NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2019 * WINNER OF THE J ANTHONY LUKAS WORK-IN-PROGRESS AWARD * FINANCIAL TIMES’ BEST BOOKS OF 2019 * NPR FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2019 * FINALIST FOR THE FINACIAL TIMES/MCKINSEY BUSINESS BOOK OF 2019 * KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOKS OF 2019 * SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOKS OF 2019 “Superb…Among the best books ever written about an American corporation.” —Bryan Burrough, The New York Times Book Review Just as Steve Coll told the story of globalization through ExxonMobil and Andrew Ross Sorkin told the story of Wall Street excess through Too Big to Fail, Christopher Leonard’s Kochland uses the extraordinary account of how one of the biggest private companies in the world grew to be that big to tell the story of modern corporate America. The annual revenue of Koch Industries is bigger than that of Goldman Sachs, Facebook, and US Steel combined. Koch is everywhere: from the fertilizers that make our food to the chemicals that make our pipes to the synthetics that make our carpets and diapers to the Wall Street trading in all these commodities. But few people know much about Koch Industries and that’s because the billionaire Koch brothers have wanted it that way. For five decades, CEO Charles Koch has kept Koch Industries quietly operating in deepest secrecy, with a view toward very, very long-term profits. He’s a genius businessman: patient with earnings, able to learn from his mistakes, determined that his employees develop a reverence for free-market ruthlessness, and a master disrupter. These strategies made him and his brother David together richer than Bill Gates. But there’s another side to this story. If you want to understand how we killed the unions in this country, how we widened the income divide, stalled progress on climate change, and how our corporations bought the influence industry, all you have to do is read this book. Seven years in the making, Kochland “is a dazzling feat of investigative reporting and epic narrative writing, a tour de force that takes the reader deep inside the rise of a vastly powerful family corporation that has come to influence American workers, markets, elections, and the very ideas debated in our public square. Leonard’s work is fair and meticulous, even as it reveals the Kochs as industrial Citizens Kane of our time” (Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Private Empire).
Christopher Koch comes home to Vintage! Vintage is excited and proud to announce the publication of Chrisopher Koch's impressive backlist of titles: Crossing the Gap: Memories and Reflections The Boys in the Island Out of Ireland 'No Australian novelist has done more to capture Asia for the Australian imagination that Koch.' The Australian Republished with two brand new pieces, Crossing the Gap is a fascinating insight into a major Australian novelist's development. This collection of short works employs the memoir as a springboard, presenting us with reflections on literature and an analysis of Australia's changing place in the world over the author's lifetime - a lifetime stretching from the British Empire of his childhood to the post-colonial present. Crossing the Gap, the title piece of the collection, has a particular topical interest, dealing as it does with the shift from Empire to a new Asia-Pacific consciousness. Koch's recollection take us through several continents and an unusual range of topics, from his native island of Tasmania to London in the 1950s; from newly independent India to Sukarno's Indonesia; from California in the 1960s, with Ken Kesey and Larry McMurtry, to the China of Chairman Mao in the 1980s. It is a rich and exciting mixture, charting a novelist's growth and the influences which have shaped him. Rave reviews for Crossing the Gap 'His essays offer stiking expositions of the emotions and ideas which have fuelled his fiction.' Times Literary Supplement 'With its attractive blend of autobiographical recollection, socio-cultural comment and non-academic literary criticism, the book will be indispensable to readers of Koch's fiction; it will also grip all who can be interested in one of the nation's leading intellectuals making his contribution to Australia's definition of itself.' PN Review 'It can still seem surprising that three of the most interesting 'religious' novelists in English since the Second World War, Patrick White, Randolf Stow and Christopher Koch, come from a country as ostensibly materialistic as Australia ... (Koch) commands attention by engaging his chosen subjects so energetically.' London Magazine 'Reading the ruminations of Christopher Koch ... is a bit like going for a walk in the county at night beneath a full moon. You are absorbed into the atmosphere and afterwards find no clear recollection of the earth having passed beneath your feet.' The Age 'There are sentences that stay in the mind and give pleasure long after they are read.' The Bulletin 'Crossing the Gap demonstrates again Koch's extraordinary skill at rendering the feeling and texture of places.' The Canberra Times
A fascinating insight into a major Australian novelist's development, this collection of pieces employs the memoir as springboard, presenting us with reflections on literature and an analysis of Australia's changing place in the world over the author's lifetime - a lifetime stretching from the British Empire of his childhood to the post-colonial present. 'Crossing the Gap', the title piece of the collection, has a particular topical interest, dealing as it does with the shift from Empire to a new Asia-Pacific consciousness. 'His essays offer striking expositions of the emotions and ideas which have fuelled his fiction.' the times Literary Supplement 'Reading the ruminations of Christopher Koch ... is a bit like going for a walk in the country at night beneath a full moon. You are absorbed into the atmosphere and afterwards find no clear recollection of the earth having passed beneath your feet.' the Age 'No novelist has done more to capture Asia for the Australian imagination than Koch.' Greg Sheridan, Foreign Editor, the Australian
New York City: a battered town left for dead, one that almost a million people abandoned and where those who remained had to live behind triple deadbolt locks. It was reinvigorated and became the capital of wealth and innovation, an engine of cultural vibrancy, a magnet for immigrants, and a city of endless possibility. Since its founding in 1968, New York Magazine has told the story of that city's constant morphing, week after week. This book draws from all that coverage to present an enormous, sweeping, idiosyncratic picture of a half-century at the center of the world. It constitutes an unparalleled history of that city's transformation, and of a New York City institution as well.
Invest Like a Dealmaker outlines an approach to investing that is far removed from what most investors have been conditioned to believe, but which has produced consistent profits for its practitioners decade after decade. While the concepts covered are not well known by the average investor, they are well appreciated by Wall Street insiders and dealmakers—particularly those who think about stocks as whole companies, as things with real assets, and cash flows that exist in the real world.
In this book Christopher Hasty presents a striking new theory of musical duration. Drawing on insights from modern "process" philosophy, he advances a fully temporal perspective in which meter is released from its mechanistic connotations and recognized as a concrete, visceral agent of musical expression. Part one of the book reviews oppositions of law and freedom, structure and process, determinacy and indeterminacy in the speculations of theorists from the eighteenth century to the present. Part two reinterprets these contrasts to form a highly original account of meter that engages diverse musical repertories and aesthetic issues.
A Dictonary of Science and Technology. Color Illustration Section. Symbols and Units. Fundamental Physical Constants. Measurement Conversion. Periodic Table of the Elements. Atomic Weights. Particles. The Solar System. Geologial Timetable. Five-Kingdom Classification of Organisms. Chronology of Modern Science. Photo Credits.
This study investigates the history of the traditions that coalesced around the name Philip in the New Testament and other early Christian literature. It proposes that all of this material ultimately owes its genesis to one historical and literary figure, Philip the apostle. This proposition is explored through a wide-ranging examination of the evidence: Luke's redactional employment of traditional materials about Philip the apostle in Acts 8:4-25 and 8:26-40, the evidence of the canonical Gospels, the second-century perspective on Philip as an apostolic authority figure invoked to legitimate various Christian practices, Philip's apostolic authority in "gnostic" documents for the transmission of the revelatory teaching of Jesus, and the Acts of Philip as a witness to the formation of Christian culture in the earliest centuries. While historical issues are considered where possible, the focus is on the life of the traditions and their reception.
Cholera is a frightening disease. Victims are wracked by stomach cramps and suffer intense diarrhoea. Death can come within hours. Though now seeming a distant memory in Europe, which suffered several epidemics in the 19th century before John Snow identified the link with water, it is still a serious threat in many parts of the world - Zimbabwe is a recent example. Snow's discovery was one of the great breakthroughs of epidemiology and a wonderful story from the history of science. Later came the discovery of the culprit organism - Cholera vibrio - understanding of its life cycle, and the development of a vaccine. But the problem of cholera has not disappeared. This book tells the story of cholera, and looks at both the medical success in the West, and the different attitudes to the disease in countries in which it is prevalent as opposed to those in which it put in a temporary appearance. Unlike other books on cholera, which focus on the experience of particular countries, Christopher Hamlin's account draws together the experiences from various countries, both those that were colonies and those that were not. Cholera: the biography is part of the Oxford series, Biographies of Diseases, edited by William and Helen Bynum. In each individual volume an expert historian or clinician tells the story of a particular disease or condition throughout history - not only in terms of growing medical understanding of its nature and cure, but also shifting social and cultural attitudes, and changes in the meaning of the name of the disease itself.
The overarching purpose of Moral Cruelty is to identify and sensitize the reader to the existence of "moral sadism." It is the authors' contention that what we as individuals perceive as "normal" modes of interaction conceal hidden contributions to cruelty.
“A gripping tale . . . A convincing, page-turning evocation of recent history.”—The New York Times Ray Barton travels to war-ravaged Southeast Asia to search for his missing friend Michael Langford, a brilliant, risk-taking combat photographer who was stolen into Khmer Rouge Cambodia on a mysterious mission and disappeared. The search illuminates Langford’s heroism, his fierce loyalties, and the personal highways he has traveled to war. Langford’s empathy for the brave but poorly commanded Cambodian troops and his love for a young Cambodian woman have led him in the end to put down the camera and take up the gun in a foreign struggle he had made his own. Koch richly evokes Indochina—from the deceptively tranquil rice paddies of South Vietnam to the corrupt, doomed pink-and-white city of Phnom Penh. Highways to a War is a story of intense relationships forged in a dangerous and hallucinatory land that continues to haunt the American soul. “An absorbing, deeply moving . . . tale of love and heroism. . . . The evocation of the Cambodian landscape . . . is truly haunting.”—Kirkus Reviews “Highways to a War ranks among the best of the . . . literature that has come out of the agony of the wars in Southeast Asia.”—The Orlando Sentinel
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2019 * WINNER OF THE J ANTHONY LUKAS WORK-IN-PROGRESS AWARD * FINANCIAL TIMES’ BEST BOOKS OF 2019 * NPR FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2019 * FINALIST FOR THE FINACIAL TIMES/MCKINSEY BUSINESS BOOK OF 2019 * KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOKS OF 2019 * SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOKS OF 2019 “Superb…Among the best books ever written about an American corporation.” —Bryan Burrough, The New York Times Book Review Just as Steve Coll told the story of globalization through ExxonMobil and Andrew Ross Sorkin told the story of Wall Street excess through Too Big to Fail, Christopher Leonard’s Kochland uses the extraordinary account of how one of the biggest private companies in the world grew to be that big to tell the story of modern corporate America. The annual revenue of Koch Industries is bigger than that of Goldman Sachs, Facebook, and US Steel combined. Koch is everywhere: from the fertilizers that make our food to the chemicals that make our pipes to the synthetics that make our carpets and diapers to the Wall Street trading in all these commodities. But few people know much about Koch Industries and that’s because the billionaire Koch brothers have wanted it that way. For five decades, CEO Charles Koch has kept Koch Industries quietly operating in deepest secrecy, with a view toward very, very long-term profits. He’s a genius businessman: patient with earnings, able to learn from his mistakes, determined that his employees develop a reverence for free-market ruthlessness, and a master disrupter. These strategies made him and his brother David together richer than Bill Gates. But there’s another side to this story. If you want to understand how we killed the unions in this country, how we widened the income divide, stalled progress on climate change, and how our corporations bought the influence industry, all you have to do is read this book. Seven years in the making, Kochland “is a dazzling feat of investigative reporting and epic narrative writing, a tour de force that takes the reader deep inside the rise of a vastly powerful family corporation that has come to influence American workers, markets, elections, and the very ideas debated in our public square. Leonard’s work is fair and meticulous, even as it reveals the Kochs as industrial Citizens Kane of our time” (Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Private Empire).
Entries address topics related to genocide, crimes against humanity and peace, and human rights violations; profile perpetrators including Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, and Idi Amin; and discuss institutions set up to prosecute these crimes in countries around the world.
Eager for a "doable adventure", author Christopher Koch sets off on an impromptu 1,500 mile motorcycle trip down the Mississippi River from St. Paul to New Orleans in early November 2014- ill-equipped and underprepared as an unexpected arctic air mass, the death rattle of a Pacific Supertyphoon, slams into the American heartland. While meteorologists struggle for superlatives to describe the record breaking bitter cold, Koch pushes onward to overcome the weather, mechanical difficulties, and his own poor decision making, and in doing so learns as much about himself as the landscape through which he rides.At once thought-provoking and hilarious, "Welcome to Metropolis" is the type of book you'll be tempted to read out loud. Fans of Mary Roach and Bill Bryson may just find a new author to place on their must-read lists.
Jakarta, 1965. Waiting for explosions, the city smells of frangipani, kretek cigarettes, and fear. It is THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY. the charismatic god-king Sukarno has brought Indonesia to the edge of chaos - to an abortive revolution that will leave half a million dead. For the Western correspondents here, this gathering apocalypse is their story and their drug, while the sufferings of the Indonesian people are scarcely real: a shadow play. Working at the eye of the storm are television correspondent Guy Hamilton and his eccentric dwarf cameraman Billy Kwan. In Kwan's secret fantasy life, both Sukarno and Hamilton are heroes. But his heroes betray him, and Billy is driven to desperate action. As the Indonesian shadow play erupts into terrible reality, a complex personal tragedy of love, obsession and betrayal comes to its climax. 'A profound and beautiful book' - Les Murray, the Sydney Morning Herald 'A richly and fully realised work of fiction, well conceived and beautifully executed.' - Larry McMurtry 'Intelligent, compassionate, flavoursome, convincing ... In Billy Kwan, Mr Koch has created one of the most memorable characters of recent fiction. this book is to be prized.' - the times Literary Supplement
A fascinating insight into a major Australian novelist's development, this collection of pieces employs the memoir as springboard, presenting us with reflections on literature and an analysis of Australia's changing place in the world over the author's lifetime - a lifetime stretching from the British Empire of his childhood to the post - colonial present. 'Crossing the Gap', the title piece of the collection, has a particular topical interest, dealing as it does with the shift from Empire to a new Asia - Pacific consciousness. 'His essays offer striking expositions of the emotions and ideas which have fuelled his fiction.' The Times Literary Supplement 'Reading the ruminations of Christopher Koch ... is a bit like going for a walk in the country at night beneath a full moon. You are absorbed into the atmosphere and afterwards find no clear recollection of the earth having passed beneath your feet.' The Age 'No novelist has done more to capture Asia for the Australian imagination than Koch.' Greg Sheridan, Foreign Editor, The Australian
When Christopher Koch sets out on a journey through Ireland with his friend the folksinger Brian Mooney, each is seeking an aspect of the past. Mooney is returning to a country where he spent much of his adult life, while two of Koch's great-great-grandmothers came from Ireland to Van Diemen's Land: one of them as a convict. Koch is looking for traces of the mid-nineteenth century: the time of the Famine, which flung the ancestors of so many Irish-Australians across the globe. What he finds, between meetings in pubs with folk musicians and IRA supporters, is modern Ireland. Greatly changed from the impoverished country he visited in the 1950s, it's enjoying the boom of the early twenty-first century, despite the unresolved struggle in the North. For Koch, though, the true soul of this land is to be found in the countryside, where doorways can still be seen to the different levels of the Faery Otherworld: the Many-Coloured Land. 'It is difficult to praise this book too highly. When a master like Koch writes, you expect masterly writing. In this book that is what you get.' the Canberra times 'this is one of the most accurately observed books about Ireland, written by a foreigner, that I have read ... [Koch] came well equipped to assess us, and he makes none of the blunders of the tourist-writer. He is well read in our history and literature ... He is in every way a perceptive but courteous visitor.' Irish Independent
Christopher Koch's bestselling Out of Ireland now published into Vintage A leader of the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848, Robert Devereaux is an Irish gentleman who is prepared to hazard a life of privilege in the fight for his country's freedom. Transported to Van Diemen's land as a political prisoner, he enters a life that greatly changes him, falling in love with a young Irish convict woman, and through her coming to know the people he's long romanticised. But his cause, and the life he has lost, will not let him go. Rave reviews for Out of Ireland 'These novels (Out of Ireland and Highways to a War) will surely become Australian classics.' The Australian's Review of Books 'Koch is both painter and poet-an acute observer of detail with a language so distilled in its purity as to create the illusion that the reader is also the observer.' Sydney Morning Herald 'Robert Devereaux is a splendid literary invention u Koch is at home in the demotic of various convict-era brothels and cubbies u and the chaff of classically-educated gentleman revolutionaries is an Arcadian setting in Van Dieman's Land u Koch's novel has much in common with the revelations of the machinery of nightmare states portrayed by Kafka and Solzhenitsyn u With both books (Highways to a War and Out of Ireland), he has enlarged our understanding of the capabilities of fiction.' Brisbane Courier Mail and Sydney Daily Telegraph 'That it succeeds so well is mainly because Koch is able to capture that voice-grave, measured, beautifully lucid-so well u An impressive and formidable achievement.' Melbourne Age 'In writing about the Tasmanian landscape in which he grew up, Koch rises to lyrical heights that fulfil his long-held impulse towards poetry u A profound exploration of human idealism and an intensely literary experience that intentionally echoes the structure of Dante's Inferno.' Who Weekly 'When you have read out of Ireland and set it aside you will have joined a circle of friends who lived and loved and struggled 150 years ago, and you will wonder how long it will be again before you will be able to pick up and read as great and compelling a book again. I warmly comment Out of Ireland to you all.' Richard O'Brien, Ambassador of Ireland to Australia
The brilliant companion volume to HIGHWAYS TO A WAR. This masterful novel tells the story of a man who suffers exile through fighting for the future of his people. A leader of the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848, Robert Devereaux is an Irish gentleman who is prepared to hazard a life of privilege in the fight for his country's freedom. Transported to Van Diemen's land as a political prisoner, he enters a life that greatly changes him, falling in love with a young Irish convict woman. Through Kathleen O'Rahilly he comes to know the people he's long romanticised; but his cause, and the life he has lost, will not let him go. 'These novels (Out Of Ireland and Highways To A War) will surely become Australian classics.' - The Australian's Review of Books 'Koch is both painter and poet - an acute observer of detail with a language so distilled in its purity as to create the illusion that the reader is also the observer.' Sydney Morning Herald 'That it succeeds so well is mainly because Koch is able to capture that voice - grave, measured, beautifully lucid - so well. An impressive and formidable achievement.' Melbourne Age 'When you have read Out Of Ireland and set it aside you will have joined a circle of friends who lived and loved and struggled 150 years ago, and you will wonder how long it will be again before you will be able to pick up and read as great and compelling a book again. I warmly comment Out Of Ireland to you all.' Richard O'Brien, Ambassador of Ireland to Australia
When Christopher Koch sets out on a journey through Ireland with his friend the folksinger Brian Mooney, each is seeking an aspect of the past. Mooney is returning to a country where he spent much of his adult life, while two of Koch's great-great-grandmothers came from Ireland to Van Diemen's Land: one of them as a convict. Koch is looking for traces of the mid-nineteenth century: the time of the Famine, which flung the ancestors of so many Irish-Australians across the globe. What he finds, between meetings in pubs with folk musicians and IRA supporters, is modern Ireland. Greatly changed from the impoverished country he visited in the 1950s, it's enjoying the boom of the early twenty-first century, despite the unresolved struggle in the North. For Koch, though, the true soul of this land is to be found in the countryside, where doorways can still be seen to the different levels of the Faery Otherworld: the Many-Coloured Land. 'It is difficult to praise this book too highly. When a master like Koch writes, you expect masterly writing. In this book that is what you get.'The Canberra Times 'This is one of the most accurately observed books about Ireland, written by a foreigner, that I have read ... Koch] came well equipped to assess us, and he makes none of the blunders of the tourist-writer. He is well read in our history and literature ...He is in every way a perceptive but courteous visitor.' Irish Independent
Collection of essays that chart the author's development as a novelist and provide insight into his feelings about the place of Australia within the Asian-Pacific region, as evidenced in 'Across the Sea Wall' (1965) and the 1979 NBC Banjo Award-winning 'Year of Living Dangerously'. The reader is transported through India, Indonesia, London and San Francisco and presented with literary anecdotes, yet the influence of the author's native Tasmania remains paramount. First published in the UK in 1987.
Jakarta, 1965. Waiting for explosions, the city smells of frangipani, kretek cigarettes, and fear. It is THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY. The charismatic god - king Sukarno has brought Indonesia to the edge of chaos - to an abortive revolution that will leave half a million dead. For the Western correspondents here, this gathering apocalypse is their story and their drug, while the sufferings of the Indonesian people are scarcely real: a shadow play. Working at the eye of the storm are television correspondent Guy Hamilton and his eccentric dwarf cameraman Billy Kwan. In Kwan's secret fantasy life, both Sukarno and Hamilton are heroes. But his heroes betray him, and Billy is driven to desperate action. As the Indonesian shadow play erupts into terrible reality, a complex personal tragedy of love, obsession and betrayal comes to its climax. 'A profound and beautiful book' - Les Murray, The Sydney Morning Herald 'A richly and fully realised work of fiction, well conceived and beautifully executed.' - Larry McMurtry 'Intelligent, compassionate, flavoursome, convincing ... In Billy Kwan, Mr Koch has created one of the most memorable characters of recent fiction. This book is to be prized.' - The Times Literary Supplement
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