"From the author of 1491--the best-selling study of the pre-Columbian Americas--a deeply engaging new history that explores the most momentous biological event since the death of the dinosaurs. More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed totally different suites of plants and animals. Columbus's voyages brought them back together--and marked the beginning...

Elon Musk, the renowned entrepreneur and innovator behind SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity, sold one of his internet companies, PayPal, for $1.5 billion. Ashlee Vance captures the full spectacle and arc of the genius's life and work, from his tumultuous upbringing in South Africa and flight to the United States to his dramatic technical innovations and entrepreneurial pursuits. Vance uses Musk's story to explore one of the pressing questions of our age:...

In The World Is Flat, the highly-regarded New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman advances the work on globalization that made his The Lexus and the Olive Tree a bestseller. Claiming that the world is now at an important historical point--as important as the changes brought by the discoveries by Columbus or by the Industrial Revolution--Friedman analyzes the events, inventions, and business practices that have resulted in a changed world, one...

Why are some nations rich and others poor? Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of the right policies? Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). Based on fifteen years of original research, Acemoglu and Robinson marshall historical evidence from the...

This book explains how Billy Beene, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, is using a new kind of thinking to build a successful and winning baseball team without spending enormous sums of money. The author examines the fallacy behind the major league baseball refrain that the team with the biggest wallet is supposed to win. Over the past four years the Oakland Athletics, a major league team with a minor league payroll, have had one of the...

The system will show you how to teach your children to manage money and have a good attitude while they're learning to earn, budget, and spend wisely.

"Outlines how the American economic system is failing, with increasing income inequality and a shrinking middle class, and reveals how a market designed for broad prosperity can reverse the trend toward diminished opportunity."--Publisher.

In The Unsettling of America Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural development and spiritual discipline. Today's agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families, and as a nation we are thus more estranged from the land--from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it. Sadly, as Berry notes in the afterword to this new edition, his arguments and observations are still relevant today. We continue...

"Marriage is a mysterious, often irrational business. Making it work till death do you part--or just till the end of the week--isn't always easy. And no one ever handed you a user's manual. Until now. Here, Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson offer something new: a clear-eyed, rational route to demystifying your disagreements and improving your relationship. The key, they propose, is to think like an economist. Economics is the study of resource allocation,...

A sweeping history of the California coastline documents its changing culture and ecology while exploring its role in the state's efforts to counter environmental disasters, citing the influence of the international border fence and the rich animal and plant life that depend on the coast for survival.