Search results for ""Author Charles""

We use money every day. Yet the practice of exchanging paper or bytes for goods and services seems absurd if you think about it. Naked Money explores why money exists and why it so often gets entire nations in trouble. Charles Wheelan explains with his trademark wit and refreshing clarity how our banks and monetary systems should work in ideal situations, and he reveals the havoc and suffering caused in real situations by inflation, deflation, illiquidity and other monetary effects. With illuminating stories from Argentina, Zimbabwe, North Korea, America, China and elsewhere around the world, Naked Money demystifies the curious world behind the paper in our wallets and the digits in our bank accounts.

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The passage of the Clean Air Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970 marked a sweeping transformation in American politics. In a few short years, the environmental movement pushed Republican and Democratic elected officials to articulate a right to clean air as part of a bevy of new federal guarantees. Charged with delivering on those promises, the EPA represented a bold assertion that the federal government had a responsibility to protect the environment, the authority to command private business to reduce their pollution, and the capacity to dictate how they did so. In Valuing Clean Air, Charles Halvorson examines how the environmental concern that propelled the Clean Air Act and the EPA coincided with economic convulsions that shook the liberal state to its core. Business groups, public interest organizations, think tanks, and a host of other actors, including Ralph Nader, wasted little time after the EPA's creation in identifying and trying to pull the new levers of power. As powerful businesses pressed to roll back regulations, elected officials from both political parties questioned whether the nation could keep its environmental promises. In response, the EPA's staff and leadership practiced a politics of the possible, adopting a monetized approach to environmental value that shielded the agency's rulemaking but sat at odds with environmentalist notions of natural rights and contributed to the elevation of economics as the language and logic of policy. As Halvorson demonstrates, environmental protection came to serve as a central battleground in larger debates over markets, government, and public welfare. For anyone who has wondered where cap and trade came from and how environmental activists came to discuss wetlands protection, air pollution, and fracking in the language of cost-benefit analysis, Valuing Clean Air provides an insightful look at a half-century of the making of US environmental policy.

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The Tattvasamgraha, or Encyclopedia of Metaphysics, is the most influential and frequently studied philosophical text from the late period of Indian Buddhism. Its authors-Santaraksita and his commentator and student, Kamalasila-both played key roles in founding the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. In the Tattvasamgraha, they explain, discuss, and critique a range of views from across the South Asian philosophical and religious spectrum, including ideas drawn from Buddhism, Jainism, and traditions now incorporated into Hinduism. The Tattvasamgraha also includes the earliest discussion of Advaita Vedanta in any Buddhist text. In The Tattvasamgraha of Santaraksita, Charles Goodman translates chapters of the text that deal with fundamental philosophical issues like the existence or nonexistence of God and the soul; the nature of matter and causal relationships; the connection between words and their referents; rules of logic; sources of human knowledge; and the compatibility of beliefs about karma with Buddhism's fundamental claim that there is no self. Goodman's introductory chapters discuss translation choices and explain the arguments and reasoning employed by the Tattvasamgraha's original authors. Together, Goodman's accessible translations and introductory chapters give readers an ideal way to familiarize themselves with the argumentative methods and logical principles of Buddhist epistemology, as well as the intellectual and cultural context of Buddhist philosophy.

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The Reality of Real Estate is written from a practical perspective–presenting concepts within the context of job competencies. It emphasizes the practices and procedures of real estate and stresses the operational and mechanical steps in the transaction such as the buying and selling; the review and assessment of title, the preparation of Deeds and Mortgages, and the preparation and completion of the settlement. Each chapter is filled with examples, forms and exercises that give students hands-on experience working with a variety of real estate situations.

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“If there’s ever been a more complex and compelling hero in crime fiction than Inspector Rutledge, I can’t think of one.” —Jeffery Deaver In one of his most puzzling cases, Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge must delve deep into a dead man’s life and his past to find a killer determined to keep dark secrets buried.A peaceful Welsh village is thrown into turmoil when a terrified boy stumbles on a body in a nearby river. The man appears to have fallen from the canal aqueduct spanning the valley. But there is no identification on the body, he isn’t a local, and no one will admit to having seen him before. With little to go on, the village police turn to Scotland Yard for help. When Inspector Ian Rutledge is sent from London to find answers, he is given few clues—a faded military tattoo on the victim’s arm and an unusual label in the collar of his shirt. They eventually lead him to the victim’s identity: Sam Milford. By all accounts, he was a good man and well-respected. Then, why is his death so mysterious? Looking for the truth, Rutledge uncovers a web of lies swirling around a suicidal woman, a child’s tragic fate, and another woman bent on protecting her past. But where among all the lies is the motive for murder? To track a killer, Rutledge must retrace Milford’s last journey. Yet death seems to stalk his every move, and the truth seems to shift at every turn. Man or woman, this murderer stays in the shadows, and it will take desperate measures to lure him—or her—into the light.

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A timeless selection of some of Charles Bukowski's best unpublished and uncollected poems Charles Bukowski was a prolific writer who produced countless short stories, novels, and poems that have reached beyond their time and place to speak to generations of readers all over the world. Many of his poems remain little known, material that appeared in small magazines but was never collected, and a large number of them have yet to be published. In Storm for the Living and the Dead, Abel Debritto has curated the very finest of this material-poems from obscure, hard-to-find magazines, as well as from libraries and private collections all over the country-most of which will be new to Bukowski's readers and some of which has never been seen before. In doing so, Debritto has captured the essence of Bukowski's inimitable poetic style-tough and hilarious but ringing with humanity. Storm for the Living and the Dead is a gift for any devotee of the Dirty Old Man of American letters.

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Scotland Yard’s Ian Rutledge finds himself caught in a twisted web of vengeance, old grievances, and secrets that lead back to World War I in the nineteenth installment of the acclaimed bestselling series.On the eve of the bloody Battle of the Somme, a group of English officers having a last drink before returning to the Front make a promise to each other: if they survive the battle ahead—and make it through the war—they will meet in Paris a year after the fighting ends. They will celebrate their good fortune by racing motorcars they beg, borrow, or own from Paris to Nice.In November 1919, the officers all meet as planned, and though their motorcars are not designed for racing, they set out for Nice. But a serious mishap mars the reunion. In the mountains just north of their destination, two vehicles are nearly run off the road, and one man is badly injured. No one knows—or will admit to knowing—which driver was at the wheel of the rogue motorcar.Back in England one year later, during a heavy rainstorm, a driver loses control on a twisting road and is killed in the crash. Was it an accident due to the hazardous conditions Or premeditated murder Is the crash connected in some way to the unfortunate events in the mountains above Nice the year before The dead driver wasn’t in France—although the motorcar he drove was. If it was foul play, was it a case of mistaken identity Or was the dead man the intended victim after allInvestigating this perplexing case, Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge discovers that the truth is elusive—and that the villages on the South Downs, where the accident happened, are adept at keeping secrets, frustrating his search. Determined to remain in the shadows this faceless killer is willing to strike again to stop Rutledge from finding him. This time, the victim he chooses is a child, and it will take all of Rutledge’s skill to stop him before an innocent young life is sacrificed.

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Tickety-Boo is a block of a book with more than two hundred images edited from smart phone photographs taken during Charles H. Traub’s everyday ramblings over the last four years. The English expression tickety-boo loosely translates 'Everything is okay, but maybe everything isn't!' Therein lies the enigmatic crux of the images contained in the book. The smart phone is an ingenious companion that readily makes a photographic response by Traub quick and unobtrusive – a third eye, if you will. A stream of consciousness flows in his response to places, things, and people that catch his eclectic whimsy. His subjects are ambiguous and out of context, yet once organized together within this book, create a kind of pictorial completeness, both soothing and disquieting. The photographs in each spread vividly amplify each other leading the viewer to the next sequence. The mundane becomes animated, and in the end, this is a book about the delirious conditions of our time.

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