!1: Now is the time RICHARD SCARRY'S BUSYTOWN STORYBOOKS: HILDA HIPPO'S FAVORITE STORIES (The Busy World of Richard Scarry) Order Today!
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Date Created : Nov 10, 2010 16:42:13
From baking cookies, to exploring a haunted house, to making abeautiful valentine for Lowly Worm, Hilda Hippo is one of a kind!Everyone turns to Hilda for help because she always knows what to do.But as readers will find out in the eight fun-filled adventures in thisstorybook, things often don't go as planned. It takes a special hippo tomake everything right again. That's why Hilda's favorite stories are sureto become yours, too!
!1: Now is the time Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc.How the Working Poor Became Big Business Order Today!
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Over All Rating Reviews : Great Deal : $12.95
Date Created : Oct 28, 2010 00:51:21
For most people, the Great Crash of 2008 has meant troubling times. Not so for those in the flourishing poverty industry, for whom the economic woes spell an opportunity to expand and grow. These mercenary entrepreneurs have taken advantage of an era of deregulation to devise high-priced products to sell to the credit-hungry working poor, including the instant tax refund and the payday loan. In the process they've created an industry larger than the casino business and have proved that pawnbrokers and check cashers, if they dream big enough, can grow very rich off those with thin wallets.
Broke, USA is Gary Rivlin's riveting report from the economic fringes. From the annual meeting of the national check cashers association in Las Vegas to a tour of the foreclosure-riddled neighborhoods of Dayton, Ohio, here is a subprime Fast Food Nation featuring an unforgettable cast of characters and memorable scenes. Rivlin profiles players like a former small-town Tennessee debt collector whose business offering cash advances to the working poor has earned him a net worth in the hundreds of millions, and legendary Wall Street dealmaker Sandy Weill, who rode a subprime loan business into control of the nation's largest bank. Rivlin parallels their stories with the tale of those committed souls fighting back against the major corporations, chain franchises, and newly hatched enterprises that fleece the country's hardworking waitresses, warehouse workers, and mall clerks.
Timely, shocking, and powerful, Broke, USA offers a much-needed look at why our country is in a financial mess and gives a voice to the millions of ordinary Americans left devastated in the wake of the economic collapse.
!1: Best Buy So after reading this book it definitely solidified what I already knew, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. I noticed that lately "Capitalists" no longer want to be known as "Capitalists" they want to be called "Free Enterprise". I like any other love profit but there is profit and there is OBSCENE profit. Mr. Rivlin goes into this kind of profit. He shows you how simple men who came from nothing made their American dream come true. In any book this fairy tale would be the best part of the book. The difference here is that the men in this book didn't create something that they sold and bought mansions from the profit. These Free Enterprisers just stepped on the necks of people who were already in trouble. I realize now that America won't change, we will always have people who will refuse to understand what APR is or what accumulated fees do to the final outcome of a loan. In my opinion we have to start with third graders and as they go through each successive grade we teach them more and more about money. This way when they grow up they will be able to steer clear of the parasites Mr. Rivlin describes in his book.
One thing you will see is that these parasites in their descriptions of their business drape themselves with the American flag (Lee Greenwood's "Proud to be an American" playing softly in the background). Talking about how America allows them to make profit while creating jobs and providing services to people who have no other option. I realize that some see America this way but what ever happened to looking out for your brother?
Anyway this book is well worth it along with others but I have to say it is depressing especially since my wife who started at Associates in Irving was a part of this. She only processed papers but she would see what was happening. Being from Germany she thought it was normal American Business Processes. Did she ever wake up. on Sale!
!1: Now is the time An Old-fashioned Girl - Louisa M. Alcott Order Today!
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Over All Rating Reviews : Great Deal :
Date Created : Oct 14, 2010 07:35:10
"IT 'S time to go to the station, Tom."
"Come on, then."
"Oh, I 'm not going; it 's too wet. Should n't have a crimp left if I went out such a day as this; and I want to look nice when Polly comes."
"You don't expect me to go and bring home a strange girl alone, do you?" And Tom looked as much alarmed as if his sister had proposed to him to escort the wild woman of Australia.
"Of course I do. It 's your place to go and get her; and if you was n't a bear, you 'd like it."
"Well, I call that mean! I supposed I 'd got to go; but you said you 'd go, too. Catch me bothering about your friends another time! No, sir! " And Tom rose from the sofa with an air of indignant resolution, the impressive effect of which was somewhat damaged by a tousled head, and the hunched appearance of his garments generally.
"Now, don't be cross; and I 'll get mamma to let you have that horrid Ned Miller, that you are so fond of, come and make you a visit after Polly 's gone," said Fanny, hoping to soothe his ruffled feelings.
"How long is she going to stay?" demanded Tom, making his toilet by a promiscuous shake.
Over All Rating Reviews : Great Deal : $1.00
Date Created : Sep 16, 2010 23:21:07
In this spare and mesmerizing debut work of fiction, Christine Lincoln takes us inside the hearts and minds of African Americans whose lives unfold against a vividly evoked Southern rural landscape. As they navigate between the old and the new, between youth and adulthood, they find themselves choosing between the comforts of what they trust unquestioningly and the fearsome excitements of what they might come to know.
An abandoned seven-year-old girl living inside a fantasy of invisibility . . . a young woman weighing the life she’s expected to want against the freedom that will transport her to the unexpected . . . a boy whose world is both expanded and contracted by stories he hears from a beautiful stranger—the characters who inhabit this profoundly moving collection are brought to life with a remarkably light touch and an extraordinary depth of insight and emotion.
Christine Lincoln possesses a gift of great originality. In Sap Rising, she proves herself one of those rare writers whose work transcends its own rich particularity to speak with stunning clarity to the most fundamental elements of the human experience.
!1: Best Buy Christine Lincoln�s debut novel, Sap Rising, is rooted in the mystical, rural Grandville where the tales of its townspeople are captured in 12 intertwining short stories. The sagas are told from varying viewpoints: fathers, grandmothers, young boys, nosey neighbors, teenaged girls, etc. and are rooted in themes of self-discovery, escapism, and hope.
All of the stories are symbolic and appealing, but a few that really struck this reviewer were the title story, �Sap Rising� and �A Very Close Conspiracy�. In �Sap Rising�, we meet a very restless young woman, Ebbie Pinder, who runs away from the mediocrity of life as a homemaker in Grandville to the bright lights of the big city. She returns home alone and with her child, Pontella, in �Like Dove Wings� and Pontella�s plight is recounted in �A Hook Will Sometimes Keep You�. In �A Very Close Conspiracy�, we meet the town drunk, Hiron Fuller, who retraces his life, loves, and views as a black man as he succumbs to a fatal injury.
The author demonstrates her depth and range of character development by taking the reader deep inside the psyches of Hiron, a man worn down by racism and poverty, the self-doubting Pontella who was abandoned by her mother, Ebbie, and the painful episodes of Boag�s and Cinny�s coming-of-age transformation. She paints a picture of the human condition and adds insight and emotion into each story. Ms. Lincoln is a great storyteller with a style akin to J. California Cooper�s yet distinctively her own. She has made her mark with a successful debut � I am looking forward to her next release.
Reviewed by Phyllis APOOO BookClub, The Nubian Circle Book Club on Sale!
±1±: Now is the time The Five Thousand and One Nights (European Short Stories, No. 4) (European Short Stories (Seattle, Wash.), No. 4.) Order Today!
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Over All Rating Reviews : Great Deal : $8.49
Date Created : Aug 19, 2010 19:15:13
On holiday with her laptop-obsessed husband, Myra undergoes a quiet transformation. The Australian landscape (even in paintings) seems to have an almost miraculous effect on her, and when they go on a bus tour of the Blue Mountains, she finds herself suddenly broaching the taboo subject--Bridget Cashel, her husband's mistress. Penelope Lively limns the tense moment: "Myra listened to her own words with astonishment and satisfaction. George too listened, apparently. His eyes leapt to life. Myra saw surprise, dismay and a process of rapid thought." By the end of the ride, alas, reality returns, and she sees they will not again speak so openly. "What had passed between them today would remain for ever beyond the Blue Mountains, potent and powerful. She felt a touch sorry for Bridget Cashel. And possibly for George." A trainee at a local manor is increasingly drawn to the Medusa Fountain. Though he knows it's against the rules, one day he joins the nymphs, a transgression that modulates unavailingly into a shocking conclusion--the daring subtlety of Lively's art turning a fable into a tragedy. Another character, stuck in Slovenia following a conference, suddenly realizes "there are realities which for most of us are beyond imagination." Not beyond this author's, however.
The Five Thousand and One Nights is a collection of quiet wit. Its author tends to view her characters sympathetically, especially as they cope with change and the passage of time. The title story is more assertive in mode, and contains a very modern Sultan and Scheherazade. At 42, she is still narrating, though the Sultan has recently found her tales more addling than enjoyable: "You're using some rather confusing words these days, you know. What does sensibility mean? And I get muddled about the settings. Where's Devonshire?" It takes the narrative of a certain Mrs. Dalloway to make him fight back, getting in on the story game with some action- and violence-packed prose. This is fairy-tale revisionism at its best and reads as if Lively delighted in its creation. It is the most irresistible, and exhilarating, story of this fine collection.
±1±: Now is the time Down Yonder, Florida: Tales of the Big Ol' Sandbar Order Today!
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Over All Rating Reviews : Great Deal : $11.98
Date Created : Aug 05, 2010 20:00:08
Florida isn't just one big, paved-over shopping mall of designer gowns and ticky-tacky tourist treats. The fabled "Sunshine State" (Flarda, as the Crackers call it) still calls the romantic, the adventurous, the explorer, even the renegade seeking the peace and quiet of the gently washing surf or the mystery of the wooded swamp. Although rapidly dwindling under the flowing lava advance of asphalt and concrete, the natural and truest Florida can still be found and enjoyed and appreciated like it was by the ancients. These stories from the mythical, "Down Yonder, Florida," will get readers in touch with the magical, mystical, enchanting and - most of all - welcoming "Land of Flowers."
±1±: Now is the time Yalta Conference 1945 - Various Order Today!
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Date Created : Jul 08, 2010 17:19:05
(a) the United Nations as they existed on 8 Feb., 1945; and
(b) Such of the Associated Nations as have declared war on the common enemy by 1 March, 1945. (For this purpose, by the term "Associated Nations" was meant the eight Associated Nations and Turkey.) When the conference on world organization is held, the delegates of the United Kingdom and United State of America will support a proposal to admit to original membership two Soviet Socialist Republics, i.e., the Ukraine and White Russia.
3. That the United States Government, on behalf of the three powers, should consult the Government of China and the French Provisional Government in regard to decisions taken at the present conference concerning the proposed world organization.
4. That the text of the invitation to be issued to all the nations which would take part in the United Nations conference should be as follows:
"The Government of the United States of America, on behalf of itself and of the Governments of the United Kingdom, the Union of Soviet Socialistic Republics and the Republic of China and of the Provisional Government of the French Republic invite the Government of -------- to send representatives to a conference to be held on 25 April, 1945, or soon thereafter , at San Francisco, in the United States of America, to prepare a charter for a general international organization for the maintenance of international peace and security.
±1±: Now is the time The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It Order Today!
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Over All Rating Reviews : Great Deal : $13.97
Date Created : Jun 24, 2010 22:21:58
“Beware of geeks bearing formulas.” --Warren Buffett
In March of 2006, the world’s richest men sipped champagne in an opulent New York hotel. They were preparing to compete in a poker tournament with million-dollar stakes, but those numbers meant nothing to them. They were accustomed to risking billions.
At the card table that night was Peter Muller, an eccentric, whip-smart whiz kid who’d studied theoretical mathematics at Princeton and now managed a fabulously successful hedge fund called PDT…when he wasn’t playing his keyboard for morning commuters on the New York subway. With him was Ken Griffin, who as an undergraduate trading convertible bonds out of his Harvard dorm room had outsmarted the Wall Street pros and made money in one of the worst bear markets of all time. Now he was the tough-as-nails head of Citadel Investment Group, one of the most powerful money machines on earth. There too were Cliff Asness, the sharp-tongued, mercurial founder of the hedge fund AQR, a man as famous for his computer-smashing rages as for his brilliance, and Boaz Weinstein, chess life-master and king of the credit default swap, who while juggling billion worth of positions for Deutsche Bank found time for frequent visits to Las Vegas with the famed MIT card-counting team.
On that night in 2006, these four men and their cohorts were the new kings of Wall Street. Muller, Griffin, Asness, and Weinstein were among the best and brightest of a new breed, the quants. Over the prior twenty years, this species of math whiz --technocrats who make billions not with gut calls or fundamental analysis but with formulas and high-speed computers-- had usurped the testosterone-fueled, kill-or-be-killed risk-takers who’d long been the alpha males the world’s largest casino. The quants believed that a dizzying, indecipherable-to-mere-mortals cocktail of differential calculus, quantum physics, and advanced geometry held the key to reaping riches from the financial markets. And they helped create a digitized money-trading machine that could shift billions around the globe with the click of a mouse.
Few realized that night, though, that in creating this unprecedented machine, men like Muller, Griffin, Asness and Weinstein had sowed the seeds for history’s greatest financial disaster.
Drawing on unprecedented access to these four number-crunching titans, The Quants tells the inside story of what they thought and felt in the days and weeks when they helplessly watched much of their net worth vaporize – and wondered just how their mind-bending formulas and genius-level IQ’s had led them so wrong, so fast. Had their years of success been dumb luck, fool’s gold, a good run that could come to an end on any given day? What if The Truth they sought -- the secret of the markets -- wasn’t knowable? Worse, what if there wasn’t any Truth?
In The Quants, Scott Patterson tells the story not just of these men, but of Jim Simons, the reclusive founder of the most successful hedge fund in history; Aaron Brown, the quant who used his math skills to humiliate Wall Street’s old guard at their trademark game of Liar’s Poker, and years later found himself with a front-row seat to the rapid emergence of mortgage-backed securities; and gadflies and dissenters such as Paul Wilmott, Nassim Taleb, and Benoit Mandelbrot.
With the immediacy of today’s NASDAQ close and the timeless power of a Greek tragedy, The Quants is at once a masterpiece of explanatory journalism, a gripping tale of ambition and hubris…and an ominous warning about Wall Street’s future.
±1±: Best Buy Lofty Mathematical principles applied to finances and real-life can make for exciting reading. First example: Ariel Rubinstein had been toiling through an article on how to apply mathematics to games; and at length the economist found himself, as the sharpness of his focus waned, seeking respite from the tedium in Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Purloined Letter." But the economist's work, it seemed, wouldn't let him rest. For in the middle of the detective story, Poe launched into an analysis of mathematics and game theory! Rubinstein read in Poe:
"I knew one about eight years of age, whose success at guessing in the game of `even and odd' attracted universal admiration. This game is simple, and is played with marbles. One player holds in his hand a number of these toys, and demands of another whether that number is even or odd. If the guess is right, the guesser wins one; if wrong, he loses one. "The boy to whom I allude won all the marbles of the school. Of course he had some principle of guessing; and this lay in mere observation and admeasurement of the astuteness of his opponents. For example, an arrant simpleton is his opponent, and, holding up his closed hand, asks, `are they even or odd?' Our schoolboy replies, `odd,' and loses; but upon the second trial he wins, for he then says to himself, `the simpleton had them even upon the first trial, and his amount of cunning is just sufficient to make him have them odd upon the second; I will therefore guess odd;' -- he guesses odd, and wins. "Now, with a simpleton a degree above the first, he would have reasoned thus: `This fellow finds that in the first instance I guessed odd, and, in the second, he will propose to himself, upon the first impulse, a simple variation from even to odd, as did the first simpleton; but then a second thought will suggest that this is too simple a variation, and finally he will decide upon putting it even as before. I will therefore guess even;' -- he guesses even, and wins.
"Now this mode of reasoning in the schoolboy, whom his fellows termed `lucky,' -- what, in its last analysis, is it?' `It is merely,' I said, `an identification of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent.'"
Later he found that the mathematics within game theory prevailed. There was no statistically significant difference between how often each player won (SN: 7-08).
Second Example is in the fast-paced story of "The Quants," Wall Street Journal reporter Patterson explores the role of mathematicians behind the financial crash of 2008. The tale follows investors who are called the Quants forasmuch as they use complicated abstract mathematics and computers to gain millions of dollars through the applying the results to the market.
This true-life plot is fascinating and simple to understand, however some financial terminology can be a bit difficult to comprehend, yet the story of applied mathematical high-jinks and excessive prosperity along with the fast rise and upcoming fall is absolutely captivating.
"For the most part I do the thing which my own nature drives me to do" (Albert Einstein). on Sale!
±1±: Now is the time The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine Order Today!
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Over All Rating Reviews : Great Deal : $13.94
Date Created : Jun 16, 2010 05:44:45
The #1 New York Times bestseller: a brilliant account—character-rich and darkly humorous—of how the U.S. economy was driven over the cliff. When the crash of the U. S. stock market became public knowledge in the fall of 2008, it was already old news. The real crash, the silent crash, had taken place over the previous year, in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn’t shine, and the SEC doesn’t dare, or bother, to tread: the bond and real estate derivative markets where geeks invent impenetrable securities to profit from the misery of lower- and middle-class Americans who can’t pay their debts. The smart people who understood what was or might be happening were paralyzed by hope and fear; in any case, they weren’t talking.
The crucial question is this: Who understood the risk inherent in the assumption of ever-rising real estate prices, a risk compounded daily by the creation of those arcane, artificial securities loosely based on piles of doubtful mortgages? Michael Lewis turns the inquiry on its head to create a fresh, character-driven narrative brimming with indignation and dark humor, a fitting sequel to his #1 best-selling Liar’s Poker. Who got it right? he asks. Who saw the real estate market for the black hole it would become, and eventually made billions of dollars from that perception? And what qualities of character made those few persist when their peers and colleagues dismissed them as Chicken Littles? Out of this handful of unlikely—really unlikely—heroes, Lewis fashions a story as compelling and unusual as any of his earlier bestsellers, proving yet again that he is the finest and funniest chronicler of our times.
±1±: Best Buy Mr. Lewis capably argues that our economic mess is the fault of financial dealings so specialized that nobody bothered to actually think about what was happening; nobody actually read the fine print. Because the best and brightest are tasked with simply making money, the system got turned into a feedback loop that exploded; leaving us about a trillion dollars in the hole. The genius of the book is that Mr. Lewis demonstrates how and why nobody but a few wise traders had the incentive or desire to do anything about the problem, which was essentially that some very smart people created worthless assets that they convinced the entire investment banking system to purchase in quantities that stagger the mind. Mr. Lewis invites us to ponder the incentives that make our markets and economy work.
A good argument can be made that our political system is headed into the same trap. The elected officials and we, the electorate, do not understand the complexities of government and modern global politics. Just as it took a gentleman with Asperger's to hone in on the mind-numbing text of a CDO that nobody else read, we have a Congress that passed a hopelessly complex health-care reform bill and I am confident that when that mess blows up we will be reading a story written by one of the very few that actually powered through the full text of the bill that the real decisionmakers refused to read. We insist on simplifying complex issues without reaching for an understanding. By so doing we risk building a political structure that is as flimsy as was the financial structure of the asset-backed securities markets.
The book did a great job of explaining the complexities of high-finance. Obviously everything is clearer in hindsight. I'm no Einstein, but I can reach for any number of books that can help me wrap my mind around his ideas. True genius sees the truth before everyone else and that was the message of this book. We don't all have to be experts, but we need to insure that there are experts working for us and not for themselves. There are people out there who understand exactly what is wrong with the world and we need to provide them with incentives to share their observations and prevent the rest of us from driving off a cliff.
Every voter in any industrialized democracy should have a duty and obligation to learn what happened with the CDO debacle, we cannot hope to prevent a future bubble if we do not take the lessons from this experience. Fortunately, the government was able to step in and prevent credit markets from completely breaking down--it seems, to this reviewer at least, that the economy was not dealt a fatal blow, but how close we came should be the focus and study of every concerned citizen. on Sale!
