Download or read book Rise of the Spectacular written by John Hannigan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-08-29 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this prequel to Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis (1998), his acclaimed book about the post-industrial city as a site of theming, branding and simulated spaces, sociologist John Hannigan travels back in time to the 1950s. Unfairly stereotyped as ‘the tranquillized decade’, America at mid-century hosted an escalating proliferation and conjunction of ‘spectacular’ events, spaces, and technologies. Spectacularization was collectively defined by five features. It reflected and legitimated a dramatic increase in scale from the local/regional to the national. It was mediated by the increasingly popular medium of television. It exploited middle-class tension between comfortable conformity and desire for safe adventure. It celebrated technological progress, boosterism and military power. It was orchestrated and marketed by a constellation, sometimes a coalition, of entrepreneurs and dream merchants, most prominently Walt Disney. In this wide-ranging odyssey across mid-century America, Hannigan visits leisure parks (Cypress Gardens), parades (Tournament of Roses), mega-events (Squaw Valley Olympics, Century 21 Exposition), architectural styles (desert modernism), innovations (underwater photography, circular film projection) and everyday wonders (chemistry sets). Collectively, these fashioned the ‘spectacular gaze’, a prism through which Americans in the 1950s were acculturated to and conscripted into a vision of a progressive, technology-based future. Rise of the Spectacular will appeal to architects, landscape designers, geographers, sociologists, historians, and leisure/tourism researchers, as well as non-academic readers who are by a fascinating era in history.

Download or read book Billion Dollar Loser written by Reeves Wiedeman and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller: This "vivid" inside story of WeWork and its CEO tells the remarkable saga of one of the most audacious, and improbable, rises and falls in American business history (Ken Auletta). Christened a potential savior of Silicon Valley's startup culture, Adam Neumann was set to take WeWork, his office share company disrupting the commercial real estate market, public, cash out on the company's forty-seven billion dollar valuation, and break the string of major startups unable to deliver to shareholders. But as employees knew, and investors soon found out, WeWork's capital was built on promises that the company was more than a real estate purveyor, that in fact it was a transformational technology company. Veteran journalist Reeves Weideman dives deep into WeWork and it CEO's astronomical rise, from the marijuana and tequila-filled board rooms to cult-like company summer camps and consciousness-raising with Anthony Kiedis. Billion Dollar Loser is a character-driven business narrative that captures, through the fascinating psyche of a billionaire founder and his wife and co-founder, the slippery state of global capitalism. A Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller “Vivid, carefully reported drama that readers will gulp down as if it were a fast-paced novel” (Ken Auletta)

Download or read book Nothin But a Good Time written by Justin Quirk and published by Unbound Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-03 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1983 until 1991, Glam Metal was the sound of American culture. Big hair, massive amplifiers, drugs, alcohol, piles of money and life-threatening pyrotechnics. This was the world stalked by Bon Jovi, Kiss, W.A.S.P., Skid Row, Dokken, Motley Crue, Cinderella, Ratt and many more. Armed with hairspray, spandex and strangely shaped guitars, they marked the last great era of supersize bands. Where did Glam Metal come from? How did it spread? What killed it off? And why does nobody admit to having been a Glam Metaller anymore?

Download or read book The Spectacular Simon Burchwood written by Scott Semegran and published by Mutt Press. This book was released on 2013-09-12 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recently divorced and his writing career in shambles, Simon Burchwood's life is a complete disaster. He reluctantly finds work as a computer support technician and resigns that his career as the next great American novelist will never come to fruition. When he learns that his ex-wife abruptly moves to Dallas with his children, he embarks on a crazy road trip with a nerdy coworker and a hitchhiking punk rock girl and discovers the inspiration he desperately needs for his new literary masterpiece. Take another trip with the one and only Simon Burchwood. From Kindle bestselling writer and cartoonist Scott Semegran, The Spectacular Simon Burchwood is for fans of literary fiction with a touch of magical realism and a dose of dark humor. This is the second book in the Simon Adventures Series which includes The Meteoric Rise of Simon Burchwood, The Spectacular Simon Burchwood, and Sammie & Budgie. "Simon is starting to understand something, and his luck literally changes. Semegran handles this quite deftly. We see the progress he is making in getting a grasp of what life is about." — The New Podler Review of Books What Reviewers Are Saying About Simon Burchwood: "Simon is such a character that I couldn't wait to find what he did next." — Great Books Under $5 (5 Stars) "It's pretty fun to be inside his head." — Red Adept Reviews (4.5 Stars) "Simon Burchwood Is A Genius, It's True!" — Bitsy Bling Books (4 Stars) "Cracked me up!" — Ashton the Book Blogger (4 Stars)

Download or read book Framing the Black Panthers written by Jane Rhodes and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2017-01-30 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A potent symbol of black power and radical inspiration, the Black Panthers still evoke strong emotions. This edition of Jane Rhodes's acclaimed study examines the extraordinary staying power of the Black Panthers in the American imagination. Probing the group's longtime relationship to the media, Rhodes traces how the Panthers articulated their message through symbols and tactics the mass media could not resist. By exploiting press coverage through everything from posters to public appearances to photo ops, the Panthers created a linguistic and symbolic universe as salient today as during the group's heyday. They also pioneered a sophisticated version of mass media activism that powers contemporary African American protest. Featuring a timely new preface by the author, Framing the Black Panthers is a breakthrough reconsideration of a fascinating phenomenon.

Download or read book Fantasy City written by John Hannigan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-07-20 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fantasy City analyses the post-industrialist city as a site of entertainment. By discussing examples from a wide variety of venues, including casinos, malls, heritage developments and theme parks, Hannigan questions urban entertainments economic foundations and historical background. He asks whether such areas of fantasy destroy communities or instead create new groupings of shared identities and experiences. The book is written in a student friendly way with boxed case studies for class discussion.

Download or read book The Templars written by Dan Jones and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Dan Jones is an entertainer, but also a bona fide historian. Seldom does one find serious scholarship so easy to read.” – The Times, Book of the Year A New York Times bestseller, this major new history of the knights Templar is “a fresh, muscular and compelling history of the ultimate military-religious crusading order, combining sensible scholarship with narrative swagger" – Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Jerusalem A faltering war in the middle east. A band of elite warriors determined to fight to the death to protect Christianity’s holiest sites. A global financial network unaccountable to any government. A sinister plot founded on a web of lies. Jerusalem 1119. A small group of knights seeking a purpose in the violent aftermath of the First Crusade decides to set up a new order. These are the first Knights Templar, a band of elite warriors prepared to give their lives to protect Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. Over the next two hundred years, the Templars would become the most powerful religious order of the medieval world. Their legend has inspired fervent speculation ever since. In this groundbreaking narrative history, Dan Jones tells the true story of the Templars for the first time in a generation, drawing on extensive original sources to build a gripping account of these Christian holy warriors whose heroism and alleged depravity have been shrouded in myth. The Templars were protected by the pope and sworn to strict vows of celibacy. They fought the forces of Islam in hand-to-hand combat on the sun-baked hills where Jesus lived and died, finding their nemesis in Saladin, who vowed to drive all Christians from the lands of Islam. Experts at channeling money across borders, they established the medieval world’s largest and most innovative banking network and waged private wars against anyone who threatened their interests. Then, as they faced setbacks at the hands of the ruthless Mamluk sultan Baybars and were forced to retreat to their stronghold in Cyprus, a vindictive and cash-strapped King of France set his sights on their fortune. His administrators quietly mounted a damning case against the Templars, built on deliberate lies and false testimony. On Friday October 13, 1307, hundreds of brothers were arrested, imprisoned and tortured, and the order was disbanded amid lurid accusations of sexual misconduct and heresy. They were tried by the Pope in secret proceedings and their last master was brutally tortured and burned at the stake. But were they heretics or victims of a ruthlessly repressive state? Dan Jones goes back to the sources tobring their dramatic tale, so relevant to our own times, to life in a book that is at once authoritative and compulsively readable.

Download or read book The Man in the Rockefeller Suit written by Mark Seal and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-06-02 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A real-life Talented Mr. Ripley, the unbelievable thirty-year run of a shape-shifting con man. The story of Clark Rockefeller is a stranger-than-fiction twist on the classic American success story of the self-made man-because Clark Rockefeller was totally made up. The career con man who convincingly passed himself off as Rockefeller was born in a small village in Germany. At seventeen, obsessed with getting to America, he flew into the country on dubious student visa documents and his journey of deception began. Over the next thirty years, boldly assuming a series of false identities, he moved up the social ladder through exclusive enclaves on both coasts-culminating in a stunning twelve-year marriage to a rising star businesswoman with a Harvard MBA who believed she'd wed a Rockefeller. The imposter charmed his way into exclusive clubs and financial institutions-working on Wall Street, showing off an extraordinary art collection-until his marriage ended and he was arrested for kidnapping his daughter, which exposed his past of astounding deceptions as well as a connection to the bizarre disappearance of a California couple in the mid-1980s. The story of The Man in the Rockefeller Suit is a probing and cinematic exploration of an audacious imposer-and a man determined to live the American dream by any means necessary.

Download or read book Losing the Signal written by Jacquie McNish and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015-11-05 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Canadian National Business Book Award 2016 Shortlisted for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award 2015 In 2009, BlackBerry controlled half of the US smartphone market. Today that number is less than one per cent. What went so wrong? Losing the Signal is the riveting story of a company that toppled global giants before succumbing to the ruthlessly competitive forces of Silicon Valley. This is not a conventional tale of modern business failure by fraud and greed; instead, the rise and fall of BlackBerry reveals the dangerous speed at which innovators race along the information superhighway. With unprecedented access to key players, senior executives, directors, and competitors, Losing the Signal unveils the remarkable rise of a company that started above a bagel store in a small Canadian city and went on to control half of the US smartphone market. However, at the very moment BlackBerry was ranked the world’s fastest-growing company, internal feuds and chaotic growth crippled the company as it faced its gravest test: the entry of Apple and Google into the mobile phone market. Expertly told by acclaimed journalists Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, this is an entertaining, whirlwind narrative that goes behind the scenes to reveal one of the most compelling business stories of the new century.

Download or read book Have Gun Will Travel written by Ronin Ro and published by Main Street Books. This book was released on 1999 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preeminent rap journalist Ronin Ro exposes Death Row Records: an empire built on greed, corruption, murder, and exploitation. 16 photos.

Download or read book Trumped written by John R. O’Donnell and published by Crossroad Press. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ON TOP OF THE WORLD … IN A HOUSE OF CARDS The tabloids tracked his every move. The business magazines predicted his demise. And the public couldn't get enough. But the only people privy to Donald Trump's real story were the members of his inner circle—men such as Jack O'Donnell, a top executive at Atlantic City's Trump Plaza Casino until April, 1990. For three years O'Donnell witnessed the goings-on in the House of Trump that the people only guessed at. Now he reveals what he saw. Here's the inside story of Trump's legendary tirades, his convenient forgetfulness, and the infamous Donald Trump ego. O'Donnell tells how the Plaza staff catered to Trump's personal whims, and to those of his mistress—and how the man who built the largest gambling hall in the world knew little about running a casino. From the hypocrisy, bad deals, and the monumental debt to the untold tales of Marla and Ivana, Trumped! rips the mask off the mighty Trump facade—revealing a man whose castle is about to collapse.

Download or read book The Cult of We written by Eliot Brown and published by Crown. This book was released on 2021-07-20 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER • A FINANCIAL TIMES, FORTUNE, AND NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • “The riveting, definitive account of WeWork, one of the wildest business stories of our time.”—Matt Levine, Money Stuff columnist, Bloomberg Opinion The definitive story of the rise and fall of WeWork (also depicted in the upcoming Apple TV+ series WeCrashed, starring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway), by the real-life journalists whose Wall Street Journal reporting rocked the company and exposed a financial system drunk on the elixir of Silicon Valley innovation. LONGLISTED FOR THE FINANCIAL TIMES AND MCKINSEY BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD WeWork would be worth $10 trillion, more than any other company in the world. It wasn’t just an office space provider. It was a tech company—an AI startup, even. Its WeGrow schools and WeLive residences would revolutionize education and housing. One day, mused founder Adam Neumann, a Middle East peace accord would be signed in a WeWork. The company might help colonize Mars. And Neumann would become the world’s first trillionaire. This was the vision of Neumann and his primary cheerleader, SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son. In hindsight, their ambition for the company, whose primary business was subletting desks in slickly designed offices, seems like madness. Why did so many intelligent people—from venture capitalists to Wall Street elite—fall for the hype? And how did WeWork go so wrong? In little more than a decade, Neumann transformed himself from a struggling baby clothes salesman into the charismatic, hard-partying CEO of a company worth $47 billion—on paper. With his long hair and feel-good mantras, the six-foot-five Israeli transplant looked the part of a messianic truth teller. Investors swooned, and billions poured in. Neumann dined with the CEOs of JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, entertaining a parade of power brokers desperate to get a slice of what he was selling: the country’s most valuable startup, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and a generation-defining moment. Soon, however, WeWork was burning through cash faster than Neumann could bring it in. From his private jet, sometimes clouded with marijuana smoke, he scoured the globe for more capital. Then, as WeWork readied a Hail Mary IPO, it all fell apart. Nearly $40 billion of value vaporized in one of corporate America’s most spectacular meltdowns. Peppered with eye-popping, never-before-reported details, The Cult of We is the gripping story of careless and often absurd people—and the financial system they have made.

Download or read book Spectacular Skyscrapers written by Meish Goldish and published by Bearport Publishing. This book was released on 2011-08-01 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Identifies the most spectacular skyscrapers in the world and explains their incredible features through size comparisons and photos.

Download or read book Last Train to Paradise written by Les Standiford and published by Crown. This book was released on 2003-08-05 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fast-paced and gripping true account of the extraordinary construction and spectacular demise of the Key West Railroad—one of the greatest engineering feats ever undertaken, destroyed in one fell swoop by the strongest storm ever to hit U.S. shores. In 1904, the brilliant and driven entrepreneur Henry Flagler, partner to John D. Rockefeller, dreamed of a railway connecting the island of Key West to the Florida mainland, crossing a staggering 153 miles of open ocean—an engineering challenge beyond even that of the Panama Canal. Many considered the project impossible, but build it they did. The railroad stood as a magnificent achievement for more than twenty-two years, heralded as “the Eighth Wonder of the World,” until its total destruction in 1935's deadly storm of the century. In Last Train to Paradise, Standiford celebrates this crowning achievement of Gilded Age ambition, bringing to life a sweeping tale of the powerful forces of human ingenuity colliding with the even greater forces of nature’s wrath.

Download or read book Circle of Greed written by Patrick Dillon and published by Crown. This book was released on 2011-04-12 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Circle of Greed is the epic story of the rise and fall of Bill Lerach, once the leading class action lawyer in America and now a convicted felon. For more than two decades, Lerach threatened, shook down and sued top Fortune 500 companies, including Disney, Apple, Time Warner, and—most famously—Enron. Now, the man who brought corporate moguls to their knees has fallen prey to the same corrupt impulses of his enemies, and is paying the price by serving time in federal prison. If there was ever a modern Greek tragedy about a man and his times, about corporate arrogance and illusions and the scorched-earth tactics to not only counteract corporate America but to beat it at its own game, Bill Lerach's story is it.

Download or read book The Spectacular Modern Woman written by Liz Conor and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2004-07-16 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Liz Conor explores the role of media technology in the emergence of the 'modern woman' in the 1920s. At once liberating & confining, the media images of women set standards of appearance that were closely tied to ideas about the roles a woman could fulfill, from city girl to mannekin to flapper.

Download or read book Retail Disruptors written by Jan-Benedict Steenkamp and published by Kogan Page Publishers. This book was released on 2018-10-03 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of hard discounters like Aldi and Lidl has been monumental. Explore the very real threat they pose to traditional retailers and brand manufacturers and what you can learn from their growth. Hard discounters are stores that sell a limited selection of consumer-packaged goods and perishables - typically fewer than 2,000 Stock Keeping Units - for prices that are usually 50-60% lower than national brands. The best-known hard discounters are Aldi and Lidl, but global brands include Trader Joe's, EuroSpin, Biedronka, Netto and Leader Price. Their rise has been monumental; they have irrevocably changed the face of retail in Europe and Australia and are making steady inroads into the US. Retail Disruptors is the first book that explores this upheaval, providing expert insight into the business models of the leading hard discounters, and what mainstream retailers and brand manufacturers can do to remain competitive in the face of disruption. Meticulously researched by two of the leading authorities in retail strategy, private labels, branding, and hard discounting, Retail Disruptors is essential reading for all brand manufacturers and retailers who want to retain the competitive edge.