READING: The incredible tale of how ambitious oil rivals Marcus Samuel, Jr., and Henri Deterding joined forces to topple the Standard Oil empire Marcus Samuel, Jr., is an unorthodox Jewish merchant trader. Henri Deterding is a take-no-prisoners oilman. In 1889, John D. Rockefeller is at the peak of his power. Having annihilated all competition and possessing near-total domination of the market, even the U.S. government is wary of challenging the great “anaconda” of Standard Oil. The Standard never loses—that is until Samuel and Deterding team up to form Royal Dutch Shell. A riveting account of ambition, oil, and greed, Breaking Rockefeller traces Samuel’s rise from outsider to the heights of the British aristocracy, Deterding’s conquest of America, and the collapse of Rockefeller’s monopoly. The beginning of the twentieth century is a time when vast fortunes were made and lost. Taking readers through the rough and tumble of East London’s streets, the twilight turmoil of czarist Russia, to the halls of the British Parliament, and right down Broadway in New York City, Peter Doran offers a richly detailed, fresh perspective on how Samuel and Deterding beat the world’s richest man at his own game.

READING: 2112-A time of prosperity and world peace. The peace is not to last however A new menace threatens the Earth, one such as the world has never seen Can the UFIB and its star agents stop the menace that is Scumball!

READING: The history of criminal justice in the U.S. is often described as a pendulum, swinging back and forth between strict punishment and lenient rehabilitation. While this view is common wisdom, it is wrong. In Breaking the Pendulum, Philip Goodman, Joshua Page, and Michelle Phelps systematically debunk the pendulum perspective, showing that it distorts how and why criminal justice changes. The pendulum model blinds us to the blending of penal orientations, policies, and practices, as well as the struggle between actors that shapes laws, institutions, and how we think about crime, punishment, and related issues. Through a re-analysis of more than two hundred years of penal history, starting with the rise of penitentiaries in the 19th Century and ending with ongoing efforts to roll back mass incarceration, the authors offer an alternative approach to conceptualizing penal development. Their agonistic perspective posits that struggle is the motor force of criminal justice history. Punishment expands, contracts, and morphs because of contestation between real people in real contexts, not a mechanical -swing- of the pendulum. This alternative framework is far more accurate and empowering than metaphors that ignore or downplay the importance of struggle in shaping criminal justice. This clearly written, engaging book is an invaluable resource for teachers, students, and scholars seeking to understand the past, present, and future of American criminal justice. By demonstrating the central role of struggle in generating major transformations, Breaking the Pendulum encourages combatants to keep fighting to change the system.

READING: Pulitzer Prize-winnende autobiografie van de grote vrouw achter de Watergate-onthullingen. Katharine Graham was een timide telg uit een roemrucht en steenrijk geslacht. Als kind werd ze aan haar lot overgelaten. Als vrouw maakte ze mee hoe haar briljante man Phil, vertrouweling van onder andere John F. Kennedy, langzaam door depressies werd verzwolgen en ten slotte zelfmoord pleegde. Eenmaal weduwe overwint Graham haar onzekerheid. Van vrouw die etentjes organiseerde transformeerde ze in charismatisch leider van een gezaghebbende krant. Ze overleefde het old boys network van de krantenwereld en slaagde erin The Washington Post tot nieuwe hoogten te brengen.

READING: In 1955, John D. Rockefeller III convened a committee to respond to post-World War II interest in developing improved understanding of, and relations with, countries in Asia. His family's long-standing interest in Asia had led him to travel in China and

READING: In the first half of the twentieth century, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation helped to create and maintain a cultural and intellectual infrastructure in Canada that benefited key institutions such as University of Toronto, McGill University, the National Gallery, the Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Canadian Social Science Research Council. Jeffrey Brison documents how American philanthropy facilitated the transformation from a private, localized system of cultural, intellectual, and academic patronage to a complex, nation-based system of incorporated patronage - a system in which the major patron was the federal state. His study calls into question our essentialistic notions of contrasting national identities and the now-mythologized juxtaposition of an American culture fueled by the free market with a Canadian one sustained by state support.

READING: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, en Google zijn vier van de invloedrijkste bedrijven ter wereld. Bijna iedereen denkt te weten hoe ze dat geworden zijn. Bijna iedereen heeft het fout. Over De vier is de laatste twintig jaar ongelooflijk veel geschreven. Niemand beschrijft hun macht en fenomenale succes zo inzichtelijk als Scott Galloway. Hij gaat op zoek naar antwoorden op een aantal fundamentele vragen: Hoe is het De vier gelukt ons leven zo te infiltreren dat ze bijna onmogelijk te vermijden (of te boycotten) zijn? Waarom vergeeft de beurs ze zondes die andere bedrijven zouden verwoesten? Is er, in hun race om als eerste het bedrijf te worden dat een biljoen dollar waard is, nog iemand die de strijd met ze kan aangaan? Op zijn eigen unieke manier, die hem ook een van de meest gevierde business-professoren heeft gemaakt, deconstrueert hij de strategieën van De vier die schuilgaan onder het glanzende oppervlak. Hij laat zien hoe zij – met een niet te evenaren snelheid en bereik – onze fundamentele emotionele behoeftes manipuleren die ons al sinds de oertijd drijven. En hij onthult hoe je deze inzichten kunnen toepassen voor de groei van je eigen bedrijf of carrière. Of je nu de concurrentie met ze wilt aangaan, zaken met ze wilt doen of gewoon in de wereld wilt leven die zij domineren, je moet De vier begrijpen.

READING: Cursus voor persoonlijk succes via het beïnvloeden van mensen uit de directe omgeving.

READING: The environmentalist describes how he created a successful tomato business as a teenager, worked at the USDA, and founded two non-profit organizations that have drawn attention to climate change and lagging agricultural productivity.

READING: Taking as an example the Clinton health care reform initiative, the authors show how a policy that aimed to please everyone ended by satisfying no one due to pressure groups, political gamesmanship and the inertia of the American 'system'.

READING: Following in the successful vein of Managing for the Future (1992) and Managing in a Time of Great Change (1995), the incomparable Peter Drucker is back with fresh thoughts, insights, and knowledge about the ever-changing business society around us and the ever-expanding management roles required of us all-chiefs, executives, managers, and knowledge workers alike. Two main themes are explored in many of the chapters in Managing in the Next Society: the rapidly expanding information shock wave that had its Internet Big Bang as recently as 1995; and the changing shape of our society to come-six major trends that are rapidly transforming our world into what Peter Drucker calls The Next Society.

READING: How a female investigative journalist brought down the world’s greatest tycoon and broke up the Standard Oil monopoly. Long before the rise of mega-corporations like Wal-Mart and Microsoft, Standard Oil controlled the oil industry with a monopolistic force unprecedented in American business history. Undaunted by the ruthless power of its owner, John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937), a fearless and ambitious reporter named Ida Minerva Tarbell (1857–1944) confronted the company known simply as “The Trust.” Through her peerless fact gathering and devastating prose, Tarbell, a muckraking reporter at McClure’s magazine, pioneered the new practice of investigative journalism. Her shocking discoveries about Standard Oil and Rockefeller led, inexorably, to a dramatic confrontation during the opening decade of the twentieth century that culminated in the landmark 1911 Supreme Court antitrust decision breaking up the monopolies and forever altering the landscape of modern American industry. Based on extensive research in the Tarbell and Rockefeller archives, Taking on the Trust is a vivid and dramatic history of the Progressive Era with powerful resonance for the first decades of the twenty-first century.

READING: In this sweeping, incisive post mortem, Dean Starkman exposes the critical shortcomings that softened coverage in the business press during the mortgage era and the years leading up to the financial collapse of 2008. He locates the roots of the problem in the origin of business news as a market messaging service for investors in the early twentieth century. This access-dependent strain of journalism was soon opposed by the grand, sweeping work of the muckrakers. Propelled by the innovations of Bernard Kilgore, the great postwar editor of the Wall Street Journal, these two genres merged when mainstream American news organizations institutionalized muckraking in the 1960s, creating a powerful guardian of the public interest. Yet as the mortgage era dawned, deep cultural and structural shifts—some unavoidable, some self-inflicted—eroded journalism's appetite for its role as watchdog. The result was a deafening silence about systemic corruption in the financial industry. Tragically, this silence grew only more profound as the mortgage madness reached its terrible apogee from 2004 through 2006. Starkman frames his analysis in a broad argument about journalism itself, dividing the profession into two competing approaches—access reporting and accountability reporting—which rely on entirely different sources and produce radically different representations of reality. As Starkman explains, access journalism came to dominate business reporting in the 1990s, a process he calls "CNBCization," and rather than examining risky, even corrupt, corporate behavior, mainstream reporters focused on profiling executives and informing investors. Starkman concludes with a critique of the digital-news ideology and corporate influence, which threaten to further undermine investigative reporting, and he shows how financial coverage, and journalism as a whole, can reclaim its bite.

READING:

READING: The TV style consultant shares her insights into what works and what doesn't in home decorating, using celebrity abodes to make her case--from Bette Midler's chipped china shower tile to Calvin Klein's gorgeous lamps.

READING: Rockefellerocracy: Kennedy Assassinations, Watergate, and Monopoly of the “Philanthropic” Foundations is a portal to a universe of political and economic supremacy, revealing links to the crimes of the century. Kennedy had a dream for the nation, but Nelson Rockefeller, a ruthless megalomaniac, had his own selfish scheme to become president. After a ten-year-long course of wrongdoing to steal American democracy, his nomination to the vice presidency by President Gerald Ford was not the hand of fate. Congressman Ford had served as an integral part of the Warren Commission whitewash. The two men formed the first administration not elected by the people This release coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the JFK assassination, that infamous weekend in November of 1963 that author Richard James DeSocio remembers well. He even witnessed Jack Ruby execute Lee Harvey Oswald in front of a live TV audience. Originally searching for answers to satisfy his own curiosity, that led to twenty-five years of painstaking research, the author has unraveled the dark mystery that baffled a nation for half a century. The verdict is radically different from the official version.

READING: Philanthropic societies funded by the Rockefeller family were prominent in the social history of the twentieth century, for their involvement in medicine and applied science. This book provides the first detailed study of their relatively brief but nonetheless influential foray into the field of mathematics.

READING: Consists chiefly of reprints from various medical journals.

READING: Hij bladerde verder in het woordenboek. Twister. Twist tie. Twit. Twitch. Twitcher. Twitchy. Twite. En toen stond het daar. `Het zacht tjirpende geluid dat sommige vogels maken. Noahs hart begon te bonzen terwijl hij verder las. `Een dergelijk geluid, vooral zacht, trillend gepraat of gelach. Dit is het, ging het door hem heen. `Onrust of opwinding; drukte. Een werkwoord. Twitter. `Kwetteren. Twitter. Twitteren. Twitterde. Getwitterd. Terwijl de zon onderging en het in Noahs appartement langzaam donker werd, schreef hij nog snel een mail aan Ev. `Wat zijn jouw gedachten over de domeinnaam twitter? schreef hij, en besefte toen wat de tagline kon zijn en voegde eraan toe: `Een heel nieuw niveau van contact. Of zoiets. Wat begon als een van de vele start-ups in Silicon Valley ontwikkelde zich al snel tot een verhaal over vriendschap en verraad, over macht en heerschappij en over geloof in je product. Twitter bleek al snel een explosieve uitvinding die de wereld zou veranderen. Journalist Nick Bilton reconstrueerde het verhaal van Twitter van begin tot eind aan de hand van talloze bronnen en gesprekken met insiders. Bloedstollend en ontroerend tegelijk.

READING: Inderjeet Parmar reveals the complex interrelations, shared mindsets, and collaborative efforts of influential public and private organizations in the building of American hegemony. Focusing on the involvement of the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations in U.S. foreign affairs, Parmar traces the transformation of America from an "isolationist" nation into the world's only superpower, all in the name of benevolent stewardship. Parmar begins in the 1920s with the establishment of these foundations and their system of top-down, elitist, scientific giving, which focused more on managing social, political, and economic change than on solving modern society's structural problems. Consulting rare documents and other archival materials, he recounts how the American intellectuals, academics, and policy makers affiliated with these organizations institutionalized such elitism, which then bled into the machinery of U.S. foreign policy and became regarded as the essence of modernity. America hoped to replace Britain in the role of global hegemon and created the necessary political, ideological, military, and institutional capacity to do so, yet far from being objective, the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations often advanced U.S. interests at the expense of other nations. Incorporating case studies of American philanthropy in Nigeria, Chile, and Indonesia, Parmar boldly exposes the knowledge networks underwriting American dominance in the twentieth century.