In this updated paperback edition of a "rich, readable, and authoritative" Fortune) book, Wall Street Journal reporter Petzinger tells the dramatic story of how a dozen men, including Robert Crandall of American Airlines, Frank Borman of Eastern, and Richard Ferris of United, battled for control of the world's airlines.
The vanguards of change in Amer. bus. are most visible not in the penthouse suites of the Fortune 500, but in successful small- & medium-size firms. Here, Petzinger takes you inside this revolution to reveal how a dynamic generation of innovators & entrepreneurs is creating a collaborative new workplace, a value-added marketplace, & an economy overflowing with opportunity. He draws from corp. case studies of co's. in more than 40 cities in 30 states, as well as accounts from overseas. His startling conclusions reveal not only a changing of the guard but far-reaching changes in the way bus. is conducted. This is an account of the Ônew order' in bus. -- an order in which exciting technology goes hand-in-hand with a culture of compassion.
A gathering of brilliant and viciously funny recollections from one of the twentieth century’s most famous literary enfants terribles. Written in 1980 but published here for the first time, these texts tell the story of the various farces that developed around the literary prizes Thomas Bernhard received in his lifetime. Whether it was the Bremen Literature Prize, the Grillparzer Prize, or the Austrian State Prize, his participation in the acceptance ceremony—always less than gracious, it must be said—resulted in scandal (only at the awarding of the prize from Austria’s Federal Chamber of Commerce did Bernhard feel at home: he received that one, he said, in recognition of the great example he set for shopkeeping apprentices). And the remuneration connected with the prizes presented him with opportunities for adventure—of the new-house and luxury-car variety. Here is a portrait of the writer as a prizewinner: laconic, sardonic, and shaking his head with biting amusement at the world and at himself. A revelatory work of dazzling comedy, the pinnacle of Bernhardian art.
Walking records the conversations of the unnamed narrator and his friend Oehler while they walk, discussing anything that comes to mind but always circling back to their mutual friend Karrer, who has gone irrevocably mad."--Amazon.com.
A high-strung Austrian intellectual undertakes the organization of the papers of a friend who has just committed suicide, and he gradually discovers a mind driven to madness by tragedy and its own pure thought and refined perceptions
Instead of the book he’s meant to write, Rudolph, a Viennese musicologist, produces this dark and grotesquely funny account of small woes writ large, of profound horrors detailed and rehearsed to the point of distraction. We learn of Rudolph’s sister, whose help he invites, then reviles as malevolent meddling; his ‘really marvelous’ house, which he hates; the suspicious illness he carefully nurses; his ten-year-long attempt to write the perfect opening sentence; and, finally, his escape to the island of Majorca, which turns out to be the site of someone else’s very real horror story. A brilliant and haunting tale of procrastination, failure, and despair, Concrete is a perfect example of why Thomas Bernhard is remembered as “one of the masters of contemporary European fiction” (George Steiner).
Ein Medizinstudent nimmt den Auftrag an, den Kunstmaler Strauch zu beobachten, der sich in das Gebirgsdorf Weng zurückgezogen hat. In seinen Aufzeichnungen hält er die Monologe und Visionen Strauchs fest, bis er entdeckt, daß diese Begegnung, die er bewältigen zu können glaubte, ihn selbst überwältigt.
Although he is best known in the United States as a novelist, Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard has been hailed in Europe as one of the most significant and controversial of contemporary playwrights. George Steiner has predicted that the current era in German-language literature will be recognized as the "Bernhard period"; John Updike compares Bernhard with Kafka, Grass, Handke, and Weiss. His dark, absurdist plays can be likened to those of Beckett and Pinter, but their cultural and political concerns are distinctly Bernhard's. While Austria's recent political history lends particular credibility to Bernhard's satire, his criticisms are directed at the modern world generally; his plays grapple with questions of totalitarianism and the subjection of the individual and with notions of reality and appearance.
Thomas Bernhard is one of the greatest twentieth-century writers in the German language. Extinction, his last novel, takes the form of the autobiographical testimony of Franz-Josef Murau. The intellectual black sheep of a powerful Austrian land-owning family, Murau lives in Rome in self-exile. Obsessed and angry with his identity as an Austrian, he resolves never to return to the family estate of Wolfsegg. But when news comes of his parents' deaths, he finds himself master of Wolfsegg and must decide its fate. Written in Bernhard's seamless style, Extinction is the ultimate proof of his extraordinary literary genius. "Strangely gripping. The glue that holds his remarkable novel together is the unique virtuosity of his imaginative prose, a highly original kind of writing that resembles musical patterns of theme, variations and recapitulation."—Steve Dowden, Washington Times "With a breathtaking sustained intensity . . . Bernhard assaults through the voice of Murau the modern world as exemplified by his birthplace, Austria."—Thomas McGonigle, Chicago Tribune Books "Perfectly balanced and continually interesting. . . . The particular fineness of Extinction lies in its depiction of a consciousness in action."—Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World "Bernhard's distinctive style . . . is caught with quite remarkable fidelity in David McLintock's excellent translation . . . . The work of a master."—W.E. Yates, New York Times Book Review "When Thomas Bernhard died, Austria lost one of its bravest authors . . . . David McLintock's translation . . . is exquisite. It presents an English far richer than most English language books . . . . Fresh, disturbed and punchy."—Benjamin Weissman, Los Angeles Times
The epigraph to Correction, Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard's masterpiece, reads: 'A body needs at least three points of support, not in a straight line, to fix its position.' Three-Part Inventions finds in this simple geometrical axiom a surprisingly complex key to an understanding of Bernhard's major novels. It argues that each of them, although firmly anchored in Austrian history, emerges from an archetypal story involving a trio of figures: a protagonist who, having been deprived of a desired object by a more powerful adversary, displaces his frustration upon a scapegoat who suffers in his place. It further shows that Bernhard transforms this destructive protagonist-adversary-scapegoat pattern into a creative trio formed by the author himself, the artistic precursors who serve as his models, and the readers who receive the finished work. This study is intended to enrich for English-language readers the unforgettable experience of reading the author whom Italo Calvino once called 'the greatest writer in the world.
A collection of previously untranslated stories from a master of twentieth-century Austrian literature, Thomas Bernhard. "The cold increases with the clarity," said Thomas Bernhard while accepting a major literary prize in 1965. That clarity was the postwar realization that the West's last remaining cultural reference points were being swept away by the ever-greater commodification of humankind. Collecting five stylistically transitional tales by Bernhard, all of which take place in sites of extreme cold, this volume extends that bleak vision of the master Austrian storyteller. In "Ungenach," the reluctant heir of an enormous estate chooses to give away his legacy to an assortment of oddballs as he discovers the past of his older brother, who was murdered during a career in futile colonialist philanthropy. In "The Weatherproof Cape," a lawyer tries to maintain a sense of familial solidarity with a now-dead client with the help of an unremarkable piece of clothing. "Midland in Stilfs" casts a jaundiced eye on the laughable efforts of a cosmopolitan foreigner to attain local authenticity on a moribund Alpine farmstead. In "At the Ortler," two middle-aged brothers--one a scientist, the other an acrobat--meditate on their unusual career paths while they climb a mountain to reclaim a long-abandoned family property. And in "At the Timberline," the unexpected arrival of a young couple in a mountain village leads to the discovery of a scandalous crime that casts a shadow on the personal life of the policeman investigating it.
In this updated paperback edition of a "rich, readable, and authoritative" Fortune) book, Wall Street Journal reporter Petzinger tells the dramatic story of how a dozen men, including Robert Crandall of American Airlines, Frank Borman of Eastern, and Richard Ferris of United, battled for control of the world's airlines.
And you thought the passengers were mad. Airline employees are fed up, too-with pay cuts, increased workloads and management's miserly ways, which leave workers to explain to often-enraged passengers why flying has become such a miserable experience."—New York Times, December 22, 2007When both an industry's workers and its customers report high and rising frustration with the way they are being treated, something is fundamentally wrong. In response to these conditions, many of the world's airlines have made ever-deeper cuts in services and their workforces. Is it too much to expect airlines, or any other enterprise, to provide a fair return to investors, high-quality reliable service to their customers, and good jobs for their employees?Measured against these three expectations, the airline industry is failing. In the first five years of the twenty-first century alone, U.S. airlines lost a total of $30 billion while shedding 100,000 jobs, forcing the remaining workers to give up over $15 billion in wages and benefits. Combined with plummeting employee morale, shortages of air traffic controllers, and increased congestion and flight delays, a total collapse of the industry may be coming. Is this state of affairs inevitable? Or is it possible to design a more sustainable, less volatile industry that better balances the objectives of customers, investors, employees, and the wider society? Does deregulation imply total abrogation of government's responsibility to oversee an industry showing the clear signs of deterioration and increasing risk of a pending crisis?Greg J. Bamber, Jody Hoffer Gittell, Thomas A. Kochan, and Andrew von Nordenflycht explore such questions in a well-informed and engaging way, using a mix of quantitative evidence and qualitative studies of airlines from North America, Asia, Australia, and Europe. Up in the Air provides clear and realistic strategies for achieving a better, more equitable balance among the interests of customers, employees, and shareholders. Specifically, the authors recommend that firms learn from the innovations of companies like Southwest and Continental Airlines in order to build a positive workplace culture that fosters coordination and commitment to high-quality service, labor relations policies that avoid long drawn-out conflicts in negotiating new agreements, and business strategies that can sustain investor, employee, and customer support through the ups and downs of business cycles.
LRB BOOKSHOP'S AUTHOR OF THE MONTH ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 WITH A NEW AFTERWORD BY BEN LERNER, AUTHOR OF THE TOPEKA SCHOOL 'If you haven't read Bernhard, you will not know of the most radical advance in fiction since Joyce ... My advice: dive in.' Lucy Ellmann 'I absolutely love Bernhard: he is one of the darkest and funniest writers ... A must read for everybody.' Karl Ove Knausgaard It is 1967. Two men lie bedridden in separate wings of a Viennese hospital. The narrator, Thomas Bernhard, is stricken with a lung ailment; his friend Paul, nephew of Ludwig Wittgenstein, is suffering from one of his periodic bouts of madness. As their friendship quickens, these two eccentric men discover in each other an antidote to their feelings of despair on the unexpected strength of what they share - a spiritual symmetry forged by their love of music, black humour, disgust for bourgeois Vienna, and fear of mortality. A restless blend of fiction and memoir, Wittgenstein's Nephew is not only a haunting meditation on the artist's struggle to maintain a foothold on reality, but an impassioned eulogy to a real-life friendship - newly illuminated by Ben Lerner's afterword.
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