The Why Axis

Two of Forbes magazine’s “world’s most powerful economists” provide the breakthrough ideas to challenge the assumptions of human decision-making. Can economics be passionate? Can it centre on people and what really matters to them? And can it help us understand why they do what they do in everyday life? Two revolutionary economists believe it can. In The Why Axis, Uri Gneezy and John List lead us on a journey to discover the economics underlying human motivation and how to structure the incentives that can get people to move mountains. Finding the right incentive can be like looking for a needle in a haystack, but Gneezy and List have pioneered an innovative approach to zeroing in on those needles. Like other economists, they gather data and build models, but then they go much, much further, embedding themselves in our messy world—the factories, schools, communities and offices where people live, work and play. Their goal: to discover solutions to the big, difficult problems, such as the gap between rich and poor, the violence plaguing inner city schools, why people really discriminate, and whether women are really less competitive than men. Their revelatory and startling discoveries about how incentives really work are both groundbreaking and immensely practical. This research will change the way we both think about and take action on big and little problems. Anyone working in business, politics, education or philanthropy can use the approach Gneezy and List describe in The Why Axis to reach a deeper, more nuanced understanding of human behaviour and a better grasp of what motivates people and why.

Wildly praised by readers and critics alike, Robert Charles Wilson's Spin won science fiction's highest honor, the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Now, in Axis, Spin's direct sequel, Wilson takes us to the "world next door"—the planet engineered by the mysterious Hypotheticals to support human life, and connected to Earth by way of the Arch that towers hundreds of miles over the Indian Ocean. Humans are colonizing this new world—and, predictably, fiercely exploiting its resources, chiefly large deposits of oil in the western deserts of the continent of Equatoria. Lise Adams is a young woman attempting to uncover the mystery of her father's disappearance ten years earlier. Turk Findley is an ex-sailor and sometimes-drifter. They come together when an infall of cometary dust seeds the planet with tiny remnant Hypothetical machines. Soon, this seemingly hospitable world will become very alien indeed—as the nature of time is once again twisted, by entities unknown. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

A “fascinating, well-researched account” of Mildred Gillars, the failed actress who turned on her country and became a Nazi propagandist during WWII (Publishers Weekly). One of the most notorious Americans of the twentieth century was a failed Broadway actress turned radio announcer named Mildred Gillars (1900–1988), better known to American GIs as “Axis Sally.” Despite the richness of her life story, there has never been a full-length biography of the ambitious, star-struck Ohio girl who evolved into a reviled disseminator of Nazi propaganda. At the outbreak of war in September 1939, Gillars had been living in Germany for five years. Hoping to marry, she chose to remain in the Nazi-run state even as the last Americans departed for home. In 1940, she was hired by the German overseas radio, where she evolved from a simple disc jockey and announcer to a master propagandist. Under the tutelage of her married lover, Max Otto Koischwitz, Gillars became the personification of Nazi propaganda to the American GI. Spicing her broadcasts with music, Gillars’s used her soothing voice to taunt Allied troops about the supposed infidelities of their wives and girlfriends back home, as well as the horrible deaths they were likely to meet on the battlefield. Supported by German military intelligence, she was able to convey personal greetings to individual US units, creating an eerie foreboding among troops who realized the Germans knew who and where they were. After broadcasting for Berlin up to the very end of the war, Gillars tried but failed to pose as a refugee, and was captured by US authorities. Her 1949 trial for treason captured the attention and raw emotion of a nation fresh from the horrors of the Second World War. Gillars’s twelve-year imprisonment and life on parole, including a stay in a convent, is a remarkable story of a woman who attempts to rebuild her life in the country she betrayed.

It seemed that whenever Mussolini acted on his own, it was bad news for Hitler. Indeed, the Fuhrer's relations with his Axis partners were fraught with an almost total lack of coordination. Compared to the Allies, the coalition was hardly an alliance at all. Focusing on Germany's military relations with Italy, Romania, Hungary, and Finland, Richard DiNardo unearths a wealth of information that reveals how the Axis coalition largely undermined Hitler's objectives from the Eastern Front to the Balkans, Mediterranean, and North Africa. DiNardo argues that the Axis military alliance was doomed from the beginning by a lack of common war aims, the absence of a unified command structure, and each nation's fundamental mistrust of the others. Germany was disinclined to make the kinds of compromises that successful wartime partnerships demanded and, because Hitler insisted on separate pacts with each nation, Italy and Finland often found themselves conducting counterproductive parallel wars on their own. DiNardo's detailed assessments of ground, naval, and air operations reveal precisely why the Axis allies were so dysfunctional as a collective force, sometimes for seemingly mundane but vital reasons-a shortage of interpreters, for example. His analysis covers coalition warfare at every level, demonstrating that some military services were better at working with their allies than others, while also pointing to rare successes, such as Rommel's effective coordination with Italian forces in North Africa. In the end, while some individual Axis units fought with distinction—if not on a par with the vaunted Wehrmacht—and helped Germany achieve some of its military aims, the coalition's overall military performance was riddled with disappointments. Breaking new ground, DiNardo's work enlarges our understanding of Germany's defeat while at the same time offering a timely reminder of the challenges presented by coalition warfare.

The factors leading to the defeat of the Axis Powers in World War II have been debated for decades. One prevalent view is that overwhelming Allied superiority in materials and manpower doomed the Axis. Another holds that key strategic and tactical blunders lost the war--from Hitler halting his panzers outside Dunkirk, allowing more than 300,000 trapped Allied soldiers to escape, to Admiral Yamamoto falling into the trap set by the U.S. Navy at Midway. Providing a fresh perspective on the war, this study challenges both views and offers an alternative explanation: the Germans, Japanese and Italians made poor design choices in ships, planes, tanks and information security--before and during the war--that forced them to fight with weapons and systems that were too soon outmatched by the Allies. The unprecedented arms race of World War II posed a fundamental "design challenge" the Axis powers sometimes met but never mastered.

"The Beijing-Islamabad axis plays a central role in Asia's geopolitics, from India's rise to the prospects for a post-American Afghanistan, from the threat of nuclear terrorism to the continent's new map of mines, ports and pipelines. China is Pakistan's great economic hope and its most trusted military partner; Pakistan is the battleground for China's encounters with Islamic militancy and the heart of its efforts to counter-balance the emerging US-India partnership. For decades, each country has been the other's only 'all-weather' friend. Yet the relationship is still little understood. The wildest claims about it are widely believed, while many of its most dramatic developments are hidden from the public eye. This book sets out the recent history of Sino-Pakistani ties and their ramifications for the West, for India, for Afghanistan, and for Asia as a whole. It tells the stories behind some of its most sensitive aspects, including Beijing's support for Pakistan's nuclear program, China's dealings with the Taliban, and the Chinese military's planning for crises in Pakistan. It describes a relationship increasingly shaped by Pakistan's internal strife, and the dilemmas China faces between the need for regional stability and the imperative for strategic competition with India and the USA."--Amazon.com.

"This book explains how six isolationist media barons in the United States and Great Britain shaped the political culture of their respective nations on the eve of and during World War II. Together, William Randolph Hearst's newspaper chain, Lord Rothermere's Daily Mail, Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express, Robert McCormick's Chicago Tribune, Joe Patterson's New York Daily News, and Cissy Patterson's Washington Times-Herald reached a staggering sixty million people by the late 1930s, and even more during the war that followed. Often dismissed by historians and foreign policy scholars because of their sensationalist, tabloid treatment of the news, these media lords and their newspapers had massive influence on public opinion at a critical time in world history. As Hitler built up his military and invaded his neighbors, these press lords worked together to pressure their governments to dismiss and ignore the fascist threat. They met the greatest crisis of the twentieth century not by urging collective action against tyranny but by spinning conspiracy theories, warning of race suicide, or even embracing fascism. They imagined a white nation and then constructed its enemies-not the Nazis, or even the Japanese, but the "warmongers" among their fellow citizens who wanted to resist rather than appease the aggressors. As they fought against resistance to fascism, they helped lay the foundation for the nationalist, racist, and anti-Semitic Right that we live with today"--

Axis Mundi: The Book of Spirits is a sourcebook detailing many of the myriad spirits serving Gaia. Here are the elementals, Enigmatics, Epiphlings, Naturae and the broods of the great tribal totems themselves. Can you afford not to seek their favor?