3 posts tagged “books”
Stewart Hamilton and Alicia Micklethwait (2006), Greed and Corporate Failure: Lessons from Recent Disasters (London: Palgrave: 1403986363), has the best short thumbnail discussion of Enron (and of other things) I have yet found:
"At the end of the year [2000], proposed write-offs for asset impairment were on the order of $7 billion against reported shareholders' equity of $11.4 billion. Such a write-down would have greatly increased Enron's debt/equity ratio... loss of investment-grade status... the trading business would be destroyed. Somehow, Fastow persuaded Anderson to defer consideration of this until after the year end. Furthermore, the broadband venture was losing money... the fall in the value of Enron's share price was likely to trigger its guarantee obligations in relation to many of the SPEs..."
The return of Captain Future:
David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, eds., The Space Opera Renaissance (New York: Tor: 0765306174).
Book Description "Space opera", once a derisive term for cheap pulp adventure, has come to mean something more in modern SF: compelling adventure stories told against a broad canvas, and written to the highest level of skill. Indeed, it can be argued that the "new space opera" is one of the defining streams of modern SF.
Now, World Fantasy Award-winning anthologists David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer have compiled a definitive overview of this subgenre, both as it was in the days of the pulp magazines, and as it has become in 2005. Included are major works from genre progenitors like Jack Williamson and Leigh Brackett, stylish midcentury voices like Cordwainer Smith and Samuel R. Delany, popular favorites like David Drake, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Ursula K. Le Guin, and modern-day pioneers such as Iain M. Banks, Steven Baxter, Scott Westerfeld, and Charles Stross.
Product Details
Hardcover: 944 pages
Publisher: Tor Books (July 11, 2006)
ISBN: 0765306174
Well worth reading. Now I want to run off and reread Leigh Brackett's The Ginger Star.
From John Wright, "The Guest Law":
The oathtaking concluded with Captain Ereshkigal saying: "...and if I am forsworn, let devils and ghosts consume me in Gaia's Wasteland, in God's Hell, and may I suffer the vengeance of the Machines of Earth."
"Exactly so," said Captain Descender, smiling.
In which I drink my morning coffee, hog Vox's bandwidth, and sing the praises of Alan Furst's Dark Star: a novel that really is like seeing Casablanca for the first time.
