Today institutional investors dominate the stock market. They hold assets valued at about 6.5 trillion - almost one fifth of the country's financial assets. Furthermore, institutional investors now own well over half of the stock in the country's 100 largest corporations, including such flagship companies as IBM, GE, Johnson & Johnson, and Mobil. Because of the tremendous influence institutional investors have on American corporations, business and government policymakers must make assumptions about how and why they make decisions - their priorities, motives, and concerns. In addition, anyone who markets to institutional investors needs to know what makes them tick. Sprinkled with candid and often colorful quotations from a variety of investment insiders, Fortune and Folly gives you a unique look at what really happens on Wall Street; facts that challenge the assumptions routinely made about the economic motivations of business behavior; new insights on pension safety and possible political influences; and economic analyses by Carolyn K. Brancato, the country's foremost expert on the economics of institutional investing.

Ever since her mother died and her father lost his shoemaking skills, Fortunata has survived by telling fake fortunes. But when she's tricked into telling a grand fortune for a prince, she is faced with the impossible task of fulfilling her wild prophecy—or her father will be put to death. Now Fortunata has to help Prince Leonato secure a magic sword, vanquish a wicked witch, discover a long-lost golden shoe, and rescue the princess who fits it. If only she hadn't fallen in love with the prince herself !

The historical record crowns success. Those enshrined in its annals are men and women whose ideas, accomplishments, or personalities have dominated, endured, and most important of all, found champions. John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, and Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets are classic celebrations of the greatest, the brightest, the eternally constellated. Paul Collins' Banvard's Folly is a different kind of book. Here are thirteen unforgettable portraits of forgotten people: men and women who might have claimed their share of renown but who, whether from ill timing, skullduggery, monomania, the tinge of madness, or plain bad luck--or perhaps some combination of them all--leapt straight from life into thankless obscurity. Among their number are scientists, artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and adventurers, from across the centuries and around the world. They hold in common the silenced aftermath of failure, the name that rings no bells. Collins brings them back to glorious life. John Banvard was an artist whose colossal panoramic canvasses (one behemoth depiction of the entire eastern shore of the Mississippi River was simply known as "The Three Mile Painting") made him the richest and most famous artist of his day. . . before he decided to go head to head with P. T. Barnum. René Blondot was a distinguished French physicist whose celebrated discovery of a new form of radiation, called the N-Ray, went terribly awry. At the tender age of seventeen, William Henry Ireland signed "William Shakespeare" to a book and launched a short but meteoric career as a forger of undiscovered works by the Bard -- until he pushed his luck too far. John Symmes, a hero of the War of 1812, nearly succeeded in convincing Congress to fund an expedition to the North Pole, where he intended to prove his theory that the earth was hollow and ripe for exploitation; his quixotic quest counted Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe among its greatest admirers. Collins' love for what he calls the "forgotten ephemera of genius" give his portraits of these figures and the other nine men and women in Banvard's Folly sympathetic depth and poignant relevance. Their effect is not to make us sneer or p0revel in schadenfreude; here are no cautionary tales. Rather, here are brief introductions-acts of excavation and reclamation-to people whom history may have forgotten, but whom now we cannot.

With its prime focus on the human factor in history, this book examines the role of foolishness in the unfolding of major events in Britain, particularly invasions, from Caesar's expeditions to the Norman Conquest. Many historians believe that foolishness in a bygone age cannot be meaningfully assessed, but this book does not accept that view.

Roxanne Whitcomb plans to spend her London season finding a rich backer for her brother’s inventions until she meets Spencer Tanner and realizes she cannot marry for money. Tanner is attracted to her wit and startled by her lively nature, but assumes that, like other women, she needs protection. Her London debut is ruined by the arrival of her estranged mother and guardian, recalling gossip about her father’s suicide and mother’s untimely remarriage. Roxanne decides to tackle her problems by rescuing her mother and protecting her brother, but Tanner is reluctant to offer help, doubting her theory on why this would be necessary. Then he discovers the independent Rox can also be resourceful and courageous.

It is shocking for Helena to realize that, after being divorced for 8 years, she is still irresistibly attracted to her ex-husband after they meet again. But Andreas is still bitter and angry about the past. He still recalled the humiliation he had felt when she had left him. The cruelty of a friend's jest that Andreas had taken the youngest mare from the stable but had not known how to ride it." Yet when Helena saw him she saw only that "he looked vaguely older, a little more harassed than he had been in the past. His body was the same, it exuded strength and a touch of the primitive that the gray mohair silk could not quite disguise."

"After winning an unprecedented 150 court rulings in the Canadian resource sector, it's natives - Resource Rulers - who now determine the outcome of resource plays. The defining feature of this historic struggle has been the remarkable rise of native empowerment. Today, many resource-rich regions are low-level conflict zones where government, industry, eco-activists, and natives vie for supremacy. This book offers a way forward with new rules of engagement for resource development and for winning outcomes in the road-to-resources sweepstakes."--Billgallagher.ca/resource-rulers-book.