Fixers

The shocking, definitive account of the lawyers and media tycoons who enabled the rise of Donald Trump, featuring new revelations from a Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal team With his blunt-force fame and the myths he’s propagated about himself, Donald Trump has always moved in a world of gossip barons, crooked lawyers, and porn stars. But when he became the Republican nominee for the presidency in 2016, all of these characters crawled out from the underbelly of Trump’s stardom and stumbled onto the global stage with him. In The Fixers, Joe Palazzolo and Michael Rothfeld have produced a deeply reported and exquisitely drawn portrait of that world, full of secret phone calls, hidden texts, and desperate deals, unearthing the practice of “catch and kill” by which Trump surrogates paid hush money to cover up his affairs, and detailing Trump’s historic relationship with his fixers—from his early, influential relationship with Roy Cohn to his reliance on Michael Cohen, National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. It traces the arc of their interactions from the 1970s through the 2016 campaign and beyond. It is a distinctly American saga that navigates the worlds of reality TV, cash-for-trash tabloids, single-shingle law shops, celebrity bashes, high-end real estate, pornography, and politics. The characters and settings of this book are part of a vulgar circus that crisscrosses the country, from New York to L.A. to D.C. Terrifying, darkly comic, and compulsively readable, The Fixers is an epic political adventure in which greed, corruption, lust, and ambition collide, and that leads, ultimately, to the White House. Advance praise for The Fixers “Of the dozens of books chronicling Donald Trump’s presidency, The Fixers is destined to sit atop the pile. It has everything you look for in a political page-turner: Colorful characters, intrigue, sex, corruption and—unlike much of the Trump canon—meticulous, factual reporting by two ace reporters. What a read!”—John Carreyrou, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Blood

Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickling are virtually unknown outside of Hollywood and little-remembered even there, but as General Manager and Head of Publicity for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, they lorded over all the stars in Hollywood's golden age from the 1920s through the 1940s--including legends like Garbo, Dietrich, Gable and Garland. When MGM stars found themselves in trouble, it was Eddie and Howard who took care of them--solved their problems, hid their crimes, and kept their secrets. They were "the Fixers." At a time when image meant everything and the stars were worth millions to the studios that owned them, Mannix and Strickling were the most important men at MGM. Through a complex web of contacts in every arena, from reporters and doctors to corrupt police and district attorneys, they covered up some of the most notorious crimes and scandals in Hollywood history, keeping stars out of jail and, more importantly, their names out of the papers. They handled problems as diverse as the murder of Paul Bern (husband of MGM's biggest star, Jean Harlow), the studio-directed drug addictions of Judy Garland, the murder of Ted Healy (creator of The Three Stooges) at the hands of Wallace Beery, and arranging for an unmarried Loretta Young to adopt her own child--a child fathered by a married Clark Gable. Through exhaustive research and interviews with contemporaries, this is the never-before-told story of Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickling. The dual biography describes how a mob-related New Jersey laborer and the quiet son of a grocer became the most powerful men at the biggest studio in the world.

From the bestselling author of The Inheritance Games comes a pulse-pounding YA thriller full of power plays, romantic tension, and sinister plots, perfect for fans of Elite and One of Us is Lying. When Tess Kendrick is sent to stay with her older sister in Washington D.C., she has no idea that the famed Ivy Kendrick is the capital's number one "fixer," who helps powerful people make their scandal disappear . . . for a price. Soon after Tess enrolls in the prestigious Hardwicke School, she unwittingly finds herself following in Ivy's footsteps. Tess never thought she and Ivy had much in common, but when her new friends at school need help, she discovers that her talents quickly make her Hardwicke's own go-to high school fixer. Secrets pile up as each sister lives a double life--until their worlds come crashing together in a conspiracy that reaches from the halls of Hardwicke to Capitol Hill. Suddenly, there is much more on the line than good grades, money, or relationships. The odds are stacked against Tess, and the price for this fix might be more than she can pay . . . Don't miss any of these other books by Jennifer Lynn Barnes: The Naturals The Naturals Killer Instinct All In Bad Blood Twelve Raised by Wolves: Raised by Wolves Taken by Storm Trial by Fire The Squad Perfect Cover Killer Spirit Tattoo: Tattoo Fate The Fixer Nobody Every Other Day Platinum Golden

This is the story of a seductive idea. Over the past century, the potential of new technology to solve social dilemmas has captivated modern culture. From apps that encourage physical activity to airport scanners meant to prevent terrorism, the concept that clever innovation can improve society is irresistible, but faith in such technological fixes is seldom questioned. Where did this idea come from, what makes it so appealing, and how does it endanger our future? Techno-Fixers traces the source of modern confidence in technology to engineering hubris, radical utopian movements, science fiction fanzines, policy-makers' soundbites, corporate marketing, and optimistic consumer culture from the turn of the twentieth century until today. Sean Johnston demonstrates that, through the promotion of prominent government scientists, technocrats, entrepreneurs, and popular media, modern invention became the favourite tool for addressing human problems and society's ills. Nonetheless, when it comes to assessing the success of cigarette filters as the solution to safe smoking, or DDT as the answer for agricultural productivity, the evidence is sobering. Cautioning that the rhetoric of technological fixes seldom matches reality, Johnston examines how employing innovation to bypass traditional methods can foster as many problems as it solves. A critical examination of modern faith in technology, Techno-Fixers evaluates past mistakes, present implications, and future opportunities for innovating societies.

Mind Fixers tells the history of psychiatry’s quest to understand the biological basis of mental illness and asks where we need to go from here. In Mind Fixers, Anne Harrington, author of The Cure Within, explores psychiatry’s repeatedly frustrated struggle to understand mental disorder in biomedical terms. She shows how the stalling of early twentieth century efforts in this direction allowed Freudians and social scientists to insist, with some justification, that they had better ways of analyzing and fixing minds. But when the Freudians overreached, they drove psychiatry into a state of crisis that a new “biological revolution” was meant to alleviate. Harrington shows how little that biological revolution had to do with breakthroughs in science, and why the field has fallen into a state of crisis in our own time. Mind Fixers makes clear that psychiatry’s waxing and waning biological enthusiasms have been shaped not just by developments in the clinic and lab, but also by a surprising range of social factors, including immigration, warfare, grassroots activism, and assumptions about race and gender. Government programs designed to empty the state mental hospitals, acrid rivalries between different factions in the field, industry profit mongering, consumerism, and an uncritical media have all contributed to the story as well. In focusing particularly on the search for the biological roots of schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar disorder, Harrington underscores the high human stakes for the millions of people who have sought medical answers for their mental suffering. This is not just a story about doctors and scientists, but about countless ordinary people and their loved ones. A clear-eyed, evenhanded, and yet passionate tour de force, Mind Fixers recounts the past and present struggle to make mental illness a biological problem in order to lay the groundwork for creating a better future, both for those who suffer and for those whose job it is to care for them.

James B. Stewart, bestselling author of Den of Thieves, raves that Fixers “is a hugely entertaining novel that steps boldly into the most perplexing and enduring mystery of the financial crisis: why its perpetrators were not only not punished, but rewarded by the government.” In Fixers, Michael M. Thomas, the New York Times-bestselling novelist and longtime financial insider, has crafted an exhilarating thriller of a top conspiracy between Wall Street and the White House. On a winter’s night, a well-heeled “cultural consultant” named Chauncey Suydam gets a call from the head of the world’s most powerful investment bank, who says a financial crisis is brewing and has a plan to insulate Wall Street from the fallout—and keep people such as himself out of jail. His mission for Chauncey is simple: to help funnel millions of dollars to a presidential candidate espousing change, in exchange for a few Wall Street–friendly names in the resultant administration. Yet as Chauncey wends his way among the nation’s political elite and becomes addicted to his masterful manipulations, he sees with greater clarity than ever how decisions really get made—on Wall Street and in Washington. And as the magnitude of the fix he’s perpetrating begins to sink in, its poisonous affect on Main Street becomes apparent, and his addiction to his masterful manipulations evident, Chauncey starts to have second thoughts. Is it too late?

A guide to finding, screening, hiring and working with fixers and guides for international field research projects.

"In this book, Zrinka Stahuljak issues a challenge to scholars working in medieval studies to account for the history of translation, and to experts in translation studies to read the work of medievalists. Focusing on the term "fixer," she unpacks modern uses of the words "interpreter" and "translator" and restores them to their premodern origins: as an active agent who performed a wide range of tasks, as insider informant, local guide, broker of knowledge, and transmitter of art. For Stahuljak, the fixer was a multifunctional intermediary, not a mere translator or interpreter (in the restricted modern sense), but an enabler, facilitator, and mediator, the engine driving the exchange of multiple linguistic, social, cultural, and topographic forms of knowledge. She proposes a paradigmatic shift for both medieval literary history and for the history of translation to confront and interrogate each other in their core disciplinary practices, which promote national, political, and colonial agendas masked as neutrality. Surveying a variety of texts from 1250 to 1500, including crusade treatises and travel writings, accounts of pilgrims and spies, chronicles and romances in both prose and verse, and traversing an impressive range of languages, including Latin, Middle French, German, Italian, and Spanish, Stahuljak asks both medievalists and translation studies scholars to reconsider their assumptions and methods as a way to reconstruct a premodern, precolonial, inclusive world literature"--