Slam-Dunk Success


Book Description

Great leadership begins with great understanding. No one knows that better than basketball legend Byron Scott and lifelong business executive Charlie Norris who, respectively, won NBA championships and resurrected multimillion-dollar corporations by being team players no matter their position. Whether it's on the basketball court, in the boardroom, or in everyday life, getting to the heads and hearts of people is paramount to getting the most out of them. In SLAM-DUNK SUCCESS, Scott and Norris share their parallel formulas for victory and prove that, with the right tools, winning can happen anywhere. As a player Scott won three championships with the Los Angeles Lakers, and as coach he twice took the New Jersey Nets to the NBA Finals and won Coach of the Year honors with the New Orleans Hornets. With every team his role changed, but his winning mentality never faltered. As CEO of McKesson Water, Charlie Norris turned a $200 million-dollar company into a company that sold ten years later for $1.1 billion dollars and, as chairman of the board of Freshpet, he helped lead the start-up from early stage testing to become a publicly traded company with a market value of over $350 million. In each job, he led with the same amount of conviction and care. Their book-which grew from their unlikely friendship and realization that two men from completely different backgrounds could have the same leadership ideals-breaks down their keys to motivating others, negotiating deals, and creating prosperity from scratch. Their blueprint includes lessons on listening, turning failure into learning opportunities, and delegating authority with extreme precision. Leadership is a full-time job and Byron Scott and Charlie Norris's story is a guidebook for leaders in all fields and in any position looking to better both their careers and lives. Champions are formed when people make those around them better and this book shows how you can be a winner every day.




Wasted


Book Description

Wasted is a riveting exploration of the complicated, and often surprising, ways that waste occurs in our businesses, our communities, and our lives “A smart, unconventional book that takes readers far beyond what they think they know about a complex subject.”—Kari Byron, former cast member of MythBusters Waste. We spend a great deal of energy trying to avoid it, but once you train your eyes to look for it, you’ll see it all around you—in your home, your business, and your everyday life. In Wasted, futurist Byron Reese and entrepreneur Scott Hoffman take readers on a fascinating journey through this modern world of waste, drawing on science, economics, and human behavior to envision what a world with far less of it—or none of it at all—might look like. Along the way, they explore thought-provoking issues such as • why the United States got a higher proportion of its energy from renewable sources in 1950 than it does today • whether the amount of gold in unused mobile phones can be extracted for profit • how switching to water fountains on a single route from Singapore to Newark could prevent the use of 3,400 plastic bottles—on each flight • whether the amount of money you save buying goods in bulk is offset by the amount you lose when some spoil. Ultimately, the question of reducing waste is scientific, philosophical, and, most of all, complex. According to Reese and Hoffman, the rush toward simple answers has often led to well-meaning efforts that cause more waste than they save. The only way we can hope to make progress is to treat waste as the complicated issue it is. While the authors don’t promise easy answers, in this compelling book they take an important step toward solutions by examining the questions at play, giving actionable steps, and ensuring that you’ll never see the world of waste the same way again.




Phantom Skies & Shifting Ground


Book Description

A fascinating collaborative investigation of some of the earliest photographs of Latin America by the renowned 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge







Scott, Byron and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter


Book Description

Scott, Byron and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter is an innovative study of Scott's and Byron's poetical engagement with borders (actual and metaphorical) and the people living on and around them. The author discusses Scott's edited collection of Border Ballads, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and his narrative poetry, and Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage , cantos 1 and 2, his Eastern Tales, and his late, utopian South-Sea poem The Island. This fascinating study provides a detailed exegesis of the importance of borders to these leading poets and the public, during the early years of the Nineteenth-Century, with an emphasis on reciprocal literary influences, and on attitudes towards cultural instability.







Byron Easy


Book Description

It's 24 December 1999, Byron Easy, a poverty-stricken poet, half-cut and suicidal, sits on a stationary train at King's Cross waiting to depart. He has in his lap a bin-liner containing his remaining worldly goods - an empty wine bottle, a few books, a handful of crumpled banknotes. As the journey commences he conjures memories (painful and euphoric alike) of the recent past, of his rollercoaster London life, and, most distressingly, of Mandy - his half-Spanish Amazonian wife - in an attempt to make sense of his terrible, and ordinary, predicament...So what has led him to this point? Where are his friends, his family, his wife? What happened to his dreams. And what awaits him at the end of his journey?Byron Easy is an epic, baroque sprawling monster of a novel, and a unique portrait of love and marriage, of the flux of memory, and of England in the dying days of the twentieth century from a young British writer of exceptional promise.




The Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron


Book Description

The Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron offers the latest in critical thinking about the poet that defined the Romantic era across Europe and beyond. The volume presents forty-four groundbreaking essays that enable readers to assess Lord Byron's central position in Romantic traditions and his profound and far-reaching influence on British, European, and world culture. The chapters are organized into five sections-'Works', 'Biographical Contexts', 'Literary and Cultural Contexts', 'Afterlives', and 'Reading Byron Now'-that guide readers through the most important issues and frameworks for interpreting Byron. 'Works' presents original readings of Byron's key works and many of his lesser-known ones, giving space to extensive studies of his great epic, Don Juan, and the poem that brought him fame, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. 'Biographical Contexts' invites readers to consider Byron's life through key themes and patterns. 'Literary and Cultural Contexts' sets out the most important intellectual traditions from which Byron's work emerged and in which it developed. 'Afterlives' shows readers the extent of Byron's influence on literature, art, music, and politics in Europe and beyond. 'Reading Byron Now' advances the critical agendas that are shaping Byron Studies today. The Handbook tackles key themes associated with Byron including the Byronic Hero, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, sexuality, mobility, scepticism, the Gothic, celebrity culture, and much more. For new readers of Byron, the volume provides an excellent grounding in his life and work, and for specialists, it opens up exciting new approaches to an icon of Romantic literature.




Byron's European Impact


Book Description

The works of Lord Byron and his friend Sir Walter Scott had an influence on European literature which was immediate and profound. Peter Cochran’s book charts that influence on France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland and Russia, with individual chapters on Goethe, Pushkin, and Baudelaire – and one special chapter on Ibsen, who called Peer Gynt his Manfred. Cochran shows that, although Byron’s best work is his satirical writing, which is aimed in part at his earlier “romantic” material and its readership, his self-correction was not taken on board by many European writers (Pushkin being the exception), and it was the gloomy Byronic Heroes who held sway. These were often read as revolutionaries, but were in fact dead-end. It was a mythical, not a literary Byron whom people thought they had read. The book ends with chapters on three British writers who seem at last to have read Byron, in their different ways, accurately – Eliot, Joyce, and Yeats.




The Perversity of Poetry


Book Description

Once the dominant literary form, poetry was gradually eclipsed by the realist novel; indeed, by 1940 W. H. Auden was able to note, "Poetry makes nothing happen." In The Perversity of Poetry, Dino Franco Felluga explores the cultural background of poetry's marginalization by examining nineteenth-century reactions to Romantic poetry and ideology. Focusing on the work of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, as well as periodical reviews, student manuals, and contemporary medical journals, the book details the period's two contending (and equally outrageous) claims regarding poetry. Scott's poetry, on the one hand, was continually represented as a panacea for a modern world overtaken by new principles of utilitarianism, capitalism, industrialism, and democracy. Byron's, by contrast, was represented either as a cancer in the heart of the social order or as a contagious pandemic leading to various pathological symptoms. The book concludes with a coda on Alfred Lord Tennyson, which illustrates how the Victorian reception of Scott and Byron affected the most popular poetic genius of midcentury. Ultimately, The Perversity of Poetry uncovers how the shift to a rhetoric of health allowed critics to oppose what they perceived as a potent and potentially dangerous influence on the age, the very thing that would over the course of the century be marginalized into such obscurity: poetry, thanks to its perverse insistence on making something happen.