wounds while deepening others. . . . A mediation of the violence of American ambition.”—The New York Times Book Review NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY REAL SIMPLE “A deeply involving portrait of the American postwar family” (Jennifer Egan) about sibling rivalry, dark secrets, and a young girl’s struggle with freedom and artistic desire In the years after World War II, the bleak yet beautiful plains of South Dakota still embody all the contradictions—the ruggedness and the promise—of the old frontier. This is a place where you can eat strawberries from wild vines, where lightning reveals a boundless horizon, where descendants of white settlers and native Indians continue to collide, and where, for most, there are limited options. René shares a home, a family, and a passion for dance with her older brother, Leon. Yet for all they have in common, their lives are on remarkably different paths. In contrast to René, a born spitfire, Leon is a gentle soul. The only boy in their ballet class, Leon silently endures often brutal teasing. Meanwhile, René excels at everything she touches, basking in the delighted gaze of their father, whom Leon seems to disappoint no matter how hard he tries. As the years pass, René and Leon’s parents fight with increasing frequency—and ferocity. Their father—a cattle broker—spends more time on the road, his sporadic homecomings both yearned for and dreaded by the children. And as René and Leon grow up, they grow apart. They grasp whatever they can to stay afloat—a word of praise, a grandmother’s outstretched hand, the seductive attention of a stranger—as René works to save herself, crossing the border into a larger, more hopeful world, while Leon embarks on a path of despair and self-destruction. Tender, searing, and unforgettable, The Distance Home is a profoundly American story spanning decades—a tale of haves and have-nots, of how our ideas of winning and losing, success and failure, lead us inevitably into various problems with empathy and caring for one another. It’s a portrait of beauty and brutality in which the author’s compassionate narration allows us to sympathize, in turn, with everyone involved. “A riveting family saga for the ages . . . one of the best books I’ve read in years.”—Mary Karr “Saunders’ debut is an exquisite, searing portrait of family and of people coping with whatever life throws at them while trying to keep close to one another.”—Booklist (starred review)
Download or read book The Plays Screenplays and Films of David Mamet written by Steven Price and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2008-09-09 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Mamet is arguably the most important living American playwright. This Guide provides an up-to-date study of the key criticism on the full range of Mamet's work. It engages with his work in film as well as in the theatre, offering a synoptic overview of, and critical commentary on, the scholarly criticism of each play, screenplay or film.
Download or read book Confidence Culture written by Shani Orgad and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-06 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Confidence Culture, Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill argue that imperatives directed at women to “love your body” and “believe in yourself” imply that psychological blocks rather than entrenched social injustices hold women back. Interrogating the prominence of confidence in contemporary discourse about body image, workplace, relationships, motherhood, and international development, Orgad and Gill draw on Foucault’s notion of technologies of self to demonstrate how “confidence culture” demands of women near-constant introspection and vigilance in the service of self-improvement. They argue that while confidence messaging may feel good, it does not address structural and systemic oppression. Rather, confidence culture suggests that women—along with people of color, the disabled, and other marginalized groups—are responsible for their own conditions. Rejecting confidence culture’s remaking of feminism along individualistic and neoliberal lines, Orgad and Gill explore alternative articulations of feminism that go beyond the confidence imperative.
Download or read book A Man by Any Other Name written by Joseph M. Beilein Jr. and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2023-09 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few men of the Civil War era were as complicated or infamous as William Clarke Quantrill. Most who know him recognize him as the architect of the Confederate raid on Lawrence, Kansas, in August 1863 that led to the murder of 180 mostly unarmed men and boys. Before that, though, Quantrill led a transient life, shifting from one masculine form to another. He played the role of fastidious schoolmaster, rough frontiersman, and even confidence man, developing certain notions and skills on his way to becoming a proslavery bushwhacker. Quantrill remains impossible to categorize, a man whose motivations have been difficult to pin down. Using new documents and old documents examined in new ways, A Man by Any Other Name paints the most authentic portrait of Quantrill yet rendered. The detailed study of this man not only explores a one-of-a-kind enigmatic figure but also allows us entry into many representative experiences of the Civil War generation. This picture brings to life a unique vision of antebellum life in the territories and a fresh view of guerrilla warfare on the border. Of even greater consequence, seeing Quantrill in this way allows us to examine the perceived essence of American manhood in the mid-nineteenth century.
Download or read book Essays written by Sydney Smith and published by . This book was released on 1847 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Confidence Game written by Dean Starkman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-22 with total page 12 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dean Starkman takes on what has become a dominant perspective on the future of news in the digital age as personified by three well known media thinkers—Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky, and Jeff Jarvis—who have dominated the "future of news" debate. Starkman makes a powerful case that the perspective that these three represent, despite their many useful insights, is in the end corrosive to public-service journalism.
Download or read book Joining the Resistance written by Carol Gilligan and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-22 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the publication of her landmark book In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan has transformed the way we think about women and men and the relations between them. It was ‘the little book that started a revolution’, and with more than 800,000 copies in print it has become one of the most widely read and influential books ever written on gender and human development. In her new book Joining the Resistance Carol Gilligan reflects on the evolution of her thinking and shows how her key ideas were interwoven with her own life experiences. Her work began with the question of voice: who is speaking to whom, in what body, telling what stories about which relationships? By listening carefully she heard a voice that had been held in silence, and in the process realized the extent to which we – both women and men – had been telling false stories about ourselves. In her subsequent work Gilligan found that adolescent girls resisted pressures to disengage themselves from their honest voices, and by joining their resistance she opened the way for the development of a more humane way of thinking about personal and political relationships. For the central conviction of her work today – and the central thesis of this book – is that the requisites for love and the requisites for citizenship in a democratic society are one and the same. Both voice and the desire to live in relationships inherent in our human nature, together with the capacity to resist false authority. Combining autobiographical reflection with an analysis of key questions about gender and human development, this timely and highly readable book by one of America’s greatest contemporary thinkers will appeal to a wide readership.
Download or read book William Faulkner William James and the American Pragmatic Tradition written by David H. Evans and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2008-05 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In William Faulkner, William James, and the American Pragmatic Tradition, David H. Evans pairs the writings of America's most intellectually challenging modern novelist, William Faulkner, and the ideas of America's most revolutionary modern philosopher, William James. Though Faulkner was dubbed an idealist after World War II, Evans demonstrates that Faulkner's writing is deeply connected to the emergence of pragmatism as an intellectual doctrine and cultural force in the early twentieth century. Tracing pragmatism to its very roots, Evans examines the nineteenth-century confidence man of antebellum literature as the original practitioner of the pragmatic principle that a belief can give rise to its own objects. He casts this figure as the missing link between Faulkner and James, giving him new prominence in the prehistory of pragmatism. Moving on to Jamesian pragmatism, Evans contends that James's central innovation was his ability to define truth in narrative terms -- just as the confidence man did -- as something subjective and personal that continually shapes reality, rather than a set of static, unchanging facts. In subsequent chapters Evans offers detailed interpretations of three of Faulkner's most important novels, Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses, and The Hamlet, revealing that Faulkner, too, saw truth as fluid. By avoiding conclusion and finality, these three novels embody the pragmatic belief that life and the world are unstable and constantly evolving. Absalom, Absalom! stages a conflict of historical discourses that -- much like the pragmatic concept of truth -- can never be ultimately resolved. Evans shows us how Faulkner explores the conventional and arbitrary status of racial identity in Go Down, Moses, in a way that is strikingly similar to James's criticism of the concept of identity in general. Finally, Evans reads The Hamlet, a work that is often used to support the idea that Faulkner is opposed to modernity, as a depiction of a distinctly pragmatic and modern world. With its creative coupling of James's philosophy and Faulkner's art, Evans's lively, engaging book makes a bold contribution to Faulkner studies and studies of southern literature.
Download or read book How Confidence Works written by Ian Robertson and published by Random House. This book was released on 2021-06-03 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Brilliant ... it will change how you think about confidence.' Johann Hari 'Important for everyone but crucial for women.' Mary Robinson 'Interesting and important.' Steven Pinker __________ Why do boys instinctively bullshit more than girls? How do economic recessions shape a generation's confidence? Can we have too much confidence and, if so, what are the consequences? Imagine we could discover something that could make us richer, healthier, longer-living, smarter, kinder, happier, more motivated and more innovative. Ridiculous, you might say... What is this elixir? Confidence. If you have it, it can empower you to reach heights you never thought possible. But if you don't, it can have a devastating effect on your future. Confidence lies at the core of what makes things happen. Exploring the science and neuroscience behind confidence that has emerged over the last decade, clinical psychologist and neuroscientist Professor Ian Robertson tells us how confidence plays out in our minds, our brains and indeed our bodies. He explains where it comes from and how it spreads - with extraordinary economic and political consequences. And why it's not necessarily something you are born with, but something that can be learned.
Download or read book Re thinking Mediations of Post truth Politics and Trust written by Jayson Harsin and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-01-23 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection reaches beyond fake news and propaganda, beyond misinformation and charismatic liars, to explore the lesser-publicized cultural forms and practices that serve as a cultural infrastructure for post-truth society and politics. Situating post-truth in specific contexts as a site of contestation or crisis, the book critically explores it as a dynamic and shifting site around which political and cultural practices in specific contexts revolve and overlap. Through a breadth of perspectives, the volume considers a number of overlapping cultural and political developments across varying national and transnational contexts: changing technologies and practices of cultural production that sometimes shift and at other times reproduce authority of traditional institutional truth-tellers; seismic cultural changes in representations, values and roles regarding gender, sexuality, race and historical memory about them, as well as corresponding reactionary discourses in the “culture wars”; questions of authenticity, honesty, and power relations that combine many of the former shifts within an all-encompassing culture of (self-) promotional, attentional capitalism. These considerations lead scholars to focus on corresponding shifting cultural dynamics of popular truth-telling and (dis-) trust-making that inform political culture. In this more global view, post-truth becomes foremost an influentially anxious public mood about the struggles to secure or undermine publicly accepted facts. This nuanced and insightful collection will interest scholars and students of communication studies, media and cultural studies, media ethics, journalism, media literacy, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and politics.
Download or read book Ruined Eden of the Present written by Gary Richard Thompson and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 1981 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A recurrent idea in Darrel Abel's criticism of the works of Hawthorne gives this volume its title. The idea of a fallen world and its potential for partial redemption through art and the art of criticism is a theme that weaves in and out of the sixteen essays. The volume as a whole displays an explicit and implicit concern with critical approaches and reflects an awareness of the fictiveness of critical resolutions in a world in which boundaries are constantly under challenge, for example, those which divide "textuality" from "contextuality." This collection of essays explores the problems the practical critic and teacher has had to face in the shifts in taste, assumptions, and methodology in the moves from moral and historical criticism to the "New Criticism," and to the newer linguistic and semiotic criticism.
Download or read book Confidence Game written by Christine S. Richard and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An expose on the delusion, greed, and arrogance that led to America's credit crisis The collapse of America's credit markets in 2008 is quite possibly the biggest financial disaster in U.S. history. Confidence Game: How a Hedge Fund Manager Called Wall Street's Bluff is the story of Bill Ackman's six-year campaign to warn that the $2.5 trillion bond insurance business was a catastrophe waiting to happen. Branded a fraud by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, and investigated by Eliot Spitzer and the Securities and Exchange Commission, Ackman later made his investors more than $1 billion when bond insurers kicked off the collapse of the credit markets. Unravels the story of the credit crisis through an engaging and human drama Draws on unprecedented access to one of Wall Street's best-known investors Shows how excessive leverage, dangerous financial models, and a blind reliance on triple-A credit ratings sent Wall Street careening toward disaster Confidence Game is a real world "Emperor's New Clothes," a tale of widespread delusion, and one dissenting voice in the era leading up to the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression.
Download or read book The Confidence Game written by Maria Konnikova and published by Canongate Books. This book was released on 2016-01-28 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The con artist: from Bernie Madoff to Clark Rockefeller to Lance Armstrong. How do they get away with it? And what keeps us falling for them, over and over again? In The Confidence Game, Maria Konnikova investigates the psychological principles that underlie each stage of the swindle, from the put-up all the way to the fix, and how we can train ourselves to spot a story that isn't all it seems.
