"An absorbing, affecting and beautifully written novel."--New York Times Book Review

A former Wall Street Journal reporter and author of The Proving Ground presents a narrative account of the construction of a $40 million yacht through the experiences of its contributors, tracing the audacious Ponzi scheme devised by its creator and the roles of the Southern Mississippi laborers who built it.

Tells the story of Doug Von Allmen's plan to build an extraordinary yacht and the way that the 2008 financial crisis threatened the project and the livelihood of the one thousand employees of the shipyard where it was built.

David Tittensor offers a groundbreaking new perspective on the Gülen movement, a Turkish Muslim educational activist network that emerged in the 1960s and has grown into a global empire with an estimated worth of $25 billion. Named after its leader Fethullah Gülen, the movement has established more than 1,000 secular educational institutions in over 140 countries, aiming to provide holistic education that incorporates both spirituality and the secular sciences. Despite the movement's success, little is known about how its schools are run, or how Islam is operationalized. Drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey, Tittensor explores the movement's ideo-theology and how it is practiced in the schools. His interviews with both teachers and graduates from Africa, Indonesia, Central Asia, and Turkey show that the movement is a missionary organization, but of a singular kind: its goal is not simply widespread religious conversion, but a quest to recoup those Muslims who have apparently lost their way and to show non-Muslims that Muslims can embrace modernity and integrate into the wider community. Tittensor also examines the movement's operational side and shows how the schools represent an example of Mohammad Yunus's social business model: a business with a social cause at its heart. The House of Service is an insightful exploration of one of the world's largest transnational Muslim associations, and will be invaluable for those seeking to understand how Islam will be perceived and practiced in the future.

Providing a critique of international relations theory and a critical examination of how leaders with transformative ambition change domestic and international politics, this book will appeal to leadership, politics and international relations academic

Common Finno-Ugric spoken between 4000 B.C. to approximately 3000 B.C. in the watershed area)continental Devide) between the Volgas Bend and the Ural Mountains ()presently Russias) Around 1200 words could be reconstructed for this ancient language form by comparative phonology of about 20 languages (such as Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Lapp/Sami, Khanty, Mansi, Mordvin, etc.) still spokon altogether by about 24 million non/Slavic native speakers in oil-rich Eastern Europe and Western Siberia. Reconstrcted grammar, syntax asnd semantics of Commoin Finno-Ugric are also discussed. The book is a so-called "worksheet-edition". Lists, charts aare printed in it as they came out from the computer. This will facilitate subsequent research (especially manipulation of the data in computers). The narrative is kept in a simple form "cablespeak' style). The grabscripotion is uncomplicated. Diacritic marks were only occasionally used (only c; and c" appear). Easy to read and understand even by the general; reader. Targeted specialist of Linguistics, Language Origins Research (LOR), Language Universals, Cultural Anthropology, Human Prehistory , Comparative Religion Study find here a massive amount of new information unknown or little heeded in previous international research.

This is the first comprehensive exploration of ancient and modern tyranny in the history of political thought. Waller R. Newell argues that modern tyranny and statecraft differ fundamentally from the classical understanding. Newell demonstrates a historical shift in emphasis from the classical thinkers' stress on the virtuous character of rulers and the need for civic education to the modern emphasis on impersonal institutions and cold-blooded political method. The turning point is Machiavelli's call for the conquest of nature. Newell traces the lines of influence from Machiavelli's new science of politics to the rise of Atlanticist republicanism in England and America, as well as the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century and their effects on the present. By diagnosing the varieties of tyranny from erotic voluptuaries like Nero, the steely determination of reforming conquerors like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar and modernizing despots such as Napoleon and Ataturk to the collectivist revolutions of the Jacobins, Bolsheviks, Nazis, and Khmer Rouge, Newell shows how tyranny is every bit as dangerous to free democratic societies today as it was in the past.