Download or read book Opinions of an Old Contrarian written by Guy Friddell and published by Falcon Guides. This book was released on 1997 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes columns from Friddell's newspaper years as a columnist for the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk and the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Download or read book The Contrarian written by Max Chafkin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the enigmatic, controversial and hugely influential power broker who sits at the dynamic intersection of tech, business and politics Since the days of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, no industry has made a greater global impact than Silicon Valley. And few individuals have done more to shape Silicon Valley than billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel. From the technologies we use every day to the delicate power balance between Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington, Thiel has been a behind-the-scenes operator influencing countless aspects of contemporary life. But despite his power and the ubiquity of his projects, no public figure is quite so mysterious. In the first major biography of Thiel, Max Chafkin traces the trajectory of the innovator's singular life and worldview, from his upbringing as the child of immigrant parents and years at Stanford as a burgeoning conservative thought leader to his founding of PayPal and Palantir, early investment in Facebook and SpaceX, and relationships with fellow tech titans Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Eric Schmidt. The Contrarian illuminates the extent to which Thiel has sought to export his values to the corridors of power beyond Silicon Valley, such as funding the lawsuit that bankrupted the blog Gawker to strenuously backing far-right political candidates, including Donald Trump for president. Eye-opening and deeply reported, The Contrarian is a revelatory biography of a one-of-a-kind leader and an incisive portrait of a tech industry whose explosive growth and power is both thrilling and fraught with controversy.
Download or read book Letters to a Young Contrarian written by Christopher Hitchens and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-04-28 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From bestselling author and provocateur Christopher Hitchens, the classic guide to the art of principled dissent and disagreement In Letters to a Young Contrarian, bestselling author and world-class provocateur Christopher Hitchens inspires the radicals, gadflies, mavericks, rebels, and angry young (wo)men of tomorrow. Exploring the entire range of "contrary positions"—from noble dissident to gratuitous nag—Hitchens introduces the next generation to the minds and the misfits who influenced him, invoking such mentors as Emile Zola, Rosa Parks, and George Orwell. As is his trademark, Hitchens pointedly pitches himself in contrast to stagnant attitudes across the ideological spectrum. No other writer has matched Hitchens's understanding of the importance of disagreement—to personal integrity, to informed discussion, to true progress, to democracy itself.
Download or read book Contrarian Commentary written by Mel Fisher and published by FriesenPress. This book was released on 2024-05-05 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did bananas come to be? Who is the most useless member of society? What do language fads tell us about the history of human development? What would space aliens say about our well-kept lawns? These short pieces and essays provide thought-provoking and entertaining social commentary from a point of view not usually seen—that is, Contrarian. Written for a small-town (Dryden, Ontario) newspaper and the author’s blog between 2012 and 2023, Mel Fisher appeals to the “common sense of the common people,” writing about everything from breakfast cereal to Darwin to global warming to God. Contrarian Commentary pokes fun at the foibles of modern life, questions mainstream media, and celebrates the profound strangeness of humanity on the blue-and-green planet we call home.
Download or read book Unsettled Updated and Expanded Edition written by Steven E. Koonin and published by BenBella Books. This book was released on 2024-06-11 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this updated and expanded edition of climate scientist Steven Koonin’s groundbreaking book, go behind the headlines to discover the latest eye-opening data about climate change—with unbiased facts and realistic steps for the future. "Greenland’s ice loss is accelerating." "Extreme temperatures are causing more fatalities." "Rapid 'climate action' is essential to avoid a future climate disaster." You've heard all this presented as fact. But according to science, all of these statements are profoundly misleading. With the new edition of Unsettled, Steven Koonin draws on decades of experience—including as a top science advisor to the Obama administration—to clear away the fog and explain what science really says (and doesn't say). With a new introduction, this edition now features reflections on an additional three years of eye-opening data, alternatives to unrealistic “net zero” solutions, global energy inequalities, and the energy crisis arising from the war in Ukraine. When it comes to climate change, the media, politicians, and other prominent voices have declared that “the science is settled.” In reality, the climate is changing, but the why and how aren’t as clear as you’ve probably been led to believe. Koonin takes readers behind the headlines, dispels popular myths, and unveils little-known truths: Despite rising greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures decreased from 1940 to 1970 Models currently used to predict the future do not accurately describe the climate of the past, and modelers themselves strongly doubt their regional predictions There is no compelling evidence that hurricanes are becoming more frequent—or that predictions of rapid sea level rise have any validity Unsettled is a reality check buoyed by hope, offering the truth about climate science—what we know, what we don’t, and what it all means for our future.
Download or read book Editor for Justice written by Alexander S. Leidholdt and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2002-05-01 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From his assumption of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot's editorial helm in 1919 until his death in 1950, Louis Isaac Jaffé served as one of the South's leading and most respected liberal journalists. Prejudice he faced as a Jew created in him an abiding empathy with the downtrodden, and his World War I military service and subsequent Red Cross work deepened his sensitivity to injustice. Alexander Leidholdt's new biography maps the battlefield of intolerance and civil rights violations on which Jaffé fired his journalistic salvos and explores the complexities of a man who was poised to become a national spokesman for a better South. Jaffé worked ceaselessly to advance racial understanding, successfully lobbying locally for black parks and beaches, black police, and a black college. A high point of Leidholdt's book is the account of Jaffé's attacks on mob justice, a stirring record of one writer's response to what he saw as inexcusable moral sluggishness in civil authorities. For his campaign urging Virginia lawmakers to adopt stiff antilynching legislation, he earned the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished editorial writing. Achieving a poignant balance between Jaffé's significant professional accomplishments and the private pains he bore—including anti-Semitism, a mentally unstable wife, and an estranged son—this superb study demonstrates how Jaffé's difficulties limited him as an active liberal reformer but also fueled his prescient and impassioned warnings against Hitler's rise to power in the early thirties. Drawing extensively from primary source material, much of it previously unexamined, Editor for Justice makes an important contribution to journalism and to southern, Jewish, and black history. Readers will treasure the depiction of an extraordinary champion of human rights.
Download or read book Someone written by Alice McDermott and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fully realized portrait of one woman's life in all its complexity, by the National Book Award–winning author An ordinary life—its sharp pains and unexpected joys, its bursts of clarity and moments of confusion—lived by an ordinary woman: this is the subject of Someone, Alice McDermott's extraordinary return, seven years after the publication of After This. Scattered recollections—of childhood, adolescence, motherhood, old age—come together in this transformative narrative, stitched into a vibrant whole by McDermott's deft, lyrical voice. Our first glimpse of Marie is as a child: a girl in glasses waiting on a Brooklyn stoop for her beloved father to come home from work. A seemingly innocuous encounter with a young woman named Pegeen sets the bittersweet tone of this remarkable novel. Pegeen describes herself as an "amadan," a fool; indeed, soon after her chat with Marie, Pegeen tumbles down her own basement stairs. The magic of McDermott's novel lies in how it reveals us all as fools for this or that, in one way or another. Marie's first heartbreak and her eventual marriage; her brother's brief stint as a Catholic priest, subsequent loss of faith, and eventual breakdown; the Second World War; her parents' deaths; the births and lives of Marie's children; the changing world of her Irish-American enclave in Brooklyn—McDermott sketches all of it with sympathy and insight. This is a novel that speaks of life as it is daily lived; a crowning achievement by one of the finest American writers at work today. A Publishers Weekly Best Fiction Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of 2013 A New York Times Notable Book of 2013 A Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of 2013 An NPR Best Book of 2013
Download or read book Gentle and Lowly written by Dane C. Ortlund and published by Crossway. This book was released on 2020-03-18 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christians know that God loves them, but can easily feel that he is perpetually disappointed and frustrated, maybe even close to giving up on them. As a result, they focus a lot—and rightly so—on what Jesus has done to appease God’s wrath for sin. But how does Jesus Christ actually feel about his people amid all their sins and failures? This book draws us to Matthew 11, where Jesus describes himself as “gentle and lowly in heart,” longing for his people to find rest in him. The gospel flows from God’s deepest heart for his people, a heart of tender love for the sinful and suffering. These chapters take readers into the depths of Christ’s very heart for sinners, diving deep into Bible passages that speak of who Christ is and encouraging readers with the affections of Christ for his people. His longing heart for sinners comforts and sustains readers in their up-and-down lives.
Download or read book Put Old on Hold written by Barbara Morris and published by Barbara Morris, R.Ph.. This book was released on 2003-10 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barbara Morris distils her own experience and her daily contact with seniors into an easy-to-follow program to minimise and reverse the negative aspects of ageing. Her recommendations for optimum nutrition, exercise, and mental stimulation can halt, and even reverse, the onset of old age. The adverse effects of negative thinking about ageing are explained, and strategies for combating these self-defeating attitudes are outlined in detail. Tests to determine biological age give readers a sense of how young they are now and what needs to be done to set and achieve their goals.
Download or read book Thinking as a Science written by Henry Hazlitt and published by Ludwig von Mises Institute. This book was released on 1916 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Books on thinking": pages 248-251.
Download or read book We Came We Saw We Left A Family Gap Year written by Charles Wheelan and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charlie Wheelan and his family do what others dream of: They take a year off to travel the world. This is their story. What would happen if you quit your life for a year? In a pre–COVID-19 world, the Wheelan family decided to find out; leaving behind work, school, and even the family dogs to travel the world on a modest budget. Equal parts "how-to" and "how-not-to"—and with an eye toward a world emerging from a pandemic—We Came, We Saw, We Left is the insightful and often hilarious account of one family’s gap-year experiment. Wheelan paints a picture of adventure and connectivity, juggling themes of local politics, global economics, and family dynamics while exploring answers to questions like: How do you sneak out of a Peruvian town that has been barricaded by the local army? And where can you get treatment for a flesh-eating bacteria your daughter picked up two continents ago? From Colombia to Cambodia, We Came, We Saw, We Left chronicles nine months across six continents with three teenagers. What could go wrong?
Download or read book F Wall Street written by Joel Ponzio and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-05-18 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy; profit from folly rather than participate in it." —Warren Buffett Investors shouldn't hate the market because of its up and downs. They should capitalize on it—and give a middle finger to those brokers wasting their time (and money) buying and selling, viewing investing as just buying stocks and not taking ownership of a company. In this book, Joe Ponzio gives an "f-you" to Wall Street and teaches you how to become a sharp value investor who uses economic downturns to your advantage. By buying into companies you believe in—but that may be selling for less than their intrinsic value, like high-end retailers in a weak market and discount retailers in a strong one—you will profit from their long-term performance. It's the perfect guide for anyone fed up with Wall Street's bull.
Download or read book The Contrarian s Guide to Leadership written by Steven B. Sample and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2003-04-18 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this offbeat approach to leadership, college president Steven B. Sample-the man who turned the University of Southern California into one of the most respected and highly rated universities in the country-challenges many conventional teachings on the subject. Here, Sample outlines an iconoclastic style of leadership that flies in the face of current leadership thought, but a style that unquestionably works, nevertheless. Sample urges leaders and aspiring leaders to focus on some key counterintuitive truths. He offers his own down-to-earth, homespun, and often provocative advice on some complex and thoughtful issues. And he provides many practical, if controversial, tactics for successful leadership, suggesting, among other things, that leaders should sometimes compromise their principles, not read everything that comes across their desks, and always put off decisions.
Download or read book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind written by Julian Jaynes and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2000-08-15 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry
Download or read book Safe Haven written by Mark Spitznagel and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is a safe haven? What role should they play in an investment portfolio? Do we use them only to seek shelter until the passing of financial storms? Or are they something more? Contrary to everything we know from modern financial theory, can higher returns actually come as a result of lowering risk? In Safe Haven, hedge fund manager Mark Spitznagel—one of the top practitioners of safe haven investing and portfolio risk mitigation in the world—answers these questions and more. Investors who heed the message in this book will never look at risk mitigation the same way again.
Download or read book Too Big to Walk The New Science of Dinosaurs written by Brian J. Ford and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since Jurassic Park we thought we knew how dinosaurs lived their lives. In this remarkable new book, Brian J. Ford reveals that dinosaurs were, in fact, profoundly different from what we believe, and their environment was unlike anything we have previously thought.
Download or read book The Great Dissenter written by Peter S. Canellos and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-06-28 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of an American hero who stood against all the forces of Gilded Age America to help enshrine our civil rights and economic freedoms. Dissent. No one wielded this power more aggressively than John Marshall Harlan, a young union veteran from Kentucky who served on the US Supreme Court from the end of the Civil War through the Gilded Age. In the long test of time, this lone dissenter was proven right in case after case. They say history is written by the victors, but that is not Harlan's legacy: his views--not those of his fellow justices--ulitmately ended segregation and helped give us our civil rights and our economic freedoms. Derided by many as a loner and loser, he ended up being acclaimed as the nation's most courageous jurist, a man who saw the truth and justice that eluded his contemporaries. "Our Constitution is color blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens," he wrote in his famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, one of many cases in which he lambasted his colleagues for denying the rights of African Americans. When the court struck down antitrust laws, Harlan called out the majority for favoring its own economic class. He did the same when the justices robbed states of their power to regulate the hours of workers and shielded the rich from the income tax. When other justices said the court was powerless to prevent racial violence, he took matters into his own hands: he made sure the Chattanooga officials who enabled a shocking lynching on a bridge over the Tennessee River were brought to justice. In this monumental biography, prize-winning journalist and bestselling author Peter S. Canellos chronicles the often tortuous and inspiring process through which Supreme Courts can make and remake the law across generations. But he also shows how the courage and outlook of one man can make all the difference. Why did Harlan see things differently? Because his life was different, He grew up alongside Robert Harlan, whom many believed to be his half brother. Born enslaved, Robert Harlan bought his freedom and became a horseracing pioneer and a force in the Republican Party. It was Robert who helped put John on the Supreme Court. At a time when many justices journey from the classroom to the bench with few stops in real life, the career of John Marshall Harlan is an illustration of the importance of personal experience in the law. And Harlan's story is also a testament to the vital necessity of dissent--and of how a flame lit in one era can light the world in another. --
