Siro

Siro
Author: David Ignatius
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 666
Release: 2013-12-24
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1848667477

Made restless by the tightening restrictions of CIA bureaucracy, agent Alan Taylor oversteps moral and legal bounds in a top-secret mission to destabilize the Soviet Union. His new recruit - the beautiful Anna Barnes, who struggles with complex feelings for Taylor - receives a deeper education than she signed up for in David Ignatius’s trademark world of shifting international and domestic pressures, hidden loyalties, and secret agendas.

Agents of Innocence: A Novel

Agents of Innocence: A Novel
Author: David Ignatius
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2011-02-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0393066711

A "superlative spy novel" (New York Times) by the author of the bestselling espionage thrillers Body of Lies and The Director. Agents of Innocence is the book that established David Ignatius's reputation as a master of the novel of contemporary espionage. Into the treacherous world of shifting alliances and arcane subterfuge comes idealistic CIA man Tom Rogers. Posted in Beirut to penetrate the PLO and recruit a high-level operative, he soon learns the heavy price of innocence in a time and place that has no use for it.

The Increment: A Novel

The Increment: A Novel
Author: David Ignatius
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2010-05-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0393071405

The New York Times bestseller: “A remarkably timely and pulse-quickening tale of deception, divided loyalty, and moral haziness.”—Raleigh News & Observer Harry Pappas, chief of the CIA’s Persia House, receives an encrypted message from a scientist in Tehran. But soon the source of secrets from the Iranian bomb program dries up: the scientist panics; he’s being followed, but he doesn’t know who’s on to him, and neither does Harry. To get his agent out, Harry turns to a secret British spy team known as “The Increment,” whose operatives carry the modern version of the double-O “license to kill.” But the real story is infinitely more complicated than Harry understands, and to get to the bottom of it he must betray his own country.

Body of Lies: A Novel

Body of Lies: A Novel
Author: David Ignatius
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2008-04-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0393066703

The novel made into the major motion picture released October 2008, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe: "Clever [and] well-paced, Body of Lies is hard to put down."—John Miller, Wall Street Journal CIA soldier Roger Ferris has come out of Iraq with a shattered leg and an intense mission— to penetrate the network of a master terrorist known only as "Suleiman." Ferris's plan is inspired by a masterpiece of British intelligence during World War II: He prepares a body of lies, literally the corpse of an imaginary CIA officer who appears to have accomplished the impossible by recruiting an agent within the enemy's ranks.This scheme binds friend and foe in a web of extraordinary subtlety and complexity. When it begins to unravel, Ferris finds himself flying blind into a hurricane. His only hope is the urbane head of Jordan's intelligence service. But can Ferris trust him?

Siro: A Novel

Siro: A Novel
Author: David Ignatius
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 625
Release: 2013-05-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0393346641

“A riveting imagined world, so real in fact that one always wonders if it is imagined at all.” —Scott Turow Made restless by the tightening restrictions of CIA bureaucracy, agent Alan Taylor oversteps moral and legal bounds in a top-secret mission to destabilize the Soviet Union. His new recruit—the beautiful Anna Barnes, who struggles with complex feelings for Taylor—receives a deeper education than she signed up for in David Ignatius’s trademark world of shifting international and domestic pressures, hidden loyalties, and secret agendas.

El Norte Or Bust

El Norte Or Bust
Author: David Stoll
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2013
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1442220686

Debt is the hidden engine driving undocumented migration to the United States. So argues David Stoll in this powerful chronicle of migrants, moneylenders, and swindlers in the Guatemalan highlands, one of the locales that, collectively, are sending millions of Latin Americans north in search of higher wages. As an anthropologist, Stoll has witnessed the Ixil Mayas of Nebaj grow in numbers, run out of land, and struggle to find employment. Aid agencies have provided microcredits to turn the Nebajenses into entrepreneurs, but credit alone cannot boost productivity in crowded mountain valleys, which is why many recipients have invested the loans in smuggling themselves to the United States. Back home, their remittances have inflated the price of land so high that only migrants can afford to buy it. Thus, more Nebajenses have felt obliged to borrow the large sums needed to go north. So many have done so that, even before the Great Recession hit the U.S. in 2008, many were unable to find enough work to pay back their loans, triggering a financial crash back home. Now migrants and their families are losing the land and homes they have pledged as collateral. Chain migration, moneylending, and large families, Stoll proposes, have turned into pyramid schemes in which the poor transfer risk and loss to their near and dear.

Cultish

Cultish
Author: Amanda Montell
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2021-06-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0062993178

“One of those life-changing reads that makes you see—or, in this case, hear—the whole world differently.” —Megan Angelo, author of Followers “At times chilling, often funny, and always perceptive and cogent, Cultish is a bracing reminder that the scariest thing about cults is that you don't realize you're in one till it's too late.”—Refinery29.com The New York Times bestselling author of The Age of Magical Overthinking and Wordslut analyzes the social science of cult influence: how “cultish” groups, from Jonestown and Scientologists to SoulCycle and social media gurus, use language as the ultimate form of power. What makes “cults” so intriguing and frightening? What makes them powerful? The reason why so many of us binge Manson documentaries by the dozen and fall down rabbit holes researching suburban moms gone QAnon is because we’re looking for a satisfying explanation for what causes people to join—and more importantly, stay in—extreme groups. We secretly want to know: could it happen to me? Amanda Montell’s argument is that, on some level, it already has . . . Our culture tends to provide pretty flimsy answers to questions of cult influence, mostly having to do with vague talk of “brainwashing.” But the true answer has nothing to do with freaky mind-control wizardry or Kool-Aid. In Cultish, Montell argues that the key to manufacturing intense ideology, community, and us/them attitudes all comes down to language. In both positive ways and shadowy ones, cultish language is something we hear—and are influenced by—every single day. Through juicy storytelling and cutting original research, Montell exposes the verbal elements that make a wide spectrum of communities “cultish,” revealing how they affect followers of groups as notorious as Heaven’s Gate, but also how they pervade our modern start-ups, Peloton leaderboards, and Instagram feeds. Incisive and darkly funny, this enrapturing take on the curious social science of power and belief will make you hear the fanatical language of “cultish” everywhere.

Homesick

Homesick
Author: Roshi Fernando
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2012-03-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1408826402

It is New Year's Eve, 1982, and the whole gang is at Victor and Nandini's house. The Godfather is on repeat upstairs. Baila music is blaring from the record player in the lounge. Poppadoms are frying in the kitchen. And Preethi, tipsy on youth and friendship and covert cigarettes out the window, just wants to belong. But what does that mean, to belong? Is it: paying over the odds for a bottle of whisky? Getting lost with your impassive grandmother on the way home from school? Mourning for Elvis? Adopting a child whose skin is darker than yours? Marrying an English boy? Learning how to speak in a voice that doesn't remind you of your father? Feeling awkward at an office barn dance? Losing your lover, twice? Vowing to destroy the world and then changing your mind? Is it something else, just out of reach? From that New Year's party to a family funeral, via ghetto blasters and growing pains, through 7/7 and the world according to Charlie Chaplin, life in all of its complexity happens to Preethi, Nil, Lolly, Rohan, and their tightly knotted Sri Lankan families in south London. Tracing the fine lines of politics, tradition and community, Roshi Fernando's stunning collection of linked stories pulls us back, back, to the knowledge of home.

Reshaping Retail

Reshaping Retail
Author: Stefan Niemeier
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2013-06-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1118698886

The modern retail system has worked to dazzling effect. From the 19th century, store owners emerged from small beginnings to set in train an industry that has seen some operators become nationally, even globally, dominant. Along the way, they turned retailing into an art, and then a science. Now retailers in emerging markets appear to be repeating the story all over again, except on a scale and at a speed beyond anything we have seen before. Given all of this, it can be hard for those who work in retailing to accept that the industry as we know it is living on borrowed time, on the brink of transformation. There is now an urgency with which conventional store-based retailers must now act and the extent of the challenges this change represents in strategic, organizational, and above all, technological terms. Reshaping Retail sets out the driving causes, current trends and consequences of a transformation in retail triggered by technology. The changes go far beyond making items available for sale on the internet. Starting by briefly setting the historical and business system contexts for retail and describe the role that technology has played in the creation of modern retail it then explains the underlying technological drivers behind the current revolution – radical changes in the capacity of both hardware and software, mobile telecommunications changes and the advances of the Internet. Ultimately, success will hinge on more than competence; it will come down to a way of thinking. Customer-centricity will need to be valued not just by the store owner, as in the past, but also by all employees in the organization. It will need to become embedded in their daily tasks. The same applies to technology, which must be at the center of the organization and recognized as such by everyone. With a combination of extensive desk and field research, interviews with leading retailers and technologists, together with the real world experience of practitioners in this area, Reshaping Retail will inspire and help store retailers to make the necessary transformation now to win in the new consumer driven world.

The Last Circle of Ulysses Grant

The Last Circle of Ulysses Grant
Author: Robert C. Conner
Publisher:
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2018-02-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780998967011

Ulysses Grant is dying of throat cancer. Surrounded by intimates, Grant attempts to write his memoirs in his final days. This is a spellbinding tale of an American hero trying to win one last battle. Based upon original source materials, the story is an accurate depiction of who and what filled the mind and last days of the man who saved the Union.