Download or read book History s Worst Decisions and the People who Made Them written by Stephen Weir and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book History s Worst Decisions written by Stephen Weir and published by . This book was released on 2006-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mankind's past is strewn with mistakes, colossal blunders driven by virtue as often as vice. This is an entertaining look at some monumental mishaps, from Adam and Eve's decision to eat the apple and Nero's burning down of his own city to the destruction of the Himalayan rain forest and the billions of dollars wasted on the Y2K scare.
Download or read book History s Worst Decisions written by Ian Whitelaw and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book History s Worst Decisions written by Stephen Weir and published by Allen & Unwin. This book was released on 2005 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History is strewn with mistakes. Many made by well intentioned people who were bright, intelligent, capable, but just made the wrong decision.
Download or read book Encyclopedia Idiotica written by Stephen Weir and published by B.E.S. Publishing. This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 64 A.D. burning of Rome during the reign of Nero . . . Winston Churchill's ill-conceived and disastrous World War I plan to invade Turkey at Gallipoli . . . the Maginot Line, built in France in 1929-34 in a foolhardy effort to prevent the feared German invasion . . . the 1950s thalidomide pharmaceutical disaster that resulted in at least 20,000 babies born with deformities . . . the 1989-91 misappropriation of company funds by publishing executive Robert Maxwell, and the collapse of his financial empire . . . the Enron scandal of 2000 that brought down a yet larger business empire. Chronicled in these pages are stories of corporate chicanery, poor military decisions, engineering disasters, diplomatic blunders, and other appalling, large-scale mistakes that resulted in ruin and misery for countless innocent bystanders. Here are baleful tales motivated by false hope, anger, greed, pride, lust, and many other instances of erratic human behavior. A selection of approximately 50 disastrous decisions are presented, each grim account summarized in a report of roughly a half-dozen pages and enhanced with sidebars and thumbnail-sized cartoon-style illustrations. Each account opens with its cast of characters, then sets the story's background before reporting the grim details and concluding with the unhappy moral. Here is a page-turner of a book that recounts some of history's most dramatic-but also catastrophic-moments.
Download or read book More of History s Worst Decisions written by Ian Whitelaw and published by Pier 9. This book was released on 2012 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If the road to damnation is paved with the best of intentions, then the road to disaster is paved with what, at first sight, appeared to be a smart move. More of History's Worst Decisions features a second crop of humongous historical bloopers, ordered chronologically, starting with the granddaddy of them all, our hominid ancestors' decision to come down from the trees, and categorized into military, religion, culture, politics, scandal, environment and everyone's current favourite, economics.
Download or read book The Worst Decisions ever written by Stephen Weir and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book History s Worst Decisions Ever written by Stephen Weir and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book History s Worst Decisions written by Stephen Weir and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Black Mondays written by Joel D. Joseph and published by . This book was released on 2013-08 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the first edition of Black Mondays was published in 1987, bad Supreme Court decisions were an anomaly. Now, unfortunately, the nation's highest court has taken advantage of a power vacuum in Washington to become the most powerful branch of government. And the High Court is legislating, despite the apparent "conservative" nature of the court. The worst decision in recent history was Bush v. Gore in which the Supreme Court enacted a judicial coup d'etat, installing George W. Bush as President of the United States, overruling Florida and Congress. Florida was not allowed to finish counting ballots even though the Supreme Court ruled that prior counting violated the Constitution of the United States. And the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution specifically provides that Congress shall count the votes of the presidential electors. If two competing slates of presidential electors from one state are presented to Congress, Congress, not the United States Supreme Court must decide which slate of electors are to be counted. In 2008, President George W. Bush signed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments into law that gave Chief Justice Roberts the power to appoint all members of the FISA Court without Senate confirmation. Concerning government spying, the Supreme Court has ruled that the ACLU does not have standing to challenging the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, thus allowing virtually unlimited surveillance by the government. In recent years, the Supreme Court has taken charge of gun control, video-game violence, campaign finance and class actions. It has taken power from States and cities and given them to corporations. "Corporations are people," the Court has announced, allowing unlimited corporate involvement in political campaigns. Corporations can now dictate that disputes with customers are settled by arbitration, not in court. The Supreme Court has ruled that these arbitrations cannot be class arbitrations overriding State law and individual rights.
Download or read book History s Greatest Decisions written by Bill Price and published by Chartwell Books. This book was released on 2017-01-29 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History’s Greatest Decisions identifies and profiles the many important and difficult decisions leaders have made through history which shaped the world as we know it today. One of the defining features of being human is our capacity for complex problem solving. Most of the time we deal with mundane concerns, like what to have for breakfast or which pair of shoes to wear, but occasionally people face decisions about rather weightier matters. History’s Greatest Decisions is concerned with this second category, those important and difficult decisions which only a very few people get to make and which can impact on the lives of millions of others and have the potential to change the world. From our unknown ancestors who made the first stone tools, to those people in Northern Ireland who managed to put aside their differences in order to create a better future for their children; from the most powerful man in the world deciding not to start a nuclear war, to a woman on a bus standing up for her rights refusing to move seats. History's Greatest Decisions looks at well-known and not-so-well-known examples of people who made the crucial decisions and got them right.
Download or read book Profiles in Folly written by Alan Axelrod and published by Union Square + ORM. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling author of Profiles in Audacity returns with an “illuminating [and] entertaining” study of historically bad decisions (Publishers Weekly). In an engrossing anecdotal format, historian and bestselling author Alan Axelrod turns to the dark side of audacious decision-making—and explores history’s most tragic errors, the people who made them, and why they happened. While Axelrod looks at the hopelessly dumb and the overtly evil, the main focus is on smart people who had the best of intentions—but whose plans went disastrously wrong. The 35 compelling stories include the sailing of the “unsinkable” Titanic; Edward Bernays’s 1929 campaign to recruit women smokers; Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of the Nazis; Ken Lay’s deception with Enron; and even the choice to create a “New Coke” and fix what wasn’t broke. These are cautionary tales that any decision-maker can learn from—albeit with exquisite twists ranging from acerbic to horrific.
Download or read book Rob Neyer s Big Book of Baseball Blunders written by Rob Neyer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BLOOPER: BALL SQUIRTS THROUGH BILLY BUCKNER'S LEGS. BLUNDER: BILLY BUCKNER'S MANAGER LEFT HIM IN THE GAME. Baseball bloopers are fun; they're funny, even. A pitcher slips on the mound and his pitch sails over the backstop. An infielder camps under a pop-up...and the ball lands ten feet away. An outfielder tosses a souvenir to a fan...but that was just the second out, and runners are circling the bases (and laughing). Without these moments, the highlight reels wouldn't be nearly as entertaining. Baseball blunders, however, can be tragic, and they will leave diehard fans asking why...why...why? Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Blunders does its best to answer all those whys, exploring the worst decisions and stupidest moments of managers, general managers, owners, and even commissioners. As he did in his Big Book of Baseball Lineups, Rob Neyer provides readers with a fascinating examination of baseball's rich history, this time through the lens of the game's sometimes hilarious, often depressing, and always perplexing blunders. · Which ill-fated move cost the Chicago White Sox a great hitter and the 1919 World Series? · What was Babe Ruth thinking when he became the first (and still the only) player to end a World Series by getting caught trying to steal? · Did playing one-armed Pete Gray in 1945 cost the Browns a pennant? · How did winning a coin toss lead to the Dodgers losing the National League pennant on Bobby Thomson's "Shot Heard 'round the World"? · How damaging was the Frank Robinson-for-Milt Pappas deal, really? · Which of Red Sox manager Don Zimmer's mistakes in 1978 was the worst? · Which Yankees trade was even worse than swapping Jay Buhner for Ken Phelps? · What non-move cost Buck Showalter a job and gave Joe Torre the opportunity of a lifetime? · Game 7, 2003 ALCS: Pedro winds up to throw his 123rd pitch...what were you thinking? These are just a few of the legendary (and not-so-legendary) blunders that Neyer analyzes, always with an eye on what happened, why it happened, and how it changed the fickle course of history. And in separate chapters, Neyer also reviews some of the game's worst trades and draft picks and closely examines all the teams that fell just short of first place. Another in the series of Neyer's Big Books of baseball history, Baseball Blunders should win a place in every devoted fan's library.
Download or read book Great Military Blunders written by Geoffrey Regan and published by Madcap. This book was released on 2017-02 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "From ancient times to the Bay of Pigs and the Falklands War, military history has been marked as much by misjudgements and incompetence as by gallantry and glory. In this fascinating and entertaining collection, author Geoffrey Regan recounts some of the staggering stories of military blunder. His anecdotes encompass every aspect of warfare from the insanity of commanders to the provision of inadequate supplies."--Back cover.
Download or read book A More Beautiful and Terrible History written by Jeanne Theoharis and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2018-01-30 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praised by The New York Times; O, The Oprah Magazine; Bitch Magazine; Slate; Publishers Weekly; and more, this is “a bracing corrective to a national mythology” (New York Times) around the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement has become national legend, lauded by presidents from Reagan to Obama to Trump, as proof of the power of American democracy. This fable, featuring dreamy heroes and accidental heroines, has shuttered the movement firmly in the past, whitewashed the forces that stood in its way, and diminished its scope. And it is used perniciously in our own times to chastise present-day movements and obscure contemporary injustice. In A More Beautiful and Terrible History award-winning historian Jeanne Theoharis dissects this national myth-making, teasing apart the accepted stories to show them in a strikingly different light. We see Rosa Parks not simply as a bus lady but a lifelong criminal justice activist and radical; Martin Luther King, Jr. as not only challenging Southern sheriffs but Northern liberals, too; and Coretta Scott King not only as a “helpmate” but a lifelong economic justice and peace activist who pushed her husband’s activism in these directions. Moving from “the histories we get” to “the histories we need,” Theoharis challenges nine key aspects of the fable to reveal the diversity of people, especially women and young people, who led the movement; the work and disruption it took; the role of the media and “polite racism” in maintaining injustice; and the immense barriers and repression activists faced. Theoharis makes us reckon with the fact that far from being acceptable, passive or unified, the civil rights movement was unpopular, disruptive, and courageously persevering. Activists embraced an expansive vision of justice—which a majority of Americans opposed and which the federal government feared. By showing us the complex reality of the movement, the power of its organizing, and the beauty and scope of the vision, Theoharis proves that there was nothing natural or inevitable about the progress that occurred. A More Beautiful and Terrible History will change our historical frame, revealing the richness of our civil rights legacy, the uncomfortable mirror it holds to the nation, and the crucial work that remains to be done. Winner of the 2018 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize in Nonfiction
Download or read book A People s History of the Supreme Court written by Peter Irons and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-07-25 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive history of the people and cases that have changed history, this is the definitive account of the nation's highest court featuring a forward by Howard Zinn Recent changes in the Supreme Court have placed the venerable institution at the forefront of current affairs, making this comprehensive and engaging work as timely as ever. In the tradition of Howard Zinn's classic A People's History of the United States, Peter Irons chronicles the decisions that have influenced virtually every aspect of our society, from the debates over judicial power to controversial rulings in the past regarding slavery, racial segregation, and abortion, as well as more current cases about school prayer, the Bush/Gore election results, and "enemy combatants." To understand key issues facing the supreme court and the current battle for the court's ideological makeup, there is no better guide than Peter Irons. This revised and updated edition includes a foreword by Howard Zinn. "A sophisticated narrative history of the Supreme Court . . . [Irons] breathes abundant life into old documents and reminds readers that today's fiercest arguments about rights are the continuation of the endless American conversation." -Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
Download or read book End of History and the Last Man written by Francis Fukuyama and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2006-03-01 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since its first publication in 1992, The End of History and the Last Man has provoked controversy and debate. Francis Fukuyama's prescient analysis of religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes, and war is as essential for a world fighting fundamentalist terrorists as it was for the end of the Cold War. Now updated with a new afterword, The End of History and the Last Man is a modern classic.
