While visiting Japan, animation writer Chris Robinson gets lost. Drifting through Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Kyoto, he stumbles into a string of encounters―with mysterious figures like Bob Dylan, Haruki Murakami, sumo wrestlers, and Big Bird, and with Japanese animators both living and dead. Each meeting draws him into a deep, dark, uncanny current of Japanese animation―one that has nothing to do with Godzilla, Akira, anime, manga, or Hayao Miyazaki.The original book, Time Out of Mi...

A sweeping history of America during the tumultuous decades between the ends of World War I and World War II, when a mainly rural, isolationist republic was transformed into a nuclear superpower and the leader of the free world.Through the prosperous 1920s and its culture wars to the Great Crash and Depression of the Thirties, the fits and starts of the New Deal, and then the all-consuming fight to defeat fascism in World War II, the twenty-five years from 1920 thr...

Test more. Assume less. How a scientific mindset drives smarter decisions in an uncertain world.Every day, leaders face high-stakes decisions about products, customers, strategy, and resource allocation. Yet many of these decisions rely on untested assumptions. Overconfidence, gut instinct, and "what worked before" often stand in for evidence, leaving companies exposed to costly missteps. And the problem goes beyond the workplace: we all make countless choices abou...

For more than two decades, The Warren Buffett Portfolio has guided investors toward mastering the art of focus investing―a strategy that concentrates on a select group of superior businesses rather than spreading resources thin across countless holdings. With the release of the 25th Anniversary Edition, Robert G. Hagstrom, one of the most respected interpreters of Warren Buffett's investment philosophy, offers fresh insights into why concentrated portfolios remain the key to long-...

In the chaotic months after Pearl Harbor, the Pacific War was anything but certain. The US Navy, reeling from sudden loss, scrambled to slow Japanese momentum, while the Imperial Japanese Navy pressed outward, convinced that seizing Southeast Asia's resources was essential to survival. This book captures that dangerous, uncertain moment—from December 1941 through April 1942—when the outcome of the Pacific War remained very much in doubt.Moving across a vast maritime battlefield,

This engaging book by Jeff Rauseo blends film history with a modern guide to streaming, helping you navigate the complex history of movie making and ultimately how to know what to watch in the vast ocean of content. From the golden age of Hollywood to the best new movies to stream, Rauseo breaks down the ever-evolving movie watching experience to help us understand the good, the bad, and the ugly of streaming.Ever feel overwhelmed by endless streaming choices? Jeff Rauseo's Los...

When the spirit of an American airman befriends a Japanese woman and her daughter in the days before the Hiroshima bomb, he races against time to save the ones he loves the most.When American WWII bombardier Micah Lund dies on a mission over Japan, his spirit remains trapped as a yurei ghost. Dazed, he follows Kiyomi Oshiro, a war widow struggling to care for her young daughter, Ai, as food is scarce, work at the factory is brutal, and her in-laws treat her like a ...

Telecommunications networks are vast, intricate, hugely costly systems for exchanging messages and information—within cities and across continents. From the Post Office and the telegraph to today's internet, these networks have sown domestic division while also acting as sources of international power.In Crossed Wires, Dan Schiller, who has conducted archival research on United States telecommunications for more than forty years, recovers the extraordinary social history o...

The Myth That Made Us exposes how false narratives—of a supposedly post-racist nation, of the self-made man, of the primacy of profit- and shareholder value-maximizing for businesses, and of minimal government interference—have been used to excuse gross inequities and to shape and sustain the US economic system that delivers them. Jeff Fuhrer argues that systemic racism continues to produce vastly disparate outcomes and that our brand of capitalism favors doing little to reduce di...

An urgent plea for a broader understanding and awareness of the unconsidered dangers of new genetic technologiesSince 2010 it has been possible to determine a person's genetic makeup in a matter of days at an accessible cost for many millions of people. Along with this technological breakthrough there has emerged a movement to use this information to help prospective parents "eliminate preventable genetic disease." As the prospect of systematically excluding the ap...

The one primer you need to launch, lead, and sponsor successful projects.We're now living in the project economy. As the number of projects initiated in both the public and private sectors skyrockets, project management skills have become essential for all leaders and managers. But despite this project boom, the failure rate remains extremely high. Why? Leaders have too many projects and too little visibility into them, and they lack the project implementation comp...

The first telling of the unknown story of America's two-hundred-year history as a slave-trading nationA total of 305,000 enslaved Africans arrived in the New World aboard American vessels over a span of two hundred years as American merchants and mariners sailed to Africa and to the Caribbean to acquire and sell captives. Using exhaustive archival research, including many collections that have never been used before, historian Sean M. Kelley argues that slave tradi...