Over A Barrel

With high hopes, Daphne Ballinger lands her dream job at The New York Times. But it's not long until writing about weddings becomes a painful reminder of her own failed romance, and her love of the city slowly sours as well. Is it time to give up the Big Apple for her small hometown of Appleton? When her eccentric Aunt Dee passes away and leaves a sizeable estate to Daphne, going back home is an easy choice. What isn’t easy is coming to terms with the downright odd clauses written into the will. Daphne only stands to inherit the estate if she agrees to her aunt's very specific posthumous terms -- personal and professional. And if she fails to comply, the sprawling old Victorian house shall be bequeathed to . . . Aunt Dee’s cats. And if Daphne thinks that’s odd, wait until she finds out an array of secrets about Aunt Dee's life, and how imperfect circumstances can sometimes lead to God's perfect timing.

Longtime commodities trader Raymond J. Learsy lifts the veil of the Mideast oil cartel, showing how OPEC manipulates the oil markets and destabilizes the world's economy. With refreshing candor and an insider's perspective, Learsy explains how OPEC: twists bogus perceptions of oil scarcity to hike prices and gain political power is compromised by Islamist terrorist connections that fuel anti-American hatred with dollars from our own wallets keeps Third-World nations in abject poverty despite their rich oil deposits and became the de facto master of Iraq's newly liberated oil fields A sharp, sweeping survey of OPEC's methods of economic dominance, this book explains how to bust the Mideast oil cartel and chart our own course toward energy independence.

How a small family company in the Finger Lakes became one of the most important wine producers in the United States, only to be taken down by corporate greed and mismanagement. In 1880, Walter Stephen Taylor, a cooper’s son, started a commercial grape juice company in New York’s Finger Lakes region. Two years later, wine production was added, and by the 1920s, the Taylor Wine Company was firmly established. Walter Taylor’s three sons carefully guided the company through Prohibition and beyond, making it the most important winery in the Northeast and profoundly affecting the people and community of Hammondsport, where the company was headquartered. In the 1960s, the Taylor family took the company public. Ranked sixth in domestic wine production and ripe for corporate takeover, the company was sold to Coca-Cola in 1977. Three more changes of corporate ownership followed until, in 1995, this once-dynamic and important wine producer was obliterated, tearing apart the local economy and changing a way of life that had lasted for nearly a century. Drawing on archival research as well as interviews with many of the principal players, Thomas Pellechia skillfully traces the economic dynamism of the Finger Lakes wine region, the passion and ingenuity of the Taylor family, and the shortsighted corporate takeover scenario that took down a once-proud American family company. In addition to providing important lessons for business innovators, Over a Barrel>/i> is a cautionary tale for a wine region that is repeating its formative history. Thomas Pellechia is an independent journalist and writer who previously produced wine in the Finger Lakes and operated a wine shop in Manhattan. He is the author of Wine: The 8,000-Year-Old Story of the Wine Trade, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Starting and Running a Winery, and Timeless Bounty: Food and Wine in New York’s Finger Lakes. He lives in Hammondsport, New York.

The United States is highly dependent on foreign oil. Well over half of the oil and petroleum products consumed in America--approximately 12 million barrels per day, or more than 600 gallons for every man, woman, and child each year--now come from abroad. And the U.S. government projects that the level of imports will only continue to rise, reaching between 16 and 21 million barrels per day by 2025. What precisely are the costs of U.S. foreign oil dependence? Unfortunately, no one has yet offered a satisfactory answer to this vital question. As a result, the costs to the United States of its dependence on oil from abroad have gone largely unrecognized and, in fact, are much greater than most people realize. Some costs, like the annual bill for oil imports--and, by reflection, the price that motorists pay at the pump or the size of homeowners' heating oil bills--are obvious and quantifiable. A number of others, however, are not so apparent or easy to measure. For example, it is difficult to put a price tag on the costs of coddling oil-rich authoritarian regimes at the expense of promoting representative government, human rights, and other important values. This book seeks to remedy this oversight by providing the first comprehensive analysis of the costs--both economic and policy-related--of U.S. foreign oil dependence and how they might be reduced. It shows that since the 1970s, the economic costs alone have run into the trillions of dollars. Successive administrations have tended to neglect the opportunities at home to reduce these costs by limiting demand. Instead, they have emphasized foreign and military policies that have proven both highly expensive and largely unsuccessful. One positive conclusion the author draws is that the opportunities for reducing oil consumption remain largely unexploited and the costs of U.S. foreign oil dependence can still be substantially reduced at relatively little expense. At least as important, however, will be rethinking and revising the expensive foreign, security, and military policies and commitments that have developed around U.S. foreign oil dependence over the past three decades.