Down by the river

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David Mamet

In Bambi vs. Godzilla, David Mamet, the award-winning playwright and screenwriter, gives us an exhilaratingly subversive inside look at Hollywood from the perspective of a filmmaker who has always played the game his own way.Who really reads the scripts at the film studios? How is a screenplay like a personals ad? Whose opinion matters when revising a screenplay? Why are there so many producers listed in movie credits? And what the hell do those producers do, anyway? Refreshingly unafraid to offend, Mamet provides hilarious, surprising, and bracingly forthright answers to these and other questions about virtually every aspect of filmmaking, from concept to script to screen. He covers topics ranging from "How Scripts Got So Bad" to the oxymoron of "Manners in Hollywood." He takes us step-by-step through some of his favorite movie stunts and directorial tricks, and demonstrates that it is craft and crew, not stars and producers, that make great films. He tells us who his favorite actors and what his favorite movies are, who he thinks is the most perfect actor to grace the screen, and who he thinks should never have appeared there.Demigods and sacred cows of the movie business--beware! But for the rest of us, Mamet speaking truth to Hollywood makes for searingly enjoyable reading.From the Hardcover edition.

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Joshua Levine

It took three generations to build Barneys into the world's most fabulous clothing store - and less than a decade to tear it down. This book is at once a family saga, a cautionary business tale, and a superbly detailed, behind-the-scenes account of how a secondhand store founded on pluck and chutzpah grew into a glittering international retail empire, only to founder on greed and hubris. Patriarch Barney Pressman started small in 1923, but within two decades he was selling more suits than anyone in the world. By the time his son, Fred, took over in the 1960s, Barneys was a thriving institution, and Boys Town at Barneys was the site of every New York boy's clothing rite of passage. But Fred had loftier ambitions; he was never comfortable with the crass discounter image. He staked the family fortune on European fabrics and design, wound up transforming the entire world of men's fashion, and made a killing along the way. But it was Fred's sons, Gene and Bob, who really wanted it all - not just a store but a grandiose temple of ultimate chic. Instead, through extravagance, flamboyance, greed, and an arrogant disregard for sound business principles, they raced heedlessly into one of the most spectacular business flameouts in retail history.

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Tom Peters

Forty-five prescriptions specify what managers at every level must do if the organizations they lead are to survive in today's chaotic economic environment.

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Jack Beatty

The World According to Peter Drucker is the first biography and concise intellectual portrait of one of the twentieth century's great minds - "the greatest thinker management theory has produced," in the words of The Economist. Written with Drucker's full cooperation, the book ranges over six decades of Drucker's work from his early antifascist writings to his very latest books. The reader learns the inside story of why Drucker's classic study of General Motors, Concept of the Corporation, was scorned by GM's storied chairman, Alfred P. Sloan; watches over Drucker's shoulder as he virtually invents management and management theory; and notes the recurring paradox of Drucker's career: the "man who invented the corporate society" has been a sometimes sulphuric critic of capitalist excess. Indeed, Drucker, the author writes, should be seen as "a moralist of our business civilization."