Up Close and All In

Up Close and All In
Author: John Mack
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2022-10-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1982174285

From John Mack, former CEO of Morgan Stanley, an intimate personal memoir and riveting business story, recounting how he helped grow the company from 300 to 50,000 employees over four decades, transformed a notoriously competitive culture into a successful and collaborative one, and lead the company through the 2008 financial crisis. During his thirty-four-year tenure at Morgan Stanley, John Mack’s goal was to build the strongest and most productive team on Wall Street. His ability to motivate his employees to do their best work, especially in times of crisis, was fostered by his willingness to slash through bureaucracy and stand up to powerful interests. A forceful personality, one journalist said Mack was “described as ‘charismatic’ so regularly that it could be part of his name.” In Up Close and All In, Mack traces his personal journey from a one-stoplight North Carolina mill town to a fortieth-floor corner office on Wall Street—and shares the life lessons he learned along the way. He developed a titanium-strength stomach for risk, stress, and competition while landing accounts early in his career, as investment banks fought like wolfpacks to take advantage of new deregulation, fielding business raids, booms, and busts. As he rose through the ranks, he never forgot where he came from, relying on his instincts, doing what was right, and listening to his people on the front lines. This culture of trust and collaboration helped Morgan Stanley anticipate future trends before other firms, adapt quickly, and achieve record profits. This gripping memoir includes both humbling lows—like when Mack made the difficult decision to leave Morgan Stanley in 2001—and exhilarating highs—such as when he made an eleventh-hour agreement with the Japanese bank Mitsubishi to save the company during the 2008 financial crisis, having refused to give in when top regulators pressured him to sell the firm for $2 per share. With humor and honesty, Mack shares advice on both business and life: how to create a culture of team players, how to keep perspective during crises, how to make difficult decisions when all eyes are on you, and more. From a singular man who’s as unafraid to cry publicly as he is to anger some of the most powerful people in the world, this is an indispensable guide to living and leading well.

Constable

Constable
Author: C. R. Leslie
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Total Pages: 423
Release: 1995-08-24
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780714833606

An invaluable memoir of the great British 19th-century landscape painter.

Company Man

Company Man
Author: John Rizzo
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2014-01-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1451673930

At the intersection of politics, law and national security--from "protect us at all costs" to "what the hell have you guys been up to, anyway?"--A lawyer's life in the CIA. Under seven presidents and 11 different CIA directors, Rizzo rose to become the CIA's most powerful career attorney. Given the agency's dangerous and secret mission, spotting and deterring possible abuses of law, offering guidance and protecting personnel from legal jeopardy was, and remains, no easy task. The author accumulated more than 30 years of war stories, and he tells most of them.

Memoirs of Montparnasse

Memoirs of Montparnasse
Author: John Glassco
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2012-02-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1590175379

Memoirs of Montparnasse is a delicious book about being young, restless, reckless, and without cares. It is also the best and liveliest of the many chronicles of 1920s Paris and the exploits of the lost generation. In 1928, nineteen-year-old John Glassco escaped Montreal and his overbearing father for the wilder shores of Montparnasse. He remained there until his money ran out and his health collapsed, and he enjoyed every minute of his stay. Remarkable for their candor and humor, Glassco’s memoirs have the daft logic of a wild but utterly absorbing adventure, a tale of desire set free that is only faintly shadowed by sadness at the inevitable passage of time.

Me

Me
Author: Elton John
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Total Pages: 427
Release: 2019-10-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1509853332

In his first and only official autobiography, music icon Elton John reveals the truth about his extraordinary life. Me is the joyously funny, honest and moving story of the most enduringly successful singer/songwriter of all time. The Sunday Times bestseller with a new chapter bringing the story up to date. 'The rock memoir of the decade' – Daily Mail 'The rock star's gloriously entertaining and candid memoir is a gift to the reader' – Sunday Times ______________ Christened Reginald Dwight was a shy boy with Buddy Holly glasses who grew up in the London suburb of Pinner and dreamed of becoming a pop star. By the age of twenty-three, he was performing his first gig in America, facing an astonished audience in his bright yellow dungarees, a star-spangled T-shirt and boots with wings. Elton John had arrived and the music world would never be the same again. His life has been full of drama, from the early rejection of his work with songwriting partner Bernie Taupin to spinning out of control as a chart-topping superstar; from half-heartedly trying to drown himself in his LA swimming pool to disco-dancing with the Queen; from friendships with John Lennon, Freddie Mercury and George Michael to setting up his AIDS Foundation. All the while, Elton was hiding a drug addiction that would grip him for over a decade. In Me Elton also writes powerfully about getting clean and changing his life, about finding love with David Furnish and becoming a father. In a voice that is warm, humble and open, this is Elton on his music and his relationships, his passions and his mistakes. This is a story that will stay with you, by a living legend. ______________ 'Self-deprecating, funny . . . You cannot help but enjoy his company throughout, temper tantrums and all' – The Times 'Racy, pacy and crammed with scurrilous anecdotes - what more could you ask from the rocket man' – Guardian (Book of the Week) 'Chatty, gossipy, amusing and at times brutally candid' – Telegraph

The History of Bones

The History of Bones
Author: John Lurie
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2023-10-24
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0399592989

The quintessential depiction of 1980s New York and the downtown scene from the artist, actor, musician, and composer John Lurie “A picaresque roller coaster of a story, with staggering amounts of sex and drugs and the perpetual quest to retain some kind of artistic integrity.”—The New York Times In the tornado that was downtown New York in the 1980s, John Lurie stood at the vortex. After founding the band The Lounge Lizards with his brother, Evan, in 1979, Lurie quickly became a centrifugal figure in the world of outsider artists, cutting-edge filmmakers, and cultural rebels. Now Lurie vibrantly brings to life the whole wash of 1980s New York as he developed his artistic soul over the course of the decade and came into orbit with all the prominent artists of that time and place, including Andy Warhol, Debbie Harry, Boris Policeband, and, especially, Jean-Michel Basquiat, the enigmatic prodigy who spent a year sleeping on the floor of Lurie’s East Third Street apartment. It may feel like Disney World now, but in The History of Bones, the East Village, through Lurie’s clear-eyed reminiscence, comes to teeming, gritty life. The book is full of grime and frank humor—Lurie holds nothing back in this journey to one of the most significant moments in our cultural history, one whose reverberations are still strongly felt today. History may repeat itself, but the way downtown New York happened in the 1980s will never happen again. Luckily, through this beautiful memoir, we all have a front-row seat.

Me and the Biospheres

Me and the Biospheres
Author: John Polk Allen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2009
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

Synergetic Press is proud to announce the long-awaited release of Me and the Biospheres: A Memoir by the Inventor of Biosphere 2, the definitive autobiography of one of the most luminous minds of our time. Accomplished poet, philosopher, inventor and total systems scientist, John Allen is a charming and engaging guide to how the world's largest laboratory for global ecology ever built came to be. Anyone suffering from the Global Warming Blues will cherish this uplifting account of the most ambitious environmental experiment ever undertaken. Biosphere 2, a world under glass, covered three acres of Arizona desert. Contained within a magnificently designed air-tight, sealed glass and steel framed architectural setting were models of seven biomes: an ocean with coral reef, marsh, rainforest, savannah, desert, farm and a micro-city. Eight people lived inside this structure for two years (1991-1993) setting world records in human life support, monitoring their impact on the environment, while providing crucial data for future manned missions into outer space. John Allen prepared for the manifestation of Biosphere 2 by assembling many smaller projects: the creation of a ferro-cement hulled ship to study ocean and river ecologies and cultures; the development of a rainforest enrichment project, a theater group, world-class art gallery and more. As awe inspiring as the great cathedrals, Biosphere 2's building and operation demanded the efforts of the most diverse team of scientists, engineers, artists and thinkers from around the world with whom John Allen worked closely for decades. His memoir is a rich and complex narrative, filled with rollicking adventure, exceptional camaraderie and mind-bending science, lavishly illustrated with nearly four hundred photographs. Me and the Biospheres is a passionate call to reawaken to the beauty of our peerless home, Biosphere 1, the Earth.