Archives de l’auteur : WebmasterBenisti

WOMEN MONEY POWER de Josie Cox

From an experienced financial journalist, the story of how women have fought for financial freedom, and the social and political hurdles that have keep them from equality.

WOMEN MONEY POWER
The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality
by Josie Cox
Abrams, March 2024

For centuries, women were denied equal access to money and the freedom and power that came with it. They were restricted from owning property or transacting in real estate. Even well into the 20th century, women could not take out their own loans or own bank accounts without their husband’s permission. They could be fired for getting married or pregnant, and if they still had a job, they could be kept from certain roles, restricted from working longer hours, and paid less than men for equal work.

It was a raw deal, and women weren’t happy with it. So they pushed back. In WOMEN MONEY POWER, financial journalist Josie Cox tells the story of women’s fight for financial freedom. This is an inspirational account of brave pioneers who took on social mores and the law, including the “Rosies” who filled industrial jobs vacated by men and helped win WWII, the heiress whose fortune helped create the birth control pill, the brassy investor who broke into the boys’ club of the New York Stock Exchange, and the namesake of landmark equal pay legislation who refused to accept discrimination.

But as any woman can tell you, the battle for equality—for money and power—is far from over. Cox delves deep into the challenges women face today and the culture and systems that hold them back. This is a fascinating narrative account of progress, women’s lives, and the work still to be done.

Josie Cox is a journalist, editor, and broadcaster with a particular interest in business, workplace culture, and equality. She has an extensive professional network and experience working for a broad range of media outlets in Germany, Switzerland, the UK, and the US, including Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, and The Independent, where she served as business editor. As a freelancer, her work has appeared in The Guardian, Fortune, Forbes, The Times and Sunday Times of London, and other publications. She has appeared as a commentator on CNN, Fox News, Al Jazeera, and Sky News, and is a regular guest on the BBC. Cox was a fully funded 2020/2021 Knight–Bagehot Fellow at Columbia Journalism School. She has an MBA from Columbia Business School and is also an associate instructor within the Strategic Communications program at Columbia’s School of Professional Studies. She lives in New York City.

THE END OF REALITY de Jonathan Taplin

A brilliant takedown and exposé of the great con job of the twenty-first century—the metaverse, crypto, space travel, transhumanism—being sold by four billionaires (Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreesen, Elon Musk), leading to the degeneration and bankruptcy of our society.

THE END OF REALITY:
How Four Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of The Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto
by Jonathan Taplin
PublicAffairs, September 2023
(via Writers House)

At a time when the crises of income inequality, climate, and democracy are compounding to create epic wealth disparity and the prospect of a second American civil war, four billionaires are hyping schemes that are designed to divert our attention away from issues that really matter. Each scheme—the metaverse, cryptocurrency, space travel, and transhumanism—is an existential threat in moral, political, and economic terms.
In THE END OF REALITY¸ Jonathan Taplin provides perceptive insight into the personal backgrounds and cultural power of these billionaires—Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreesen (“The Four”) —and shows how their tech monopolies have brought middle-class wage stagnation, the hollowing out of many American towns, a radical increase in income inequality, and unbounded public acrimony. Meanwhile, the enormous amount of taxpayer money to be funneled into the dystopian ventures of « The Four, » the benefits of which will accrue to billionaires, exacerbate these disturbing trends. 
THE END OF REALITY is both scathing critique and reform agenda that replaces the warped worldview of « The Four » with a vision of regenerative economics that seeks to build a sustainable society with healthy growth and full employment.

Persuasive and insightful, this cutting portrait of America on the verge of oligarchy hits home.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

Jonathan Taplin is a public intellectual, writer, film producer, and scholar. He is the director emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and professor at the USC Annenberg School from in the field of international communication management and digital media entertainment. His extraordinary journey has put him at the crest of every major cultural wave in the past half century: he was tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band, producer of major films such as Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, an executive at Merrill Lynch, creator of the Internet’s first video-on-demand service  and a cultural critic and author writing about technology in the new millennium. His book Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy (Little Brown 2017) was nominated by the Financial Times as one of the Best Business Books of 2017. His commentary has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time magazine, the Huffington Post, the Guardian, Medium, the Washington Monthly, and the Wall Street Journal.

DESPERATELY SEEKING SOMETHING de Susan Seidelman

From the director of Desperately Seeking Susan and the pilot of Sex and the City comes DESPERATELY SEEKING SOMETHING, a charming and insightful memoir from Susan Seidelman, who blazed a trail in the early 1980s for a future generation of women filmmakers.

DESPERATELY SEEKING SOMETHING
by Susan Seidelman
Macmillan, June 2024
(via Writers House)

In the early 1970s, Susan Seidelman left the ordinary suburb in which she was raised and moved to New York City to become someone different. The city was bankrupt, crumbling, cheap… and the Lower East Side was evolving into a creative playground for artists and misfits looking to reinvent themselves. There, Seidelman would break boundaries: first as an award winning independent film director of Smithereens (the first independent film nominated at the Cannes Film Festival), then as a much sought after studio director when Hollywood was still run as an all-boys club. Her work would become an important part of the zeitgeist that influenced the music, fashion, and pop culture of America in the 1980s and 90s as she unapologetically challenged the male gaze that permeated most movies of that time.

A story about feminism and creativity, and a fascinating look behind the scenes, DESPERATELY SEEKING SOMETHING is a treat for cinephiles, aspiring filmmakers, feminists, gender studies scholars, pop culture enthusiasts, New York City history lovers, punks, “bad girls,” aging Baby Boomers, and everyone and anyone who believes in the power of reinvention.

Susan Seidelman began her directorial career in the 1980s when her low budget film Smithereens became the first American Independent film accepted into the Official Competition at the Cannes Film Festival. It went on to garner awards at several major international festivals and is currently distributed by the “Criterion Collection”. Susan’s next endeavor Desperately Seeking Susan (starring Madonna and Rosanna Arquette) was a critical and commercial success that helped launch the screen careers of many emerging actors of that time. The film premiered at Cannes in 1985, was nominated for a French “Cesar” for Best Foreign Film and voted one of the top 100 films of all times by the BBC. Directing the pilot and early episodes of HBO’s hit series Sex and the City are among the highlights of Seidelman’s TV career, which also includes two Emmy nominations for her Showtime movie A Cooler Climate.

BORN WEIRD d’Andrew Kaufman

From the author of the international bestselling All My Friends Are Superheroes!

BORN WEIRD
by Andrew Kaufman
The Friday Project/HarperCollins, December 2012
(via The Rights Factory)

The Weirds have always been a little peculiar, but not one of them ever suspected that they’d been cursed.

At the moment of the births of her five grandchildren Annie Weir gave each one a special power she thought was a blessing. Richard, the oldest, would always keep safe; Abba would always have hope; Lucy would never get lost and Kent would be able to beat anyone in a fight. As for Angie, she would always forgive, instantly. But over the years these blessings turned out to be curses that ruined their lives.

Now Annie is dying and she has one last task for Angie: gather her far-flung brothers and sisters and assemble them in her grandmother’s hospital room so that at the moment of her death, she can lift these blessings-turned-curses. And Angie has just two weeks to do it.

What follows is a quest like no other, tearing up highways and racing through airports, from a sketchy Winnipeg nursing home to the small island kingdom Upliffta, from the family’s crumbling ancestral mansion in Toronto to a motel called Love. Along the way, Angie searches for the answer to the greatest family mystery of all: what really happened to their father, whose maroon Maserati was fished out of a lake so many years ago?

Andrew Kaufman is the author of All My Friends Are Superheroes, The Tiny Wife, The Waterproof Bible, and Born Weird. He was born in Wingham, Ontario, the birthplace of Alice Munro, making him the second-best writer from a town of 3000. His work has been published in eleven countries and translated into nine languages. He is also an accomplished screenwriter and lives in Toronto with his wife and their two children.

THE MEMOIRS of VALMIKI RAO de Lindsay Pereira

A masterful retelling of the ancient Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana, THE MEMOIRS of VALMIKI RAO explores themes of religious and political hypocrisy and how the disadvantaged are used as pawns to fight the wars of the powerful.

THE MEMOIRS of VALMIKI RAO
by Lindsay Pereira
Vintage Books/Penguin Random House India, August 2023
(via The Rights Factory)

Madeline Miller’s Circe meets Rushdie’s Midnight Children with a dash of the whimsy and caper of Wes Anderson, THE MEMOIRS of VALMIKI RAO is about young love and the loss of innocence set against the backdrop of one of the most tumultuous periods of modern Indian history. In a nondescript apartment in a corner of Mumbai, a retired postman, Valmiki Rao, reflects on a month in 1992. A month in which a mosque burned and religious extremism reigned. A month in which young men took up arms against their brothers and made enemies of neighbours. A month which would have long-lasting effects on modern India. It was a time when blood flowed on the streets and men and women gave up their lives for invisible gods.

In writing his memoirs of this period, Valmiki Rao tells the story of Rameshwar, a neighbourhood hero, and the young woman he loves, Janaki, who is also coveted by the local thug Ravindra. As the city burns around them, Rameshwar must risk everything to rescue Janaki from Ravindra’s grasp, an act which will ultimately impact the lives of everyone in the neighbourhood forever.

Lindsay Pereira is a Toronto-based journalist and editor. He studied at St. Xavier’s College and the University of Bombay and holds a PhD in literature. He was co-editor with the late Eunice de Souza of Women’s Voices (Oxford University Press). His first novel, GODS and ENDS (Penguin Random House India) was shortlisted for the 2021 JCB Prize for Literature, and Tata Literature Live! First Book Award for Fiction. His short story collection SONGS OUR BODIES SING (Penguin Random House India) will be published in 2024. World English Rights excluding the Indian sub-continent are available for both.