World Almanac and Book of Facts 2010

Posted on http://platinumbooks.blogspot.com/2010/01/world-almanac-and-book-of-facts-2010.html

Ranked #1 of New York Times bestseller book.
World Almanac is a complete book of statistic data of 2009. Containing complete information of political , economic , scientific , entertainment and education in 1008 pages. Almanac is one of all time annually published book.

Product Description
Get answers to virtually any question with this impressive compendium of information.

The World Almanac and Book of Facts is America's top-selling reference book of all time, with more than 80 million copies sold. Published annually since 1868, this compendium of information is the source for all your entertainment, reference, and learning needs. Labeled a "treasure trove of political, economic, scientific and educational statistics and information" by the Wall Street Journal, the almanac contains thousands of facts that are unavailable publicly elsewhere, making it a must-have for students, teachers, and anyone with a thirst for knowledge-in fact, it has been featured as a category on Jeopardy and is routinely used as a go-to general study guide for aspiring game show contestants. Coming soon in a 2010 edition and boasting full-color and black-and-white photographs, The World Almanac and Book of Facts will answer all your trivia questions-spanning a wide range of categories, including history, sports, geography, pop culture, and much more.

Notable features include:

-2009 Time Capsule
-The Bush Legacy
-Swine Flu Coverage
-Decade in Review
-U.S. Colleges and Universities
-Population Statistics for Cities over 10,000 People
-The World at a Glance
-Offbeat News Stories
-World Series Results
-Year in Pictures.

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Bon Jovi : When we were beautiful by Bon Jovi

"We've got to hold on for what we've got"

Livin' on a Prayer
You Give Love a Bad Name
Wanted Dead or Alive
Bad Medicine
Keep the Faith
Bed of Roses
Always
It's My Life
Have a Nice Day

These are names of greatest hits song of legendary rock band formed in 1983.
Bon Jovi. It has been 26 years since their first album "Bon Jovi" came out in 1984.
The band is still active nowaday. This book contains their stories through decades and their personal life.

Pictures of their daily schedule of concert tours in this book.

Back cover picture:

From left: Tico Torres ( drummer, percussion ) , Jon Bon Jovi ( lead singer ) ,

Richie Sambora ( guitar,back vocals ) , David Bryan ( keyboardrist,back vocals )

From Backcover

The Story of Bon Jovi's career - spanning three deacdes,producing countless hits , and

selling out stadium-sized concert venues-has earned the band legendary status. But despite

the band's acclaim,fans have been offered very few up-close-andpersonal glimpses of the musicians. To commemorate their twenty-fifth anniversary, Bon Jovi gave flimaker and photographer Phil Griffin unprecedented access to their lives, onstage and off.

Product Description
BON JOVI: WHEN WE WERE BEAUTIFUL is an intimate look at one of America′s most enduringly popular bands after 25 years of hits, fame, tours and troubles. It is the companion to a major documentary to be released in Fall 09 to coincide with the band′s anniversary. The documentary follows the band on their 2008 Lost Highway tour and at home, talking about everything from life on the road and onstage to band members′ own personal crises.

The book is illustrated with gorgeous new photos and stills from the documentary, providing unprecedented insights into a band that is known for staying away from the media. Archival photographs provide the complete picture of the band′s extraordinary reign at the top of the charts. Jon Bon Jovi is writing an introduction and text throughout the book, and the other band members, including Richie Sambora, are contributing extended captions. This is a unique portrait of rock legends after 25 years together, reflecting on their past as well looking forward to the future.


About the Author
Bon Jovi is the American rock band from Sayreville, New Jersey. Front man Jon Bon Jovi is lead singer, with Richie Sambora on guitar, David Bryan on keyboard, and Tico Torres on the drums. Over the past twenty-five years Bon Jovi has sold more than 120 million albums worldwide and 34 million in the United States.

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The Autobiography of Ben Franklin by Benjamin Franklin himself

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Benjamin Franklin ( January 17, 1706 - April 17, 1790 ) ,is perhaps one of most important history figure in U.S. history. Benjamin Franklin was a leading author and printer, satirist, political theorist, politician, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman , soldier and one of Founding Fathers of United States of America. His colorful life and legacy of scientific and political achievement have seen Franklin honored on coinage and money; warships; the names of many towns, counties, educational institutions, namesakes, and companies; and more than two centuries after his death, countless cultural references.

Every children in U.S. have learned about his role in American history, but there are more to learn about his inspired life during the hard time of American Revolutionary.

Review
"The acting is superb."

-- LA Times

"This well-known work by one of our nation's founding fathers was certainly given to the right individual to narrate. Fredd Wayne, whose one-man show, "Benjamin Franklin, Citizen," has also been recorded by Audio Editions, seems to have captured Franklin's persona."

-- Dick Richmond, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 19, 1997


Product Description
Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography is one of the most famous works in American literature. He started it as a private collection of anecdotes for his son, but soon it was transformed into a work of history. This is a charming, self-portrait of one of America's greatest forefathers.


From the Inside Flap
Famous as a scientist, statesman, philosopher, businessman, and civic leader, Benjamin Franklin was also one of the most powerful and controversial American writers of his time, and has been a subject of intense debate ever since: to Matthew Arnold, he exemplified "victorious good sense"; to D.H. Lawrence, he was "the first dummy American." Franklin's classic Autobiography is his last word on his greatest literary creation -- his own invented persona, the original incarnation of the American success story.

For the first time, the authoritative editions of works by major American novelists, poets, scholars, and essayists collected in the hardcover volumes of The Library of America are being published singly in a series of handsome and durable paperback books. A distinguished author has contributed an introduction for each volume, which also includes a detailed chronology of the author's life and career, an essay on the choice of the text, and notes.


About the Author
Fredd Wayne's distinguished career includes stage, film and television performances in South Pacific, Oh, Men! Oh, Women!, Wonderful Town, Cagney & Lacey, Cheers, and Matlock. He has performed Benjamin Franklin, Citizen on Broadway and toured with it throughout the world, as well as starring in an NBC-TV special, Ben Franklin, American.

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George Lucas's Blockbusting: A Decade-by-Decade Survey of Timeless Movies Including Untold Secrets of Their Financial and Cultural Success

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Journey through decades of Movies business industry and its evolution throughout our history.

Find out what is the best 300 flims of all time.

Reccommended by many famous directors :

Steven Spielberg

Martin Scorsese

WalterMurch

Ron Howard

Sid Ganis

Product Description
By meticulously compiling the details of how movies have been made and financed since the medium′s inception, chronicling their performances at the box office, and offering expert commentary about the most important trends of the last one hundred years, the authors of this book have given readers a singularly unique perspective on the film-making industry and a superlative blueprint for future successful filmmaking ventures.

Taking us decade by decade, this book focuses on the revenues, costs, production and distribution of 300 of the most critically and financially successful movies of all time from the business′s origins through 2005. Its numerous essays examine trends in war, noir, bio-drama, biblical, epic, musical, western, disaster, crime, and action adventure films, as well as the advent the summer movie, auteur filmmaking, and the revolutionary advances that have been made in film technology over time. Furthermore, its full complement of charts, graphs and diagrams presenting such things as salary histories, awards and honors, the number of principal photography days required, advertising expenditures, domestic versus overseas profits and more, also include conversions of past movie-making dollars into current dollar values for easy and relevant comparisons.

The ideal resource for filmmakers of every kind, this book evidences that blockbusters have not only been made on relatively low budgets before, but that they have been made time and time again through varying economic climates.

George Lucas′s Blockbusting is indispensible reading for all who love and contribute to the film business.


About the Author
Alex Ben Block is an internationally known entertainment industry journalist, author, broadcaster, and show business historian. He was Editor of two of Hollywood's top trade publications-The Hollywood Reporter and Television Week, which Block helped successfully re-launch. He was also an Associate Editor of Forbes magazine and a movie critic in Detroit, Miami, and Los Angeles. He oversaw programming for the American Pavilion at Cannes, 2008. Currently Editor-at-Large for The Hollywood Reporter and Show Business Historian for Hollywood Today. Lucy Autrey Wilson began her career with Lucasfilm in 1974, typing the script to the first Star Wars movie on an IBM Selectric typewriter. She then explored areas as diverse as construction, film, special effects, licensing, and merchandising. In the late 1980s, she launched an all-new Star Wars publishing program comprised of more than 1,500 titles, including 63 New York Times bestsellers, before moving on to new challenges in nonfiction publishing. She currently serves as the Director of Publishing for George Lucas Books, a division of JAK Films.

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What the dog saw : And other adventures by Malcolm Gladwell

Posted On : http://platinumbooks.blogspot.com/2009/12/what-dog-saw-and-other-adventures-by.html

Volume 4 book of National Magazine Award winner Malcolm Gladwell.

What The Dog Saw.

Review
GREAT PRAISE FOR WHAT THE DOG SAW:

"[Malcolm Gladwell] is one of the brightest stars in the media firmament...Gladwell's clear prose and knack for upending conventional wisdom across the social sciences have made The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, as well as his lengthy magazine features on topics ranging from cool-hunting to ketchup, into must reads." (Time.com Alex Altman )

"This evidence of a Gladwell effect helps to predict something larger: that Mr. Gladwell's new book will be as successful as his first three...This book full of short conversation pieces is a collection that plays to the author's strengths. It underscores his way of finding suitably quirky subjects (the history of women's hair-dye advertisements; the secret of Heinz's unbeatable ketchup; even the effects of women's changing career patterns on the number of menstrual periods they experience in their lifetimes) and using each as gateway to some larger meaning." (New York Times Janet Maslin )

"Gladwell is a writer of many gifts. His nose for the untold back story will have readers repeatedly muttering, "Gee, that's interesting!" He avoids shopworn topics, easy moralization and conventional wisdom, encouraging his readers to think again and think different...Some chapters are masterpieces in the art of the essay."

(The New York Times Book Review Steven Pinker )

"Uniformly delightful...Malcolm Gladwell can write engrossingly about just about anything...His witty, probing articles are as essential to David Remnick's New Yorker as those of Wolcott Gibbs and A.J. Liebling were to Harold Ross's...Gladwell has a gift for capturing personalities, a Borscht Belt comic's feel for timing and a bent for counterintuitive thinking. He loves to start a piece by settling you onto a cushion of received ideas, then yanking it out from under you."-

(Bloomberg News Craig Seligman )

"Malcolm Gladwell triumphantly returns to his roots with this collections of his great works from The New Yorker Magazine....Do yourself a favor and curl up with What the Dog Saw this week: It is more entertaining and edifying than should be legal for any book."

(Louisville Courier-Journal Scott Coffman )

"In What the Dog Saw, Malcolm Gladwell leads the reader on delightful side excursions, shows with insightful conversation how one path interweaves with another, and suggests meaning-he is, in short, an interpretative naturalist of American culture." (The Oregonian Alice Evans )



Product Description
What is the difference between choking and panicking? Why are there dozens of varieties of mustard-but only one variety of ketchup? What do football players teach us about how to hire teachers? What does hair dye tell us about the history of the 20th century?


In the past decade, Malcolm Gladwell has written three books that have radically changed how we understand our world and ourselves: The Tipping Point; Blink; and Outliers. Now, in What the Dog Saw, he brings together, for the first time, the best of his writing from TheNew Yorker over the same period.


Here is the bittersweet tale of the inventor of the birth control pill, and the dazzling inventions of the pasta sauce pioneer Howard Moscowitz. Gladwell sits with Ron Popeil, the king of the American kitchen, as he sells rotisserie ovens, and divines the secrets of Cesar Millan, the "dog whisperer" who can calm savage animals with the touch of his hand. He explores intelligence tests and ethnic profiling and "hindsight bias" and why it was that everyone in Silicon Valley once tripped over themselves to hire the same college graduate.


"Good writing," Gladwell says in his preface, "does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head."What the Dog Saw is yet another example of the buoyant spirit and unflagging curiosity that have made Malcolm Gladwell our most brilliant investigator of the hidden extraordinary.




About the Author
Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine since 1996. His 1999 profile of Ron Popeil won a National Magazine Award, and in 2005 he was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People. He is the author of "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference," (2000) and "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" (2005), both of which were number one New York Times bestsellers.

Click here to buy " What the dog saw " book from Amazon.com here.

Investment Legends: The Wisdom that Leads to Wealth (Financial Review) by Barrie Dunstan

Posted on http://platinumbooks.blogspot.com/2009/12/investment-legends-wisdom-that-leads-to.html

This book contain stories of 15 legendary investors

The Chronicler and Historian - Peter Bernstein
The Literary Investor - Barton Biggs
Staying the Course - John C Bogle
Calm and Balance - Anthony Bolton
The Corporate Raider - Sir Ron Brierley
Analytical Perspicacity - Gary Brinson
The Prodigies - Warren Buffet and Charles Munger
The Optimist - Abby Joseph Cohen
The Teacher - Ray Dalio
The Contrarian - Marc Faber
The Admired Manager - David Fisher
The Articulate Pessimist - Jeremy Grantham
The Card Counter - Bill Gross
The Nicest Guy in the Business - Martin Leibowitz
The Early Adopter - Lewis Sanders

You will find the content in both profession and personal story of each extraordinary investor with different styles. They have their keys to be successful in this capitalism global investment.

Product Description
Part-philosophy, part-business strategy and part-biography, Investment Legends provides fascinating insight into the key ingredients required for successful investing, as explored through the experiences and tips of fifteen of the world’s leading investors.

Drawing on his forty years in the business, leading Financial Review journalist, Barrie Dunstan has travelled the globe interviewing the cast of characters in this book. Throwing the net far and wide, Dunstan’s subjects include those virtually born into the business, such as Barton Biggs and Peter Bernstein, as well as others who came to investment via the card tables at Las Vegas or the ski slopes of Switzerland. Each interview provides insights about the legends - who are they, how do they think about investment, what do they believe is most important, why these beliefs matter, and when they might change their mind.

In this captivating book, you’ll get to meet some of the world’s leading lights in the investment world. Share in their secrets to success, and follow their dramatic journeys, led by the guiding hand of wise and insightful author, Barrie Dunstan.


From the Back Cover
With over half a century of experience to draw upon, no other journalist cam boast the range and depth of analysis of financial markets. As the elder statesman of Australian financial journalism, Barrie brings to his interviews a depth of understanding that allows him to probe the thinking of some of the best financial minds in a manner that puts his subjects at ease and that delivers rare insights.—Richard Gilbert, CEO, Investment and Financial Services Association

Barrie Dunstan brings both great experience and insight to his writings on the investment industry. Over the years he has sat down with some of the true legends of the investment world and this book offers a unique insight into how some of the best minds in the world approach investing.—Jeremy Duffield, Managing Director, Vanguard Asia-Pacific

Dunstan has produced a book that is as insightful as it is readable. His dissection of these investment veterans’ different ways of thinking is testament to his journalistic prowess…
--David Marvin, Chairman, Marvin & Palmer

Part-business strategy and part-biography, Investment Legends provides a rare insight into the world’s mist influential and successful investor. In this collection of candid, perceptive and engaging profiles, respected financial journalist Barrie Dunstan reveals the people behind the legends and the personal qualities that have seen them dominate the world of investment. Discover what shaped these pioneers during their lives and their education, what brought them into the industry, the people who influenced them during their career and who among their peers they admire.


About the Author
Barrie Dunstan is one of Australia’s most experienced and widely read investment writers, with 52 years of stock market involvement underpinning his craft. He has worked at The Age and The Herald, and since 1987 has been writing for The Australian Financial Review, where he is currently an associate editor.

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The Complete Sherlock Holmes: All 4 Novels and 56 Short Stories

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Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who first appeared in publication in 1887. The author was a Scottish writer and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Story focus on the brilliant London "consulting detective",Sherlock Holmes is famous for his intellectual prowess and is renowned for his skilful use of astute observation, deductive reasoning and forensic skills to solve difficult cases.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote 4 novels and 56 short stories that feature Holmes. The first story, A Study in Scarlet, appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887 and Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1890, respectively. Sherlock Holmes grew tremendously in popularity with the beginning of the first series of short stories in The Strand Magazine in 1891; further series of short stories and two serialised novels appeared until 1927. The stories cover a period from around 1875 up to 1907, with a final case in 1914.

This is a set of complete work of Sherlock Holmes containing with 4 novels and 56 short stories which have been arranged in 1986 within 944 pages.



Amazon.com Review
This volume, authorized by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's estate, contains all 4 full-length novels and all 56 short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes. At over a thousand pages, the weighty tome is a perfect gift for budding amateur sleuths, and it is an ideal companion for a long stay on a desert island (or a leisurely trip through the English countryside). As the reader wades past the tense introductions of A Study in Scarlet and moves towards such classic tales as The Hound of the Baskervilles, "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," and "The Final Problem," she is sure to draw her own conclusions about Holmes's veiled past and his quirky relationship with his "Boswell," Watson. Doyle never revealed much about Holmes's early life, but the joy of reading the complete Holmes is assembling the trivia of each story into something like a portrait of the detective and his creator. By the end of the long journey through London and across Europe (with a long stopover at Reichenbach Falls), one is apt to have found a friend for life.

--Patrick O'Kelley --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.



Review
"A remarkable undertaking - the dramatisation of all 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories.. Applauding them, and particularly Clive Merrison's Holmes, made my hands sore."" Peter Davalle, The Times --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.



Review
“Sherlock Holmes is the very foundation stone of the edifice that is crime fiction.”
— The Times --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.


From the Publisher
Here, collected in one volume, are all four full-length novels and 56 short stories chronicling the colorful adventures of Sherlock Holmes--every word Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ever wrote about Baker Street's most famous resident. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.



From the Inside Flap
Here, collected in one volume, are all four full-length novels and 56 short stories chronicling the colorful adventures of Sherlock Holmes--every word Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ever wrote about Baker Street's most famous resident. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.



About the Author
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) produced more than 30 books, 150 short stories, poems, plays and essays across a wide range of genres. His most famous creation is the detective Sherlock Holmes, whom he introduced in his first novel A Study in Scarlet. P. D. James is an award-winning author whose titles include Death in Holy Orders, The Lighthouse, and The Murder Room.

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