Juggling for the Complete Klutz

Cassidy, John

Rimbeaux, B. C.

Children's Books

HarperCollins Distribution Services

When Vannevar Bush, Franklin D. Roosevelt's chief scientific adviser, sat down in 1945 to write a magazine article about the future, he had no idea what he was beginning. Bush's vision of a desktop computer that would contain all of human knowledge inspired the scientists who built the Internet. In the early 1990s, when a British computer programmer devised the World Wide Web and an Illinois student invented an easy-to-use Web browser, the Internet was transformed from a scientific curiosity into the biggest gold rush since the Klondike.
In Dot.con, John Cassidy, one of the country's leading financial journalists and a staff writer at the New Yorker, relates the stories of Netscape, Yahoo!, America Online, Amazon.com, and other Internet companies, large and small. In a lively and entertaining narrative, Cassidy traces the rise of Internet stocks and the development of a populist stock market culture to the end of the Cold War. He shows how an unscrupulous alliance of entrepreneurs such as Jeff Bezos, venture capitalists such as John Doerr, stock analysts such as Mary Meeker, and investment bankers such as Frank Quattrone helped turn an exciting technological development into an unstable and dangerous speculative bubble.
Cassidy doesn't restrict his attention to Silicon Valley and Wall Street. He demonstrates how many prominent journalists and policy makers helped to expand and prolong the bubble, particularly Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve.
But in the end, Cassidy concludes, responsibility for the Internet boom and bust cannot be placed on any one individual. It was a nationwide epizootic that involved tens of millions of Americans. And now that it is over, the country as a whole is paying a heavy price for succumbing to greed and wishful thinking. An artful blend of storytelling, history, and economics, Dot.con provides the first complete and authoritative account of the biggest financial story of the modern era.

Dot.Con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold

Business & Money

Investing

Harper

The Internet stock bubble wasn't just about goggle-eyed day traderstrying to get rich on the Nasdaq and goateed twenty-five-year-olds playing wannabe Bill Gates. It was also about an America that believed it had discovered the secret of eternal prosperity: it said something about all of us, and what we thought about ourselves, as the twenty-first century dawned. John Cassidy's Dot.con brings this tumultuous episode to life. Moving from the Cold War Pentagon to Silicon Valley to Wall Street and into the homes of millions of Americans, Cassidy tells the story of the great boom and bust in an authoritative and entertaining narrative. Featuring all the iconic figures of the Internet era - Marc Andreessen, Jeff Bezos, Steve Case, Alan Greenspan, and many others - and with a new Afterword on the aftermath of the bust, Dot.con is a panoramic and stirring account of human greed and gullibility.

Dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era

Reference

Harper-perennial

How Markets Fail offers a new, enlightening way to understand the force of the irrational in our volatile global economy. Why do many people contribute generously to charity but fail to save for their own retirement? What is the economic answer to global warming? Using fascinating new insights from behavioural economics, and vivid contemporary and historical examples, Cassidy explains that individual behavioural biases and kinks—such as overconfidence, envy, and a sense of altruism and fairness—all help us understand the world in ways that rational-choice economics does not. This is the book that explains both the current moment and such past and future moments. We will continue to get things wrong. But at least now we will be having the right conversation.

How Markets Fail: The Logic Of Economic Calamities

Economics

Penguin Canada

For fifty years, economists have been developing elegant theories or how markets facilitate innovation, create wealth, and allocate society's resources efficiently. But what about when they fail, when they lead us to stock market bubbles, glaring inequality, polluted rivers, and credit crunches? In How Markets Fail, John Cassidy describes the rising influence of "utopian economies"―the thinking that is blind to how real people act and that denies the many ways an unregulated free market can bring on disaster. Combining on-the-ground reporting and clear explanations of economic theories Cassidy warns that in today's economic crisis, following old orthodoxies isn't just misguided―it's downright dangerous.

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities

Picador

A Station in the Delta

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Ballantine Books

Plunging into the crossfire is Toby Busch, CIA clandestine field officer, fresh from a failed mission in Germany. Determined to leave his haunted past behind, he falls in love with a beautiful war widow from Hanoi - and learns incredulously of a planned all-out Viet Cong offensive to be sprung on Tet, the sacred New Year. To the enemy, Busch is a target. To his superiors, he is a dangerous embarrassment. From the air-conditioned, plexiglassed American preserve in My Tho, operations station in the Mekong Delta, to the chafing, treacherous shadows deep in the jungle, Busch alone must face the looming holocaust, as his life - and love - come under raging fire.

Genre Fiction

Behind the alarming headlines about job losses, bank bailouts, and corporate greed is a little-known story of bad ideas. For fifty years or more, economists have been busy developing elegant theories of how markets work—how they facilitate innovation, wealth creation, and an efficient allocation of society’s resources. But what about when markets don’t work? What about when they lead to stock market bubbles, glaring inequality, polluted rivers, real estate crashes, and credit crunches? In How Markets Fail, John Cassidy describes the rising influence of what he calls utopian economics—thinking that is blind to how real people act and that denies the many ways an unregulated free market can produce disastrous unintended consequences. He then looks to the leading edge of economic theory, including behavioral economics, to offer a new understanding of the economy—one that casts aside the old assumption that people and firms make decisions purely on the basis of rational self-interest. Taking the global financial crisis and current recession as his starting point, Cassidy explores a world in which everybody is connected and social contagion is the norm. In such an environment, he shows, individual behavioral biases and kinks—overconfidence, envy, copycat behavior, and myopia—often give rise to troubling macroeconomic phenomena, such as oil price spikes, CEO greed cycles, and boom-and-bust waves in the housing market. These are the inevitable outcomes of what Cassidy refers to as “rational irrationality”—self-serving behavior in a modern market setting. Combining on-the-ground reporting, clear explanations of esoteric economic theories, and even a little crystal-ball gazing, Cassidy warns that in today’s economic crisis, conforming to antiquated orthodoxies isn’t just misguided—it’s downright dangerous. How Markets Fail offers a new, enlightening way to understand the force of the irrational in our volatile global economy.

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

24 PAGES OF BRILLIANTLY RIDICULOUS INVENTIONS!

The Klutz Book of Brilliantly Ridiculous Inventions (Klutz Books)

Boyle, Brendan

Scholastic. Inc.

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Books by Cassidy, John