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The acclaimed director of such films as Brideshead Revisited shares the story of his youth and career, providing coverage of such topics as his childhood as the son of star Geraldine Fitzgerald, his relationships with Hollywood elite and the allegations that Orson Welles was his real father.
The problem of moral luck is that there is a contradiction in our common sense ideas about moral responsibility. In one strand of our thinking, we believe that a person can become more blameworthy by luck. For example, two reckless drivers manage their vehicles in the same way, and one but not the other kills a pedestrian. We blame the killer driver more than the merely reckless driver, because we believe that the killer driver is more blameworthy. Nevertheless, this idea contradicts another feature of our thinking captured in this moral principle: A person’s blameworthiness cannot be affected by that which is not within her control. Thus, our ordinary thinking about moral responsibility implies that the drivers are and are not equally blameworthy. In Defense of Moral Luck aims to make progress in resolving this contradiction. Hartman defends the claim that certain kinds of luck in results, circumstance, and character can partially determine the degree of a person’s blameworthiness. He also explains why there is a puzzle in our thinking about moral responsibility in the first place if luck often affects a person’s praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. Furthermore, the book’s methodology provides a unique way to advance the moral luck debate with arguments from diverse areas in philosophy that do not bottom out in standard pro-moral luck intuitions.
Have you ever noticed that you talk about luck every day of your life? Luck is your silent companion, sometimes bringing awesome parking spaces, a chance meeting with a new love interest, or a small windfall. Most of the time you probably don’t even pay attention to luck. Chances are, you only really think about luck when you buy a lottery ticket or participate in a contest. Luck is so much more than that. If you take steps to live longer by eating right and exercising, why wouldn’t you also take similar steps to improve your good fortune? Barrie Dolnick and Anthony Davidson asked themselves this very question, and set out to study luck and decipher how it works. In this insightful and engaging book, they share the secrets they’ve uncovered so you can use luck more effectively in your day-to-day life. Where does luck originate? Does one need to be “born lucky” in order to be lucky? Answering these and many other pressing questions, Dolnick and Davidson investigate both ancient and scientific approaches to luck. From early man to famous rationalists, luck has been prayed for, played with, and courted. You’ll learn how ancient practices such as the I Ching, astrology, tarot, and numerology have been used to understand luck, and how great mathematicians studied luck–some guided by their own interest in gambling. Every- one wants to be lucky. Once you know the fundamentals of luck, the authors take you through your own Personal Luck Profile so that you can use this wisdom and try your luck. People do a lot of weird things to improve their luck–and now you can make smart choices and informed decisions about how to play with yours.
From acclaimed director Michael Lindsay-Hogg (The Normal Heart, The Beatles’ Let It Be, Brideshead Revisited, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, etc.), son of glamorous Warner’s movie star Geraldine Fitzgerald: a magical dreamscape memoir of his boyhood, coming-of-age, and making his way in the worlds of theater, film, and television. Lindsay-Hogg’s father, an English baronet from a family whose money came from the China trade, lived in Ireland and was rarely seen by his son. The author’s stepfather was the scion of the Isidor Straus fortune, co-owner of R. H. Macy’s; Straus went down with the Titanic, and the author’s stepfather was, alas, fortune-less. The author's mother, Geraldine Fitzgerald, the redheaded Irish seductress who won instant acclaim as Bette Davis’s best friend in Dark Victory and in William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights, spent time with Hollywood’s elite—Laurence Olivier, Charles Chaplin, and Orson Welles, with whom she worked in New York at the Mercury Theater and in other productions. Lindsay-Hogg writes of how he wented his way into this exotic, mysterious, and seductive world, encountering as a small boy the likes of Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst, playing hide-and-seek with Olivia de Havilland, serving drinks to Humphrey Bogart, discussing life with Henry Miller. At the book’s center, an offhand comment made to Lindsay-Hogg by his mother, when he was sixteen, about talk circulating (false, she claimed) that she had had a romantic relationship with Orson Welles (Fitzgerald and Welles had lived together at his home in Beverly Hills) and that Welles, rumor had it, was Michael’s father (“It’s not true,” she said. “You know how people put two and two together and get three . . .”). That was the end of the conversation. (“It’s time for bed . . . You have school in the morning . . .” she said.) For Lindsay-Hogg, it opened up a whole new realm of his life. He was forever changed by the knowing—of not knowing. Interwoven throughout his narrative is the element of questioning who his father was. Was he the patron saint of American pictures, the legendary genius of the twentieth century, Orson Welles, a consistently inconsistent person in Michael’s life . . . or was he the man who considered himself Michael’s real father? What did his “father” know? What did Welles know? And what did his mother know to be true (she had brought the author up to believe that she always told the truth)? And when would she tell her son what the truth was . . . As Lindsay-Hogg struggled to make sense of it all, questions of missed chances, conversations never had, questions of what is withheld and what is true took root, dogging him, shaping his life . . . questions still, that haunt and inform this moving, deft, and illuminating memoir.
Competing Against Luck by Clayton M. Christensen,Taddy Hall,Karen Dillon,David S. Duncan Pdf
The foremost authority on innovation and growth presents a path-breaking book every company needs to transform innovation from a game of chance to one in which they develop products and services customers not only want to buy, but are willing to pay premium prices for. How do companies know how to grow? How can they create products that they are sure customers want to buy? Can innovation be more than a game of hit and miss? Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has the answer. A generation ago, Christensen revolutionized business with his groundbreaking theory of disruptive innovation. Now, he goes further, offering powerful new insights. After years of research, Christensen has come to one critical conclusion: our long held maxim—that understanding the customer is the crux of innovation—is wrong. Customers don’t buy products or services; they "hire" them to do a job. Understanding customers does not drive innovation success, he argues. Understanding customer jobs does. The "Jobs to Be Done" approach can be seen in some of the world’s most respected companies and fast-growing startups, including Amazon, Intuit, Uber, Airbnb, and Chobani yogurt, to name just a few. But this book is not about celebrating these successes—it’s about predicting new ones. Christensen contends that by understanding what causes customers to "hire" a product or service, any business can improve its innovation track record, creating products that customers not only want to hire, but that they’ll pay premium prices to bring into their lives. Jobs theory offers new hope for growth to companies frustrated by their hit and miss efforts. This book carefully lays down Christensen’s provocative framework, providing a comprehensive explanation of the theory and why it is predictive, how to use it in the real world—and, most importantly, how not to squander the insights it provides.
Justice, Institutions, and Luck by Kok-Chor Tan Pdf
Kok-Chor Tan addresses three key questions in political philosophy: Where does distributive equality matter? Why does it matter? And among whom does it matter? He argues for an institutional site for egalitarian justice, a luck-egalitarian ideal of why equality matters, and a global scope for distributive justice.
Author : Johan P. Mackenbach Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA Page : 253 pages File Size : 54,7 Mb Release : 2019-08-29 Category : Medical ISBN : 9780198831419
The world we live in is hugely unequal. People in a better socioeconomic position do not only lead more comfortable lives, but also longer and healthier lives. This is true not only in the poorer parts of the world but also in the richest countries, including the advanced welfare states of Western Europe which have successfully pushed back poverty and other forms of material disadvantage. Why are health inequalities - systematically higher rates of disease, disability, and premature death among people with a lower level of education, occupation or income - so persistent? How can we expect to reduce this when it persists even in the most advanced states? Written by a leading figure in public health, this book looks to answer these questions by taking a broad, critical look at the scientific evidence surrounding the explanation of health inequalities, including recent findings from the fields of epidemiology, sociology, psychology, economics, and genetics. It concludes that a simplistic view, in which health inequalities are a direct consequence of social inequality, does not tell us the full story. Drawing upon a unique series of studies covering 30 European countries and more than three decades of observations, it shows that health inequalities are partly driven by autonomous forces that are difficult to counteract, such as educational expansion, increased social mobility, and rapid but differential health improvements. Finally, the book explores how we might use these new findings to continue our efforts to build a healthier and more equal future. Offering a truly multidisciplinary perspective and an accessible writing style, Health Inequalities is an indispensable resource for health researchers, professionals, and policy-makers, as well as for social scientists interested in inequality.
"I love this sad, beautiful, hopeful book." --Kathleen Glasgow, New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Pieces and How to Make Friends With the Dark For fans of Nina LaCour and Jennifer Niven, a richly layered novel that's both uplifting and heartbreaking, about piecing yourself together after loss and the dark truths we choose to keep from each other and ourselves. San Francisco. New Year's Eve. A tragic accident after the party of the year. Cara survives. Her best friend, G, doesn't. Nine months later, Cara is still struggling, consumed by grief and a dark secret she'd rather forget. In the hopes of offering a fresh start, her mother sends her to boarding school in Switzerland, a place where no one knows what happened--and where they never will, if Cara can help it. But her new classmates Ren and Hector won't let her close herself off. They are determined to break down the walls she has so carefully built up. And maybe Cara wants them to . . . especially Hector, who seems to understand her like no one else does. The problem is that the closer Cara gets to Hector, the more G slips away. If moving on means letting go of the past--and admitting what she did that night--Cara's not sure how. But a second chance awaits, if she can only find the strength within herself. "A poignant exploration of grief, guilt, and forgiveness." --Sophie Kinsella, New York Times bestselling author of Finding Audrey and the Shopaholic series "Transportive and redemptive, this is a gentle story about the universality of grief, the beauty of self-forgiveness, and how new friendship can help heal old wounds."--Ashley Woodfolk, author of The Beauty That Remains and When You Were Everything "Atmospheric....this is a delicious read."-Irish Times "A good choice for readers who enjoyed Stephanie Perkins's Anna and the French Kiss and Gayle Forman's If I Stay."--SLJ
“There is good luck, and there is bad luck, and then there’s the ambiguous sort of luck that’s a lot of this and some of the other.” Philip Lawrence, a robust and pleasure-loving furniture-maker, dies suddenly at the age of forty-six. Though that’s terribly young by most standards, he’s lucky to have passed presumably peacefully in his sleep. Less fortunate, however, are the three women he leaves behind to make sense of his loss. There’s Nora, his wife of seventeen years, who wakes up next to his dead body. A fiery visual artist, Nora’s feminist re-interpretation of biblical themes stoked fundamentalist outrage from her small-town neighbours. Now, as her emotions run the gamut, she must confront solo life in a place she despises. Nora shares the house with Sophie, a buxom and bossy redhead, who works as the couple’s housekeeper and personal assistant. A recovering virtue addict, Sophie turns to menial tasks as a way to suppress painful memories of her two-year stint as an overseas aid worker. Philip’s death leaves her quietly reeling. And then there’s the pliable and vacuous Beth, a former beauty queen, who serves as Nora’s live-in muse and model. She mourns not Philip so much as the loss of a haven from her own creepy past. The novel follows the three days immediately after Philip’s death. Privately, each woman deals with memories and emotions, secrets and uncomfortable revelations, while at the same time preparing for the public rituals of mourning (including a funeral like no other). The narrative moves seamlessly from one perspective to another with delicious dark humour and wry insight into the nature of death, love, mourning, fundamentalism and luck. Barfoot’s tenth novel, Luck was shortlisted for the 2005 Scotiabank Giller Prize. The jury citation reads as follows: “Joan Barfoot is at the peak of her powers with this splendidly realized tragicomedy about a household in the wake of an unexpected death. With its note-perfect narration, mordant wit and wonderfully neurotic cast of characters, Luck shows how death can reveal life in all its absurdity and complexity. This scintillating comedy of manners is also a profound meditation on fate, love, and artifice.”
In the late 60s, three teenagers from around the globe are making their way in the world: Enrique Florit, from Cuba, living in southern California with his flamboyant magician father; Marta Claros, getting by in the slums of San Salvador; Leila Rezvani, a well-to-do surgeon's daughter in Tehran. We follow them through the years, surviving war, disillusionment, and love, as their lives and paths intersect. With its cast of vividly drawn characters, its graceful movement through time, and the psychological shifts between childhood and adulthood, A Handbook to Luck is a beautiful, elegiac, and deeply emotional novel by beloved storyteller Cristina García.
Great by Choice by Jim Collins,Morten T. Hansen Pdf
Ten years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns withanother groundbreaking work, this time to ask: why do some companies thrive inuncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Based on nine years of research,buttressed by rigorous analysis and infused with engaging stories, Collins andhis colleague Morten Hansen enumerate the principles for building a truly greatenterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous and fast-moving times. This book isclassic Collins: contrarian, data-driven and uplifting.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND O: THE OPRAH MAGAZINE • Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more. “My father’s wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place and see what might be in it for us.” So begins this remarkable novel by Amy Bloom, whose critically acclaimed Away was called “a literary triumph” (The New York Times). Lucky Us is a brilliantly written, deeply moving, fantastically funny novel of love, heartbreak, and luck. Disappointed by their families, Iris, the hopeful star and Eva the sidekick, journey through 1940s America in search of fame and fortune. Iris’s ambitions take the pair across the America of Reinvention in a stolen station wagon, from small-town Ohio to an unexpected and sensuous Hollywood, and to the jazz clubs and golden mansions of Long Island. With their friends in high and low places, Iris and Eva stumble and shine though a landscape of big dreams, scandals, betrayals, and war. Filled with gorgeous writing, memorable characters, and surprising events, Lucky Us is a thrilling and resonant novel about success and failure, good luck and bad, the creation of a family, and the pleasures and inevitable perils of family life, conventional and otherwise. From Brooklyn’s beauty parlors to London’s West End, a group of unforgettable people love, lie, cheat and survive in this story of our fragile, absurd, heroic species. Praise for Lucky Us “Lucky Us is a remarkable accomplishment. One waits a long time for a novel of this scope and dimension, replete with surgically drawn characters, a mix of comedy and tragedy that borders on the miraculous, and sentences that should be in a sentence museum. Amy Bloom is a treasure.”—Michael Cunningham “Exquisite . . . a short, vibrant book about all kinds of people creating all kinds of serial, improvisatory lives.”—The New York Times “Bighearted, rambunctious . . . a bustling tale of American reinvention . . . If America has a Victor Hugo, it is Amy Bloom, whose picaresque novels roam the world, plumb the human heart and send characters into wild roulettes of kismet and calamity.”—The Washington Post “Bloom’s crisp, delicious prose gives [Lucky Us] the feel of sprawling, brawling life itself. . . . Lucky Us is a sister act, which means a double dose of sauce and naughtiness from the brilliant Amy Bloom.”—The Oregonian “A tasty summer read that will leave you smiling . . . Broken hearts [are] held together by lipstick, wisecracks and the enduring love of sisters.”—USA Today “Exquisitely imagined . . . [a] grand adventure.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Marvelous picaresque entertainment . . . a festival of joy and terror and lust and amazement that resolves itself here, warts and all, in a kind of crystalline Mozartean clarity of vision.”—Elle
There are two kinds of grammarians, those who describe and those who prescribe. In the academic world, the prescribers are usually viewed as the conservative old guard. The descriptarians are usually seen as the activists, young bucks who believe the task of grammarians is to map or chart how speakers use their language and note its changes over time.