Clearance
Mystery Bundle of Books
Looking for something to read during this stressful time? Our Mystery Bundle consists of six books that were assigned for recent BMC courses, a random collection of used and new books from overstock and buyback. Original bookshop retail value of at least $40, so you'll save at least 55% -- and usually much more.
You won't know what you'll get, but each title was vetted by BMC faculty so you know that every book has merit. We are offering serveral versions of this bundle for $18.00 each:
- Nonfiction only
- All categories, nonfiction/fiction mix (books in English only)
- Fiction in French
- Fiction in Spanish
- Mystery Bundles for 2 ($40.00)
- Mystery Bundles for 3 ($60.00)
Popovers and Candlelight
by Marcia Biederman BMC '70
Transforming Nokia
Ghostwritten by Catherine Fredman BMC '80
The great Nokia turnaround--universal business lessons for leaders in any industry
Nokia once dominated the smartphone industry. It was to mobile phones was Kleenex is to facial tissues. Then iPhones and Androids appeared out of nowhere and pushed Nokia off the cliff. In just four years, the company lost over 90 percent of its value. Revenues were in freefall; massive layoffs became common. Pundits predicted that bankruptcy wasn't a matter of if, it was a matter of when.
Then something equally shocking occurred. In record time, Nokia bounced back. With a vengeance. Nokia reinvented itself and is now the second-biggest player in the $100 billion-dollar global wireless market.
In Transforming Nokia, the man who orchestrated and led Nokia's comeback--Chairman of the Board Risto Siilasmaa--reveals the story of Nokia's fall and resurrection. He reveals the inside story of the collapse and provides survival strategies and change-management methods any business leader can take to the bank. You'll learn how to harness the power of what Siilasmaa calls "paranoid optimism" and apply his winning entrepreneurial leadership model to rise above any challenge and drive sustainable success.
Whether you lead a team or a corporate division, head a start-up or a massive organization, and whether your business is on the rocks or running smoothly, Transforming Nokia provides everything you need to sharpen your foresight, expand your options, seize opportunities, and thrive, no matter what changes tomorrow brings.
Primary Politics
by Elaine Kamarck BMC '72
The 2020 presidential primaries are on the horizon and this third edition of Elaine Kamarck's Primary Politics will be there to help make sense of them. Updated to include the 2016 election, it will once again be the guide to understanding the modern nominating system that gave the American electorate a choice between Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton.
In Primary Politics, political insider Elaine Kamarck explains how the presidential nomination process became the often baffling system we have today, including the "robot rule." Her focus is the largely untold story of how presidential candidates since the early 1970s have sought to alter the rules in their favor and how their failures and successes have led to even more change. She describes how candidates have sought to manipulate the sequencing of primaries to their advantage and how Iowa and New Hampshire came to dominate the system. She analyzes the rules that are used to translate votes into delegates, paying special attention to the Democrats' twenty-year fight over proportional representation and some of its arcana.
Drawing on meticulous research, interviews with key figures in both parties, and years of experience, this book explores one of the most important questions in American politics-how we narrow the list of presidential candidates every four years.
100 Year Starship, The
African Renaissance Project of Thabo Mbeki
This book provides a critical analysis of the targets and objectives of The African Renaissance project as articulated by former South African President Thabo Mbeki. The work is divided into five chapters: South Africa before and since 1994; invaluable lessons for the African Renaissance project; targets and objectives of the African Renaissance as articulated by Thabo Mbeki; the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) as the litmus test for the African Renaissance; the DRC as the strategic heart of the African continental transformation; the African Renaissance Project: key issues, processes and developments. It provides a critical analysis of the South African socio-historical roots and targets in these issues, processes and developments of the African Renaissance project. The book has a conclusion and recommendations.
Afropessimism
Why does race seem to color almost every feature of our moral and political universe? Why does a perpetual cycle of slavery--in all its political, intellectual, and cultural forms--continue to define the Black experience? And why is anti-Black violence such a predominant feature not only in the United States but around the world? These are just some of the compelling questions that animate Afropessimism, Frank B. Wilderson III's seminal work on the philosophy of Blackness.
Combining precise philosophy with a torrent of memories, Wilderson presents the tenets of an increasingly prominent intellectual movement that sees Blackness through the lens of perpetual slavery. Drawing on works of philosophy, literature, film, and critical theory, he shows that the social construct of slavery, as seen through pervasive anti-Black subjugation and violence, is hardly a relic of the past but the very engine that powers our civilization, and that without this master-slave dynamic, the calculus bolstering world civilization would collapse. Unlike any other disenfranchised group, Wilderson argues, Blacks alone will remain essentially slaves in the larger Human world, where they can never be truly regarded as Human beings, where, "at every scale of abstraction, violence saturates Black life."
And while Afropessimism delivers a formidable philosophical account of being Black, it is also interwoven with dramatic set pieces, autobiographical stories that juxtapose Wilderson's seemingly idyllic upbringing in mid-century Minneapolis with the abject racism he later encounters--whether in late 1960s Berkeley or in apartheid South Africa, where he joins forces with the African National Congress. Afropessimism provides no restorative solution to the hatred that abounds; rather, Wilderson believes that acknowledging these historical and social conditions will result in personal enlightenment about the reality of our inherently racialized existence.
Radical in conception, remarkably poignant, and with soaring flights of lyrical prose, Afropessimism reverberates with wisdom and painful clarity in the fractured world we inhabit. It positions Wilderson as a paradigmatic thinker and as a twenty-first-century inheritor of many of the African American literary traditions established in centuries past.
Art of Perpetuation
Vivid explorations of cryogenics, lion baiting, iDollators, dodo birds, SpaceX, and more populate The Art of Perpetuation, a poignant new collection of lyric essays from Alison Powell that troubles the boundaries between human and animal, living and dead, man and woman, adult and child. These nine whip-smart essays juxtapose personal narrative-memories of the author's childhood growing up in southern Indiana and experiences as a mother of two-with scientific, historical, and cultural narrative. Throughout the collection, Powell seeks to unearth, to peel back, to lay bare: "To pry something out of someone, the meat of a walnut from its enamel-like shell, is an excavation-to uncover a lie, an infidelity." Dizzying, fragmentary, and provocative, Powell's lyrical investigations dig in deep, coming up for air only to expose the meaningless of naming in a world obsessed with self-perpetuation. "To say a poem is like a body is to say one's self is a machine. To say a body is erasable is to say extinction is a temperate clicking.... And like that, with one hand on the glass and one gloved hand inside the mouth of the woolly rhino, you have done it."
BAD GUYS DON'T HAVE BIRTHDAYS
Their play is filled with warnings. They invent chaos in order to show that everything is under control. They portray fear to prove that it can be conquered. No theme is too large or too small for their intense scrutiny. Fantasy play is their ever dependable pathway to knowledge and certainty.
" It . . . takes a special teacher to value the young child's communications sufficiently, enter into a meaningful dialogue with the youngster, and thereby stimulate more productivity without overwhelming the child with her own ideas. Vivian Paley is such a teacher".--Maria W. Piers, in the "American Journal of Education"
"[Mrs. Paley's books] should be required reading wherever children are growing. Mrs. Paley does not presume to "understand" preschool children, or to theorize. Her strength lies equally in knowing that she does not know and in trying to learn. When she cannot help children--because she can neither anticipate nor follow their thinking-- she strives not to hinder them. She avoids the arrogance of adult to small child; of teacher to student; or writer to reader".--Penelope Leach, author of "Your Baby & Child" in the "New York Times Book Review"
Barcelona
by Gary W. McDonogh - Professor of Growth and Structure of Cities