The Practical Guide to Understanding and Raising Hotel Profitability (The Practical Guide to Events and Hotel Management Series)

Business & Money

Martin, Adrian

Industries

Routledge

The Practical Guide to Understanding and Raising Hotel Profitability offers a comprehensive, easy-to-follow breakdown of how to understand profit and loss accounts for hotels. It offers practical advice on how to maximise the profits of this customer-facing business and improve performance results. Chapters cover every aspect of the profit and loss account including marketing, accommodation, food and beverage sales, quality, budgeting, event sales, and all the corresponding costs involved. It explains all the relevant KPIs and industry quirks within the profit and loss document as well as industry benchmarks to equip the reader with the skills to attend high level meetings, complete finance-based assignments and ultimately run their own business. Valuable tips from leading professionals within the industry are included throughout, giving advice on how to improve hotels’ financial results and positively influence net profit through everyday actions. Packed full of practical case studies and written in an easy-to-read-style, this book is essential reading for hospitality students and current hospitality and hotel managers.

The Practical Guide to Achieving Customer Satisfaction in Events and Hotels (The Practical Guide to Events and Hotel Management Series)

Berners, Philip

While there is no shortage of of books on the environment there are few introductory texts that outline the social theory that informs human geographical approaches to the interactions between ecology and society. Students arriving at university often lack the understanding of history, economics, politics, sociology and philosophy that contemporary human geography requires. Environments in a Changing World addresses this deficit, providing foundation knowledge in a form that is accessible to first year students and applied to the understanding of both contemporary environmental issues and the challenge of sustainability. Students are challenged to develop and defend their own ethical and political positions on sustainability and respond to the need for new forms of ecological citizenship.

Environments in a Changing World (Insights Into Human Geography)

Politics & Social Sciences

Huckle, John

Social Sciences

Reflecting upon his experience making his 2010 feature film Mothers, a cinematic triptych interweaving three narratives that are each, in their own way, about the often tenuous lines between truth and fiction, and one of which actually morphs into a documentary about the aftermath in a small Macedonian town where three retired cleaning women were found raped and killed in 2008 and the murderer turned out to be the journalist covering the story for a major Macedonian newspaper, the Oscar-nominated Macedonian-born and New York-based writer-director Milcho Manchevski writes that,
“Most of us look at films differently or accept stories in a different way if we believe that they are true. We watch a documentary film in a different way from the way we watch a drama. We read a magazine article in a different way from the way in which we read a short story. Sometimes, we even treat a film that employs actors differently than a regular drama because we were told that it is based on something that really happened. We treat these works based on truth or reporting on the truth in different ways. Why? What is it in our relation to reality or in our relation to what we perceive to be reality that makes us value a work of artifice (an art piece) differently depending on our knowledge or conviction of whether that work of artifice is based on events that really took place?”
In this extended essay, or letter, Manchevski ruminates the different ways in which both filmmakers and audiences create, experience, and absorb the cinematic narrative with a certain trust and faith in the artwork to render, not the factual truth, per se, but the importantly shared experience of trusting “the plane of reality created by the work itself,” such that “we trust its inner logic and integrity, we have faith in what happens while we give ourselves to this work of art.” Truth becomes a question of what artist and audience can see and feel together: what feels real becomes the world we inhabit.
The book also includes an Afterword, "Truth Approaches, Reality Affects," by internationally renowned film scholar Adrian Martin.

Truth and Fiction: Notes on (Exceptional) Faith in Art

Arts & Photography

Manchevski, Milcho

Photography & Video

Punctum Books

Where is film analysis at today? What is cinema theory up to, behind our backs? The field, as professionally defined (at least in the Anglo-American academic world), is presently divided between contextual historians who turn to broad formations of modernity, and stylistic connoisseurs who call for a return to old-fashioned things like authorial vision, tone, and mise en scène. But there are other, vital, inventive currents happening — in criticism, on the Internet, in small magazines, and renegade conferences everywhere — which we are not hearing much about in any official way. Last Day Every Day shines a light on one of these exciting new avenues.
Is there a way to bring together, in a refreshed manner, textual logic, hermeneutic interpretation, theoretical speculation, and socio-political history? A way to break the deadlock between classical approaches that sought organic coherence in film works, and poststructuralist approaches that exposed the heterogeneity of all texts and scattered the pieces to the four winds? A way to attend to the minute materiality of cinema, while grasping and contesting the histories imbricated in every image and sound?
In “A Philosophical Interpretation of Freud,” Paul Ricoeur (drawing upon Hegel) remarks: “The appropriation of a meaning constituted prior to me presupposes the movement of a subject drawn ahead of itself by a succession of ‘figures,’ each of which finds its meaning in the ones which follow it.” The notion of the figural has recently become popular in European film theory and analysis, especially due to the work of Nicole Brenez — in which the figure stands for “the force . . . of everything that remains to be constituted” in a character, object, social relation or idea. Her use of the term refers back to magisterial work of German literary philologist Erich Auerbach (Mimesis), who decoded the religious interpretive system wherein all persons and events are grasped as significant only insofar as they prefigure their fulfilment on the ‘last day’ of divine judgment.
Auerbach’s 1920s work on figuration in Dante was an important influence on his friend Walter Benjamin; and it was this ‘theological’ aspect of Benjamin’s thought that caught Kracauer’s attention, leading to the problematic of the redemption of worldly things. Last Day Every Day traces the notion of figural thinking from Weimar then to Paris (and beyond) today, taking in contemporary writings by William Routt and Giorgio Agamben, as well as two filmmakers also touched by such thinking and its cultural ambience: Josef von Sternberg (The Blue Angel) and Douglas Sirk (The Tarnished Angels).
Figural analysis has a resonance for its practitioners today that goes far beyond its theological roots and undertones. It has become a way to trace and write cultural history, sensitive to the smallest but most powerful vibrations, exchanges, and metamorphoses within texts, whether filmic, literary, pictorial, aural, or theatrical. Modern cinema, in particular, often reverberates with the apocalyptic thunder of the last day (think Lars von Trier’s Melancholia or Abel Ferrara’s 4:44 Last Day on Earth) – while also opening us to the miracles and mysteries, the perplexities and potentialities, of every day.

Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking from Auerbach and Kracauer to Agamben and Brenez

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

Sergio Leone, maestro of the spaghetti Western, spent sixteen years developing what was to be his final work--the gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America (1983). This "testament film" has a special place in Leone's oeuvre because it marries the directors typically flamboyant, expressionistic style to a story full of profound melancholy and regret. Tracing the lives of a gang of Jewish hoods from their childhood in the New York streets of the 1920s, through Prohibition and union racketeering, to the 1960s, Once Upon a Time in America centers on the relationship between Noodles (Robert De Niro) and Max (James Woods)--an intense friendship destroyed by time, the shifting tides of political history, and mutual betrayal. As well as detailing the film's genesis, its production history, and its different versions, this study considers Once Upon a Time in America in the context of Leone's evolution as a grand cinema stylist. It illuminates his themes, his method, and his aesthetic, and judges his enormous impact upon subsequent generations of filmmakers the world over.

Once Upon a Time in America (BFI Film Classics)

British Film Institute

Loss of biodiversity is one of the great environmental challenges facing humanity but unfortunately efforts to reduce the rate of loss have so far failed. At the same time, these efforts have too often resulted in unjust social outcomes in which people living in or near to areas designated for conservation lose access to their territories and resources. In this book the author argues that our approach to biodiversity conservation needs to be more strongly informed by a concern for and understanding of social justice issues.   Injustice can be a driver of biodiversity loss and a barrier to efforts at preservation. Conversely, the pursuit of social justice can be a strong motivation to find solutions to environmental problems. The book therefore argues that the pursuit of socially just conservation is not only intrinsically the right thing to do, but will also be instrumental in bringing about greater success.   The argument for a more socially just conservation is initially developed conceptually, drawing upon ideas of environmental justice that incorporate concerns for distribution, procedure and recognition. It is then applied to a range of approaches to conservation including benefit sharing arrangements, integrated conservation and development projects and market-based approaches such as sustainable timber certification and payments for ecosystem services schemes. Case studies are drawn from the author's research in Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Laos, Bolivia, China and India.

Just Conservation: Biodiversity, Wellbeing and Sustainability (Earthscan Conservation and Development)

Reference

Loss of biodiversity is one of the great environmental challenges facing humanity but unfortunately efforts to reduce the rate of loss have so far failed. At the same time, these efforts have too often resulted in unjust social outcomes in which people living in or near to areas designated for conservation lose access to their territories and resources. In this book the author argues that our approach to biodiversity conservation needs to be more strongly informed by a concern for and understanding of social justice issues.  Injustice can be a driver of biodiversity loss and a barrier to efforts at preservation. Conversely, the pursuit of social justice can be a strong motivation to find solutions to environmental problems. The book therefore argues that the pursuit of socially just conservation is not only intrinsically the right thing to do, but will also be instrumental in bringing about greater success.   The argument for a more socially just conservation is initially developed conceptually, drawing upon ideas of environmental justice that incorporate concerns for distribution, procedure and recognition. It is then applied to a range of approaches to conservation including benefit sharing arrangements, integrated conservation and development projects and market-based approaches such as sustainable timber certification and payments for ecosystem services schemes. Case studies are drawn from the author's research in Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Laos, Bolivia, China and India.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Martin, Adrian. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Martin, Adrian

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Martin, Adrian. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Practical Guide to Understanding and Raising Hotel Profitability (The Practical Guide to Events and Hotel Management Series)

The Practical Guide to Understanding and Raising Hotel Profitability (The Practical Guide to Events and Hotel Management Series)

The Practical Guide to Achieving Customer Satisfaction in Events and Hotels (The Practical Guide to Events and Hotel Management Series)

The Practical Guide to Achieving Customer Satisfaction in Events and Hotels (The Practical Guide to Events and Hotel Management Series)

Environments in a Changing World (Insights Into Human Geography)

Truth and Fiction: Notes on (Exceptional) Faith in Art

Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking from Auerbach and Kracauer to Agamben and Brenez

Once Upon a Time in America (BFI Film Classics)

Just Conservation: Biodiversity, Wellbeing and Sustainability (Earthscan Conservation and Development)

Just Conservation: Biodiversity, Wellbeing and Sustainability (Earthscan Conservation and Development)