Ford Library

Here are a set of mini-reviews of four important new books on “going green.”

Click the titles below for information on location and availability.

• Global warming is good for business by Kimberly B. Keilbach. Quill Driver Books, 2009.Provides practical advice on identifying entrepreneurial opportunities, and describes new green technologies that have the potential to power a new generation of innovation.
• Two billion cars: driving toward sustainability by Daniel Sperling and Deborah Gordon. Oxford University Press, 2009.Describes the reluctance of auto manufacturers to employ promising new technologies for reducing the auto’s carbon footprint and recommends solutions for change.
• How to cool the planet : geoengineering and the audacious quest to fix earth’s climate. by Jeff Goodell. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.Explores options for cooling earth’s climate in a hurry, focusing on strange and promising ideas that are beginning to attract research dollars, such as “cloud brightening,” pumping water droplets into the air to buffer ocean clouds’ reflectivity.
• Strategy for sustainability: a business manifesto by Adam Werbach. Harvard Business Press, 2009.Shows business leaders how to formulate a green strategy attuned to social, economic and cultural trends, and to implement it by engaging people inside the company and within the community..

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

Our latest list of titles:

It’s Complicated
Lovely Bones
Pirate Radio
Daybreakers
Extraordinary Measures
Invictus
Leap Year
The Messenger
The Spy Next Door
Valentine’s Day

In case you missed the brief article about summer Library database use in the last MBAA Newsletter, we wanted to post this reminder from our Database Terms of Use.

Your access to, and data from, Ford Library databases may not be used to support the work (for profit or non-profit) of any company or organization at any time, including during a summer internship. Inappropriate, or commercial use of database resources is a breach of a binding legal contract and may result in both: a) loss of access to those resources for all Duke and Fuqua users, and b) legal action being taken by the vendor against the breaching user and/or Duke University.

You can find detailed examples of appropriate summer use of Library databases on the following secure web page:

http://library.fuqua.duke.edu/internal/summerdbs.htm

Please let us know if you have any questions, and have a great summer!

Lewis, Michael. The big short : inside the doomsday machine. W. W. Norton, 2010.

Master storyteller Malcolm Gladwell calls Michael Lewis the finest storyteller of our generation. Moneyball and Liar’s Poker made him one of the best business journalists today. Among his recent successes is The Blind Side.

The Big Short is called the definitive book on the current recession. Having worked at Saloman Brothers in the 1980s, he provides an insider’s view of a perfect storm brewing. Lewis’ story revolves around several obscure Wall Street players who understood the housing market was built on a house of cards.

Although most people are left with the impact of the recession; Steve Eisman, an analyst at Oppenheimer and Co.; Greg Lippman a bond trader for Deutsche Bank; and Michael Burry, who left Stanford Medical School to manage his own hedge fund, acted upon an opportunity to make tremendous profits. Read more …

We have a long list of new titles this month:

Fantastic Mr. Fox
Mad Men. Season 3
The Men who Stare at Goats
Princess and the Frog
Red Cliff. Part I and Part II
Sherlock Holmes
An Education
Fighter
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
What Doesn’t Kill You

Here’s the April installment of Ford Library Director, Meg Trauner’s selections of five recent business books recommended to Fuqua Dean Blair Sheppard.

Click the titles below for information on location and availability.

• The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis. W. W. Norton, 2010.

  Entertaining portrayal of market skeptics who profited from the financial meltdown.

• Checklist Manifesto: How to get things right by Atul Gawande. Metropolitan Books, 2009.

  Simple checklists can improve the practice of medicine and other complex situations.

• Chief Culture Officer: How to create a living breathing corporation by Grant McCracken. Basic Books, 2009.

  Reading cultural trends is profitable for business, and the skill can be taught.

• On the Brink: Inside the race to stop the collapse of the global financial system by Henry M. Paulson, Jr. Business Plus, 2010.

  Day-by-day account of how Paulson etc worked to save the financial system during the meltdown.

• Switch: How to change things when change is hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Broadway Books, 2010.

  Change is complicated by the disjunction between our rational and emotional minds.

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

Ford Library tips its top hat to Duke graduate student, and one of our extraordinary circulation clerks, Julia Gaffield!

While doing research at the British National Archives earlier this year for her doctoral dissertation on 19th century Haiti, Julia discovered the only known printed copy of Haiti’s Declaration of Independence.

We like to think that her duties searching out lost books here at Ford helped hone her skills at scholarly investigation; but Julia probably came to us already adept.

You can read more about Julia’s discovery, and its truly significant impacts on Haiti and its neighbors in these articles at The Duke Chronicle, and Durham Herald-Sun.

UPDATE: You can also watch a video interview with Julia on her “moment of discovery” on the Duke News & Communications site.

Well done, Julia!

Andrews, Edmund L. Busted : life inside the great mortgage meltdown. W. W. Norton, 2009.

Busted is a personal and penetrating account of one man’s experience with purchasing an overpriced house with a subprime mortgage. Written by an economics reporter for the New York Times, the author is aware of the economic and financial risks, yet he succumbs to temptation and buys a house he cannot afford. With his judgment impaired by his emotions – he is in love – Andrews enters into a vortex of debt from credit cards and desperate refinancing on his home.

Andrews ends up ruined financially. He claims responsibility, but he also blames the mortgage brokers and real estate appraisers, money lenders and Wall Street players, credit rating agencies, institutional investors and Washington policymakers. Eventually he blames his ex-wife. One person he does not blame is his new wife. The Atlantic later reported that he failed to disclose Andrews’s new wife’s history of bankruptcy.

This is not a book with a happy ending. Yet this blunt tale of personal ruin is riveting and well worth the investment in time.

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

Come meet and network with Fuqua’s premium business information providers.

On Wednesday, April 7, from 11am – noon, Ford Library will host a vendor showcase featuring 9 business information providers who supply data and research tools to leading business schools around the globe.

All Fuqua MBA students are cordially invited to join us in the Esbenshade Room (across from the Library entrance) for this event.

This is an open event with no formal presentations, and it gives you a chance speak to individual company reps, and view product demonstrations of tools that you may very well find on your corporate desk top after graduation.

We look forward to seeing you there!

See the new releases shelf for:

2012
Capitalism: A Love Story
Captain Abu Raed [Jordan]
Crude
Everybody’s Fine
Informant!
Paris
Precious
Time Traveler’s Wife
Up in the Air
Where the Wild Things Are
A Serious Man