A fully illustrated graphic memoir of a child of the '60s who was raised into a life of crime and addiction —but graduated into freedom. Matthew Parker was in his mid-forties when he started college. He’d been sidetracked: Eleven years were eaten up by serving time in various county jails, state penitentiaries, and federal prison. He’d been arrested more than thirty times, racking up eight felonies in a crime career that began at age thirteen, when he started dealing pot. When he got out of prison for the last time and kicked his heroin addiction, he was determined to spend the next chapter of his life in the classroom. And he did just that, going on to complete a master’s degree from Columbia University’s highly competitive creative writing program. Through captivating black-and-white illustrations drawn in a distinctively primitive style, Larceny in My Blood flashes back on Parker's childhood, with memories of a loving but lawless mother teaching him that breaking the law was the way to survive. From there it moves to an account of Parker’s lost decades, where he resorted to petty crime to support a heroin habit. After years of fighting the system, Parker sees the light and Larceny in My Blood becomes a poignant portrait of a man trying to find his way in the straight and narrow. A unique memoir, Parker’s images and words form a mesmerizing road to redemption.

#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER AN ADAM SAVAGE BOOK CLUB PICK The book-length answer to anyone who ever put their hand up in math class and asked, “When am I ever going to use this in the real world?” “Fun, informative, and relentlessly entertaining, Humble Pi is a charming and very readable guide to some of humanity's all-time greatest miscalculations—that also gives you permission to feel a little better about some of your own mistakes.” —Ryan North, author of How to Invent Everything Our whole world is built on math, from the code running a website to the equations enabling the design of skyscrapers and bridges. Most of the time this math works quietly behind the scenes . . . until it doesn’t. All sorts of seemingly innocuous mathematical mistakes can have significant consequences. Math is easy to ignore until a misplaced decimal point upends the stock market, a unit conversion error causes a plane to crash, or someone divides by zero and stalls a battleship in the middle of the ocean. Exploring and explaining a litany of glitches, near misses, and mathematical mishaps involving the internet, big data, elections, street signs, lotteries, the Roman Empire, and an Olympic team, Matt Parker uncovers the bizarre ways math trips us up, and what this reveals about its essential place in our world. Getting it wrong has never been more fun.

The Panama Canal was the costliest undertaking in history; its completion in 1914 marked the beginning of the “American Century.” Panama Fever draws on contemporary accounts, bringing the experience of those who built the canal vividly to life. Politicians engaged in high-stakes diplomacy in order to influence its construction. Meanwhile, engineers and workers from around the world rushed to take advantage of high wages and the chance to be a part of history. Filled with remarkable characters, Panama Fever is an epic history that shows how a small, fiercely contested strip of land made the world a smaller place and launched the era of American global dominance.

Traces the rise and fall of Caribbean sugar dynasties, discussing the Britain's dependence on colony wealth, the role of slavery in sugar plantation culture, and the North American colonial opposition to sugar policy in London.

Monte Cassino is the true story of one of the bitterest and bloodiest of the Allied struggles against the Nazi army. Long neglected by historians, the horrific conflict saw over 350,000 casualties, while the worst winter in Italian memory and official incompetence and backbiting only worsened the carnage and turmoil. Combining groundbreaking research in military archives with interviews with four hundred survivors from both sides, as well as soldier diaries and letters, Monte Cassino is both profoundly evocative and historically definitive. Clearly and precisely, Matthew Parker brilliantly reconstructs Europe’s largest land battle–which saw the destruction of the ancient monastery of Monte Cassino–and dramatically conveys the heroism and misery of the human face of war.

The fastest growing and most competitive organizations in the world have no bureaucracies, no bosses, and no bullshit. The tomato sauce in your pantry. The raincoat in your closet. The smart TV hanging in your living room. What do all of these products have in common? Chances are they were created by organizations where colleagues self-allocate into teams based on intrinsic motivation. Where individuals self-manage their commitments to each other without the coercion of managers. And where teams launch new products and ventures on the market without the control of leaders. These organizations represent a new, radically collaborative breed of corporation. Recently doubling in number and already comprising 8% of corporations around the world, scientists and researchers have discovered that radically collaborative organizations are more competitive on practically every meaningful financial measure. They enjoy higher market share, higher innovation, and higher customer satisfaction than their traditional corporate competitors—and they also enjoy higher engagement, loyalty, and motivation from their employees. In this groundbreaking book, technology thought leader and organizational architect Matt K. Parker breaks down the counterintuitive principles and practices that radically collaborative organizations thrive on. By combining the latest insights from organizational science, sociology, and psychology, he illuminates four imperatives that all radically collaborative organizations must embrace in order to succeed: team autonomy, managerial devolution, deficiency gratification, and candid vulnerability. Millions of workers around the world are collapsing under the weight of command-and-control culture. The crisis has reached its breaking point. Now is the time to embrace radical change. Discover the revolutionary shift to partnership and equality and the economic superiority that follows with A Radical Enterprise.

Three lectures, initially presented before the University of Cambridge and now collected here, examine Matthew Parker as a noted collector of books, an avid annotator, and a keen student of Old English. In these lectures Dr. Page assesses the evidence for Parker's use of his manuscripts and printed books by drawing upon varied sources, including Parker's very numerous annotations upon their pages, and surveys the archbishop's role in the early-modern rediscovery and recovery of Old English and other medieval sources. Plates accompany the text to illustrate many characteristic aspects of Parker's interventions in his books.