Milestones

Sample

Leo Melamed with Bob Tamarkin

He is one of the most powerful figures in the world of finance - a visionary who pioneered the modern futures industry and launched the International Monetary Market (IMM). A Holocaust survivor, Leo Melamed had barely begun the first grade in 1939 when he and his parents fled their native Poland one step ahead of the oncoming Nazi juggernaut. Crossing Siberia en route to a brief stay in Japan - just months before Pearl Harbor - the family arrived in the United States to begin life anew. They settled in Chicago, where young Leo became a product of the inner city and embraced his new country and its culture. Seeking part-time employment while attending law school, Leo Melamed answered a classified ad that would change his life. Hired by what he presumed was a law firm named Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Bean, he found himself on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. "I was Alice stepping through the Looking Glass into a world of not just one Mad Hatter, but hundreds. The shouting among the traders, the movement of their bodies and hands, captivated me like nothing before ... there was a life force on that floor that was magical and exciting, and though I didn't understand what was going on, I wanted to be a part of it.". Leo Melamed became much more than just a part of it. From modest beginnings as a pork belly trader, he led the Chicago Merc for the next quarter of a century, introducing finance to an industry that was the exclusive domain of agriculture. As his reputation as a financial genius grew, so did the tales of his larger-than-life personality. In Leo Melamed: Escape to the Futures, you'll meet the man behind the legend.

Sample

Stuart Stirling

"Francisco Pizarro is possibly one of the best known but least understood figures of world history. In 1530, at the age of fifty-four, he set out on his successful and bloody conquest of Peru, thus changing the future of a continent and its peoples forever. It was a long way from his humble beginnings as an illiterate, illegitimate pig-herder. Within these pages Stuart Stirling tells the story of adversity and tragedy which was the life of Francisco Pizarro.". "By the standards of the time, Pizarro was an elderly man when he conquered Peru. He had served as a foot soldier in Spain's Italian wars and later earned a living as an Indian fighter and slaver. Audacious, ruthless and cruel, Pizarro had a surprising and almost fatalistic belief in the Indies as an escape from his illegitimacy. Luck also played a major part in his invasion of Peru - Pizarro's 200 men should not have been able to defeat the indigenous army of more than 30,000, but they did. However, the Spanish conquest saw few happy endings, even for Pizarro, who was now rich beyond his wildest dreams. Eleven years after the conquest, he was assassinated by his one-time Spanish allies.". "Stuart Stirling's researches in the Archives of the Indies in Seville enable him to present an accurate portrait of Pizarro as a man of his time, and to place even his most infamous act - the killing of the Inca king Atahualpa - within context. This book brings the man to life against a turbulent background of exploration, discovery, empire building and a clash of cultures."--BOOK JACKET.

Sample

Maximillian E. Novak

"Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions is the first biography to view Defoe's complex life through the angle of vision that is most important to us as modern readers - his career as a writer. From his earliest collection of brief stories, which he presented to his future wife under the sobriquet Bellmour, to his Compleat English Gentleman, left unpublished at his death, Defoe was pre-eminently a creator of fictions. This life gives us, for the first time, a full understanding of the thought and personal experience that went into such great works as Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana."--Jacket.

Sample

B.B. King with David Ritz

Riley B. King grew up amidst the cotton farms of Mississippi, picking in the fields. At age 21 he wrecked a tractor and took it as a sign that a brighter future awaited him as a musician in Memphis. The rest is history. Recounting his days as a disk jockey and pioneering bluesman on the rhythm and blues circuit, B. B. dramatizes his whirlwind adventures, from the Memphis of the forties to the Moscow of the nineties, in a voice that is both raw and real. A deeply sensuous and sensitive soul, he discloses his complex relationship to women and sexuality, and chronicles his first-hand experience with racism, the Civil Rights movement, and the shifting politics of show business.