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The Virgin Banker
By Jayne-Anne Gadhia. 2017
Jayne-Anne Gadhia, the straight-talking CEO of Virgin Money, looks back at the events that have influenced, shaped and inspired her…
to become one of the most powerful women in banking.With anecdotes from her life before becoming a banker, including beating the bullies and experiencing racism as part of a mixed race marriage, through to building a business from scratch, working at RBS under Fred Goodwin just before the financial crash, and steering Virgin Money to become a listed business, breaking boundaries along the way, professionally and personally.Jayne-Anne shines a light on issues surrounding the role of women in banking and the alpha-male dinosaurs that dominate the industry. She draws on the relationships and deals that have shaped her career so far, including her personal experience with mental health issues, which has helped her attitude and approach to both her business and personal life. This is not a conventional biography, nor a ‘how to do it’ business book. It is a candid, fresh and fascinating insight into being a woman in business, the financial crisis and the way in which business can be conducted as a force for good.What the **** is Normal?!
By Francesca Martinez. 2014
If you grow up in a world where wrinkles are practically illegal, going bald is cause for a mental breakdown,…
and women over size zero are encouraged to shoot themselves (immediately), what the hell do you do if you’re, gasp … DISABLED? Whatever body you’re born into, the pressure to be normal is everywhere. But have you ever met a normal person? What do they look like? Where do they live? What do they eat for breakfast?And what the **** does normal mean anyway?This is the award-winning wobbly comedian Francesca Martinez’s funny, personal, and universal story of how she learned to stick two shaky fingers up to the crazy expectations of a world obsessed with being ‘normal’.The Trust Manifesto: What you Need to do to Create a Better Internet
By Damian Bradfield. 2019
From the moment we wake up and unlock our phones, we're producing data. We offer up our unique fingerprint to…
the online world, scan our route to work, listen to a guided meditation or favourite playlist, slide money around, share documents and update our social media accounts. We reach for our phones up to 200 times a day, not knowing which companies are storing, using, selling and manipulating our data. But do we care? We're busy. We've got lives. We're pressed for time! There aren't enough hours in the day to read the terms and conditions. Or, maybe we're happy to trade our personal data for convenient services and to make our lives easier?Big data is the phenomenon of our age, but should we trust it without question? This is the trust dilemma.In 2009, Damian Bradfield founded WeTransfer, the largest file-sharing platform in the world with 50 million global users shipping more than one billion files of data a month. His unique experience of the big data economy has led him to question if there is another way to build the internet, one that is fairer and safer for everyone and, in The Trust Manifesto, he lays out this vision.Trinity: The Treachery and Pursuit of the Most Dangerous Spy in History
By Frank Close. 2019
'Everything about this story is astounding' Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times"Trinity" was the codename for the test explosion of the atomic…
bomb in New Mexico on 16 July 1945. Trinity is now also the extraordinary story of the bomb's metaphorical father, Rudolf Peierls; his intellectual son, the atomic spy, Klaus Fuchs, and the ghosts of the security services in Britain, the USA and USSR.Against the background of pre-war Nazi Germany, the Second World War and the following Cold War, the book traces how Peierls brought Fuchs into his family and his laboratory, only to be betrayed. It describes in unprecedented detail how Fuchs became a spy, his motivations and the information he passed to his Soviet contacts, both in the UK and after he went with Peierls to join the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in 1944. Frank Close is himself a distinguished nuclear physicist: uniquely, the book explains the science as well as the spying.Fuchs returned to Britain in August 1946 still undetected and became central to the UK's independent effort to develop nuclear weapons. Close describes the febrile atmosphere at Harwell, the nuclear physics laboratory near Oxford, where many of the key players were quartered, and the charged relationships which developed there. He uncovers fresh evidence about the role of the crucial VENONA signals decryptions, and shows how, despite mistakes made by both MI5 and the FBI, the net gradually closed around Fuchs, building an intolerable pressure which finally cracked him.The Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear device in August 1949, far earlier than the US or UK expected. In 1951, the US Congressional Committee on Atomic Espionage concluded, 'Fuchs alone has influenced the safety of more people and accomplished greater damage than any other spy not only in the history of the United States, but in the history of nations'. This book is the most comprehensive account yet published of these events, and of the tragic figure at their centre.The astonishing but true story of one of the most notorious spy cases from the Cold War—and the international manhunt…
that seized global attention as it revealed the shadowy world of deep cover KGB operatives. The dramatic arrest in London on January 7, 1961 of five Soviet spies made headlines worldwide and had repercussions around the globe. Alerted by the CIA, Britain's security service, MI5, had discovered two British spies stealing invaluable secrets from the highly sensitive submarine research center at Portland, UK. Their controller, Gordon Lonsdale, was a Canadian who frequently visited a middle-aged couple, the Krogers, in their sleepy London suburb. But the seemingly unassuming Krogers were revealed to be deep cover American KGB spies—infamous undercover agents the FBI had been hunting for years—and they were just one part of an extensive network of Soviet operatives in the UK.In the wake of the spies' sensational trial, the FBI uncovered the true identity of the enigmatic Lonsdale—Konon Molody, a Russian who had lived in California before being recruited by the KGB. Molody opened secret talks with MI5 to betray Russia, but before he had the chance, the KGB blackmailed Britain into spy swaps for him and the Krogers.Based on revelatory, newly-released archival material and inside sources from around the world, Dead Doubles follows the hunt for the highly damaging Portland Spy Ring. As gripping as a le Carré novel, this incredible narrative, layered with false identities, deceptions, and betrayal, crisscrosses from the UK to the USSR to the US, Canada, Europe and New Zealand, and brings to life one of the most extraordinary spy stories of the Cold War.In the tradition of Agent Zigzag comes this breathtaking biography, as fast-paced and emotionally intuitive as the very best spy…
thrillers, which illuminates an unsung hero of the French Resistance during World War II—Robert de La Rochefoucald, an aristocrat turned anti-Nazi saboteur—and his daring exploits as a résistant trained by Britain’s Special Operations Executive.A scion of one of the most storied families in France, Robert de La Rochefoucald was raised in magnificent chateaux and educated in Europe's finest schools. When the Nazis invaded and imprisoned his father, La Rochefoucald escaped to England and learned the dark arts of anarchy and combat—cracking safes and planting bombs and killing with his bare hands—from the officers of Special Operations Executive, the collection of British spies, beloved by Winston Churchill, who altered the war in Europe with tactics that earned it notoriety as the “Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” With his newfound skills, La Rochefoucauld returned to France and organized Resistance cells, blew up fortified compounds and munitions factories, interfered with Germans’ war-time missions, and executed Nazi officers. Caught by the Germans, La Rochefoucald withstood months of torture without cracking, and escaped his own death, not once but twice.The Saboteur recounts La Rochefoucauld’s enthralling adventures, from jumping from a moving truck on his way to his execution to stealing Nazi limos to dressing up in a nun’s habit—one of his many disguises and impersonations. Whatever the mission, whatever the dire circumstance, La Rochefoucauld acquitted himself nobly, with the straight-back aplomb of a man of aristocratic breeding: James Bond before Ian Fleming conjured him.More than just a fast-paced, true thriller, The Saboteur is also a deep dive into an endlessly fascinating historical moment, telling the untold story of a network of commandos that battled evil, bravely worked to change the course of history, and inspired the creation of America’s own Central Intelligence Agency.“This book grills up an enjoyable read for both avid foodies and novice diners alike! Perman’s sneak peek into the…
fascinating history of In-N-Out is as good as the delicious burgers themselves.”—Mario Batali, celebrity chef and author of Molto ItalianoA behind-the-counter look at the fast-food chain that breaks all the rules, Stacy Perman’s In-N-Out Burger is the New York Times bestselling inside story of the family behind the California-based hamburger chain with a cult following large enough to rival the Grateful Dead’s. A juicy unauthorized history of a small business-turned-big business titan, In-N-Out Burger was named one of Fast Company magazine’s Best Business Books of 2009, and Fortune Small Business insists that it “should be required reading for family business owners, alongside Rich Cohen’s Sweet and Low and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks.”Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters
By Richard A. Clarke. 2008
Richard Clarke's dramatic statement to the grieving families during the 9/11 Commission hearings touched a raw nerve across America. Not…
only had our government failed to prevent the 2001 terrorist attacks but it has proven itself, time and again, incapable of handling the majority of our most crucial national-security issues, from Iraq to Katrina and beyond. This is not just a temporary failure of any one administration, Mr. Clarke insists, but rather an endemic problem, the result of a pattern of incompetence that must be understood, confronted, and prevented. In Your Government Failed You, Clarke goes far beyond terrorism to examine the inexcusable chain of recurring U.S. government disasters and strategic blunders in recent years. Drawing on his thirty years in the White House, Pentagon, State Department, and intelligence community, Clarke gives us a privileged, if gravely troubling, look into the debacle of government policies, discovering patterns in the failures and offering ways to halt the catastrophic cycle once and for all.The Illusionist: The True Story of the Man Who Fooled Hitler
By Robert Hutton. 2024
Cairo, 1942: If you had asked a British officer who Colonel Clarke was, they would have been able to point…
him out: always ready with a drink and a story, he was a well-known figure in the local bars. If you then asked what he did, you would have less success. Those who knew didn't tell, and almost no one really knew at all.Clarke thought of himself as developing a new kind of weapon. Its components? Rumour, stagecraft, a sense of fun. Its target? The mind of Erwin Rommel, Hitler's greatest general. Throughout history, military commanders have sought to mislead their opponents. Dudley Clarke set out to do it on a scale no one had imagined before. Even afterwards, almost no one understood the magnitude of his achievement. Drawing on recently released documents and hugely expanding on the louche portrait of Clarke as seen in SAS: Rogue Heroes, journalist and historian Robert Hutton reveals the amazing story of Clarke's A Force, the invention of the SAS and the Commandos, and the masterful hoodwinking of the Desert Fox at the battle of El Alamein. The Illusionist tells for the first time the dazzling tale of how, at a pivotal moment in the war, British eccentricity and imagination combined to thwart the Nazis and save innumerable lives - on both sides.The Illusionist: The True Story of the Man Who Fooled Hitler
By Robert Hutton. 2024
Cairo, 1942: If you had asked a British officer who Colonel Clarke was, they would have been able to point…
him out: always ready with a drink and a story, he was a well-known figure in the local bars. If you then asked what he did, you would have less success. Those who knew didn't tell, and almost no one really knew at all.Clarke thought of himself as developing a new kind of weapon. Its components? Rumour, stagecraft, a sense of fun. Its target? The mind of Erwin Rommel, Hitler's greatest general. Throughout history, military commanders have sought to mislead their opponents. Dudley Clarke set out to do it on a scale no one had imagined before. Even afterwards, almost no one understood the magnitude of his achievement. Drawing on recently released documents and hugely expanding on the louche portrait of Clarke as seen in SAS: Rogue Heroes, journalist and historian Robert Hutton reveals the amazing story of Clarke's A Force, the invention of the SAS and the Commandos, and the masterful hoodwinking of the Desert Fox at the battle of El Alamein. The Illusionist tells for the first time the dazzling tale of how, at a pivotal moment in the war, British eccentricity and imagination combined to thwart the Nazis and save innumerable lives - on both sides.Burro Genius: A Memoir
By Victor Villasenor. 2004
Standing at the podium, Victor Villaseñor looked at the group of educators amassed before him, and his mind flooded with…
childhood memories of humiliation and abuse at the hands of his teachers. He became enraged. With a pounding heart, he began to speak of these incidents. When he was through, to his great disbelief he received a standing ovation. Many in the audience could not contain their own tears.So begins the passionate, touching memoir of Victor Villaseñor. Highly gifted and imaginative as a child, Villaseñor coped with an untreated learning disability (he was finally diagnosed, at the age of forty-four, with extreme dyslexia) and the frustration of growing up Latino in an English-only American school in the 1940s. Despite teachers who beat him because he could not speak English, Villaseñor clung to his dream of one day becoming a writer. He is now considered one of the premier writers of our time.Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
By Antonio Garcia Martinez. 2016
The instant New York Times bestseller, now available in paperback and featuring a new afterword from the author—the insider's guide to the…
Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, the inner workings of the tech world, and who really runs Silicon Valley“Incisive.... The most fun business book I have read this year.... Clearly there will be people who hate this book — which is probably one of the things that makes it such a great read.”— Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York TimesImagine a chimpanzee rampaging through a datacenter powering everything from Google to Facebook. Infrastructure engineers use a software version of this “chaos monkey” to test online services’ robustness—their ability to survive random failure and correct mistakes before they actually occur. Tech entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys. One of Silicon Valley’s most audacious chaos monkeys is Antonio García Martínez.After stints on Wall Street and as CEO of his own startup, García Martínez joined Facebook’s nascent advertising team. Forced out in the wake of an internal product war over the future of the company’s monetization strategy, García Martínez eventually landed at rival Twitter. In Chaos Monkeys, this gleeful contrarian unravels the chaotic evolution of social media and online marketing and reveals how it is invading our lives and shaping our future.Ten-Thirty-Three: The Inside Story of Britain's Secret Killing Machine in Northern Ireland
By Nicholas Davies. 1999
This explosive book reveals the conspiracy between British Military Intelligence and the gunman of the UDA who targeted and killed…
both Republican terrorists and ordinary Catholics. The secret partnership was sanctioned at the highest level of the British government and full details of planned operations, including killings, were passed directly to its Joint Intelligence Committee in London. Ten-Thirty-Three was the codename given to the agent who was fed with all the details necessary for Loyalist gunmen to carry out their murderous activities. But somewhere along the line the power went to Ten-Thirty-Three’s head and he became increasingly unpredictable. It wasn’t long before he was completely out of control, and his Military Intelligence bosses had the makings of a major catastrophe on their hands… This extraordinary true story lifts the lid on shocking abuses of power in Belfast in the 1980s and 1990s.Elena Vanishing: A Memoir
By Elena Dunkle, Dunkle. 2015
Seventeen-year-old Elena is vanishing. Every day means renewed determination, so every day means fewer calories. This is the story of…
a girl whose armor against anxiety becomes artillery against herself as she battles on both sides of a lose-lose war in a struggle with anorexia. Told entirely from Elena's perspective over a five-year period and cowritten with her mother, award-winning author Clare B. Dunkle, Elena's memoir is a fascinating and intimate look at a deadly disease, and a must read for anyone who knows someone suffering from an eating disorder.Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body
By Rebekah Taussig. 2020
A memoir-in-essays from disability advocate and creator of the Instagram account @sitting_pretty Rebekah Taussig, processing a lifetime of memories to…
paint a beautiful, nuanced portrait of a body that looks and moves differently than most.Growing up as a paralyzed girl during the 90s and early 2000s, Rebekah Taussig only saw disability depicted as something monstrous (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), inspirational (Helen Keller), or angelic (Forrest Gump). None of this felt right; and as she got older, she longed for more stories that allowed disability to be complex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful and fulfilling.Writing about the rhythms and textures of what it means to live in a body that doesn’t fit, Rebekah reflects on everything from the complications of kindness and charity, living both independently and dependently, experiencing intimacy, and how the pervasiveness of ableism in our everyday media directly translates to everyday life. Disability affects all of us, directly or indirectly, at one point or another. By exploring this truth in poignant and lyrical essays, Taussig illustrates the need for more stories and more voices to understand the diversity of humanity. Sitting Pretty challenges us as a society to be patient and vigilant, practical and imaginative, kind and relentless, as we set to work to write an entirely different story.The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World's Most Important Company
By Michael S. Malone. 2014
Based on unprecedented access to the corporation’s archives, The Intel Trinity is the first full history of Intel Corporation—the essential…
company of the digital age— told through the lives of the three most important figures in the company’s history: Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove.Often hailed the “most important company in the world,” Intel remains, more than four decades after its inception, a defining company of the global digital economy. The legendary inventors of the microprocessor-the single most important product in the modern world-Intel today builds the tiny “engines” that power almost every intelligent electronic device on the planet.But the true story of Intel is the human story of the trio of geniuses behind it. Michael S. Malone reveals how each brought different things to Intel, and at different times. Noyce, the most respected high tech figure of his generation, brought credibility (and money) to the company’s founding; Moore made Intel the world’s technological leader; and Grove, has relentlessly driven the company to ever-higher levels of success and competitiveness. Without any one of these figures, Intel would never have achieved its historic success; with them, Intel made possible the personal computer, Internet, telecommunications, and the personal electronics revolutions.The Intel Trinity is not just the story of Intel’s legendary past; it also offers an analysis of the formidable challenges that lie ahead as the company struggles to maintain its dominance, its culture, and its legacy.With eight pages of black-and-white photos.Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes
By Richard A. Clarke, R. P. Eddy. 2017
From President Bill Clinton's recommended reading listPublishers Weekly BestsellerWarnings is the story of the future of national security, threatening technologies,…
the U.S. economy, and possibly the fate of civilization.In Greek mythology Cassandra foresaw calamities, but was cursed by the gods to be ignored. Modern-day Cassandras clearly predicted the disasters of Katrina, Fukushima, the Great Recession, the rise of ISIS, the spread of viruses and many more. Like the mythological Cassandra, they were ignored. There are others right now warning of impending disasters—from cyber attacks to pandemics—but how do we know which warnings are likely to be right? Through riveting explorations in a variety of fields, the authors—both accomplished CEOs and White House National Security Council veterans—discover a method to separate the accurate Cassandras from the crazy doomsayers. They then investigate the experts who today are warning of future disasters: the threats from artificial intelligence, bio-hacking, malware attacks, and more, and whose calls are not being heeded. Clarke’s and Eddy’s penetrating insights are essential for any person, any business, or any government that doesn’t want to be a blind victim of tomorrow’s catastrophe.The Structured Literacy Planner: Designing Interventions for Common Reading Difficulties, Grades 1-9
By Louise Spear-Swerling. 2024
Structured Literacy (SL) approaches are increasingly recognized as the gold standard for teaching struggling readers. This highly practical book walks…
educators through designing SL interventions for students with common types of reading difficulties--word reading, comprehension, or a combination of both. Louise Spear-Swerling offers tools for assessing students' reading profiles and tailoring SL to their needs. In a convenient large-size format, the volume is packed with case studies, sample lesson plans addressing both early and advanced stages of reading, instructional activities, and application exercises for teachers. A chapter on English language structure presents essential foundations for implementing SL effectively. The companion website features a knowledge survey about language structure (with answer key), as well as downloadable copies of the book's 14 reproducible forms. See also Louise Spear-Swerling's edited volume, Structured Literacy Interventions: Teaching Students with Reading Difficulties, Grades K–6, which surveys SL interventions across all components of literacy.The Other Child: The Exceptional Siblings of Special Needs Children
By Linda Scotson. 2024
In The Other Child, Linda Scotson looks at the impact on a child at the arrival of a handicapped sibling.…
Lili, Linda Scotson&’s daughter, was only two when Doran was born, and she has been Doran&’s companion, motivator, carer—in fact, sister extraordinaire. In helping Doran, she has had to cope with other problems—with the loss of her father, ill health, and her own minor neurological difficulties. But she has done so with courage and determination. What do siblings lose, growing up with a brother or sister with brain injury—and what do they gain? How does the hostility and indifference of the outside world affect these children&’s lives? Becoming &“carers&” themselves, do they miss out on parental care from weary and overstretched parents? How do they reach an understanding, often when very young, of what their injured sibling can and cannot do? Shining through these stories is the love, the humor, and the constancy with which these children approach their very difficult family position—many of them, in adulthood, continuing to care for the handicapped companion of their childhood. By drawing attention to these children, Linda Scotson not only pays tribute to their qualities but also shows how unjust the system is towards those parents struggling to keep their brain-injured child within the family. She argues for a greater network of support systems for the healthy siblings and a greater understanding of the new home treatment programs for injured children—programs in which the whole family, as a team, can participate. This will be an invaluable book for parents of brain-injured children, and for all those professionally involved in the care of such families.Covert City: The Cold War and the Making of Miami
By Vince Houghton, Eric Driggs. 2024
Secret operations, corruption, crime, and a city teeming with spies: why Miami was as crucial to winning the Cold War…
as Washington DC or Moscow. The Cuban Missile Crisis was perhaps the most dramatic and dangerous period of the Cold War. What's less well known is that the city of Miami, mere miles away, was a pivotal, though less well known, part of Cold War history. With its population of Communist exiles from Cuba, its strategic value for military operations, and its lax business laws, Miami was an ideal environment for espionage.Covert City tells the history of how the entire city of Miami was constructed in the image of the US-Cuba rivalry. From the Bay of Pigs invasion to the death of Fidel Castro, the book shows how Miami is a hub for money and cocaine but also secrets and ideologies. Cuban exiles built criminal and political organizations in the city, leading Washington to set up a CIA station there, codenamed JMWAVE. It monitored gang activities, plotted secret operations against Castro, and became a base for surveilling Latin American neighbors. The money and infrastructure built for the CIA was integral to the development of Miami.Covert City is a sweeping and entertaining history, full of stunning experimental operations and colorful characters--a story of a place like no other.