Adventure Capitalist: The Ultimate Road Trip by Jim Rogers

Defnitely greatest Journey around the world with complete experiences

about investment and economics

From Publishers Weekly
Legendary Financier Jim Rogers retired from his career at 37 and motorcycled around the world, turning the trip into the book Investment Biker, a hybrid of business advice and travelogue. That journey, however, failed to squelch his wanderlust. Instead of enjoying his sedate life teaching finance, Rogers decided to take his fiancée and a souped-up Mercedes on a frighteningly intense road trip: three years, 116 countries and 152,000 miles. Like the car that plowed through snow, mud, sand and highways on every continent, Rogers's memoir of the journey is its own breed. Although Rogers writes, far too briefly, of life-changing events like getting married and hearing of his father's death, the book has an uncommon level of detachment. Also, even though Rogers shares investment advice and observations about the planet's political economies, his thoughts are too general to serve as business lessons. The result is an adventure tale without heart and a finance book without teeth. Rogers tries to make up for this by describing experiences like eating fried silkworms and watching prostitutes caught in the world's sex trade. Mainly, though, he chronicles prosaic details, like taking car ferries and talking to border guards, and then riffs on politics, money, immigration and culture.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist
Rogers, a Wall Street success story who has been called "The Indiana Jones of Finance," once circled the planet on a motorcycle, which landed him in The Guinness Book of World Records and resulted in his first book, Investment Biker (1994). In 1999 he set out on another world-record drive around the world in a custom-built yellow Mercedes convertible with his fiancee, Paige Parker. Starting out in Iceland, the trip took three years and encompassed 116 countries, many of which are rarely visited, in a continuous swath across Europe, the former Soviet Republic, China, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas. No one had ever driven overland following these routes, a total of 152,000 miles, another Guinness world record. Rogers' insightful commentary on the political and historical topography of these diverse countries cuts through stereotypes to give us a glimpse of the world the way it really is, for better or worse. This is a gutsy travelogue adventure from a guy who shoots straight from the hip, and it really hits the mark. David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review
"My success in the market has been predicated on viewing
the world from a different perspective".Jim Rogers," the Indiana Jones of finance"

(Time magazine) -- Review --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.


Product Description
Drive . . . and grow rich!

The bestselling author of Investment Biker is back from the ultimate road trip: a three-year drive around the world that would ultimately set the Guinness record for the longest continuous car journey. In Adventure Capitalist, legendary investor Jim Rogers, dubbed “the Indiana Jones of finance” by Time magazine, proves that the best way to profit from the global situation is to see the world mile by mile. “While I have never patronized a prostitute,” he writes, “I know that one can learn more about a country from speaking to the madam of a brothel or a black marketeer than from meeting a foreign minister.”

Behind the wheel of a sunburst-yellow, custom-built convertible Mercedes, Rogers and his fiancée, Paige Parker, began their “Millennium Adventure” on January 1, 1999, from Iceland. They traveled through 116 countries, including many where most have rarely ventured, such as Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, Angola, Sudan, Congo, Colombia, and East Timor. They drove through war zones, deserts, jungles, epidemics, and blizzards. They had many narrow escapes.

They camped with nomads and camels in the western Sahara. They ate silkworms, iguanas, snakes, termites, guinea pigs, porcupines, crocodiles, and grasshoppers.

Best of all, they saw the real world from the ground up—the only vantage point from which it can be truly understood—economically, politically, and socially.

Here are just a few of the author’s conclusions:

• The new commodity bull market has started.
• The twenty-first century will belong to China.
• There is a dramatic shortage of women developing in Asia.
• Pakistan is on the verge of disintegrating.
• India, like many other large nations, will break into several countries.
• The Euro is doomed to fail.
• There are fortunes to be made in Angola.
• Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are a scam.
• Bolivia is a comer after decades of instability, thanks to gigantic amounts of natural gas.

Adventure Capitalist is the most opinionated, sprawling, adventurous journey you’re likely to take within the pages of a book—the perfect read for armchair adventurers, global investors, car enthusiasts, and anyone interested in seeing the world and understanding it as it really is.


About the Author
Born in 1942, Jim Rogers had his first job at age five, picking up bottles at baseball games. Winning a scholarship to Yale, Rogers was coxswain on the crew. Upon graduation, he attended Balliol College at Oxford. After a stint in the army, he began work on Wall Street. He cofounded the Quantum Fund, a global-investment partnership. During the next ten years, the portfolio gained more than 4,000 percent, while the S&P rose less than 50 percent. Rogers then decided to retire—at age thirty-seven—but he did not remain idle.
Continuing to manage his own portfolio, Rogers served as a professor of finance at the Columbia Univer-sity Graduate School of Business and as moderator of The Dreyfus Roundtable on WCBS and The Profit Motive on FNN. At the same time, he laid the groundwork for his lifelong dream, an around-the-world motorcycle trip: more than 100,000 miles across six continents. That journey became the subject of Rogers’s first book, Investment Biker (1994), now available from Random House Trade Paperbacks.
While laying plans for his Millennium Adventure 1999–2001, he continued as a media commentator at Worth, CNBC, et al., and as a sometime professor.
He now contributes to Fox News, Worth, and others as he and Paige eagerly await their first child.
He can be reached at http://www.jimrogers.com/.

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Adventure Capitalist : The Ultimate Road Trip

SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D. Levitt

Original Post : http://platinumbooks.blogspot.com/2009/10/superfreakonomics-global-cooling.html

The sequel of famous bestseller book in 2006, Freakonomics .
SuperFreakonomics will be based largely upon the innovative research of Professor Levitt, who has tackled problems inside and outside the field of economics.

SuperFreakonomics gonna challenge the way we think all over again. 288 pages

Table of contents:
Introduction: Putting the Freak in Economics
Chapter 1: How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa?
Chapter 2: Why should suicide bombers buy life insurance?
Chapter 3: Unbelievable stories about apathy and altruism
Chapter 4: The fix is in---and it's cheap and simple
Chapter 5: What do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo have in common?

Explore and find the answer of these mystery unexposed reality.

-How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa?
-Why are doctors so bad at washing their hands?
-How much good do car seats do?
-What's the best way to catch a terrorist?
-Did TV cause a rise in crime?
-What do hurricanes, heart attacks, and highway deaths have in common?
-Are people hard-wired for altruism or selfishness?
-Can eating kangaroo save the planet?
-Which adds more value: a pimp or a Realtor?

About the Author
Steven D. Levitt is a professor or economics at the University of Chicago and the recipient of the John Bates Clark medal, awarded to the most influential economist under the age of forty.

Stephen J. Dubner, a former writer and editor at The New York Times Magazine, is the author of Turbulent Souls (Choosing My Religion), Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper, and the children’s book The Boy With Two Belly Buttons.

Click here to buy from Amazon.com

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

From Publishers Weekly
Elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama was offered a book contract, but the intellectual journey he planned to recount became instead this poignant, probing memoir of an unusual life. Born in 1961 to a white American woman and a black Kenyan student, Obama was reared in Hawaii by his mother and her parents, his father having left for further study and a return home to Africa. So Obama's not-unhappy youth is nevertheless a lonely voyage to racial identity, tensions in school, struggling with black literature?with one month-long visit when he was 10 from his commanding father. After college, Obama became a community organizer in Chicago. He slowly found place and purpose among folks of similar hue but different memory, winning enough small victories to commit himself to the work?he's now a civil rights lawyer there. Before going to law school, he finally visited Kenya; with his father dead, he still confronted obligation and loss, and found wellsprings of love and attachment. Obama leaves some lingering questions?his mother is virtually absent?but still has written a resonant book. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Obama argues with himself on almost every page of this lively autobiographical conversation. He gets you to agree with him, and then he brings in a counternarrative that seems just as convincing. Son of a white American mother and of a black Kenyan father whom he never knew, Obama grew up mainly in Hawaii. After college, he worked for three years as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side. Then, finally, he went to Kenya, to find the world of his dead father, his "authentic" self. Will the truth set you free, Obama asks? Or will it disappoint? Both, it seems. His search for himself as a black American is rooted in the particulars of his daily life; it also reads like a wry commentary about all of us. He dismisses stereotypes of the "tragic mulatto" and then shows how much we are all caught between messy contradictions and disparate communities. He discovers that Kenya has 400 different tribes, each of them with stereotypes of the others. Obama is candid about racism and poverty and corruption, in Chicago and in Kenya. Yet he does find community and authenticity, not in any romantic cliche{‚}, but with "honest, decent men and women who have attainable ambitions and the determination to see them through." Hazel Rochman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
"[Barack Obama] is that rare politician who can actually write - and write movingly and genuinely." Michiko Kakutani, New York Times "Fluidly, calmly, insightfully, Obama guides us straight to the intersection of the most serious questions of identity, class, and race." Washington Post Book World "Beautifully crafted... moving and candid... this book belongs on the shelf beside works like James McBride's The Color of Winter and Gregory Howard Williams's Life on the Color Line as a tale of living astride America's racial categories.." Scott Turow" --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
“Provocative . . . Persuasively describes the phenomenon of belonging to two different worlds, and thus belonging to neither.”
—New York Times Book Review

“Fluidly, calmly, insightfully, Obama guides us straight to the intersection of the most serious questions of identity, class, and race.”
—Washington Post Book World

“Beautifully crafted . . . moving and candid . . . this book belongs on the shelf beside works like James McBride’s The Color of Water and Gregory Howard Williams’s Life on the Color Line as a tale of living astride America’s racial categories.”

—Scott Turow

“Obama’s writing is incisive yet forgiving. This is a book worth savoring.”
—Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here

Product Description
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey—first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.


Pictured in lefthand photograph on cover: Habiba Akumu Hussein and Barack Obama, Sr. (President Obama's paternal grandmother and his father as a young boy). Pictured in righthand photograph on cover: Stanley Dunham and Ann Dunham (President Obama's maternal grandfather and his mother as a young girl).

From the Inside Flap
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey—first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother's family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father's life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.

About the Author
BARACK OBAMA graduated from Harvard Law School in 1991, where he served as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. He has worked as a community organizer, civil rights attorney, and law professor. Since 1997, he has represented parts of Chicago's South Side in the Illinois General Assembly, and he is currently 44th president of the United State of America.

Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Chang, a former Beijing correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, explores the urban realities and rural roots of a community, until now, as unacknowledged as it is massive—China's 130 million workers whose exodus from villages to factory and city life is the largest migration in history. Chang spent three years following the successes, hardships and heartbreaks of two teenage girls, Min and Chunming, migrants working the assembly lines in Dongguan, one of the new factory cities that have sprung up all over China. The author's incorporation of their diaries, e-mails and text messages into the narrative allows the girls—with their incredible ambition and youth—to emerge powerfully upon the page. Dongguan city is itself a character, with talent markets where migrants talk their way into their next big break, a lively if not always romantic online dating community and a computerized English language school where students shave their heads like monks to show commitment to their studies. A first generation Chinese-American, Chang uses details of her own family's immigration to provide a vivid personal framework for her contemporary observations. A gifted storyteller, Chang plumbs these private narratives to craft a work of universal relevance. (Oct. 7)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
China is in the midst of history is largest human migration, a hundred and thirty million of its citizens having left their home villages in search of urban employment. Chang, an American of Chinese descent, explores the migrant experience and the burden of being Chinese through the lives of several young women in the industrial city of Dongguan. Their Sisyphean attempts at self-reinvention are both entertaining and poignant; the most ambitious of them achieves modest success selling dubious health products, before falling under the spell of an American raw-food guru. In her diary, she reminds herself, We can be ordinary but we must not be vulgar. Chang is fine prose and her keen sense of detail more than compensate for the occasional digression, and her book is an intimate portrait of a strange and hidden landscape, a universe of relentless motion.
Copyright ©2008 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker

From Bookmarks Magazine
When it comes to global economics, Leslie T. Chang knows both sides of the equation well—that is, from the vastly different perspectives of East and West. Her readable, compelling account of human migration in Factory Girls will open many eyes, particularly in her in-depth profiles of young women who face nearly intolerable working conditions and ruthless competition ("People who are too honest in this society will lose out," the instructor of a turnkey school told Chang) as they struggle to make their way. Chang's own ancestors are on the periphery, and the author ably recounts her family's varied, tragic past in the context of a story whose ripples will surely have global repercussions in the coming years. The only complaint? Chang's own family story is worthy of its own book.
Copyright 2008 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

From Booklist
To American girls, the term “going out” means dating; to their Chinese counterparts, however, it means leaving their remote villages and migrating hundreds of miles to industrial cities to find work within the closed societies of assembly-line factories. Of Chinese ancestry herself, Wall Street Journal reporter Chang was allowed nearly unprecedented access to the sweatshops where the majority of the world’s consumer goods are produced. Following several young women as they move from job to job, Chang reveals a world of naked ambition and abject loneliness, of grueling hours and spartan living conditions, of moral compromise and ethical ambiguity. In spite of such harsh conditions, however, these young women prefer the freedom factory life provides, and fail to return to their villages to fulfill their traditional roles as wives and mothers. Making it nearly impossible to blithely use a mobile phone or strap on a pair of running shoes ever again, Chang’s portrait underscores the reality that the global economy rests on some very slender shoulders. --Carol Haggas

Review
“Engrossing. . . an exceptionally vivid and compassionate depiction of the day-to-day dramas, and the fears and aspirations, of the real people who are powering China’s economic boom.”
–The New York Times Book Review

“Chang delves deeply into the world of migrant workers to find out who these people are and what their collective dislocation means for China. Chang skillfully sketches migrants as individuals with their own small victories and bitter tragedies, and she captures the surprising dynamics of this enormous but ill-understood subculture.”
–The Washington Post

“Chang’s deeply affecting book tells the story of the invisible foot soldiers who made China’s stirring rise possible.”
–The New York Times

“This is an irresistible book.”

–People

“Excellent.”
–Chicago Tribune

“Fascinating. . . Chang powerfully conveys the individual reality behind China’s 130 million migrant workers, the largest migration in human history.”
–The Boston Globe

“Chang reveals a world staggering in its dimensions, unprecedented in its topsy-turvy effects on China’s conservative culture, and frenetic in its pace. . . Chang deftly weaves her own family’s story of migrations within China, and finally to the West, into her fascinating portrait. . . Factory Girls is a keen-eyed look at contemporary Chinese life composed of equal parts of new global realties, timeless stories of human striving, and intelligent storytelling at its best.”
–San Francisco Chronicle

“Both entertaining and poignant. . . Chang’s fine prose and her keen sense of detail more than compensate for the occasional digression, and her book is an intimate portrait of a strange and hidden landscape.”
–The New Yorker--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.


“A compelling, atmospheric look at seldom-seen China.”
–BusinessWeek

“Chang, a journalist at the Wall Street Journal, spent two years reporting in the gritty southern boomtown of Dongguan trying to put human faces on these workers, and the ones she finds are extraordinary. They are, more than anything else, the face of modern China: a country increasingly turning away from its rural roots and turbulent past and embracing a promising but uncertain future. . . The painstaking work Chang put into befriending these girls and drawing out their stories is evident, as is the genuine affection she has for them and their spirit.”
–Time

“In her impressive new book, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China, former Wall Street Journal reporter Leslie T. Chang explores this boom that's simultaneously emptying China's villages of young people and fueling its economic growth. . . To be sure, this mass migration is a big and well-told story. But Chang brings to it a personal touch: her own forebears were migrants, and she skillfully weaves through the narrative tales of their border crossings. She also succeeds in grounding the trend in wider social context, suggesting that the aspirations of these factory girls signal a growing individualism in China's socialist culture.”
–Newsweek

“Elegant. . . Chang is less interested in exposé than in getting to know the young women of Dongguan’s assembly lines. Factory Girls reveals the workplace through the workers’ eyes.”
–Financial Times

“A real coup. . . Chang, a former Beijing correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, does more than describe harsh factory conditions. She writes about the way the workers themselves see migration, bringing us views that are rarely heard. Factory Girls is highly readable and even amusing in many places, despite the seriousness of the subject. In the pages of this book, these factory girls come to life.”
–Christian Science Monitor

“Amazing. . . a fascinating ethnography of the young women who labor in the factories of Guangdong, China’s richest province, a land of boomtowns where wealth and scams and exploitation and warmth and courage all abound. . . I must have read fifty books about China this year, but this stands out as one of the best.”
–Boingboing.net

“A gifted storyteller, Chang crafts a work of universal relevance.”
–Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“In-depth reporting [that] contributes significantly to our knowledge about China’s development.”
–Kirkus Reviews

“Rising head and shoulders above almost all other new books about China, this unflinching and yearningly compassionate portrait of the lives and loves of ordinary Chinese workers is quite unforgettable: it presents the first long, hard look we have ever taken at the people who are due to become, before very much longer, the new masters of the world.”
–Simon Winchester, author of The Man Who Loved China

“Often people ask me, ‘What’s it like for women in China today?’ From now on I'll recommend Leslie Chang’s Factory Girls, which is brilliant, thoughtful, and insightful. This book is also for anyone who's ever wondered how their sneakers, Christmas ornaments, toys, designer clothes, or computers are made. The stories of these factory girls are not only mesmerizing, tragic, and inspiring -- true examples of persistence, endurance, and loneliness -- but Chang has also woven in her own family’s history, shuttling north and south through China to examine this complicated country’s past, present, and future.”
–Lisa See, author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan



Product Description

An eye-opening and previously untold story, Factory Girls is the first look into the everyday lives of the migrant factory population in China.


China has 130 million migrant workers—the largest migration in human history. In Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, tells the story of these workers primarily through the lives of two young women, whom she follows over the course of three years as they attempt to rise from the assembly lines of Dongguan, an industrial city in China’s Pearl River Delta.

As she tracks their lives, Chang paints a never-before-seen picture of migrant life—a world where nearly everyone is under thirty; where you can lose your boyfriend and your friends with the loss of a mobile phone; where a few computer or English lessons can catapult you into a completely different social class. Chang takes us inside a sneaker factory so large that it has its own hospital, movie theater, and fire department; to posh karaoke bars that are fronts for prostitution; to makeshift English classes where students shave their heads in monklike devotion and sit day after day in front of machines watching English words flash by; and back to a farming village for the Chinese New Year, revealing the poverty and idleness of rural life that drive young girls to leave home in the first place. Throughout this riveting portrait, Chang also interweaves the story of her own family’s migrations, within China and to the West, providing historical and personal frames of reference for her investigation.

A book of global significance that provides new insight into China, Factory Girls demonstrates how the mass movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and transforming Chinese society, much as immigration to America’s shores remade our own country a century ago.



About the Author

Leslie T. Chang lived in China for a decade as a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. She is married to Peter Hessler, who also writes about China. She lives in Colorado.



Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1 Going Out

When you met a girl from another factory, you quickly took her measure. What year are you? you asked each other, as if speaking not of human beings but of the makes of cars. How much a month? Including room and board? How much for overtime? Then you might ask what province she was from. You never asked her name.

To have a true friend inside the factory was not easy. Girls slept twelve to a room, and in the tight confines of the dorm it was better to keep your secrets. Some girls joined the factory with borrowed ID cards and never told anyone their real names. Some spoke only to those from their home provinces, but that had risks: Gossip traveled quickly from factory to village, and when you went home every auntie and granny would know how much you made and how much you saved and whether you went out with boys.

When you did make a friend, you did everything for her. If a friend quit her job and had nowhere to stay, you shared your bunk despite the risk of a ten-yuan fine, about $1.25, if you got caught. If she worked far away, you would get up early on a rare day off and ride hours on the bus, and at the other end your friend would take leave from work--this time, the fine one hundred yuan--to spend the day with you. You might stay at a factory you didn't like, or quit one you did, because a friend asked you to. Friends wrote letters every week, although the girls who had been out longer considered that childish. They sent messages by mobile phone instead.

Friends fell out often because life was changing so fast. The easiest thing in the world was to lose touch with someone.

The best day of the month was payday. But in a way it was the worst day, too. After you had worked hard for so long, it was infuriating to see how much money had been docked for silly things: being a few minutes late one morning, or taking a half day off for feeling sick, or having to pay extra when the winter uniforms switched to summer ones. On payday, everyone crowded the post office to wire money to their families. Girls who had just come out from home were crazy about sending money back, but the ones who had been out longer laughed at them. Some girls set up savings accounts for themselves, especially if they already had boyfriends. Everyone knew which girls were the best savers and how many thousands they had saved. Everyone knew the worst savers, too, with their lip gloss and silver mobile phones and heart-shaped lockets and their many pairs of high-heeled shoes.


The girls talked constantly of leaving. Workers were required to stay six months, and even then permission to quit was not always granted. The factory held the first two months of every worker's pay; leaving without approval meant losing that money and starting all over somewhere else. That was a fact of factory life you couldn't know from the outside: Getting into a factory was easy. The hard part was getting out.

The only way to find a better job was to quit the one you had. Interviews took time away from work, and a new hire was expected to start right away. Leaving a job was also the best guarantee of getting a new one: The pressing need for a place to eat and sleep was incentive to find work fast. Girls often quit a factory in groups, finding courage in numbers and pledging to join a new factory together, although that usually turned out to be impossible. The easiest thing in the world was to lose touch with someone.

Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse

Editorial Reviews
Product Description
If you are fed up with Washington boondoggles, and you like the small-government, politically-incorrect thinking of Ron Paul, then you'll love Tom Woods's Meltdown. In clear, no-nonsense terms, Woods explains what led up to this economic crisis, who's really to blame, and why government bailouts won't work. Woods will reveal:
* Which brave few economists predicted the economic fallout--and why nobody listened
* What really caused the collapse
* Why the Fed--not taxpayers--should have to answer for the current economic crisis
* Why bailouts are band-aids that will only provide temporary relief and ultimately make things worse
* What we should do instead, to put our economy on a healthy path to recovery

With a foreword from Ron Paul, Meltdown is the free-market answer to the Fed-created economic crisis. As the new Obama administration inevitably calls for more regulations, Woods argues that the only way to rebuild our economy is by returning to the fundamentals of capitalism and letting the free market work.

From the Inside Flap
Is Capitalism the Culprit?
The media tells us that "deregulation" and "unfettered free markets" have wrecked our economy and will continue to make things worse without a heavy dose of federal regulation. But the real blame lies elsewhere. In Meltdown, bestselling author Thomas E. Woods Jr. unearths the real causes behind the collapse of housing values and the stock market--and it turns out the culprits reside more in Washington than on Wall Street.

And the trillions of dollars in federal bailouts? Our politicians' ham-handed attempts to fix the problems they themselves created will only make things much worse.
Woods, a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and winner of the 2006 Templeton Enterprise Award, busts the media myths and government spin. He explains how government intervention in the economy--from the Democratic hobby horse called Fannie Mae to affirmative action programs like the Community Redevelopment Act--actually caused the housing bubble.

Most important, Woods, author of the New York Times bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, traces this most recent boom-and-bust--and all such booms and busts of the past century--back to one of the most revered government institutions of all: the Federal Reserve System, which allows busy-body bureaucrats and ambitious politicians to pull the strings of our financial sector and manipulate the value of the very money we use.

Meltdown also provides a timely history lesson to counter the current clamor for a new New Deal. The Great Depression, Woods demonstrates, was only as deep and as long as it was because of the government interventions by Herbert Hoover (no free-market capitalist, despite what your high school history teacher may have taught you) and Franklin D. Roosevelt (no savior of the American economy, in spite of what the mainstream media says). If you want to understand what caused the financial meltdown--and why none of the big-government solutions being tried today will work--Meltdown explains it all.

From the Back Cover
From the Foreword by Congressman Ron Paul
We can probably expect an avalanche of books in the coming months that purport to tell us what happened to the economy and what we should do about it. They'll be dead wrong, and most of the advice they provide will be dreadful. You can count on that. That's why Meltdown is so important. This book actually gets things right. It correctly identifies our problems, their causes, and what we should do about them. It treats the architects of this debacle not with the undeserved reverence they receive in Washington and on television, but with the critical eye that is so conspicuously missing from our supposedly independent thinkers in academia and the media. Tom Woods reserves his admiration for those few who, unlike the quacks who would instruct us now, actually saw the crisis coming, have a theory to explain it, and can show us the way out. In a short span, Tom Woods introduces the layman to a range of subjects that have been excluded from our national discussion for much too long. Topics our opinion leaders thought they'd buried forever, or never heard of in the first place, are suddenly back, and not a moment too soon. This book is an indispensable conduit of these critical ideas. . . . Ideas still matter, and sound economic education has rarely been as urgently necessary as it is today. There is no better book to read on the present crisis than this one, and that is why I am delighted to endorse and introduce it.

About the Author
Thomas E. Woods, Jr., Ph.D., is the New York Times bestselling author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. A senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and a contributing editor of The American Conservative magazine, he and his family live in Alabama.

Thomas E. Woods Jr. is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. He is the author of nine books, including Who Killed the Constitution?: The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush (with Kevin R. C. Gutzman) and the New York Time bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. Woods won the $50,000 first prize in the 2006 Templeton Enterprise Awards for The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy. Woods edited and wrote the introduction to four additional books, including Murray N. Rothbard's The Betrayal of the American Right and We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now (with Murray Polner). He is also the author of Beyond Distributism, part of the Acton Institute's Christian Social Thought Series. Woods lives in Auburn, Alabama, with his wife and three daughters, and maintains a website at ThomasEWoods.com.

Editorial Reviews
Product Description
In her most controversial and fiercely argued book yet, Ann Coulter calls out liberals for always playing the victim – when in fact, as she sees it, they are the victimizers. In GUILTY, Coulter explodes this myth to reveal that when it comes to bullying, no one outdoes the Left. GUILTY is a mordantly witty and shockingly specific catalog of offenses which Coulter presents from A to Z. And as with each of her past books, all of which were NYT bestsellers, Coulter is fearless in her penchant for saying what needs saying about politics and culture today.
About the Author
Ann Coulter is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans; Godless; How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must); Treason; Slander; and High Crimes and Misdemeanors. She is the legal correspondent for Human Events and a syndicated columnist for ­Universal Press Syndicate. Her weekly column can be read at anncoulter.com.

The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream Barack Obama

ABOUT THIS BOOK
“A government that truly represents these Americans–that truly serves these Americans–will require a different kind of politics. That politics will need to reflect our lives as they are actually lived. It won’t be pre-packaged, ready to pull off the shelf. It will have to be constructed from the best of our traditions and will have to account for the darker aspects of our past. We will need to understand just how we got to this place, this land of warring factions and tribal hatreds. And we’ll need to remind ourselves, despite all our differences, just how much we share: common hopes, common dreams, a bond that will not break.”–from The Audacity of HopeIn July 2004, Barack Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention with an address that spoke to Americans across the political spectrum. One phrase in particular anchored itself in listeners’ minds, a reminder that for all the discord and struggle to be found in our history as a nation, we have always been guided by a dogged optimism in the future, or what Senator Obama called “the audacity of hope.” Now, in The Audacity of Hope, Senator Obama calls for a different brand of politics–a politics for those weary of bitter partisanship and alienated by the “endless clash of armies” we see in congress and on the campaign trail; a politics rooted in the faith, inclusiveness, and nobility of spirit at the heart of “our improbable experiment in democracy.” He explores those forces–from the fear of losing to the perpetual need to raise money to the power of the media–that can stifle even the best-intentioned politician. He also writes, with surprising intimacy and self-deprecating humor, about settling in as a senator, seeking to balance the demands of public service and family life, and his own deepening religious commitment.At the heart of this book is Senator Obama’s vision of how we can move beyond our divisions to tackle concrete problems. He examines the growing economic insecurity of American families, the racial and religious tensions within the body politic, and the transnational threats–from terrorism to pandemic–that gather beyond our shores. And he grapples with the role that faith plays in a democracy–where it is vital and where it must never intrude. Underlying his stories about family, friends, members of the Senate, even the president, is a vigorous search for connection: the foundation for a radically hopeful political consensus. A senator and a lawyer, a professor and a father, a Christian and a skeptic, and above all a student of history and human nature, Senator Obama has written a book of transforming power. Only by returning to the principles that gave birth to our Constitution, he says, can Americans repair a political process that is broken, and restore to working order a government that has fallen dangerously out of touch with millions of ordinary Americans. Those Americans are out there, he writes–“waiting for Republicans and Democrats to catch up with them.”

About the Author
BARACK OBAMA is the junior U.S. senator from Illinois. He lives in Chicago with his wife, Michelle, and two daughters. In 2008, he is Democrat president election candidate.