Ford Library

…Check out our website & connect with us online

…Together we have 140 years of experience serving the Fuqua community!

…Our Reference Librarians have been asked where to find information on everything from consumer debt to 1950s car dealership jingles. If you have a question, ask a librarian via email, phone, or chat.

…Not only do we have a dedicated and hardworking staff, we also offer access to some incredible resources. Read on to find out more.

…Whether you’re planning a vacation to Alaska or a business trip to Shanghai, our Lonely Planet Travel Guides can help you find some of the best places to eat, shop, and lodge.

…With Pronunciator and Transparent Language Online, your language-learning needs are covered from Afrikaans to Xhosa.

…If you’re looking for information on retirement planning or personal investing, evaluating a charitable organization, or researching a company, you’re in luck. More than fifty databases are available to you, including Morningstar Investment Research Center, GuideStar, and OneSource.

…Need to get organized? Amazon’s #2 bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up is one of hundreds of books available to you on Ford Library Kindles.

…Audiobooks on CD are perfect for a commute. The Art of the Start 2.0 may be just the motivation you need to get started on a project.

…You can read Fifty shades of Grey on your smartphone, or listen to Gone Girl on your MP3 player with Duke’s OverDrive subscription.

…Binge-viewing is in. You can now check out up to 3 movie titles (DVD and/or Blu-Ray) for 7 days. Let the Game of Thrones marathon begin!

…Meg Trauner, Ford Library founder. 33 years at Fuqua haven’t changed her a bit!

Vault just released its annual signature list of the top 50 consulting firms to work for: the “Vault Consulting 50”. To view this list and additional premium Vault content, Fuqua students can create an account here.

Vault offers career research for candidates seeking opportunities across hundreds of industries and professions. With a premium Vault account, Fuqua students can access downloadable career guides, employer profiles and rankings, discussion boards, industry blogs, news covering the latest trends and issues, and Vault’s job board, which matches employers and recruiters with top talent.

For additional career resources, including WetFeet Guides, books on resumés and interviewing, and information about companies recruiting at Fuqua, visit Ford Library’s Career Tools webpage.

Here are our latest DVD titles:

Barely Lethal
Home
Insurgent
It Follows
Kill Me Three Times
Madame Bovary
Maggie
The Road Within
The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
True Story
What We Do in the Shadows
White God
Clouds of Sils Maria
Ex Machina

You may browse the entire DVD collection via the library catalog.

Alifirenka, Caitlin and Martin Ganda. I will always write back : how one letter changed two lives. Little, Brown and Company, 2015.

Daytime MBA 2014 alumnus Martin Ganda is president and co-founder of Seeds Of Africa Foundation, a scholarship fund for promising yet impoverished students in Zimbabwe, a resource to enable them to achieve their academic dreams. Martin’s organization is a way of giving back, as he spent his early years as an impoverished boy in rural Zimbabwe. When he reaches school age, Martin’s mother makes clear that education is his only road out of poverty. He excels as a student yet his opportunities are few. Eight years later, he is matched with a pen pal, a 12 year old girl from Pennsylvania, and his destiny changes.

I Will Always Write Back, is Martin’s new book, the story of how he and his co-author Caitlin Alifirenka began their correspondence as a school assignment, and then continued for 6 years, developing a close friendship. Written in two voices, alternating between Caitlin and Martin, the story begins in Zimbabwe, where Martin and his family share a four room house with another family, 12 people in all. He attends school in a crowded classroom, four students to a desk meant for one. Each day the teacher brings in four textbooks to share with all students.

Martin’s environment is desperately poor, but his correspondence with Caitlin shows him how life could be different. He stays focused on academic achievement and receives top grades on national exams. He earns a scholarship at the best private school in Zimbabwe, a residential school that leads to a university.

Meanwhile Caitlin’s life focuses on her friends, crushes on boys and shopping at the mall, although the shallowness may be a deliberate choice to highlight the contrast. Caitlin sends Martin a photograph and asks him for one in return. For Martin a photograph is prohibitively expensive, but his mother sacrifices the only family photo she owns, taken when Martin scored highest on a national placement test in school. Then Caitlin sends him a dollar, which in Zimbabwe is enough to buy family groceries for two weeks. After she sends him a Reebok T-shirt, Martin carries luggage at the bus station for tips for two months to buy her a pair of earrings.

After a few years, Caitlin begins to understand Martin’s hardship and the issue of poverty in general. As conditions in Zimbabwe deteriorate, she sends him her earnings from babysitting. With her mother’s help, she sends large boxes of clothing and supplies. A few years later, Caitlin’s mother helps Martin through the U.S. college application process, working with university administrators at many schools until she secures a full scholarship for him to Villanova.

There are many to admire in this book, especially Martin Ganda. He, his mother and Caitlin’s mother all set high goals and are determined to meet them. They work hard despite significant obstacles and in the end are rewarded with success. Life is significantly better for Martin and his family at the end of the book. This inspiring work is recommended for all readers.

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

Money: It is the root of all evil but it also makes the world go round. People with a lot of money are uncomfortable talking about it, but those who have inherited it understand that having money without some purpose is soul sapping. Three new books in the Ford Library show how money changes ourselves and our world.

Sullivan, Paul. The thin green line : the money secrets of the super wealthy. Simon & Schuster, 2015.

According to business journalist Paul Sullivan, the thin green line is the difference between being rich (having a large income) and being wealthy (having more money than you need to live as you wish). He explains that someone who earns a high salary but spends it all in an extravagant lifestyle is not as well off as someone who lives in financial comfort and security, regardless of income. His book advises people on how to weigh the options in spending, saving, investing, paying taxes and giving money away (to children and to charities) — making financial choices that help people feel wealthy and secure.

This book is also available as an audiobook on Overdrive.

Vigna, Paul and Michael J. Casey. The age of cryptocurrency : how Bitcoin and digital money are challenging the global economic order. St. Martin’s Press, 2015.

Two Wall Street Journalists explain cryptocurrency as an open-source computer protocol, a new digital foundation for conducting business. Best known is six year old bitcoin, which has the potential to radically change the banking sector, allowing users to bypass traditional institutions, with their high fees, powerful elites and political corruption. Bitcoin eliminates the financial middleman in business transactions, reduces costs and increases transparency. Bitcoin also allows people without access to banks at all – women in developing countries, for example — to engage in commerce to improve their standard of living. While unlikely to replace traditional banking entirely, an unregulated and decentralized financial system is destined to be another option in the world’s payment infrastructure.

This book is also available as an eBook on OverDrive and as an audiobook on OverDrive.

Sehgal, Kabir. Coined : the rich life of money and how its history has shaped us. Grand Central Publishing, 2015.

In 2008 author Kabir Sehgal worked on J.P.Morgan’s emerging markets desk in New York when the global financial crisis hit. As a personal project, he decided to learn about the root causes of the financial crisis, which led him to the work of well-known behavioral economists to help explain why money makes us act in bizarre and irrational ways. Sehgal’s research resulted in a new book, where he explains why we use money as a form of exchange; what physical forms money has taken through the ages; and how we use money as a symbol of value. The chapter on religion and money is especially enlightening.

This book is also available as an eBook on OverDrive and as an audiobook on OverDrive.

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

Our latest DVD titles added this month:

Kingsman: the Secret Service
Survivor
Timbuktu
Time Lapse
Unfinished Business
5 Flights Up
’71
Belle and Sebastian
Chappie
Danny Collins
The Duff
Get Hard
Last Knights
Playing It Cool
Run All Night
Wild Tales
Woman in Gold

You may browse the entire DVD collection via the library catalog.

Spier, Guy. The Education of a value investor : my transformative quest for wealth, wisdom, and enlightenment. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Aquamarine Fund founder Guy Spier wants university educators to search their souls for the role they play in the greed, superficiality and bad judgment among the bankers, brokers and capitalists on Wall Street. In his new book, The Education of a Value Investor, Spier writes that his own privileged education (Oxford and Harvard Business School) trained him to respond to other people’s approval rather than to an internal moral compass. Spier’s book is about his own personal journey to wisdom and maturity.

Spier begins his story as a newly minted MBA, who accepts a position as vice president at a shady brokerage house, D.H. Blair, where Spier’s Ivy League credentials dress up sketchy deals to sell to investors. The competitive environment at the firm motivates employees to push the legal and ethical boundaries to be successful. Even at the elite firms like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, bankers distort the truth to further their own self-interest. From this experience, Spier learns that a person’s environment causes one to slowly change over time.

After Spier leaves D.H.Blair, he finds it difficult to find another position in the financial sector. He reeducates himself by reading classic business books and by modeling Warren Buffett’s investment and life choices. He asks himself, “What would Warren Buffett do?” Then one day his father and a small circle of friends and business associates give him $15 million to manage. Spier founds the Aquamarine Fund and manages his fund as Warren Buffett would do, finding “companies that are cheap, have an expanding ‘moat’ around them, and that are awash in cash.” A charity lunch with Warren Buffett becomes the turning point in his life.

The Education of a Value Investor is an engrossing book. Guy Spier tells his story openly, in an easy conversational style. He writes about attention deficit disorder and the non-rational part of his brain that lead him to make bad decisions. He speaks frankly about his own flaws, including arrogance, pride and envy. He discusses the behavioral changes that he makes in his life to compensate for his emotional challenges, including relocating away from the temptations of New York and London. He shares his strategies for managing his personal vulnerabilities as well as his investments. In the end, he concludes that nothing matters as much as bringing the right people into your life.

This story of personal growth is recommended for most readers. However, Spier seems reluctant to take responsibility for his early career choice and casts the blame on his elite education. As an MBA student at Harvard, he attends Buffett’s presentation to students but barely hears the man who would later become his mentor, because he is distracted by a woman in the audience. And while it is true that some graduates of prestigious universities end up on Wall Street, compromising their ethics, not all do. Some students read their own moral compasses long before they graduate.

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

The 4th of July is often the hottest period of the summer. This year it is bound to be a roaster. Over this holiday week, Fuqua staff traditionally borrow multitudinous movies on DVD/BluRay to watch comfortably indoors in air conditioning while the food sweats on the grill outside. Movies are great, but readers, the library has more to offer than that. Remember books? Here are 3 unusual titles to add a little fireworks to the holiday.

Ariely, Dan. Irrationally yours : on missing socks, pick-up lines and other existential puzzles. HarperCollins, 2015.

Fuqua faculty member Dan Ariely writes a column “Ask Ariely” for the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal. Like any advice columnist, Ariely helps his readers solve personal problems and make good decisions. He analyzes his readers’ own puzzling behavior and the actions of co-workers, family and friends. In Irrationally Yours, Ariely expands his answers to questions published in the Journal since 2012, presenting issues such as why people complain; how to select the best stall in a public restroom; and whether it is worth the money to buy an expensive car.

Heti, Sheila, Heidi Julavits & 639 others. Women in clothes. Blue Rider Press, 2014.

Months ago, I ordered the new book Women in Clothes by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, Leanne Shapton and 639 others, thinking it was a book about the fashion industry. It is not. Instead it is an accumulation of writing by women about their clothing choices and personal style. More than 600 women participated in this work, which describes how the clothes we wear express our values and reveal our inner selves. Hundreds of brief personal stories and photographs lend an authenticity to this delightful work.

Kuhn, Reed. Fightnomics : the hidden numbers and science in mixed martial arts… Graybeard Publishing, 2013.

Strategy consultant and Fuqua 2006 MBA alumnus Reed Kuhn specialized in strategy and decision sciences while at Duke. He has been hooked on professional mixed martial arts (MMA) since he began watching the Ultimate Fighter series on television as a teenager. He recently published a new book, FightNomics, which uses the tools of decision sciences to test common assumptions about the sport. Kuhn’s data analysis advances a deeper understanding of the sport, and can be used to develop fight strategies or to predict outcomes.

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

Here are the rest of our new DVD titles for this month:

Still Alice
Focus
Jupiter Ascending
McFarland, USA
Penny Dreadful, season 1

You may browse the entire DVD collection via the library catalog.

Here are the first of our new DVD titles for the month:

Maya the Bee
Orange is the New Black, season 2
American Sniper
Fifty Shades of Grey
Leviathan
Mortdecai
Seventh Son
Spare Parts

You may browse the entire DVD collection via the library catalog.