What makes somebody a Loser, a person doomed to unfulfilled dreams and humiliation? Nobody is born to lose, and yet failure embodies our worst fears. The Loser is our national bogeyman, and his history over the past two hundred years reveals the dark side of success, how economic striving reshaped the self and soul of America. From colonial days to the Columbine tragedy, Scott Sandage explores how failure evolved from a business loss into a personality deficit, from a career setback to a gauge of our self-worth. From hundreds of private diaries, family letters, business records, and even early credit reports, Sandage reconstructs the dramas of real-life Willy Lomans. He unearths their confessions and denials, foolish hopes and lost faith, sticking places and changing times. Dreamers, suckers, and nobodies come to life in the major scenes of American history, like the Civil War and the approach of big business, showing how the national quest for success remade the individual ordeal of failure. Born Losers is a pioneering work of American cultural history, which connects everyday attitudes and anxieties about failure to lofty ideals of individualism and salesmanship of self. Sandage's storytelling will resonate with all of us as it brings to life forgotten men and women who wrestled with The Loser--the label and the experience--in the days when American capitalism was building a nation of winners.

Compared to much of the rest of the world, America and its citizens are rich. But many people are also deeply miserable—at work, at home, or both. In this provocative book, author John Brueggemann unpacks why so many people are struggling, both emotionally and financially, in a nation that looks so prosperous on the surface. From a hospital patient reduced to a balance sheet to a parent working such long hours that he misses dinner, Brueggemann argues that market thinking has permeated every corner of our lives. In the pursuit of more and better, relationships erode, to the detriment of individuals, communities, and the nation as a whole. Rich, Free, and Miserable not only outlines these pressing social problems, but also offers practical suggestions for people looking to make a positive change.

In this controversial work, Herv Varenne and Ray McDermott explore education as cultural phenomenona construct of artifice and reality we impose upon ourselves. Questioning how the American education system defines and measures success and failure, Successful Failure is a must-read for anyone interested in educational reform, the American educational system, and the anthropology of education. }In this controversial work, Herv Varenne and Ray McDermott explore education as cultural phenomenona construct of artifice and reality we impose upon ourselves. The authors discuss in five case studies how the American education system defines and measures success and failure, why there is polarization between suburban schools and urban schools, and what about our system leads us to focus on the negative. Their exploration focuses not on the people or the activities of the system, but on the institutions themselves: who decided what was a success or failure? How was the identification done, and with what consequences?This important and timely book is a must-read for anyone interested in educational reform, the American educational system, and the anthropology of education.

Ranging widely over a span of three hundred and fifty years of discussion and controversy, Martha Banta's book makes a fundamental contribution to the continuing debate on the nature of success and failure in a specifically American context. Her Whitmanesque view of the debate takes in the work of innumerable writers, particularly Emerson, Thoreau, Twain, Melville, Henry Adams, William and Henry James, Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, and Norman Mailer. She draws on the work of philosophers, psychologists, and historians as well. Rather than discussing failure and success as merely economic or political statistics, Professor Banta explores them in terms of attitudes and concepts. She asks what it feels like for an American to succeed or fail in a country that is often defined in relation to its own success or failure as an idea and as an experience. While examining the thoughts, feelings, and language of Americans caught in the dialectic between winning and losing, the author reveals the strain Americans feel in fulfilling the overall scheme of their own lives as well as the life or destiny of their country. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This history of success in the United States illustrates the degree to which personal and professional accomplishments have determined overall life satisfaction. Beyond serving as a guide to the past, present, and future of success in America, especially that found in the business world, this book poses a provocative argument: the standard practice of employing outer-directed measures of success, notably wealth, power, and fame, has worked to the psychological disadvantage of many Americans. More specifically, it shows that a comparative and competitive view of success has made a significant number of individuals feel less successful than if more inner-directed measures were used. Ironically then, the traditional model of success in the United States has been largely a failure. This work offers historians, practitioners, and general readers of non-fiction a blueprint for how to adopt a more meaningful and positive model of success in their everyday lives.

Failure should not be an option in the presidency, but for too long it has been the norm. From the botched attempt to rescue the U.S. diplomats held hostage by Iran in 1980 under President Jimmy Carter and the missed intelligence on Al Qaeda before 9-11 under George W. Bush to, most recently, the computer meltdown that marked the arrival of health care reform under Barack Obama, the American presidency has been a profile in failure. In Why Presidents Fail and How They Can Succeed Again, Elaine Kamarck surveys these and other recent presidential failures to understand why Americans have lost faith in their leaders—and how they can get it back. Kamarck argues that presidents today spend too much time talking and not enough time governing, and that they have allowed themselves to become more and more distant from the federal bureaucracy that is supposed to implement policy. After decades of "imperial" and "rhetorical" presidencies, we are in need of a "managerial" president. This White House insider and former Harvard academic explains the difficulties of governing in our modern political landscape, and offers examples and recommendations of how our next president can not only recreate faith in leadership but also run a competent, successful administration.

This book develops a systematic approach to the role of failure in innovation, using the laboratory notebooks of America's most successful inventor, Thomas Edison. It argues that Edison's active pursuit of failure and innovative uses of failure as a tool were crucial to his success. From this the author argues that not only should we expect innovations to fail but that there are good reasons to want them to fail. Using Edison's laboratory notebooks, written as he worked and before he knew the outcome we see the many false starts, wrong directions and failures that he worked through on his way to producing revolutionary inventions. While Edison's strengths in exploiting failure made him the icon of American inventors, they could also be liabilities when he moved from one field to another. Not only is this book of value to readers with an interest in the history of technology and American invention, its insights are important to those who seek to innovate and to those who employ and finance them.