Born Losers


Book Description

What makes somebody a Loser, a person doomed to unfulfilled dreams and humiliation? Nobody is born to lose, and yet failure embodies our worst fears. The Loser is our national bogeyman, and his history over the past two hundred years reveals the dark side of success, how economic striving reshaped the self and soul of America. From colonial days to the Columbine tragedy, Scott Sandage explores how failure evolved from a business loss into a personality deficit, from a career setback to a gauge of our self-worth. From hundreds of private diaries, family letters, business records, and even early credit reports, Sandage reconstructs the dramas of real-life Willy Lomans. He unearths their confessions and denials, foolish hopes and lost faith, sticking places and changing times. Dreamers, suckers, and nobodies come to life in the major scenes of American history, like the Civil War and the approach of big business, showing how the national quest for success remade the individual ordeal of failure. Born Losers is a pioneering work of American cultural history, which connects everyday attitudes and anxieties about failure to lofty ideals of individualism and salesmanship of self. Sandage's storytelling will resonate with all of us as it brings to life forgotten men and women who wrestled with The Loser--the label and the experience--in the days when American capitalism was building a nation of winners.




Losers in Space


Book Description

It is the year 2129 . . . and fame is all that matters Susan and her friends are celebutantes. Their lives are powered by media awareness, fed by engineered meals, and underscored by cynicism. Everyone has a rating; the more viewers who ID you, the better. So Susan and her almost-boyfriend Derlock cook up a surefire plan: the nine of them will visit a Mars-bound spaceship and stow away. Their survival will be a media sensation, boosting their ratings across the globe. There's only one problem: Derlock is a sociopath. Breakneck narrative, pointed cultural commentary, warm heart, accurate science, a kickass heroine, and a ticking clock . . . who could ask for more?




Natural Born Loser


Book Description

I'm Raymond, and my school is a joke. It's full of bullies and troublemakers. My solution? Be a nobody and fade into the background. But our new principal has blown my cover because he's chosen me as a prefect! It was looking pretty bad, until I made a crazy promise to get new air con for the classrooms. Now I'm REALLY in trouble!




Love Is for Losers


Book Description

This is a laugh-out-loud exploration of sexuality, family, female friendship, grief, and community. With the heart and hilarity of Netflix's critically-acclaimed Sex Education, Wibke Brueggemann's sex positive debut Love Is for Losers is required reading for Generation Z teens. Did you know you can marry yourself? How strange / brilliant is that? Fifteen-year-old Phoebe thinks falling in love is vile and degrading, and vows never to do it. Then, due to circumstances not entirely in her control, she finds herself volunteering at a local thrift shop. There she meets Emma . . . who might unwittingly upend her whole theory on life.




Lunch Is for Losers


Book Description

Every morning the world wakes up and absolutely nothing happens until someone sells something to somebody was the favorite shibboleth of Rudy Kirsch, successful entrepreneur and owner and founder of Dynograph Security Systems and Amalgamated Development. His uncanny ability to understand sales types as he called salesmen and sales managers and his facility for recognizing talent and cutting through the smoke screen of empty glibness often proffered by mediocre and failed sales types served him well. The first step in becoming a successful salesman is recognizing you have to work your ass off and that gift of gab has very little to do with it, he would say, often in frustration. This ability enabled Kirsch to put together a team of three very talented people and ask that they save what was left of his empire, namely Dynograph Security Systems. Amalgamated was established by Rudy ten years earlier when he became bored with Dynograph and left it in the incompetent hands of Mitch Feldman and his brother in law Bernie Klein. Now Rudy was in big trouble, up to his ears in debt both personal and business mostly as a result of the collapse of Amalgamated Development, one of the largest and most successful Florida home site sales organizations. Changes in the tax codes as well as much tougher administrative rules and regulations adopted by a variety of federal regulatory agencies all but killed the Florida land sale business. Rudy had no choice but to roll up his sleeves and reassume command at Dynograph. He convinced Chet Landers, his dynamic and incredibly successful vice president of sales at Amalgamated to not only join him but to accept the challenge of doubling sales at Dynograph in twelve months or less. Rudy had grown to admire Chet both as a man and as a manager and gave him carte-blanch to straighten out the mess created by Mitch and Bernie, clean house and right the Dynograph ship and do it quickly or all would be lost. Cast of characters: Steve Holiday From washing machine repairman to legendary sales manager at Dynograph. Chet Landers Football star, war hero, actor, TV icon, retirement consultant, incredible motivator, cleaned house and saved the day at Dynograph. Got rid of the vipers. Ted Sternweiss Left his South Bronx upbringing behind him except for a terrific left hook, added a new dimension to sales at Dynograph. Rudy Kirsch Understood sales types. Was a builder, the driving force behind it all. Became Chet Landers father many times. Selma Kirsch Hated it all. Knew about Debra. Debra Remington Rudys loyal executive assistant and lover of ten years. Skippy Leonard Played trumpet for Arturo Toscanini and worked for Rudy Kirsch. Brought Chet Landers to Amalgamated Development to sell home sites in Florida. Claude and Nadine a unit at an Amalgamated Development sales dinner. David Frost Teds protg, sales super star. Friendship jeopardized in confusion of success. Rose Holiday Jersey girl. Shows wisdom and insight near the end. Howie Weinfeld A different kind of salesman. Had secret weapon. Kevin Boyle Treachery was his middle name. Dave Gordon He did it his way. He trusted no one. Abby Sternweiss Of the Montgomery, Alabama Chennaults. Mitch Feldman President of Dynograph. Gave Bernie Klein a free hand. Bernie Klein Created a vipers nest at Dynograph while Rudy was away. He and Mitch loved it. John Sullivan Viper. Irv Norman Viper. Don Vorhees Viper. Meyer Chrystal Viper. Sam Rizzo Not quite a Viper. A




The Born Loser's Guide to Life


Book Description

Cartoons offer a humorous look at Brutus Thornapple's encounters with plumbers, real estate agents, bosses, coworkers, children, the police, dogs, waiters, doctors, and his wife




Every War Has Two Losers


Book Description

Born the year World War I began, acclaimed poet William Stafford (1914-1993) spent World War II in a camp for conscientious objectors. Throughout a century of conflict he remained convinced that wars simply don't work. In his writings, Stafford showed it is possible--and crucial--to think independently when fanatics act, and to speak for reconciliation when nations take sides. He believed it was a failure of imagination to only see two options: to fight or to run away. This book gathers the evidence of a lifetime's commitment to nonviolence, including an account of Stafford's near-hanging at the hands of American patriots. In excerpts from his daily journal from 1951-1991, Stafford uses questions, alternative views of history, lyric invitations, and direct assessments of our political habits to suggest another way than war. Many of these statements are published here for the first time, together with a generous selection of Stafford's pacifist poems and interviews from elusive sources. Stafford provides an alternative approach to a nation's military habit, our current administration's aggressive instincts, and our legacy of armed ventures in Europe, the Pacific, Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, and beyond.




Beautiful Losers


Book Description

One of the best-known experimental novels of the 1960s, Beautiful Losers is Leonard Cohen’ s most defiant and uninhibited work. As imagined by Cohen, hell is an apartment in Montreal, where a bereaved and lust-tormented narrator reconstructs his relations with the dead. In that hell two men and a woman twine impossibly and betray one another again and again. Memory blurs into blasphemous sexual fantasy--and redemption takes the form of an Iroquois saint and virgin who has been dead for 300 years but still has the power to save even the most degraded of her suitors. First published in 1966, Beautiful Losers demonstrates that its author is not only a superb songwriter but also a novelist of visionary power. Funny, harrowing, and fiercely moving, it is a classic erotic tragedy, incandescent in its prose and exhilarating for its risky union of sexuality and faith.




Losers, Weepers


Book Description

An ordinary office worker finds a whole lot of money—and winds up running for his life—in this twist-filled thriller by a mystery master. Jim Morgan can’t afford the briefcase. His wife’s spending has strangled him with debt, and he’s down to his last $20. But the briefcase in the leather shop calls to him. It looks like something an executive would own. It smells like success. When he buys it, he feels a confidence he hasn’t felt in years. He tells off the office bully. He talks his way into a raise. The briefcase has made him a new man—and soon, it will be his downfall. Stopping on his way home for a cocktail, Morgan sets the briefcase on the barroom floor. When he picks it up, it’s filled with cash. He’s walked off with $100,000 in stolen money. And getting rid of it will turn his life upside down—or end it.




Losers


Book Description

Born in Russia and seeing things in a different way than his American-born peers, Jupiter struggles to figure out where he belongs in the social structure at school while dealing with the torment of a bully in an unusual way in this humorous coming-of-age story.