The Rise And Fall Of A Construction Giant

The Rise and Fall of a Construction Giant: The History, People, and Stories of CFW Construction is a historical record, the chronicle of an era, a compelling story told by the man ultimately at its center.

Determined to bring utilities and small-building construction to rural areas, William R. Carter joined with Dick Farrar and John Williams to form the CFW Construction Company in Fayetteville, Tennessee, 1952. Named for the partners, CFW expanded into building plants, roads, tunnels, bridges, and more. Within forty years the company grew to five offices, 14 subsidiaries, a thousand pieces of equipment, and a proud workforce of more than 1,500 across a dozen states. Then came the scandals. By the end of the 20thcentury, CFW was gone, and the lives of everybody had changed. Dick Farrar’s son was there for the best and the worst. Now he’s written the definitive history, not just about a company, but a region and its people. With nearly a hundred restored photos, most in color, Farrar, Jr., tells the true story, naming names and documenting the details. The Rise and Fall of a Construction Giantis a keepsake, a historical record, the chronicle of an era, a compelling story told by the man at its center in the end.

In 1978, faced with the pressure to modernize and a declining budget, the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) reluctantly agreed to join China's economic reform drive, expanding its internal economy to market-oriented civilian production. This work examines PLA's role in the economy up to 1998.

It started and ended with a financial catastrophe. The Darien disaster of 1700 drove Scotland into union with England, but spawned the institutions which transformed Edinburgh into a global financial centre. The crash of 2008 wrecked the city's two largest and oldest banks – and its reputation. In the three intervening centuries, Edinburgh became a hothouse of financial innovation, prudent banking, reliable insurance and smart investing. The face of the city changed too as money transformed it from medieval squalor to Georgian elegance. This is the story, not just of the institutions which were respected worldwide, but of the personalities too, such as the two hard-drinking Presbyterian ministers who founded the first actuarially-based pension fund; Sir Walter Scott, who faced financial ruin, but wrote his way out of it; the men who financed American railways and eastern rubber plantations with Scottish money; and Fred Goodwin, notorious CEO of RBS, who took the bank to be the biggest in the world, but crashed and burned in 2008.

The construction of Pennsylvania Station (1904-1910) was a monumental undertaking equally for the voluminous earth displaced, incredible innovation, and brilliant French-influenced classical architecture, but it also was a quintessential archetype of the Gilded Age. The station reshaped the economic and social fabric of New York by dislodging scores of families and local businesses. It had been built for prestige and grandeur rather than sustainability and prolonged the rivalry with the New York Central and Hudson River Railroads, leading to the creation of Grand Central Terminal. Although the station was successful for increasing passenger journeys, the rise of independent travel after World War II and mounting financial losses culminated with its unfortunate demise and eventual destruction. Nevertheless, through the misfortune of demolition emerged the first historic preservation laws, which have saved countless historic buildings, including its Park Avenue rival.

The Severn Bridge was built as a railway bridge to create a shorter through route to avoid having to go through Gloucester. This title presents an illustrated history of the Severn Bridge 1872-1970.

Steve Peck and Sandy Assonga met at church in 2002 and they were married in 2003 by Pastor Pete Jalilie. Steve comes from a family of four as Sandy comes from a family of nine. They gave birth to their only child and blessing from God Angelina Peck in 2006 and have lived happily ever after since as a family with God leading them every step of the way. This is their first book projects together as husband and wife in the first installment of the trilogy of The Tri-Ad story being told to you now.

The world’s leading expert on Osama bin Laden delivers for the first time the “riveting” (The New York Times) definitive biography of a man who set the course of American foreign policy for the 21st century and whose ideological heirs we continue to battle today. In The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden, Peter Bergan provides the first reevaluation of the man responsible for precipitating America’s long war with al-Qaeda and its decedents, capturing bin Laden in all the dimensions of his life: as a family man, as a zealot, as a battlefield commander, as a terrorist leader, and as a fugitive. The book sheds light on his many contradictions: he was the son of a billionaire yet insisted his family live like paupers. He adored his wives and children, depending on his two wives, both of whom had PhDs, to make critical strategic decisions. Yet, he also brought ruin to his family. He was fanatically religious but willing to kill thousands of civilians in the name of Islam. He inspired deep loyalty, yet, in the end, his bodyguards turned against him. And while he inflicted the most lethal act of mass murder in United States history, he failed to achieve any of his strategic goals. In his final years, the lasting image we have of bin Laden is of an aging man with a graying beard watching old footage of himself, just as another dad flipping through the channels with his remote. In the end, bin Laden died in a squalid suburban compound, far from the front lines of his holy war. And yet, despite that unheroic denouement, his ideology lives on. Thanks to exclusive interviews with family members and associates, and documents unearthed only recently, Bergen’s “comprehensive, authoritative, and compelling” (H.R. McMaster, author of Dereliction of Duty and Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World) portrait of Osama bin Laden reveals for the first time who he really was and why he continues to inspire a new generation of jihadists.