Ford Library

Here are our latest new titles:

Transformers, Revenge of the Fallen
Food, Inc.
The Taking of Pelham 123
Lost in Austen
Music from Another Room
How to Lose Friends & Alienate People
Surveillance
Orphan
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
Cheri
The Answer Man
Treeless Mountain
Objectified
Drag Me to Hell

Steves, Rick. Travel as a political act. Nation Books, 2009.

Best selling travel writer and PBS host Rick Steves inspires readers to travel more purposely. In Travel as a Political Act, Steves encourages international travelers to remain open to new experiences and to seek options to get out of their comfort zone by becoming a temporary “local.”

Steves says that the best vacations are both fun and intensely educational. The goal is to relax and have fun, while learning and broadening one’s perspectives. Thoughtful travel comes with powerful lessons and an American traveler can learn about US society by observing with an open mind and by connecting with people that one would never meet at home.

This book is an easy read with only 200 heavily illustrated pages. Steves lays out his framework for travel and then takes the reader to seven different locations inclusing Iran, El Salvador and Denmark. The last chapter describes how travel has changed his political views and encourages the reader to put a global perspective into action at home.

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

Ford Library’s calendar of hours for November – December 2009 is now available.

The Library will be open for abbreviated hours during the Thanksgiving and Winter Holiday Breaks.

Note especially that the Library will be closed from December 24, 2009 through January 3, 2010 — reopening on January 4, 2010.

View the Calendars and Library Hours.

The lecture, “Building a Sustainable Energy Future: Market Approaches to Choices and Trade-offs” will be held today; Thursday, November 5th from 4–6 p.m. in Geneen Auditorium.

This is the first of a four-part series and represents a joint collaboration between the Fuqua School of Business and McKinsey Quarterly.  The series will consist of forums on the following areas:  energy, the financial system, globalization and business education.

Check out some of these new titles from the Ford Library on sustainability (click on a link to place a hold or check availability). Or come browse our Sustainability display at the front of the library:

• Profession and Purpose: A Resource Guide for MBA Careers in Sustainability by Katie Kross
• Investing in a Sustainable World: Why GREEN is the New Color of Money on Wall Street by Mathew J. Kiernan
• Sustainability Strategies: When Does it Pay to be Green? by Renato J. Orsato
• Making Sustainability Work: Best Practices in Managing and Measuring Corporate Social, Environmental and Economic Impacts by Marc J. Epstein
• Sustainable Investing: The Art of Long-Term Performance edited by Cary Krosinsky and Nick Robins
• Sustainable Development Handbook by Stephen A. Roosa
• Global Warming is Good for Business: How Savvy Entrepreneurs, Large Corporations, and Others are Making Money While Saving the Planet by K. B. Keilbach
• The Gort Cloud: The Invisible Force Powering Today’s Most Visible Green Brands by Richard Seireeni

The library’s database room will be closed Wednesday morning, November 4, from 8 am to 9 am and from 10 am to 11 am for training classes.  Please use the main computer lab to print your documents during these times.

Schumpeter, Joseph A. Can capitalism survive? : creative destruction and the future of the global economy. Harper Perennial, 2009.

A role of economists is to provide economic analysis of recessions such as the current one created by the financial crisis and provide strategies for restoring economic growth and prosperity.

Leading up to the current recession, The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates to make housing more affordable, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac developed a federal program enabling people to qualify for homes that ordinarily would not.

Subsequently, people purchased homes they could not afford and some lost their jobs due to the recession. Wall Street banks invested too heavily in risky loans rather than diversifying, accumulating toxic assets leading to tremendous losses.

Hayek goes as far to say that central banking destabilizes the economy. In the recent recession, government intervention led to inflation, over building, a housing bubble, and then economic indicators became unrealistic.

In addition to the destabilized housing market, the financial crisis had a ripple effect on travel, retail, the automobile and oil industries, and led to significant number of lost jobs.

Can Capitalism Survive? is excerpted from Joseph Schumpeter’s 1942 classic Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. This is where he proposed business cycles are caused by technological innovation, referred to as creative destruction. In Capitalist economies, markets eliminate obsolete technologies and utilize innovations to create new avenues for economic growth. Read more …

Kiernan, Matthew J. Investing in a sustainable world : why GREEN is the new color of money on Wall Street. Wiley, 2009.

Krosinsky, Cary and Nick Robins, eds. Sustainable investing : the art of long-term performance. Earthscan, 2008.

Traditionally, ethical and socially responsible investing has been driven by personal values. While this approach has been successful in some sectors in the U.S. and the U.K., the mainstream institutional marketplace has been out of reach. But now, research by Innovest Strategic Value Advisors shows that companies with superior positioning on sustainability issues achieved superior financial returns. Two new books discuss how both Wall Street and Main Street are now interested in investing in ethical, social and green companies to attain long term financial performance.

In Investing in a Sustainable World, Innovest founder and CEO Matthew J. Kiernan makes the business case for integrating environmental and social considerations into investment decisions. He presents conceptual and practical tools to help investors realize environmental, social and financial objectives at the same time. Read more …

Two component publications in the SRDS Media Solutions database platform will be unavailable this weekend during scheduled upgrade maintenance.

From 5:00 PM EST, Friday October 16th, until 1:00 AM EST, Monday, October 19th, the Business Publication Advertising Source, and the Consumer Magazine Advertising Source will be offline and unavailable.

SRDS is upgrading and re-naming these component publications during this downtime.  Please email us if you experience any difficulty accessing other publications within the SRDS Media Solutions database.

Note that the U.S. National Parks documentary listed below is Ken Burns’ latest film.

Our Daily Bread
Reincarnation
Rosemary’s Baby
Sleep Dealer
The Thief Lord
Trick ‘r Treat
Wallace & Gromit : A Matter of Loaf and Death
X-Men Origins. Wolverine

UPDATED: 10/15/09 – Access has been restored! The London office that manages Economist.com made some web site updates overnight that “broke” authenticated access to many Economist.com site pages and to the Economist Magazine for their academic customers. Thanks for your patience during the outage.

Duke University Libraries access to text + graphics issues of the Economist Magazine via Economist.com is temporarily unavailable.

Duke users who attempt to access the Economist Magazine via Economist.com from our Economist Publications home page, and from the Library catalog are being erroneously prompted to login by Economist.com.

We have contacted EIU concerning this issue and are awaiting their response. In the meantime, the current, full text (no graphics) of The Economist Magazine is still available from our Economist Publications home page, and in the ABI-Inform Complete database.

Thanks for your patience while we work with EIU to resolve this issue.