Casey Stengel


Book Description

The definitive biography of one of baseball's most enduring and influential characters, from New York Times bestselling author and baseball writer Marty Appel. As a player, Charles Dillon "Casey" Stengel's contemporaries included Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, and Christy Mathewson . . . and he was the only person in history to wear the uniforms of all four New York teams: the Dodgers, Giants, Yankees, and Mets. As a legendary manager, he formed indelible, complicated relationships with Yogi Berra, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, and Billy Martin. For more than five glorious decades, Stengel was the undisputed, quirky, hilarious, and beloved face of baseball--and along the way he revolutionized the role of manager while winning a spectactular ten pennants and seven World Series Championships. But for a man who spent so much of his life in the limelight--an astounding fifty-five years in professional baseball--Stengel remains an enigma. Acclaimed New York Yankees' historian and bestselling author Marty Appel digs into Casey Stengel's quirks and foibles, unearthing a tremendous trove of baseball stories, perspective, and history. Weaving in never-before-published family documents, Appel creates an intimate portrait of a private man who was elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1966 and named "Baseball's Greatest Character" by MLB Network's Prime 9. Casey Stengel is a biography that will be treasured by fans of our national pastime.




Grow


Book Description

Ten years of research uncover the secret source of growth and profit … Those who center their business on improving people’s lives have a growth rate triple that of competitors and outperform the market by a huge margin. They dominate their categories, create new categories and maximize profit in the long term. Pulling from a unique ten year growth study involving 50,000 brands, Jim Stengel shows how the world's 50 best businesses—as diverse as Method, Red Bull, Lindt, Petrobras, Samsung, Discovery Communications, Visa, Zappos, and Innocent—have a cause and effect relationship between financial performance and their ability to connect with fundamental human emotions, hopes, values and greater purposes. In fact, over the 2000s an investment in these companies—“The Stengel 50”—would have been 400 percent more profitable than an investment in the S&P 500. Grow is based on unprecedented empirical research, inspired (when Stengel was Global Marketing Officer of Procter & Gamble) by a study of companies growing faster than P&G. After leaving P&G in 2008, Stengel designed a new study, in collaboration with global research firm Millward Brown Optimor. This study tracked the connection over a ten year period between financial performance and customer engagement, loyalty and advocacy. Then, in a further investigation of what goes on in the “black box” of the consumer’s mind, Stengel and his team tapped into neuroscience research to look at customer engagement and measure subconscious attitudes to determine whether the top businesses in the Stengel Study were more associated with higher ideals than were others. Grow thus deftly blends timeless truths about human behavior and values into an action framework – how you discover, build, communicate, deliver and evaluate your ideal. Through colorful stories drawn from his fascinating personal experiences and “deep dives” that bring out the true reasons for such successes as the Pampers, HP, Discovery Channel, Jack Daniels and Zappos, Grow unlocks the code for twenty-first century business success.




Mandela's Way


Book Description

"Time" magazine editor Stengel, who collaborated with Mandela on his bestselling autobiography, distills Mandela's wisdom into 15 vital life lessons that have the power to deepen lives.




Information Wars


Book Description

A “well-told” insider account of the State Department’s twenty-first-century struggle to defend America against malicious propaganda and disinformation (The Washington Post). Disinformation is nothing new. When Satan told Eve nothing would happen if she bit the apple, that was disinformation. But today, social media has made disinformation even more pervasive and pernicious. In a disturbing turn of events, authoritarian governments are increasingly using it to create their own false narratives, and democracies are proving not to be very good at fighting it. During the final three years of the Obama administration, Richard Stengel, former editor of Time, was an Under Secretary of State on the front lines of this new global information war—tasked with unpacking, disproving, and combating both ISIS’s messaging and Russian disinformation. Then, during the 2016 election, Stengel watched as Donald Trump used disinformation himself. In fact, Stengel quickly came to see how all three had used the same playbook: ISIS sought to make Islam great again; Putin tried to make Russia great again; and we know the rest. In Information Wars, Stengel moves through Russia and Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and introduces characters from Putin to Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Mohamed bin Salman, to show how disinformation is impacting our global society. He illustrates how ISIS terrorized the world using social media, and how the Russians launched a tsunami of disinformation around the annexation of Crimea—a scheme that would became a model for future endeavors. An urgent book for our times, now with a new preface from the author, Information Wars challenges us to combat this ever-growing threat to democracy. “[A] refreshingly frank account . . . revealing.” —Kirkus Reviews “This sobering book is indeed needed to help individuals better understand how information can be massaged to produce any sort of message desired.” —Library Journal




Stengel


Book Description

One of the most endearing of American heroes, Casey Stengel guided the New York Yankees to ten pennants in twelve seasons. Here is the brilliant manager stripped naked- the person underneath all the clowning, mugging, and double-talking.




Flight Dynamics


Book Description

An updated and expanded new edition of an authoritative book on flight dynamics and control system design for all types of current and future fixed-wing aircraft Since it was first published, Flight Dynamics has offered a new approach to the science and mathematics of aircraft flight, unifying principles of aeronautics with contemporary systems analysis. Now updated and expanded, this authoritative book by award-winning aeronautics engineer Robert Stengel presents traditional material in the context of modern computational tools and multivariable methods. Special attention is devoted to models and techniques for analysis, simulation, evaluation of flying qualities, and robust control system design. Using common notation and not assuming a strong background in aeronautics, Flight Dynamics will engage a wide variety of readers, including aircraft designers, flight test engineers, researchers, instructors, and students. It introduces principles, derivations, and equations of flight dynamics as well as methods of flight control design with frequent reference to MATLAB functions and examples. Topics include aerodynamics, propulsion, structures, flying qualities, flight control, and the atmospheric and gravitational environment. The second edition of Flight Dynamics features up-to-date examples; a new chapter on control law design for digital fly-by-wire systems; new material on propulsion, aerodynamics of control surfaces, and aeroelastic control; many more illustrations; and text boxes that introduce general mathematical concepts. Features a fluid, progressive presentation that aids informal and self-directed study Provides a clear, consistent notation that supports understanding, from elementary to complicated concepts Offers a comprehensive blend of aerodynamics, dynamics, and control Presents a unified introduction of control system design, from basics to complex methods Includes links to online MATLAB software written by the author that supports the material covered in the book




You're Too Kind


Book Description

Okay, who was the first flatterer? If you guessed Satan, you'd be close, but according to YOU'RE TOO KIND, flattery began with chimpanzees, who groom each other all day long. In fact, flattery is an adaptive behaviour that has helped us survive since caveman days. It's in our genes. Our flattery is simply strategic praise, and to illustrate its myriad forms, Richard Stengel takes us on a witty idiosyncratic tour, from chimps to the God of the Old Testament (who craved flattery but never got it), to the troubadour poets of the Middle Ages (who invented the sappy cliches of romantic flattery), all the way through to Dale Carnegie (flattery will get you everywhere) and Monica Lewinsky's adoring love letters to her Big Creep (faux insults are also a form of flattery). Flattery thrives in hierarchical settings like royal courts or Fortune 500 boardrooms, and it oils the social machinery of everyday life. Studies show it works best on those who already have high opinions of themselves. Stengel sees public flattery as an epidemic in our society and private praise as being all too scarce. Most often, though, flattery these days is just a harmless deception, a victimless crime that often ends up making both the giver and the receiver feel a little better. In short, flattery works.




The Politics of Military Force


Book Description

The Politics of Military Force examines the dynamics of discursive change that made participation in military operations possible against the background of German antimilitarist culture. Once considered a strict taboo, so-called out-of-area operations have now become widely considered by German policymakers to be without alternative. The book argues that an understanding of how certain policies are made possible (in this case, military operations abroad and force transformation), one needs to focus on processes of discursive change that result in different policy options appearing rational, appropriate, feasible, or even self-evident. Drawing on Essex School discourse theory, the book develops a theoretical framework to understand how discursive change works, and elaborates on how discursive change makes once unthinkable policy options not only acceptable but even without alternative. Based on a detailed discourse analysis of more than 25 years of German parliamentary debates, The Politics of Military Force provides an explanation for: (1) the emergence of a new hegemonic discourse in German security policy after the end of the Cold War (discursive change), (2) the rearticulation of German antimilitarism in the process (ideational change/norm erosion) and (3) the resulting making-possible of military operations and force transformation (policy change). In doing so, the book also demonstrates the added value of a poststructuralist approach compared to the naive realism and linear conceptions of norm change so prominent in the study of German foreign policy and International Relations more generally.




Optimal Control and Estimation


Book Description

Graduate-level text provides introduction to optimal control theory for stochastic systems, emphasizing application of basic concepts to real problems. "Invaluable as a reference for those already familiar with the subject." — Automatica.




January Sun


Book Description

A stunning portrait of a town in the apartheid South Africa of 20 years ago, and with a new introduction telling what has happened in South Africa and that town in the intervening years, a chronicle that earned the author an invitation from the imprisoned Nelson Mandela to collaborate with him on his autobiography. Richard Stengel journeyed to South Africa in the late 1980s to chronicle life under apartheid. He ended up spending months in a small rural town where the white authorities were attempting to forcibly remove a black township. He tells this moving story through the lives of three families—one white, one black, one Indian—over the course of a single day for each of them. The private lives of each family reveal what it was like to live in a society where everyone is judged by the color of his or her skin.​ Stengel reveals the hopes and dreams of each of these families, and their resilient optimism about the future. In a new introduction, Stengel describes how some of those hopes even came to pass with the eventual release of Nelson Mandela and the election of the country’s first truly democratic government.