The Last Lecture

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
"We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand."
--Randy Pausch
A lot of professors give talks titled "The Last Lecture." Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them. And while they speak, audiences can't help but mull the same question: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?

When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave--"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams"--wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because "time is all you have...and you may find one day that you have less than you think"). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.

In this book, Randy Pausch has combined the humor, inspiration and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and given it an indelible form. It is a book that will be shared for generations to come.

Questions for Randy Pausch

We were shy about barging in on Randy Pausch's valuable time to ask him a few questions about his expansion of his famous Last Lecture into the book by the same name, but he was gracious enough to take a moment to answer. (See Randy to the right with his kids, Dylan, Logan, and Chloe.) As anyone who has watched the lecture or read the book will understand, the really crucial question is the last one, and we weren't surprised to learn that the "secret" to winning giant stuffed animals on the midway, like most anything else, is sheer persistence.

Amazon.com: I apologize for asking a question you must get far more often than you'd like, but how are you feeling?

Pausch: The tumors are not yet large enough to affect my health, so all the problems are related to the chemotherapy. I have neuropathy (numbness in fingers and toes), and varying degrees of GI discomfort, mild nausea, and fatigue. Occasionally I have an unusually bad reaction to a chemo infusion (last week, I spiked a 103 fever), but all of this is a small price to pay for walkin' around.

Amazon.com: Your lecture at Carnegie Mellon has reached millions of people, but even with the short time you apparently have, you wanted to write a book. What did you want to say in a book that you weren't able to say in the lecture?

Pausch: Well, the lecture was written quickly--in under a week. And it was time-limited. I had a great six-hour lecture I could give, but I suspect it would have been less popular at that length ;-).

A book allows me to cover many, many more stories from my life and the attendant lessons I hope my kids can take from them. Also, much of my lecture at Carnegie Mellon focused on the professional side of my life--my students, colleagues and career. The book is a far more personal look at my childhood dreams and all the lessons I've learned. Putting words on paper, I've found, was a better way for me to share all the yearnings I have regarding my wife, children and other loved ones. I knew I couldn't have gone into those subjects on stage without getting emotional.

Amazon.com: You talk about the importance--and the possibility!--of following your childhood dreams, and of keeping that childlike sense of wonder. But are there things you didn't learn until you were a grownup that helped you do that?

Pausch: That's a great question. I think the most important thing I learned as I grew older was that you can't get anywhere without help. That means people have to want to help you, and that begs the question: What kind of person do other people seem to want to help? That strikes me as a pretty good operational answer to the existential question: "What kind of person should you try to be?"

Amazon.com: One of the things that struck me most about your talk was how many other people you talked about. You made me want to meet them and work with them--and believe me, I wouldn't make much of a computer scientist. Do you think the people you've brought together will be your legacy as well?

Pausch: Like any teacher, my students are my biggest professional legacy. I'd like to think that the people I've crossed paths with have learned something from me, and I know I learned a great deal from them, for which I am very grateful. Certainly, I've dedicated a lot of my teaching to helping young folks realize how they need to be able to work with other people--especially other people who are very different from themselves.

Amazon.com: And last, the most important question: What's the secret for knocking down those milk bottles on the midway?

Pausch: Two-part answer:
1) long arms
2) discretionary income / persistence

Actually, I was never good at the milk bottles. I'm more of a ring toss and softball-in-milk-can guy, myself. More seriously, though, most people try these games once, don't win immediately, and then give up. I've won *lots* of midway stuffed animals, but I don't ever recall winning one on the very first try. Nor did I expect to. That's why I think midway games are a great metaphor for life.



From Publishers Weekly
Made famous by his Last Lecture at Carnegie Mellon and the quick Internet proliferation of the video of the event, Pausch decided that maybe he just wasn't done lecturing. Despite being several months into the last stage of pancreatic cancer, he managed to put together this book. The crux of it is lessons and morals for his young and infant children to learn once he is gone. Despite his sometimes-contradictory life rules, it proves entertaining and at times inspirational. Surprisingly, the audiobook doesn't include the reading of Pausch's actual Last Lecture, which he gave on September 18, 2007, a month after being diagnosed. Erik Singer provides an excellent inflective voice that hints at the reveries of past experiences with family and children while wielding hope and regret for family he will leave behind. The first CD is enhanced with photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

Product Description
"We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand."
--Randy Pausch
A lot of professors give talks titled "The Last Lecture." Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them. And while they speak, audiences can't help but mull the same question: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?

When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave--"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams"--wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because "time is all you have...and you may find one day that you have less than you think"). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.

In this book, Randy Pausch has combined the humor, inspiration and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and given it an indelible form. It is a book that will be shared for generations to come.

About the Author
Randy Pausch is a Professor of Computer Science, Human Computer Interaction, and Design at Carnegie Mellon University. From 1988-1997, he taught at the University of Virginia. He is an award-winning teacher and researcher, and has worked with Adobe, Google, Electronic Arts (EA), and Walt Disney Imagineering, and pioneered the Alice project. He lives in Virginia with his wife and three children.

Jeffrey Zaslow, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, attended the last lecture, and wrote the story that helped fuel worldwide interest in it. He lives in suburban Detroit with his wife, Sherry, and daughters Jordan, Alex and Eden.

House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street

Editorial Reviews
Review
"Engrossing....[Cohan] gives us in these pages a chilling, almost minute-by-minute account of the 10, vertigo-inducing days that one year ago revealed Bear Stearns to be a flimsy house of cards in a perfect storm....He does a deft job of explicating the underlying reasons that put Bear Stearns in peril in the first place....turns complex Wall Street maneuverings into high drama that is gripping — and almost immediately comprehensible — to the lay reader....riveting, edge-of-the-seat reading"
--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Cohan vividly documents the mix of arrogance, greed, recklessness, and pettiness that took down the 86 year old brokerage house and then the entire economy. It's a page-turner in the tradition of the 1990 Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Heylar, offering both a seemingly comprehensive understanding of the business and wide access to insiders....hard to put down, especially thanks to its dishy, often profane, quotes from insiders" --BusinessWeek

"Masterfully reported....[Cohan] has turned into one of our most able financial journalists....he deploys not only his hands-on experience of this exotic corner of the financial industry but also a remarkable gift for plain-spoken explanation...the other great strength of this important book is the breadth and skill of the author's interviews...Cohan does a brilliant job of sketching in the eccentric, vulgar, greedy, profane and coarse individuals who ignored all these warnings to their own profit and the ruin of so many others. It's impossible to do justice to his reportorial detail in a brief review..." -- Los Angeles Times


"A riveting blow-by-blow account of the days leading up to the government-backed shotgun wedding (to JPM)." -- The Economist

"A masterly reconstruction of Bear Stearns implosion--a tumultuous episode in Wall Street history that still reverberates throughout our economy today....meticulous reporting.....first drafts of history don't get much better than this" --Bloomberg

Product Description

On March 5, 2008, at 10:15 A.M., a hedge fund manager in Florida wrote a post on his investing advice Web site that included a startling statement about Bear Stearns & Co., the nation’s fifth-largest investment bank: “In my book, they are insolvent.”

This seemed a bold and risky statement. Bear Stearns was about to announce profits of $115 million for the first quarter of 2008, had $17.3 billion in cash on hand, and, as the company incessantly boasted, had been a colossally profitable enterprise in the eighty-five years since its founding.

Ten days later, Bear Stearns no longer existed, and the calamitous financial meltdown of 2008 had begun.

How this happened – and why – is the subject of William D. Cohan’s superb and shocking narrative that chronicles the fall of Bear Stearns and the end of the Second Gilded Age on Wall Street. Bear Stearns serves as the Rosetta Stone to explain how a combination of risky bets, corporate political infighting, lax government regulations and truly bad decision-making wrought havoc on the world financial system.

Cohan’s minute-by-minute account of those ten days in March makes for breathless reading, as the bankers at Bear Stearns struggled to contain the cascading series of events that would doom the firm, and as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, New York Federal Reserve Bank President Tim Geithner, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke began to realize the dire consequences for the world economy should the company go bankrupt.

But HOUSE OF CARDS does more than recount the incredible panic of the first stages of the financial meltdown. William D. Cohan beautifully demonstrates why the seemingly invincible Wall Street money machine came crashing down. He chronicles the swashbuckling corporate culture of Bear Stearns, the strangely crucial role competitive bridge played in the company’s fortunes, the brutal internecine battles for power, and the deadly combination of greed and inattention that helps to explain why the company’s leaders ignored the danger lurking in Bear’s huge positions in mortgage-backed securities.

The author deftly portrays larger-than-life personalities like Ace Greenberg, Bear Stearns’ miserly, take-no-prisoners chairman whose memos about re-using paper clips were legendary throughout Wall Street; his profane, colorful rival and eventual heir Jimmy Cayne, whose world-champion-level bridge skills were a lever in his corporate rise and became a symbol of the reasons for the firm’s demise; and Jamie Dimon, the blunt-talking CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who won the astonishing endgame of the saga (the Bear Stearns headquarters alone were worth more than JP Morgan paid for the whole company).

Cohan’s explanation of seemingly arcane subjects like credit default swaps and fixed- income securities is masterful and crystal clear, but it is the high-end dish and powerful narrative drive that makes HOUSE OF CARDS an irresistible read on a par with classics such as LIAR’S POKER and BARBARIANS AT THE GATE.

Written with the novelistic verve and insider knowledge that made THE LAST TYCOONS a bestseller and a prize-winner, HOUSE OF CARDS is a chilling cautionary tale about greed, arrogance, and stupidity in the financial world, and the consequences for all of us.



About the Author

WILLIAM D. COHAN, a former senior Wall Street investment banker, is the bestselling author of The Last Tycoons and the winner of the 2007 FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. He writes for The Financial Times, Fortune, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Daily Beast, and appears frequently on CNBC.



Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The first murmurings of impending doom for the financial world originated 2,500 miles from Wall Street in an unassuming office suite just north of Orlando, Florida. There, hard by the train tracks, Bennet Sedacca announced to the world at 10:15 on the morning of March 5, 2008, that venerable Bear Stearns & Co., the nation’s fifth--largest investment bank, was in trouble, big trouble. “Yep,” Sedacca wrote on the Minyanville Web site, which is dedicated to helping investors comprehend the financial world. “The great credit unwind is upon us. Credit default swaps on all brokers, particularly Lehman and Bear Stearns, are blowing out, big time.”

Sedacca, the forty--eight--year--old president of Atlantic Advisors, a $3.5 billion investment management company and hedge fund, had been watching his Bloomberg screens on a daily basis as the cost of insuring the short--term obligations–known in Wall Street argot as “credit default swaps”–of both Lehman and Bear Stearns had increased steadily since the summer of 2007 and then more rapidly in February 2008. Now he was calling the end of the credit party that had been raging on Wall Street for six years. “I’ve been talking about it for years,” Sedacca said later. “But I started to notice it that fall. Because if you think about it, if you have all this nuclear waste on your balance sheet, what are you supposed to do? You’re supposed to cut your dividends, you’re supposed to raise equity, and you’re supposed to shrink your balance sheet. And they did just the opposite. They took on more leverage. Lehman went from twenty--five to thirty--five times leveraged in one year. And then they announce a big stock buyback at $65 a share and they sell stock at $38 a share. I mean, they don’t know what they’re doing. And yet they get rewarded for doing that. It makes me sick.”

Sedacca had witnessed firsthand a few blowups in his day. He worked at the investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert–the former home of junk--bond king Michael Milken–when it was liquidated in 1990 and lost virtually overnight the stock he had in the firm as it plunged from $110 per share to zero (Drexel was a private company but the stock had been valued for internal purposes). “It was enough that it stunned,” he explained. “It was more than a twenty--nine--year--old would want to lose.” Many of his Drexel colleagues had taken out loans from Citibank to buy the Drexel stock and were left with their bank loans and worthless stock. “I know people with millions and millions of dollars of debt and the stock was at zero,” he said. They either paid off the loans or declared personal bankruptcy. “That’s what happens when everyone turns off your funding,” he added.
He then moved on to Kidder Peabody and watched that 130--year--old firm disintegrate, too. As a result of these experiences and those at other Wall Street firms, he had developed a healthy skepticism of both debt and the ways of Wall Street. Starting in the summer of 2007, he began to feel certain that the mountain of debt building across many sectors of the American economy would not come to a good end. He started betting against credit. “I’ve watched enough screens long enough to know something was wrong,” he said.

The problem at Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, Sedacca informed his clients and Minyanville readers, was that both firms had huge inventories on their balance sheets of securities backed by home mortgages. The rate of default on these mortgages, while still small, was growing at the same time that the value of the underlying collateral for the mortgage–people’s homes–was falling rapidly. Sedacca could not help noticing that the effects of this double whammy were beginning to show up in other, smaller companies involved in the mortgage industry. He could watch the noose tighten in the credit markets. “Look at what is happening to Thornburg Mortgage,” he wrote, referring to the publicly traded home mortgage lender, which specialized in making what were known as “Alt--A” mortgages, those greater than $417,000, to wealthy borrowers. Thornburg had been “overwhelmed” by margin calls from its lenders. “It supposedly only has a 0.44% default rate on its [$24.7 billion] mortgage portfolio that it services but the bonds it owns are getting pounded. Result? Margin call. The worst part is that the company went to sell some bonds to settle the margin calls but couldn’t. The ultimate Roach Motel.”

That Thornburg, based in Sante Fe, New Mexico, appeared to be hitting the wall was somewhat surprising considering its customers’ low default rate and high credit quality. The problem at Thornburg was not that its customers could no longer pay the interest and principal on their mortgages; the problem was that the company could no longer fund its business on a day--to--day basis. Thornburg had a liquidity problem because its lenders no longer liked the collateral–those jumbo mortgages–Thornburg used to obtain financing.

Unlike a bank, which is able to use the cash from its depositors to fund most of its operations, financial institutions such as Thornburg as well as pure investment banks such as Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns had no depositors’ money to use. Instead they funded their operations in a few ways: either by occasionally issuing long--term securities, such as debt or preferred stock, or most often by obtaining short--term, often overnight, borrowings in the unsecured commercial paper market or in the overnight “repo” market, where the borrowings are secured by the various securities and other assets on their balance sheets. These fairly routine borrowings have been repeated day after day for some thirty years and worked splendidly–until there was perceived to be a problem with either the securities or the institutions backing them up, and then the funding evaporated like rain in the Sahara. The dirty little secret of what used to be known as Wall Street securities firms–Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns–was that every one of them funded their business in this way to varying degress, and every one of them was always just twenty--four hours away from a funding crisis. The key to day--to--day survival was the skill with which Wall Street executives managed their firms’ ongoing reputation in the marketplace.

Thornburg financed its operations very similarly to the way investment banks did. But in mid--February 2008, Thornburg was having a very difficult time managing its perception in the marketplace because its short--term borrowings were backed by the mortgages it held on its balance sheet. Some of these mortgages were prime mortgages, money lent to the lowest--risk borrowers, and some were those Alt--A mortgages, which were marginally riskier than prime mortgages and offered investors higher yields. At Thornburg, 99.56 percent of these mortgages were performing just fine.

But that did not matter. What mattered was that the perception of these mortgage--related assets in the market was deteriorating rapidly. That perception spelled potential doom for firms such as Thornburg, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers, which financed their businesses in the overnight repo market using mortgage--related assets as collateral.

For Thornburg the trouble began on February 14, halfway around the world, when UBS, the largest Swiss bank, reported a fourth--quarter 2007 loss of $11.3 billion after writing off $13.7 billion of investments in U.S. mortgages. Amid this huge write--off, UBS said it had lost $2 billion on Alt--A mortgages and, worse, that it had an additional exposure of $26.6 billion to them. In a letter to shareholders before he lost his job on April 1, Marcel Ospel, UBS’s longtime chairman, wrote that the year 2007 had been “one of the most difficult in our history” because of “the sudden and serious deterioration in the U.S. housing market.”

UBS’s sneeze meant that Thornburg, among others, caught a major cold. By writing down the value of its Alt--A mortgages, UBS forced other players in the market to begin to revalue the Alt--A mortgages on their books. Since these were the very assets that Thornburg (and Bear Stearns) used as collateral for its short--term borrowings, soon after February 14 the company’s creditors made margin calls “in excess of $300 million” on its short--term borrowings. At first, Thornburg used what cash it had to meet the margin calls. But that did not stop the worries of its creditors. “After meeting all of its margin calls as of February 27, 2008, Thornburg Mortgage saw further continued deterioration in the market prices of its high quality, primarily AAA--rated mortgage securities,” the company wrote in a March 3 filing with the SEC. This new deterioration of the value of its prime mortgages resulted in new margin calls of $270 million–among them $49 million from Morgan Stanley, $28 million from JPMorgan on February 28, and $54 million from Goldman Sachs.

This time, though, Thornburg was “left with limited available liquidity” to meet the new margin calls or any future margin calls. From December 31, 2007, to March 3, 2008, Thornburg received margin calls totaling $1.777 billion and was able to satisfy only $1.167 billion of them, or about 65 percent–a dismal performance. The balance of $610 million “significantly exceeded its available liquidity,” the company announced on March 7. “These events have raised substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern without significant restructuring and the addition of new capital.” The company’s stock, which had traded for more than $28 per share in May 2007, closed at $4.32 on March 3, 2008, down 51 percent ...

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
"The best way to understand the dramatic transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life," writes Malcolm Gladwell, "is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do." Although anyone familiar with the theory of memetics will recognize this concept, Gladwell's The Tipping Point has quite a few interesting twists on the subject.
For example, Paul Revere was able to galvanize the forces of resistance so effectively in part because he was what Gladwell calls a "Connector": he knew just about everybody, particularly the revolutionary leaders in each of the towns that he rode through. But Revere "wasn't just the man with the biggest Rolodex in colonial Boston," he was also a "Maven" who gathered extensive information about the British. He knew what was going on and he knew exactly whom to tell. The phenomenon continues to this day--think of how often you've received information in an e-mail message that had been forwarded at least half a dozen times before reaching you.

Gladwell develops these and other concepts (such as the "stickiness" of ideas or the effect of population size on information dispersal) through simple, clear explanations and entertainingly illustrative anecdotes, such as comparing the pedagogical methods of Sesame Street and Blue's Clues, or explaining why it would be even easier to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with the actor Rod Steiger. Although some readers may find the transitional passages between chapters hold their hands a little too tightly, and Gladwell's closing invocation of the possibilities of social engineering sketchy, even chilling, The Tipping Point is one of the most effective books on science for a general audience in ages. It seems inevitable that "tipping point," like "future shock" or "chaos theory," will soon become one of those ideas that everybody knows--or at least knows by name. --Ron Hogan --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly
The premise of this facile piece of pop sociology has built-in appeal: little changes can have big effects; when small numbers of people start behaving differently, that behavior can ripple outward until a critical mass or "tipping point" is reached, changing the world. Gladwell's thesis that ideas, products, messages and behaviors "spread just like viruses do" remains a metaphor as he follows the growth of "word-of-mouth epidemics" triggered with the help of three pivotal types. These are Connectors, sociable personalities who bring people together; Mavens, who like to pass along knowledge; and Salesmen, adept at persuading the unenlightened. (Paul Revere, for example, was a Maven and a Connector). Gladwell's applications of his "tipping point" concept to current phenomena--such as the drop in violent crime in New York, the rebirth of Hush Puppies suede shoes as a suburban mall favorite, teenage suicide patterns and the efficiency of small work units--may arouse controversy. For example, many parents may be alarmed at his advice on drugs: since teenagers' experimentation with drugs, including cocaine, seldom leads to hardcore use, he contends, "We have to stop fighting this kind of experimentation. We have to accept it and even embrace it." While it offers a smorgasbord of intriguing snippets summarizing research on topics such as conversational patterns, infants' crib talk, judging other people's character, cheating habits in schoolchildren, memory sharing among families or couples, and the dehumanizing effects of prisons, this volume betrays its roots as a series of articles for the New Yorker, where Gladwell is a staff writer: his trendy material feels bloated and insubstantial in book form. Agent, Tina Bennett of Janklow & Nesbit. Major ad/promo. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal
This genial book by New Yorker contributor Gladwell considers the elements needed to make a particular idea take hold. The "tipping point" (not a new phrase) occurs when something that began small (e.g., a few funky kids in New York's East Village wearing Hush Puppies) turns into something very large indeed (millions of Hush Puppies are sold). It depends on three rules: the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context. Episodes subjected to this paradigm here include Paul Revere's ride, the creation of the children's TV program Sesame Street, and the influence of subway shooter Bernie Goetz. The book has something of a pieced-together feel (reflecting, perhaps, the author's experience writing shorter pieces) and is definitely not the stuff of deep sociological thought. It is, however, an entertaining read that promises to be well publicized. Recommended for public libraries.
-Ellen Gilbert, Rutgers Univ. Lib., New Brunswick, NJ
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist
Gladwell, a New Yorker staff writer, offers an incisive and piquant theory of social dynamics that is bound to provoke a paradigm shift in our understanding of mass behavioral change. Defining such dramatic turnarounds as the abrupt drop in crime on New York's subways, or the unexpected popularity of a novel, as epidemics, Gladwell searches for catalysts that precipitate the "tipping point," or critical mass, that generates those events. What he finds, after analyzing a number of fascinating psychological studies, is that tipping points are attributable to minor alterations in the environment, such as the eradication of graffiti, and the actions of a surprisingly small number of people, who fit the profiles of personality types that he terms connectors, mavens, and salesmen. As he applies his strikingly counterintuitive hypotheses to everything from the "stickiness," or popularity, of certain children's television shows to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, Gladwell reveals that our cherished belief in the autonomy of the self is based in great part on wishful thinking. Donna Seaman --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review
"...Gladwell manages to make sense of a tantalizing array of research findings." -- Lisbeth Schorr, Harvard Project on Effective Interventions, and author of Common Purpose: Strengthening Families and Neighborhoods to Rebuild America

"...a fascinating account...valuable..." -- Chicago Tribune, 3/26/00

"...a terrifically rewarding read..." -- Seattle Times, 3/24/00

"...brimming with new theories on the science of manipulation..." -- Time Out New York, 3/2-9/00

"Anyone interested in fads should read THE TIPPING POINT..." -- US Magazine, 3/27/00

"Hip and hopeful, The Tipping Point, is like the idea it describes: concise, elegant but packed with social power. A book for anyone who cares about how society works and how we can make it better." -- --George Stephanopoulos

"Malcolm Gladwell proposes a fascinating and possibly useful theory in "The Tipping Point"...what makes his book so appealing is the way he approaches his subject...he follows his precept of his subtitle and explores the little things that make a big difference..." -- New York Times, 2/28/00

"The Primary reason for the historic and rapid declines in crime and disorder in the subways and on the streets of New York City in the early 1990s was police activity. Police focused their activities on controlling illegal behavior to such an extent that they changed that behavior. Malcolm Gladwell's book and its theories, particularly the 'Power of Context,' clearly describes how crime and disorder were rapidly 'tipped.' It is a vital and 'must read' addition to the on-going debate about what really causes crime and disorder and how best to deal with it." -- --Commissioner William J. Bratton

"The Tipping Point is one of those rare books that changes the way you think about, well, everything. A combination of lucid explanation with vivid (and often funny) real-world examples, the book sets out to explain nothing less than why human beings behave the way they do. And, astonishingly, Malcolm Gladwell had the smarts and panache to pull it off." -- -Jeffrey Toobin, author of A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal that Nearly Brought Down a President

"What someone once said about the great Edmund Wilson is as true of Malcolm Gladwell: he gives ideas the quality of action. Here he's written a wonderful page turner about a fascinating idea that should effect the way every thinking person thinks about the world around him." -- --Michael Lewis Author of Liar's Poker and The New New Thing --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review
Why is it that fashion trends change the way we dress? Why do various TV shows, movies, and books become so popular? Malcolm Gladwell provides a diagram of our society, along with an analysis of the strategies people apply to influence and mold its direction. Gladwell describes the personality types that create trends and those that influence others by "spreading the word." History takes on a whole new perspective as he describes events of early America that specifically follow his theories of "selling the public on an idea" and "social epidemics." Feedback from market mavericks further substantiates Gladwell's viewpoints. B.J.P. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine [Published: AUG/ SEPT 01] --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

Product Description
This celebrated New York Times bestsellernow poised to reach an even wider audience in paperbackis a book that is changing the way North Americans think about selling products and disseminating ideas. Gladwells new afterword to this edition describes how readers can constructively apply the tipping point principle in their own lives and work. Widely hailed as an important work that offers not only a road map to business success but also a profoundly encouraging approach to solving social problems.

About the Author
Malcolm Gladwell is a former business and science writer at the Washington Post. He is currently a staff writer for The New Yorker.

I Will Teach You To Be Rich

Editorial Reviews
Product Description
At last, for a generation that's materially ambitious yet financially clueless comes I Will Teach You To Be Rich, Ramit Sethi's 6-week personal finance program for 20-to-35-year-olds. A completely practical approach delivered with a nonjudgmental style that makes readers want to do what Sethi says, it is based around the four pillars of personal finance— banking, saving, budgeting, and investing—and the wealth-building ideas of personal entrepreneurship.

Sethi covers how to save time by not wasting it managing money; the guns and cars myth of credit cards; how to negotiate like an Indian—the conversation begins with "no"; why "Budgeting Doesn't Have to Suck!"; how to get things rolling—for real—with only $20; what most people don't understand about taxes; how to get a CEO to take you out to lunch; how to avoid the Super Mario Brothers trap by making your savings work harder than you do; the difference between cheap and frugal; the hidden relationship between money and food. Not to mention his first key lesson: Getting started is more important than being the smartest person in the room. Integrated with his website, where readers can use interactive charts, follow up on the latest information, and join the community, it is a hip blueprint to building wealth and financial security.

Every month, 175,000 unique visitors come to Ramit Sethi's website, Iwillteachyoutoberich.com, to discover the path to financial freedom. They praise him thoughtfully ("Your site summarizes everything I want with my life—to be rich in finances, rich in experience, rich in family blessings," Dan Esparza) and effusively ("Dude, you rock. I love this site!" Richard Wu). The press has caught on, too: "Ramit Sethi is a rising star in the world of personal finance writing . . . one singularly attuned to the sensibilities of his generation. his style is part frat boy and part silicon Valley geek, with a little bit of San Francisco hipster thrown in" (San Francisco Chronicle). His writing is smart, his voice is full of attitude, and his ideas are uncommonly sound and refreshingly hype-free.

From the Back Cover
You don't have to be perfect to be rich. Or the smartest person in the room. Or a type-A personality. In fact, with Ramit Sethi's six-week program to financial independence, you can start with any amount of money, do just 85 percent of what he suggests, and succeed brilliantly through good times and bad.

As irreverent and entertaining as he is practical and wise, Sethi explains how to beat banks and credit cards at the fee game, automate your cash flow, negotiate for a raise, manage student loans, and enjoy your lattes and Manolo Blahniks by practicing conscious spending. It's how to master your money with the least amount of effort—and then get on with your life.


About the Author
Ramit Sethi is the founder and writer of Iwillteachyoutoberich.com. He speaks regularly to young staff members at companies, including Deloitte, KPMG, and Intel, on the topic of personal finance. He is also a founder and vice president of marketing for PBwiki, a company that provides online tools and services. Ramit Sethi is a recent graduate of Stanford and lives in San Francisco, California.

Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto

Editorial Reviews
Product Description
Conservative talk radio's fastest-growing superstar is also a New York Times bestselling phenomenon: the author of the groundbreaking critique of the Supreme Court, Men in Black, and the deeply personal dog lover's memoir Rescuing Sprite, Mark R. Levin now delivers the book that characterizes both his devotion to his more than 5 million listeners and his love of our country and the legacy of our Founding Fathers: Liberty and Tyranny is Mark R. Levin's clarion call to conservative America, a new manifesto for the conservative movement for the 21st century.
In the face of the modern liberal assault on Constitution-based values, an attack that has steadily snowballed since President Roosevelt's New Deal of the 1930s and resulted in a federal government that is a massive, unaccountable conglomerate, the time for re-enforcing the intellectual and practical case for conservatism is now. Conservative beliefs in individual freedoms do in the end stand for liberty for all Americans, while liberal dictates lead to the breakdown of civilized society -- in short, tyranny. Looking back to look to the future, Levin writes "conservatism is the antidote to tyranny precisely because its principles are our founding principles." And in a series of powerful essays, Levin lays out how conservatives can counter the liberal corrosion that has filtered into every timely issue affecting our daily lives, from the economy to health care, global warming, immigration, and more -- and illustrates how change, as seen through the conservative lens, is always prudent, and always an enhancement to individual freedom.

As provocative, well-reasoned, robust, and informed as his on-air commentary, Levin's narrative will galvanize readers to begin a new era in conservative thinking and action. Liberty and Tyranny provides a philosophical, historical, and practical framework for revitalizing the conservative vision and ensuring the preservation of American society.

About the Author
Mark R. Levin is a nationally syndicated talk radio host and president of Landmark Legal Foundation. He has also worked as an attorney in the private sector and as a top adviser and administrator to several members of President Reagan's cabinet. The author of the New York Times bestselling books Rescuing Sprite and Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America, Mark holds a B.A. from Temple University and a J.D. from Temple University School of Law.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.


1

On Liberty and Tyranny

There is simply no scientific or mathematical formula that defines conservatism. Moreover, there are competing voices today claiming the mantle of "true conservatism" -- including neo-conservatism (emphasis on a robust national security), paleo-conservatism (emphasis on preserving the culture), social conservatism (emphasis on faith and values), and libertarianism (emphasis on individualism), among others. Scores of scholars have written at length about what can be imperfectly characterized as conservative thought. But my purpose is not to give them each exposition, as it cannot be fairly or adequately accomplished here, nor referee among them. Neither will I attempt to give birth to totally new theories.

Instead, what follows are my own opinions and conclusions of fundamental truths, based on decades of observation, exploration, and experience, about conservatism and, conversely, non-conservatism -- that is, liberty and tyranny in modern America.

To put it succinctly: Conservatism is a way of understanding life, society, and governance. The Founders were heavily influenced by certain philosophers, among them Adam Smith (spontaneous order), Charles Montesquieu (separation of powers), and especially John Locke (natural rights); they were also influenced by their faiths, personal experiences, and knowledge of history (including the rise and fall of the Roman Empire). Edmund Burke, who was both a British statesman and thinker, is often said to be the father of modern conservatism. He was an early defender of the American Revolution and advocate of representative government. He wrote of the interconnection of liberty, free markets, religion, tradition, and authority. The Conservative, like the Founders, is informed by all these great thinkers -- and more.

The Declaration of Independence represents the most prominent official, consensus position of the Founders' rationale for declaring independence from England. It states, in part,


When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness....
The Founders believed, and the Conservative agrees, in the dignity of the individual; that we, as human beings, have a right to live, live freely, and pursue that which motivates us not because man or some government says so, but because these are God-given natural rights.

Like the Founders, the Conservative also recognizes in society a harmony of interests, as Adam Smith put it, and rules of cooperation that have developed through generations of human experience and collective reasoning that promote the betterment of the individual and society. This is characterized as ordered liberty, the social contract, or the civil society.

What are the conditions of this civil society?

In the civil society, the individual is recognized and accepted as more than an abstract statistic or faceless member of some group; rather, he is a unique, spiritual being with a soul and a conscience. He is free to discover his own potential and pursue his own legitimate interests, tempered, however, by a moral order that has its foundation in faith and guides his life and all human life through the prudent exercise of judgment. As such, the individual in the civil society strives, albeit imperfectly, to be virtuous -- that is, restrained, ethical, and honorable. He rejects the relativism that blurs the lines between good and bad, right and wrong, just and unjust, and means and ends.

In the civil society, the individual has a duty to respect the unalienable rights of others and the values, customs, and traditions, tried and tested over time and passed from one generation to the next, that establish society's cultural identity. He is responsible for attending to his own well-being and that of his family. And he has a duty as a citizen to contribute voluntarily to the welfare of his community through good works.

In the civil society, private property and liberty are inseparable. The individual's right to live freely and safely and pursue happiness includes the right to acquire and possess property, which represents the fruits of his own intellectual and/or physical labor. As the individual's time on earth is finite, so, too, is his labor. The illegitimate denial or diminution of his private property enslaves him to another and denies him his liberty.

In the civil society, a rule of law, which is just, known, and predictable, and applied equally albeit imperfectly, provides the governing framework for and restraints on the polity, thereby nurturing the civil society and serving as a check against the arbitrary use and, hence, abuse of power.

For the Conservative, the civil society has as its highest purpose its preservation and improvement.

The Modern Liberal believes in the supremacy of the state, thereby rejecting the principles of the Declaration and the order of the civil society, in whole or part. For the Modern Liberal, the individual's imperfection and personal pursuits impede the objective of a utopian state. In this, Modern Liberalism promotes what French historian Alexis de Tocqueville described as a soft tyranny, which becomes increasingly more oppressive, potentially leading to a hard tyranny (some form of totalitarianism). As the word "liberal" is, in its classical meaning, the opposite of authoritarian, it is more accurate, therefore, to characterize the Modern Liberal as a Statist.

The Founders understood that the greatest threat to liberty is an all-powerful central government, where the few dictate to the many. They also knew that the rule of the mob would lead to anarchy and, in the end, despotism. During the Revolutionary War, the states more or less followed the Articles of Confederation, in which most governing authority remained with the states. After the war, as the Founders labored to establish a new nation, the defects with the Articles became increasingly apparent. The central government did not have the ability to fund itself. Moreover, states were issuing their own currency, conducting their own foreign policy, and raising their own armies. Trade disputes among the states and with other countries were hampering commerce and threatening national prosperity.

Eventually the Articles were replaced with the Constitution, which granted the federal government enough authority to cultivate, promote, and "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity," but not enough authority to destroy it all. James Madison, the most influential of the Constitution's authors, put it best when he wrote in "Federalist 51":


But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
For much of American history, the balance between governmental authority and individual liberty was understood and accepted. Federal power was confined to that which was specifically enumerated in the Constitution and no more. And that power was further limited, for it was dispersed among three federal branches -- the legislative, executive, and judicial. Beyond that, the power remained with the states and ultimately the people.

The Framers recognized that the Constitution may require adjustments from time to time. Therefore, they provided two methods for proposing amendments, only one of which has been used in adopting all current amendments. It requires a supermajority of two-thirds of the members of both Houses of Congress to propose an amendment to the states for ratification, and three-fourths of the states to successfully ratify the proposed amendment. In all our history the Constitution has been amended only twenty-seven times -- the first ten of which, the Bill of Rights, were adopted shortly after the Constitution was ratified. Clearly the Framers did not intend the Constitution to be easily altered. It was to be a lasting contract that could be modified only by the considered judgment of a significant representation of the body politic.

But in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the Statists successfully launched a counterrevolution that radically and fundamentally altered the nature of American society. President Franklin Roosevelt and an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, through an array of federal projects, entitlements, taxes, and regulations known as the New Deal, breached the Constitution's firewalls. At first the Supreme Court fought back, striking down New Deal programs as exceeding the limits of federal constitutional authority, violating state sovereignty, and trampling on private property rights. But rather than seek an expansion of federal power through the amendment process, which would likely have blunted Roosevelt's ambitions, Roosevelt threatened the very makeup of the Court by proposing to pack it with sympathetic justices who would go along with his counterrevolution. Although Roosevelt's plan failed, the justices had been effectively intimidated. And new justices, who shared Roosevelt's statism, began replacing older justices on the Court. It was not long before the Court became little more than a rubber stamp for Roosevelt's policies.