New Releases by Michael Lewis

The classic warts-and-all portrait of the 1980s financial scene. The 1980s was the most outrageous and turbulent era in the financial market since the crash of ''29, not only on Wall Street but around the world. Michael Lewis, as a trainee at Salomon Brothers in New York and as an investment banker and later financial journalist, was uniquely positioned to chronicle the ambition and folly that fueled the decade.

The #1 New York Times bestseller: "It is the work of our greatest financial journalist, at the top of his game. And it''s essential reading."—Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair The real story of the crash began in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn''t shine and the SEC doesn''t dare, or bother, to tread: the bond and real estate derivative markets where geeks invent impenetrable securities to profit from the misery of lower- and middle-class Americans who can''t pay their debts. The smart people who understood what was or might be happening were paralyzed by hope and fear; in any case, they weren''t talking. Michael Lewis creates a fresh, character-driven narrative brimming with indignation and dark humor, a fitting sequel to his #1 bestseller Liar''s Poker. Out of a handful of unlikely-really unlikely-heroes, Lewis fashions a story as compelling and unusual as any of his earlier bestsellers, proving yet again that he is the finest and funniest chronicler of our time.

This book provides a concise and comprehensive introduction to the concept of phenomenology, perhaps the most important and influential movement in twentieth century philosophy. It explains the development of the phenomenological method in the works of four thinkers: Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It also addresses the criticisms directed at phenomenology by Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, and the ways in which phenomenology has continued to flourish in spite of such critique, in the work of Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion. The text includes many helpful features such as key definitions, sample essay and exam questions, an extensive bibliography, and suggested readings for each topic covered, making the book an ideal companion to any course in phenomenology and phenomenological thinkers. The book presupposes no prior knowledge on the part of the reader, making it suitable for those encountering phenomenology for the first time, but it also provides an original interpretation that will be of lasting value to postgraduates and scholars.

The New York Times bestseller: “Hilarious. No mushy tribute to the joys of fatherhood, Lewis’ book addresses the good, the bad, and the merely baffling about having kids.”—Boston Globe When Michael Lewis became a father, he decided to keep a written record of what actually happened immediately after the birth of each of his three children. This book is that record. But it is also something else: maybe the funniest, most unsparing account of ordinary daily household life ever recorded, from the point of view of the man inside. The remarkable thing about this story isn’t that Lewis is so unusual. It’s that he is so typical. The only wonder is that his wife has allowed him to publish it.

The time was the 1980s. The place was Wall Street. The game was called Liar’s Poker. Michael Lewis was fresh out of Princeton and the London School of Economics when he landed a job at Salomon Brothers, one of Wall Street’s premier investment firms. During the next three years, Lewis rose from callow trainee to bond salesman, raking in millions for the firm and cashing in on a modern-day gold rush. Liar’s Poker is the culmination of those heady, frenzied years—a behind-the-scenes look at a unique and turbulent time in American business. From the frat-boy camaraderie of the forty-first-floor trading room to the killer instinct that made ambitious young men gamble everything on a high-stakes game of bluffing and deception, here is Michael Lewis’s knowing and hilarious insider’s account of an unprecedented era of greed, gluttony, and outrageous fortune.

Story of Michael Oher, a rising gridiron star, who was rescued from the ghettos of Memphis and placed with a wealthy family to help develop his football skills.

Which Song is the Best and Why? Read it and see! Organized by rank, from 1 to 100, this illustrated celebration of the best songs by the boys who revolutionized rock-and-roll includes expert commentary, historical context, interview material, and lots of great sidebars (including "best" lists from some of today''s pop music powerhouses.) Like all "best of" lists, the book''s opinionated stance generates animated discussion. Here, There, and Everywhere is profusely illustrated with photos of the band at work and play, and all of the unforgettable album-cover art. Appendices include a complete song list, discography, videography, and bibliography, making it a one-stop source of Beatles facts and figures.

A Life Adrift, the memoir of balladeer-political activist Soeda Azembo (1872-1944), chronicles his life as one of Japan’s first modern mass entertainers and imparts an understanding of how ordinary people experienced and accommodated the tumult of life in prewar Japan. Azembo created enka songs sung by tenant farmers in rural hinterlands and factory hands in Tokyo and Osaka. Although his work is still largely unknown outside Japan, his poems and lyrics were so well known at his career’s peak that a single verse served as shorthand expressing popular attitudes about political corruption, sex scandals, spiralling prices, war, and love of motherland. As these categories attest, he embedded in his songs contemporary views on class conflict, gender relations, and racial attitudes toward international rivals. Ordinary people valued Azembo’s music because it was of them and for them. They also appreciated it for being distinctively modern and home-grown, qualities rare among the cultural innovations that flooded into Japan from the mid-nineteenth century. A Life Adrift stands out as the only memoir of its kind, one written first-hand by a leader in the world of enka singing.

Derrida and Lacan: Another Writing argues that Jacques Derrida''s philosophical understanding of language should be supplemented by Jacques Lacan''s psychoanalytic approach to the symbolic order. Lacan adopts a non-philosophical, genetic or developmental approach to the question of language and in doing so isolates a dimension that Derrida cannot properly envisage: the imaginary. Michael Lewis argues that the real must be understood not just in relation to the symbolic but also in relation to the imaginary. The existence of an alternative approach to the real that is other than language allows us to identify the idiosyncrasies of Derrida''s purely transcendental approach, an approach that addresses language in terms of its conditions of possibility. Lacan shows us that an attention to the genesis of the symbolic order of language and culture should lead us to understand this real other in a different way.This book relates transcendental thought to the insights of non-philosophical thought, and, more specifically, it proposes a way in which philosophy might relate to the insights of the human and natural sciences. By critically juxtaposing Derrida and Lacan, Derrida and Lacan: Another Writing attempts to systematise Slavoj Zizek''s presentation of a Lacanian alternative to Derridean deconstruction. This work should be of interest to all readers in continental thought and transcendental philosophy, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and literary studies.

''Everything, in retrospect, is obvious. But if everything were obvious, authors of histories of financial folly would be rich . . . '' From Black Monday to the Asian financial crisis, from the internet bubble to mortgage meltdown, our lives are rules by crazy cycles of euphoria and hysteria that manage to grip the world but are all-too-soon forgotten. In this unique collection of articles, Michael Lewis - ex-trader and bestselling chronicler of avarice and frenzy in the markets - casts a sceptical eye back over the most panicked-about panics of recent decades. He tells a story of boom and busts, deranged greed, outsized egos and over-inflated salaries, where the only thing that can ever be predicted is out constant inability to predict anything. Using contemporary account form commentators such as Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Krugman, plus many of his own best writings, Lewis conveys the mood before each catastrophe, what it was like in the heat of the moment, how, afterwards, we tires to explain away the chaos - and then failed to learn from it before the whole process started all over again. Panic! Gives us a completely new insight into how markets really operate - and who really knows what they''re talking about.

Michael Lewis is a master at dissecting the absurd: after skewering Wall Street in his national bestseller Liar''s Poker, he packed his mighty pen and set out on the 1996 campaign trail. As he follows the men who aspire to the Oval Office, Lewis discovers an absurd mix of bravery and backpedaling, heroic possibility and mealy-mouthed sound bytes, and a process so ridiculous and unsavory that it leaves him wondering if everyone involved—from the journalists to the candidates to the people who voted—isn''t ultimately a loser. The contenders: Pat Buchanan: becomes the first politician ever to choose a black hat over a white one. Phil Gramm: spends twenty million dollars to convince voters of his fiscal responsibility. John McCain: makes the fatal mistake of actually speaking his mind. Alan Keyes: checks out of a New Hampshire hotel and tells the manager another candidate will be paying his bill. Steve Forbes: refuses to answer questions about his father''s motorcycles. Bob Dole: marches through the campaign without ever seeming to care. Losers is a wickedly funny, unflinching look at how America really goes about choosing a President.

The #1 New York Times Bestseller "Lewis has such a gift for storytelling…he writes as lucidly for sports fans as for those who read him for other reasons." —Janet Maslin, New York Times When we first meet him, Michael Oher is one of thirteen children by a mother addicted to crack; he does not know his real name, his father, his birthday, or how to read or write. He takes up football, and school, after a rich, white, Evangelical family plucks him from the streets. Then two great forces alter Oher: the family’s love and the evolution of professional football itself into a game where the quarterback must be protected at any cost. Our protagonist becomes the priceless package of size, speed, and agility necessary to guard the quarterback’s greatest vulnerability, his blind side.

Adapted from the short story by Douglas Coupland

A story with a big heart about a boy, a coach, the game of baseball, and the game of life. "There are teachers with a rare ability to enter a child''s mind; it''s as if their ability to get there at all gives them the right to stay forever." There was a turning point in Michael Lewis''s life, in a baseball game when he was fourteen years old. The irascible and often terrifying Coach Fitz put the ball in his hand with the game on the line and managed to convey such confident trust in Lewis''s ability that the boy had no choice but to live up to it. "I didn''t have words for it then, but I do now: I am about to show the world, and myself, what I can do." The coach''s message was not simply about winning but about self-respect, sacrifice, courage, and endurance. In some ways, and now thirty years later, Lewis still finds himself trying to measure up to what Coach Fitz expected of him.

If you want to visit Walt Disney World but don''t want to spend a bundle, this is an invaluable guide to doing Disney on a budget. From the Magic Kingdom to EPCOT to Disney-MGM Studios, you''ll discover how to get the most for your pound without compromising the holiday you''ve always dreamed about. There''s advice on how to beat the crowds, cheap flights to Orlando, cheap accommodation, restaurants that won''t drain your wallet and free shows and pageants. This new edition is thoroughly updated and provides the latest information on prices and packages.

Michael Lewis’s instant classic may be “the most influential book on sports ever written” (People), but “you need know absolutely nothing about baseball to appreciate the wit, snap, economy and incisiveness of [Lewis’s] thoughts about it” (Janet Maslin, New York Times). One of GQ''s 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century Just before the 2002 season opens, the Oakland Athletics must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players and is written off by just about everyone—but then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins. How did one of the poorest teams in baseball win so many games? In a quest to discover the answer, Michael Lewis delivers not only “the single most influential baseball book ever” (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what “may be the best book ever written on business” (Weekly Standard). Lewis first looks to all the logical places—the front offices of major league teams, the coaches, the minds of brilliant players—but discovers the real jackpot is a cache of numbers?numbers!?collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers, and physics professors. What these numbers prove is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information had been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics. He paid attention to those numbers?with the second-lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to?to conduct an astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win . . . how can we not cheer for David?

Organized by ranking order from Number 1 to Number 100, this illustrated celebration of the best songs by the boys who revolutionized rock-and-roll includes expert commentary, historical context, interview material, and lots of great sidebars (including "best" lists from some of today''s pop music powerhouses). The authors are pop culture experts and lifelong Beatles aficionados whose enlightening commentary sheds new light on the subject. The book is profusely illustrated with great photos of the band at work and play, and all of the memorable album cover art that has come to represent a generation. Appendices include a complete song list, discography, videography, and bibliography, making it a one-stop source of Beatles facts and figures.

Featuring over 900 entries, this resource covers all disciplines within the social sciences with both concise definitions & in-depth essays.

The New York Times bestseller. "His book is a wake-up call at a time when many believe the net was a flash in the pan."—BusinessWeek With his knowing eye and wicked pen, Michael Lewis reveals how the Internet boom has encouraged changes in the way we live, work, and think. In the midst of one of the greatest status revolutions in the history of the world, the Internet has become a weapon in the hands of revolutionaries. Old priesthoods are crumbling. In the new order, the amateur is king: fourteen-year-olds manipulate the stock market and nineteen-year-olds take down the music industry. Unseen forces undermine all forms of collectivism, from the family to the mass market: one black box has the power to end television as we know it, and another one may dictate significant changes in our practice of democracy. With a new afterword by the author.

This primer for social work students introduces the general definitions and concepts of economics and uses case studies in social work to develop applied knowledge. The case studies include stories of job training, substance abuse centers, counseling, therapy, child protective services, and services for the poor. The concluding chapters are devoted to topics directly related to social work: economics of poverty, health economics, household economics, the economics of labor, and government failure.

This new book provides a comprehensive and refreshing insight into the more advanced topic of operations strategy. It builds on concepts from strategic management, operations management, marketing, and human resources. A three-part organization covers the nature, content, and process of operations strategy. For practicing managers.

Focusing on the marginal region of Toyama, on the Sea of Japan, the author explores the interplay of central and regional authorities, local and national perceptions of rights, and the emerging political practices in Toyama and Tokyo that became part of the new political culture that took shape in Japan following the Meiji Restoration.

New York Times Bestseller. “A superb book. . . . [Lewis] makes Silicon Valley as thrilling and intelligible as he made Wall Street in his best-selling Liar’s Poker.”—Time In the weird glow of the dying millennium, Michael Lewis set out on a safari through Silicon Valley to find the world’s most important technology entrepreneur. He found this in Jim Clark, a man whose achievements include the founding of three separate billion-dollar companies. Lewis also found much more, and the result—the best-selling book The New New Thing—is an ingeniously conceived history of the Internet revolution.

Few people question the pervasive belief that early childhood exerts an inordinate power over adult achievements, relationships, and mental health. Once robbed of our potential by the inadequacies of our upbringing, the theory goes, we risk being trapped in maladaptive patterns and unfulfilling lives. But does early experience really seal our fate? Daring to challenge prevailing models of child development, this provocative book argues that what enables us to survive--and sets us free from our pasts--is our astonishing adaptability to change, shaped by the uniquely human attributes of consciousness, will, and desire.

Summarizing the qualifying round of the international soccer competition, comparing the 24 nations that will be in the final round this year in France and highlighting the players to watch, "World Cup Soccer" gives important facts and figures on participating teams and is sprinkled throughout with interesting features, anecdotes, and trivia on World Cup matches. 50 photos. 25 illustrations.

A great deal of mathematical knowledge is required of golf course management. From budgeting estimates to ordering topdressing, to irrigation volume and coverage, to many other parts of golf course operation, a thorough understanding of basic mathematical principles and the ability to relate those principles to real-world situations is an absolute must.