Archives de catégorie : Nos incontournables

LOONSHOTS de Safi Bahcall

The breakthroughs that change the course of science, business, and history are due in some part to the influence of geniuses and in some part to serendipity. LOONSHOTS is about engineering the forces of genius and serendipity to work for you rather than against you

LOONSHOTS
How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries
by Safi Bahcall
St. Martin’s Press, March 2019

Every year, glossy magazines describe the winning cultures of innovative companies. Smiling employees raise gleaming new products like runners raising the Olympic torch. Leaders reveal their secrets. And then, so often, those companies crash and burn. Bahcall, a physicist and entrepreneur, finds answers in the science of phase transitions. The Nobel laureate Phil Anderson once captured the essence of phase transitions with the phrase “more is different.” The collective behaviors of liquids and solids—water flows, ice shatters—are more than the sum of their parts. They are something new: phases of matter. Bahcall shows why the collective behaviors of teams and companies are something new: phases of organization. Small changes in structure can transform teams from nurturing breakthroughs to inhibiting them, just like small changes in temperature can transform flowing water to rigid ice. Structure can matter more than culture. Drawing on examples from Aristotle to Star Wars, from Isaac Newton to Steve Jobs, Bahcall distills these ideas into practical rules that creatives, entrepreneurs, and managers can use to innovate faster and better. Along the way, readers will learn what James Bond and Lipitor have in common; why traffic jams appear out of nowhere on highways; and how these ideas and rules underlie the most consistently innovative organization in the world.

Safi Bahcall received his BA in physics from Harvard University and his PhD from Stanford University and was a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at U.C. Berkeley. In 1998, Bahcall joined McKinsey & Company, where he advised investment banks and pharmaceutical companies on strategy, technology, and operations. Bahcall co-founded Synta with Lan Bo Chen in 2001. In 2008, Dr. Bahcall was named Ernst & Young New England Biotechnology/ Pharmaceutical Entrepreneur of the Year. He and his work was featured in a Malcolm Gladwell profile in The New Yorker magazine in 2010.

US de A.F. Carter

For readers of Gillian Flynn and Tana French comes a twisty, thrilling suspense novel about a woman with multi-personality disorder who is accused of murdering her father

US
by A.F. Carter
The Mysterious Press, Spring 2020

It’s not enough that Carolyn Grand endured a horrific childhood that sent her father to jail for thirty years. It’s not enough that she was given to a foster care family who pushed her over the edge. It’s not enough that five Carolyn Grands are forced to share a single body. It’s not enough that Carolyn Grand spent years in two psychiatric hospitals, or that she was fed psychotropic drugs that left her little more than a zombie. It’s not enough that her psychologist considers her a play toy, or that her current course of therapy has been forced on her by a medical review board with the power to re-commit her. It’s not enough that all five Carolyns struggle every day to remain independent, to pay the rent, to put dinner on the table, to put clothes on their backs. It’s not enough that the unreformed and unrepentant father who destroyed Carolyn’s childhood, newly released from prison, has once again thrust himself into her life.
Carolyn Grand now has to defend herself against a charge of murder.

A.F. Carter lives, works and writes in New York City.

JESOLO de Tanja Raich

A dissection of family and motherhood – biting and with piercing wit

JESOLO
by Tanja Raich
Blessing, March 2019

Children are not an issue for Andrea. She has a job that is OK. For many years she has been in a relationship with Georg which is OK. And every year they have a nice holiday in Jesolo. As far as the future is concerned, Andrea doesn’t want to commit herself, but Georg would like a foundation for a life together. There seems to be no way out of this dilemma. Upon returning from a holiday together everything changes – Andrea is pregnant. Torn either way, Andrea decides to keep the child – and in doing so makes one compromise after the other: she takes out a loan although she never wanted to borrow money from the bank; she moves into the house of her parents-in-law although she never wanted to live under one roof with them. Andrea is showered with advice and forced into a maternal role she never saw as hers and cannot identify with.

Tanja Raich has published in various literature magazines and anthologies and has been awarded a number of prizes and scholarships, including the Start-Stipendium of the Austrian Federal Chancellery for her « Jesolo » project, the Frontiere – Grenzen literature prize, the Rom-Stipendium of the Austrian Federal Chancellery and the Exil-Literaturpreis.

TOO MUCH FIRE de Eleanor Henderson

How do you live a full, adult life—as a parent and wife—when you are committed to someone overwhelmed and haunted by suffering and its grave limitations?

TOO MUCH FIRE
A Marriage
by Eleanor Henderson
Ecco, TBA

The very model of responsibility, stability and seeming calm, Eleanor’s marriage to Aaron, who she met in a Florida record store when she was 17, has been riddled with grave complications owing to Aaron’s fearsome, many years-long struggle with a diabolical range of maladies, afflictions and addictions. But for over 20 years, and with two young boys, they persist. In these first 125 pages, appended by a brief but incisive proposal, Eleanor speaks with jolting frankness and relentlessly revealing candor about what it means to commit yourself to someone who suffers so variously and mysteriously, as they seek a diagnosis for the periodic madness that afflicts him to such debilitating ends. How to contend with male vulnerability and weakness when we lack any honest guidelines for doing so? How do you temper your expectations of what you can get or expect from your partner? How can you help your beloved navigate a medical establishment that can’t name, identify or sympathetically treat your elusive, life-warping set of symptoms? How do you live a full, adult life—as a parent and wife—when you are committed tosomeone this overwhelmed and haunted by suffering and its grave limitations? Can and should you persist? In this memoir, acclaimed novelist Eleanor Henderson addresses these questions with lyrical lucidity and grace.

Eleanor Henderson was born in Greece, grew up in Florida, and attended Middlebury College and the University of Virginia, where she received her MFA in 2005. Her debut novel “Ten Thousand Saints” was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2011 by The New York Times and a finalist for the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction from The Los Angeles Times. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed novel “The Twelve-Mile Straight”. Her short stories have appeared in AgniNorth American Review, Ninth Letter, Columbia, Salon, and The Best American Short Stories. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, All Things Considered, Poets & Writers, and

MANHUNTERS de Javier F. Peña et Stephen E. Murphy

The explosive memoir of legendary DEA agents and the subject of the hit Netflix series Narcos, Steve Murphy and Javier F. Peña

MANHUNTERS
How We Took Down Pablo Escobar, the World’s Most Wanted Criminal
by Javier F. Peña and Stephen E. Murphy
St. Martin’s Press, November 2019

In the decades they spent at the DEA, Javier Peña and Steve Murphy risked their lives hunting large and small drug traffickers. But their biggest challenge was the hunt for Pablo Escobar in Colombia. Now, for the first time ever, they tell the real story of how they brought down the world’s first narco-terrorist, the challenges they faced, and the innovative strategies they employed to successfully end the reign of terror of the world’s most wanted criminal. Readers will go deep inside the inner workings of the Search Bloc, the joint Colombian-US task force that resulted in an intensive 18-month operation that tracked Escobar. Between July 1992 and December 1993, Steve and Javier lived on the edge, setting up camp in Medellin at the Carlos Holguin Military Academy. There, they lived and worked with the Colombian authorities, hunting down a man who was thought by many to be untouchable. Their firsthand experience coupled with stories from the DEA’s recently de-classified files on the search for Escobar forms the beating heart of MANHUNTERS, an epic account of how two American agents risked everything to capture the world’s most wanted man.

Javier F. Peña was hired by the DEA in 1984 as a special agent, and spent four years tracking Pablo Escobar with partner Steve Murphy. Steve Murphy worked undercover sting operations in Miami, and was eventually dispatched to Colombia where he worked with partner Javier Peña to track Escobar.