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Why Going Against the Grain Pays.

Bestselling author Bill Bonner has long been a maverick observer of the financial and political world, sharpening his sardonic wit, in particular, on the vagaries of the investing public. Market booms and busts, tulip manias and dotcom bubbles, venture capitalists and vulture funds, he lets you know, are best explained not by dry statistics and obscure theories but by the metaphors and analogies of literature.

Now, in Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets, Bonner and freelance journalist Lila Rajiva use literary economics to offer broader insights into mass behavior and its devastating effects on society. Why is it, they ask, that perfectly sane and responsible individuals can get together, and by some bizarre alchemy turn into an irrational mob? What makes them trust charlatans and demagogues who manipulate their worst instincts? Why do they abandon good sense, good behavior and good taste when an empty slogan is waved in front of them. Why is the road to hell paved with so many sterling intentions? Why is there a  fool on every corner and a knave in every public office?

In attempting an answer, the authors weave a light-hearted journey through history, politics and finance to show group think at work in an improbable array of instances, from medieval crusades to the architectural follies of hedge-fund managers. Their journey takes them ultimately to the desk of the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank and to a cautionary tale of the current bubble economy. They warn that the gush of credit let loose by Alan Greenspan and multiplied by the sophisticated number games of Wall Street whizzes is fraught with perils for the unwary. Boom without end, pronounces The Street.  But Bonner and Rajiva are more cynical. When the higher math and the greater greed come together, watch out below!

Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets ends by giving concrete advice on how readers can avoid what the authors call the public spectacle of modern finance,  and become, instead, private investors -  knowing their own mind and following their own intuitions. The authors have no gimmicks to offer here -   but instead give a better understanding of the dynamics of market behavior, allowing prudent investors to protect themselves from the fads and follies of the investment markets..
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The Das Kapital of the 20th century An essential text, and the main theoretical work of the situationists Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960's up to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the late 20th century. This new edition is the Ken Knabb translation. Certainly it has the most "modern" design of all three editions, as well as a short new introduction from the translator. .
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Benjamin Weaver is awaiting death in Newgate gaol. Mysteriously convicted for a murder he didn't commit by a judge determined to see him hang, he is suddenly - and equally mysteriously - offered the means to escape. What, you may well ask, is going on? It's a question Weaver asks of himself as he slinks out into the London night on a mission to clear his name. In doing so, he steps straight into a labyrinthine plot that weaves, like Benjamin, across eighteenth century London. For the conspiracy against him is part of a grimmer and gaudier picture: one that encompasses double-dealings and dockworkers, the extorting of a priest - and a looming election with the potential to spark a revolution and topple the monarchy. Handily, Weaver is a private investigator. He's also an ex-pugilist, which is also a good thing when it comes to punching his weight in the 'polite' society of plotters and politicians, power-brokers, crime lords, assassins and spies. At the apex of which sits, rather precariously, a recent import from Hanover: The King..
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This book is a visual essay documenting the notion and history of spectacle, those public performances and happenings that galvanize hordes of people and, if only for a brief moment, express the culture of our time in mass participation. From the dazzling opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games to the surreal circus atmosphere of performance troupes like Cirque du Soleil, from holiday parades like Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade to religious events such as the Hindu festival of Kumbh Mela, which drew millions of pilgrims in 2001, this volume is a tribute to the art of celebration and ritual. As design impresario David Rockwell notes in the book's interview, "the focus of this book's journey is the value of being there. It's not about something happening to you, it's about participating...This is looking at things that are temporary and the power of something that can burst and happen and go away." As editors of this book, Mau and Rockwell bring together eye-popping photographs, interviews, and brief essays that examine the art, evolution, and cultural impact of spectacles old and new and around the globe. The book is divided in six thematic sections, each expressing an aspect of the ritualistic event: Scale, Visual Exuberance, Community, Transformation, Impermanence, and Immersion. Each section documents three spectacles, ranging from the Kumbh Mela celebration in India to Carnival celebrations to the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona; from the glitzy mass appeal of Las Vegas to the historical reenactment of the Calcio Storico in Florence, and ephemeral events like fireworks displays and flashmobs. Each featured spectacle includes several spreads of stunning color and archival photographs, a brief description, selected statistics, and an interview with a noted cultural figure, among whom are art critic Dave Hickey, architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown, theater professor Arnold Aronson of Columbia University, and theater director Julie Taymor. Illustrated sidebars profile historical figures and events, such as Pierre de Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympic Games, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. "Spectacle" presents an unprecedented collection of dynamic images that convey the palpable buzz, sheer beauty, and often bizarre fascination of man-made events worldwide. And, for those readers with a desire to get closer to the scenes as spectators or participants, the book includes a listing of 24 events with factual information (where, what, when); among these are the Dakar Motor Rally, the Cherry Blossom Festival in Japan, Dia de los Muertos in Mexico, the New York City Marathon, and Ibiza raves..
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This is the first book to collate and synthesise the recent burgeoning primary research literature on dog behaviour, evolution and cognition The author presents a new ecological approach to the understanding of dog behaviour, demonstrating how dogs can be the subject of rigorous and productive scientific study without the need to confine them to a laboratory environment.
Dog Behaviour, Evolution, and Cognition starts with an overview of the conceptual and methodological issues associated with the study of the dog, followed by a brief description of their role in human society--almost a third of human families share their daily life with a dog! An evolutionary perspective is then introduced with a summary of current research into the process of domestication. The central part of the book is devoted to issues relating to the cognitive aspects of behavior which have received particular attention in recent years from both psychologists and ethologists. The book's final chapters introduce the reader to many novel approaches to dog behavior, set in the context of behavioral development and genetics.
Directions for future research are highlighted throughout the text which also incorporates links to human and primate research by drawing on homologies and analogies in both evolution and behavior. The book will therefore be of relevance and use to anyone with an interest in behavioral ecology including graduate students of animal behavior and cognition, as well as a more general audience of dog enthusiasts, biologists, psychologists and sociologists..
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Winner, 2000 Lionel Trilling Award given by Columbia College.

Suspensions of Perception is a major historical study of human attention and its volatile role in modern Western culture. It argues that the ways in which we intently look at or listen to anything result from crucial changes in the nature of perception that can be traced back to the second half of the nineteenth century.

Focusing on the period from about 1880 to 1905, Jonathan Crary examines the connections between the modernization of subjectivity and the dramatic expansion and industrialization of visual/auditory culture. At the core of his project is the paradoxical nature of modern attention, which was both a fundamental condition of individual freedom, creativity, and experience and a central element in the efficient functioning of economic and disciplinary institutions as well as the emerging spaces of mass consumption and spectacle.

Crary approaches these issues through multiple analyses of single works by three key modernist painters—Manet, Seurat, and Cézanne—who each engaged in a singular confrontation with the disruptions, vacancies, and rifts within a perceptual field. Each in his own way discovered that sustained attentiveness, rather than fixing or securing the world, led to perceptual disintegration and loss of presence, and each used this discovery as the basis for a reinvention of representational practices.

Suspensions of Perception decisively relocates the problem of aesthetic contemplation within a broader collective encounter with the unstable nature of perception—in psychology, philosophy, neurology, early cinema, and photography. In doing so, it provides a historical framework for understanding the current social crisis of attention amid the accelerating metamorphoses of our contemporary technological culture..
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First published in 1967, Guy Debord's stinging revolutionary critique of contemporary society, The Society of the Spectacle has since acquired a cult status. Credited by many as being the inspiration for the ideas generated by the events of May 1968 in France, Debord's pitiless attack on commodity fetishism and its incrustation in the practices of everyday life continues to burn brightly in today's age of satellite television and the soundbite. In Comments on the Society of the Spectacle published twenty years later, Debord returned to the themes of his previous analysis and demonstrated how they were all the more relevant in a period when the 'integrated spectacle' was dominant. Resolutely refusing to be reconciled to the system, Debord trenchantly slices through the doxa and mystification offered tip by journalists and pundits to show how aspects of reality as diverse as terrorism and the environment, the Mafia and the media, were caught tip in the logic of the spectacular society. Pointing the finger clearly at those who benefit from the logic of domination, Debord's Comments convey the revolutionary impulse at the heart of situationism..
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