The Ugly American

The ineffectual Ambassador is just one of the handicaps facing the Americans as Southeast Asia becomes increasingly involved with Communism.

The true story of the Ivy League hedge fund cowboys who gambled with the dangerously high stakes of the Asian stock market. John Malcolm, high school football hero and Princeton graduate made his millions back in the early '90s, a time when dozens of elite young American graduates made their fortunes in hedge funds in the Far East, beating the Japanese at their own game, riding the crashing waves of the Asian stock markets, gambling at impossibly high stakes and winning. Failure meant not only bankruptcy and disgrace à la Nick Leeson, but potentially even death - at the hands of the Japanese Yakuza: one of the world's most notoriously violent organised crime syndicates. Ugly Americans tells Malcolm's story, and that of others like him, in a high octane book, filled with glamour, money and the dangers these incur, this true story is a cross between Mezrich's own best-selling Bringing Down the House and Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker.

The world's lone superpower...supreme guardian of democracy...and home of the blithely uninformed and epidemically obese. Welcome to America -- pull up a chair, click on the tube, and grab a donut. Concerned Citizen Peter Strupp is shocked and bothered by what he sees. It seems we're not as thin, smart, and good-looking as we like to think. Packed with real facts and statistics, Fat, Dumb, and Ugly takes readers on an eye-opening, laugh-out-loud, and at times horrifying tour of the numbers that shape our country: • Percentage of adults in the United States who are overweight: 64.5 • Percentage of Americans who believe they have actually spoken with Satan: 5 • Percentage of voters for whom Saturday Night Live and MTV are primary sources of information about presidential candidates: 16 • Average number of pink lawn flamingos sold annually in America: 250,000 A wickedly hilarious and addictive cultural snapshot of our nation of conspicuous consumers, fast-food fanatics, and dumbed-down dolts, Fat, Dumb, and Ugly casts a revealing spotlight on John Q. Public, the average American -- and it's not always pretty.

'The novel that I love the most is The Quiet American' Ian McEwan, Sunday Times bestselling author of Lessons Into the intrigue and violence of 1950s Saigon comes CIA agent Alden Pyle, a young idealistic American sent to promote democracy through a mysterious 'Third Force'. As Pyle's naive optimism starts to cause bloodshed, his friend Fowler, a cynical foreign correspondent, finds it hard to stand aside and watch. But even as Fowler intervenes he wonders why: for the greater good, or something altogether more complicated? WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ZADIE SMITH **One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

Marlon Brando will never cease to fascinate us: for his triumphs as an actor (On the Waterfront, The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris), as well as his disasters; for the power of the screen portrayals he gave, and for his turbulent, tumultuous personal life. Seamlessly intertwining the man and the work, Kanfer takes us through Brando's troubled childhood, to his arrival in New York in the 1940s, where he studied with the legendary Stella Adler, and at the age of twenty-three became the toast of Broadway in A Streetcar Named Desire. Kanfer expertly examines each of Brando's films - from The Men in 1950 to The Score in 2001 - making clear the evolution of Brando's singular genius, while also shedding light on the cultural evolution of Hollywood itself. And he brings into focus Brando's self-destructiveness, his lifelong dissembling, his deeply ambivalent feelings towards his chosen vocation, and the tragedies that shadowed his final years. This is a never-before-seen portrait of one of the most extraordinary talents of the twentieth century.

In the culture of the modern West, we see ourselves as thinking subjects, defined by our conscious thought, autonomous and separate from each other and the world we survey. Current research in neurology and cognitive science shows that this picture is false. We think with our bodies, and in interaction with others, and our thought is never completed. The Fiction of a Thinkable World is a wide-ranging exploration of the meaning of this insight for our understanding of history, ethics, and politics Ambitious but never overwhelming, carrying its immense learning lightly, The Fiction of a Thinkable World shows how the Western conception of the human subject came to be formed historically, how it contrasts with that of Eastern thought, and how it provides the basic justification for the institutions of liberal capitalism. The fiction of a world separated from each of us as we are separated from each other, from which we make our choices in solitary thought, is enacted by the voter in the voting booth and the consumer at the supermarket shelf. The structure of daily experience in capitalist society reinforces the fictions of the Western intellectual tradition, stunt human creativity, and create the illusion that the capitalist order is natural and unsurpassable. Steinberg’s critique of the intellectual world of Western capitalism at the same time illuminates the paths that have been closed off in that world. It draws on Chinese ethics to show how our actions can be brought in accord with the world as it is, in its ever-changing interaction and mutual transformation, and sketches a radical political perspective that sheds the illusions of the Western model. Beautifully conceived and written, The Fiction of a Thinkable World provides new ways of thinking and opens new horizons.

The US leads the world in many ways, including the amount of waste we produce. Although we constitute less than 5 percent of the world’s population, we use up to 30 percent of the world’s resources, and per capita we generate the most trash. Throwaway Nation illuminates the problem and suggests ways we can mitigate this environmental disaster.

- A New York Times and USA Today bestseller - Book of the Month Club 2016 Book of the Year - Second Place Goodreads Best Fiction of 2016 A beautiful and provocative love story between two unlikely people and the hard-won relationship that elevates them above the Midwestern meth lab backdrop of their lives. As the daughter of a drug dealer, Wavy knows not to trust people, not even her own parents. It's safer to keep her mouth shut and stay out of sight. Struggling to raise her little brother, Donal, eight-year-old Wavy is the only responsible adult around. Obsessed with the constellations, she finds peace in the starry night sky above the fields behind her house, until one night her star gazing causes an accident. After witnessing his motorcycle wreck, she forms an unusual friendship with one of her father's thugs, Kellen, a tattooed ex-con with a heart of gold. By the time Wavy is a teenager, her relationship with Kellen is the only tender thing in a brutal world of addicts and debauchery. When tragedy rips Wavy's family apart, a well-meaning aunt steps in, and what is beautiful to Wavy looks ugly under the scrutiny of the outside world. A powerful novel you won’t soon forget, Bryn Greenwood's All the Ugly and Wonderful Things challenges all we know and believe about love. 31 Books Bringing the Heat this Summer —Bustle Top Ten Hottest Reads of 2016 —New York Daily News Best Books of 2016 —St. Louis Post Dispatch