Download or read book Private Empire written by Steve Coll and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 654 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “ExxonMobil has met its match in Coll, an elegant writer and dogged reporter . . . extraordinary . . . monumental.” —The Washington Post “Fascinating . . . Private Empire is a book meticulously prepared as if for trial . . . a compelling and elucidatory work.” —Bloomberg From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of Ghost Wars and The Achilles Trap, an extraordinary exposé of Big Oil. Includes a profile of current Secretary of State and former chairman and chief executive of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson In this, the first hard-hitting examination of ExxonMobil—the largest and most powerful private corporation in the United States—Steve Coll reveals the true extent of its power. Private Empire pulls back the curtain, tracking the corporation’s recent history and its central role on the world stage, beginning with the Exxon Valdez accident in 1989 and leading to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The action spans the globe—featuring kidnapping cases, civil wars, and high-stakes struggles at the Kremlin—and the narrative is driven by larger-than-life characters, including corporate legend Lee “Iron Ass” Raymond, ExxonMobil’s chief executive until 2005, and current chairman and chief executive Rex Tillerson, President-elect Donald Trump's nomination for Secretary of State. A penetrating, news-breaking study, Private Empire is a defining portrait of Big Oil in American politics and foreign policy.
Download or read book A Private Empire written by Stephen Foster and published by Allen & Unwin. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Private Empire explores Britain's imperial past through the eyes and experiences of a single family. Historian Stephen Foster focuses on the Macphersons of Blairgowrie in Scotland, who recorded their private and public lives through five generations in an extraordinary archive of letters, documents and diaries. Elegantly presented with contemporary paintings and photographs, A Private Empire tells an intimate story of ambition and frustration, love and deception, wisdom and folly, pride and shame, passion and restraint, an attachment to place, an affection for kin-all set against the grand shifting background of Britain's imperial rule. 'In a world overpopulated by self-indulgent family histories, A Private Empire is that rarity which makes one keep reading to find out what happened to its cast of strangers.' Stephen Wilks, The Canberra Times 'A remarkably impressive book. The story he tells is an extraordinary one; indeed if it were written in the fictional genre of the family saga you would think he was stretching credulity.' Professor Stuart Macintyre, AO 'Superbly researched and wonderfully revelatory.' Professor John Mackenzie, The Scotsman 'An enthralling read and an important piece of history.' Undiscovered Scotland
Download or read book Raising Private Capital written by Matt Faircloth and published by Biggerpockets Publishing, LLC. This book was released on 2023-06-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn a detailed strategy to acquire, secure, and protect private money in your next real estate deal. Grow your real estate business and raise your game using other people's money!
Download or read book On the Grand Trunk Road written by Steve Coll and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-03-31 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of Ghost Wars and The Achilles Trap, a trek across a socially and politically damaged South Asia Bestselling author Steve Coll is one of the preeminent journalists of the twenty-first century. His last two books, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars and New York Times bestseller The Bin Ladens, have been praised for their creative insight and complex yet compelling narratives-and have put him on par with journalists such as the legendary Bob Woodward. Now, for the first time ever, the paperback edition of On the Grand Trunk Road is finally available, revised and updated with new material. Focusing on Coll's journeys in conflict-ridden India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Afghanistan as a bureau chief for The Washington Post, On the Grand Trunk Road reveals a little-seen area of the world where violence, corruption, and greed have had devastating effects on South Asians from all walks of life.
Download or read book The Selling of the Soviet Empire written by Alfred Kokh and published by SP Books. This book was released on 1998 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Never before has there been an attempt to transform a massive state-owned economy into a dynamic free market system. The story of the conversion of the dinosaur Marxist Soviet state into the free-wheeling capitalist society of today's Russian Federation is one of the most compelling dramas in history. This tale includes violence, corruption, and a web of political conspiracy. It is a true-life economic-political thriller. Who are the new Russian financial magnates who are grabbing former state property? What were the terms for disposing of the state's immense wealth to private investors? What was the role of American financiers? These questions, and more, are answered here. In addition to what he saw with his own eyes (in the crucial period between 1992 and 1997), Kokh also paints vivid pictures of the influential decision-makers that he worked closely with, including Anatoly Chubais, the little known Kremlin kingpin who ran Boris Yeltsin's re-election campaign and served as both Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister. Kokh uses his expert knowledge of the Russian government to bring readers into the momentous meetings that changed the world, including his cogent analysis of events occurring in Russia at the present time.
Download or read book Private Religious Foundations in the Byzantine Empire written by John Philip Thomas and published by Dumbarton Oaks. This book was released on 1987 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas examines the private ownership of ecclesiastical institutions to determine the nature and extent of private ownership of religious institutions in the Byzantine Empire. This includes churches, monasteries, and philanthropic institutions such as hospitals and orphanages, which were founded by private individuals and retained for personal administration independent of the public authorities of the state and church.
Download or read book Outsourcing Empire written by Andrew Phillips and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How chartered company-states spearheaded European expansion and helped create the world’s first genuinely global order From Spanish conquistadors to British colonialists, the prevailing story of European empire-building has focused on the rival ambitions of competing states. But as Outsourcing Empire shows, from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, company-states—not sovereign states—drove European expansion, building the world’s first genuinely international system. Company-states were hybrid ventures: pioneering multinational trading firms run for profit, with founding charters that granted them sovereign powers of war, peace, and rule. Those like the English and Dutch East India Companies carved out corporate empires in Asia, while other company-states pushed forward European expansion through North America, Africa, and the South Pacific. In this comparative exploration, Andrew Phillips and J. C. Sharman explain the rise and fall of company-states, why some succeeded while others failed, and their role as vanguards of capitalism and imperialism. In dealing with alien civilizations to the East and West, Europeans relied primarily on company-states to mediate geographic and cultural distances in trade and diplomacy. Emerging as improvised solutions to bridge the gap between European rulers’ expansive geopolitical ambitions and their scarce means, company-states succeeded best where they could balance the twin imperatives of power and profit. Yet as European states strengthened from the late eighteenth century onward, and a sense of separate public and private spheres grew, the company-states lost their usefulness and legitimacy. Bringing a fresh understanding to the ways cross-cultural relations were handled across the oceans, Outsourcing Empire examines the significance of company-states as key progenitors of the globalized world.
Download or read book Empire of Pain written by Patrick Radden Keefe and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 574 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. From the prize-winning and bestselling author of Say Nothing. "A real-life version of the HBO series Succession with a lethal sting in its tail…a masterful work of narrative reportage.” – Laura Miller, Slate The history of the Sackler dynasty is rife with drama—baroque personal lives; bitter disputes over estates; fistfights in boardrooms; glittering art collections; Machiavellian courtroom maneuvers; and the calculated use of money to burnish reputations and crush the less powerful. The Sackler name has adorned the walls of many storied institutions—Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, but the source of the family fortune was vague—until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis. Empire of Pain is the saga of three generations of a single family and the mark they would leave on the world, a tale that moves from the bustling streets of early twentieth-century Brooklyn to the seaside palaces of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Cap d’Antibes to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. It follows the family’s early success with Valium to the much more potent OxyContin, marketed with a ruthless technique of co-opting doctors, influencing the FDA, downplaying the drug’s addictiveness. Empire of Pain chronicles the multiple investigations of the Sacklers and their company, and the scorched-earth legal tactics that the family has used to evade accountability. A masterpiece of narrative reporting, Empire of Pain is a ferociously compelling portrait of America’s second Gilded Age, a study of impunity among the super-elite and a relentless investigation of the naked greed that built one of the world’s great fortunes.
Download or read book A Public Empire written by Ekaterina Pravilova and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Property rights" and "Russia" do not usually belong in the same sentence. Rather, our general image of the nation is of insecurity of private ownership and defenselessness in the face of the state. Many scholars have attributed Russia's long-term development problems to a failure to advance property rights for the modern age and blamed Russian intellectuals for their indifference to the issues of ownership. A Public Empire refutes this widely shared conventional wisdom and analyzes the emergence of Russian property regimes from the time of Catherine the Great through World War I and the revolutions of 1917. Most importantly, A Public Empire shows the emergence of the new practices of owning "public things" in imperial Russia and the attempts of Russian intellectuals to reconcile the security of property with the ideals of the common good. The book analyzes how the belief that certain objects—rivers, forests, minerals, historical monuments, icons, and Russian literary classics—should accede to some kind of public status developed in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. Professional experts and liberal politicians advocated for a property reform that aimed at exempting public things from private ownership, while the tsars and the imperial government employed the rhetoric of protecting the sanctity of private property and resisted attempts at its limitation. Exploring the Russian ways of thinking about property, A Public Empire looks at problems of state reform and the formation of civil society, which, as the book argues, should be rethought as a process of constructing "the public" through the reform of property rights.
Download or read book Empire of the Fund written by William A. Birdthistle and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empire of the Fund is an exposé of the way we save now with proposals to fix it. The United States has embarked upon the riskiest experiment in our financial history: to see whether millions of ordinary, untrained citizens can successfully manage trillions of dollars in a system dominated by skilled and powerful financial institutions.
Download or read book Pulp Empire written by Paul S. Hirsch and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2024-06-05 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Popular Culture Association's Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Book in Popular or American Culture In the 1940s and ’50s, comic books were some of the most popular—and most unfiltered—entertainment in the United States. Publishers sold hundreds of millions of copies a year of violent, racist, and luridly sexual comics to Americans of all ages until a 1954 Senate investigation led to a censorship code that nearly destroyed the industry. But this was far from the first time the US government actively involved itself with comics—it was simply the most dramatic manifestation of a long, strange relationship between high-level policy makers and a medium that even artists and writers often dismissed as a creative sewer. In Pulp Empire, Paul S. Hirsch uncovers the gripping untold story of how the US government both attacked and appropriated comic books to help wage World War II and the Cold War, promote official—and clandestine—foreign policy and deflect global critiques of American racism. As Hirsch details, during World War II—and the concurrent golden age of comic books—government agencies worked directly with comic book publishers to stoke hatred for the Axis powers while simultaneously attempting to dispel racial tensions at home. Later, as the Cold War defense industry ballooned—and as comic book sales reached historic heights—the government again turned to the medium, this time trying to win hearts and minds in the decolonizing world through cartoon propaganda. Hirsch’s groundbreaking research weaves together a wealth of previously classified material, including secret wartime records, official legislative documents, and caches of personal papers. His book explores the uneasy contradiction of how comics were both vital expressions of American freedom and unsettling glimpses into the national id—scourged and repressed on the one hand and deployed as official propaganda on the other. Pulp Empire is a riveting illumination of underexplored chapters in the histories of comic books, foreign policy, and race.
Download or read book Benevolent Empire written by Stephen R. Porter and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stephen Porter examines political-refugee aid initiatives and related humanitarian endeavors led by American people and institutions from World War I through the Cold War. The supporters of these endeavors presented the United States as a new kind of world power, a Benevolent Empire.
Download or read book Vernacular Industrialism in China written by Eugenia Lean and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early twentieth-century China, Chen Diexian (1879–1940) was a maverick entrepreneur—at once a prolific man of letters and captain of industry, a magazine editor and cosmetics magnate. He tinkered with chemistry in his private studio, used local cuttlefish to source magnesium carbonate, and published manufacturing tips in how-to columns. In a rapidly changing society, Chen copied foreign technologies and translated manufacturing processes from abroad to produce adaptations of global commodities that bested foreign brands. Engaging in the worlds of journalism, industry, and commerce, he drew on literati practices associated with late-imperial elites but deployed them in novel ways within a culture of educated tinkering that generated industrial innovation. Through the lens of Chen’s career, Eugenia Lean explores how unlikely individuals devised unconventional, homegrown approaches to industry and science in early twentieth-century China. She contends that Chen’s activities exemplify “vernacular industrialism,” the pursuit of industry and science outside of conventional venues, often involving ad hoc forms of knowledge and material work. Lean shows how vernacular industrialists accessed worldwide circuits of law and science and experimented with local and global processes of manufacturing to navigate, innovate, and compete in global capitalism. In doing so, they presaged the approach that has helped fuel China’s economic ascent in the twenty-first century. Rather than conventional narratives that depict China as belatedly borrowing from Western technology, Vernacular Industrialism in China offers a new understanding of industrialization, going beyond material factors to show the central role of culture and knowledge production in technological and industrial change.
Download or read book A History of Private Life From pagan Rome to Byzantium written by Philippe Ari`es and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 712 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Library has Vol. 1-5.
Download or read book Empire s Labor written by Adam D. Moore and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-15 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a dramatic unveiling of the little-known world of contracted military logistics, Adam Moore examines the lives of the global army of laborers who support US overseas wars. Empire's Labor brings us the experience of the hundreds of thousands of men and women who perform jobs such as truck drivers and administrative assistants at bases located in warzones in the Middle East and Africa. He highlights the changes the US military has undergone since the Vietnam War, when the ratio of contractors to uniformed personnel was roughly 1:6. In Afghanistan it has been as high as 4:1. This growth in logistics contracting represents a fundamental change in how the US fights wars, with the military now dependent on a huge pool of contractors recruited from around the world. It also, Moore demonstrates, has social, economic, and political implications that extend well beyond the battlefields. Focusing on workers from the Philippines and Bosnia, two major sources of "third country national" (TCN) military labor, Moore explains the rise of large-scale logistics outsourcing since the end of the Cold War; describes the networks, infrastructures, and practices that span the spaces through which people, information, and goods circulate; and reveals the experiences of foreign workers, from the hidden dynamics of labor activism on bases, to the economic and social impacts these jobs have on their families and the communities they hail from. Through his extensive fieldwork and interviews, Moore gives voice to the agency and aspirations of the many thousands of foreigners who labor for the US military. Thanks to generous funding from UCLA and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.
Download or read book Code 3 written by Sean C Cusack and published by . This book was released on 2020-04-22 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Code 3: The Rise & Fall of a Private Ambulance Empire proves that people from all walks of life are attracted to the strange realm that is Emergency Medical Services (E.M.S.). But like average employees, many of them come and go. "Like druggies, they get their quick fix and then they leave. E.M.S. sees them come and go like the motions of the ocean." But what they leave behind are their unforgettable stories. Code 3: The Rise & Fall of a Private Ambulance Empire is not your typical novel about the heroisms of what takes place in the back of an ambulance, rather, Code 3 takes you on a fast-paced 'lights and sirens' ride through the delightful disgraces that are hidden well from the public eye. Code 3 is a satire ripe with figurative allegories in concert with such prime world events as Nazi Germany and the Titanic Disaster, uniquely intertwined in the unforgiving E.M.S. field of battle set inside a huge garage on the north side of Chicago that is a branch of a massive private ambulance company merger. It was inside this garage where most of the mayhem took place. Sean C. Cusack began his professional writing career in 2004 and has since published several works of different genres. In Code 3: The Rise & Fall of a Private Ambulance Empire, Sean C. Cusack chronicles his early upbringing in the 'family business' and into his teenage years that were well absorbed with stories and characters. He further explores the odd world that was the calamitous private ambulance company that he worked at with an observant eye and humorous take on an otherwise suppressed occupation all from the watch of his comfortable confines.
Download or read book Empire of Wild written by Cherie Dimaline and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Deftly written, gripping and informative. Empire of Wild is a rip-roaring read!”—Margaret Atwood, From Instagram “Empire of Wild is doing everything I love in a contemporary novel and more. It is tough, funny, beautiful, honest and propulsive—all the while telling a story that needs to be told by a person who needs to be telling it.”—Tommy Orange, author of There There A bold and brilliant new indigenous voice in contemporary literature makes her American debut with this kinetic, imaginative, and sensuous fable inspired by the traditional Canadian Métis legend of the Rogarou—a werewolf-like creature that haunts the roads and woods of native people’s communities. Joan has been searching for her missing husband, Victor, for nearly a year—ever since that terrible night they’d had their first serious argument hours before he mysteriously vanished. Her Métis family has lived in their tightly knit rural community for generations, but no one keeps the old ways . . . until they have to. That moment has arrived for Joan. One morning, grieving and severely hungover, Joan hears a shocking sound coming from inside a revival tent in a gritty Walmart parking lot. It is the unmistakable voice of Victor. Drawn inside, she sees him. He has the same face, the same eyes, the same hands, though his hair is much shorter and he's wearing a suit. But he doesn't seem to recognize Joan at all. He insists his name is Eugene Wolff, and that he is a reverend whose mission is to spread the word of Jesus and grow His flock. Yet Joan suspects there is something dark and terrifying within this charismatic preacher who professes to be a man of God . . . something old and very dangerous. Joan turns to Ajean, an elderly foul-mouthed card shark who is one of the few among her community steeped in the traditions of her people and knowledgeable about their ancient enemies. With the help of the old Métis and her peculiar Johnny-Cash-loving, twelve-year-old nephew Zeus, Joan must find a way to uncover the truth and remind Reverend Wolff who he really is . . . if he really is. Her life, and those of everyone she loves, depends upon it.
