Housing Partnerships

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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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Richard Brookhiser

A compact, compelling biography of one of the greatest, though comparatively overlooked, of the nation’s founders. While Brookhiser (Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington, 1996), an editor at the National Review and a contributor to the New York Observer, is dead wrong that “there is nothing else by or about” Alexander Hamilton (what of biographies by Jacob Cooke, Broadus Mitchell, and Nathan Schachner?), his biography will quickly take its place as vastly more discerning than any of its predecessors. While Hamilton lacked the range, learning, and prudence of the other founders, he arguably possessed the most powerful intelligence of any of them. Moreover, foreign-born and illegitimate, his identity as an American, rather than as a Virginian or New Yorker, was deeper and more emotional than that of his great contemporaries. Brookhiser’s achievement is to capture the full nature of this flawed but great man—and to characterize him as nationalist, idealist, and visionary—in a lively and insightful biography. Along the way, the author gives us deft portraits of Hamilton’s contemporaries and analyses of the events in which Hamilton played a major role. Brookhiser also breaks new ground in portraying his subject as a masterful journalist and writer and raises him into the ranks of the nation’s greatest newspaper essayists—not only for his brilliant contributions to The Federalist but also for countless other works. Hamilton’s “relationship with words,” writes the author, “was intimate and inexhaustible.” Brookhiser is especially good at concise explanation of the young nation’s finances and at descriptions of the bitter political violence of the 1790s—passionate battles that make our own political squabbles seem like tea-party talk. Trying to strengthen Hamilton’s reputation, Brookhiser occasionally goes overboard in speculating about his subject’s psychological needs and extracting contemporary lessons from Hamilton’s behavior and ideas, but the results of his efforts are always plausible. Hamilton has gained a fair, sympathetic, and always objective biographer—and a biography for our time.

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Kevin Cope

All companies are driven to success or failure by the same five simple drivers: cash, profit, assets, growth, and people. Kevin Cope, founder of Acumen Learning, will help you appreciate how your day-to-day decisions can balance these drivers and contribute to the big picture of your organization's success. You'll discover the acumen you need to bring real value and passion to your work.

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Michael Kammen

"Americans have a long history of public arguments about taste, the uses of leisure, and what is culturally appropriate in a democracy that has a strong work ethic. Michael Kammen surveys these debates as well as our changing taste preferences, especially in the past century, and the shifting perceptions that have accompanied them."--BOOK JACKET. "Focusing on our own time, Kammen discusses the use of the fluid nature of cultural taste to enlarge audiences and increase revenues, and reveals how the public role of intellectuals and cultural critics has declined as the power of corporate sponsors and promoters has risen. As a result of this diminution of cultural authority, he says, definitive pronouncements have been replaced by divergent points of view, and there is, as well, a tendency to blur fact and fiction, reality and illusion."--BOOK JACKET.