Shining a spotlight on the life, vision, and cultivation of one of Canada's most influential historical figures.

A timely, intriguing collection of the overlooked stories of Victoria’s pioneers, trailblazers, and community builders who were also diverse people of colour. Often described as “more English than the English,” the city of Victoria has a much more ethnically diverse background than historical record and current literature reveal. Significant contributions were made by many people of colour with fascinating stories, including: the Kanaka, or Hawaiian Islanders, who constructed Fort Victoria, and members of the Kanaka community such as Maria Mahoi and William Naukana three Metis matriarchs—Amelia Connolly Douglas, Josette Legacé Work, and Isabelle M. Mainville Ross the Victoria Voltigeurs, the earliest police presence in the Colony of Vancouver Island, and who were primarily men of colour Grafton Tyler Brown, now known in the United States as one of the first and best African American artists of the American West Manzo Nagano, Canada’s first recorded immigrant from Japan and many more With information about various cultural communities in early Victoria and significant dates, May Wong’s City in Colour is a collection of fascinating stories of unsung characters whose stories are at the heart of Victoria’s history.

The great Gothic cathedrals of Europe are among the most astonishing achievements of Western culture. Evoking feelings of awe and humility, they make us want to understand what inspired the people who had the audacity to build them. This engrossing book surveys an era that has fired the historical imagination for centuries. In it Robert A. Scott explores why medieval people built Gothic cathedrals, how they built them, what conception of the divine lay behind their creation, and how religious and secular leaders used cathedrals for social and political purposes. As a traveler’s companion or a rich source of knowledge for the armchair enthusiast, The Gothic Enterprise helps us understand how ordinary people managed such tremendous feats of physical and creative energy at a time when technology was rudimentary, famine and disease were rampant, the climate was often harsh, and communal life was unstable and incessantly violent. While most books about Gothic cathedrals focus on a particular building or on the cathedrals of a specific region, The Gothic Enterprise considers the idea of the cathedral as a humanly created space. Scott discusses why an impoverished people would commit so many social and personal resources to building something so physically stupendous and what this says about their ideas of the sacred, especially the vital role they ascribed to the divine as a protector against the dangers of everyday life. Scott’s narrative offers a wealth of fascinating details concerning daily life during medieval times. The author describes the difficulties master-builders faced in scheduling construction that wouldn’t be completed during their own lifetimes, how they managed without adequate numeric systems or paper on which to make detailed drawings, and how climate, natural disasters, wars, variations in the hours of daylight throughout the year, and the celebration of holy days affected the pace and timing of work. Scott also explains such things as the role of relics, the quarrying and transporting of stone, and the incessant conflict cathedral-building projects caused within their communities. Finally, by drawing comparisons between Gothic cathedrals and other monumental building projects, such as Stonehenge, Scott expands our understanding of the human impulses that shape our landscape.

The Verizon leadership team stands apart from most leadership teams today in their willingness repeatedly to put the enterprise before the individual. At first blush, this might look like a hopelessly old-fashioned notion in the age of the selfie. Yet, I would argue this is a trait that future leaders and boards of directors across industries would do well to understand and embrace. Seidenberg not once but twice in the service of company shareholders and employees subordinated himself and put off taking sole leadership of the company to advance the enterprise’s odds of success. And many others in this story exhibited the same trait to help build this industry-leading enterprise. They understood that the risk of not acting and thereby destroying value during a period of accelerating technological change and industry consolidation—a situation faced by leadership teams around the world today—was much greater than the risk of stepping in as No. 2 or co-CEO. In my 50 years of experience, it is a rare leadership team that will subordinate itself for the benefit of the industry, customers and the company. That principle, that the company comes first, the individual second, is what will define successful leadership teams of the future. Multiple leadership principles, some new, some timeless, emerge from this narrative and will be of great use to the next generation of leaders across industries and around the world. By taking a look at a company that successfully executed exponential transformation, we can take the strategies of Verizon leaders and apply them to our own experiences.—Ram Charan

The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism, but under the name of liberalism, they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened. -Norman Thomas With the GDP growing to its peak in June 2008, why did the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy of September 15, 2008, help spark a recession that grew to be the Great Recession? How is it possible that American financial leadership was so negligent and uninformed as to not foresee an economic situation that would be described as being so severe that it would require trillions of dollars to avoid a Great Depression? Are we so incapable from a financial management perspective, or are we so paralyzed by political forces that necessary corrections were either not foreseen or not allowed? Through meticulous research, Masters of Audacity and Deceit answers these questions and connects the dots that link the myriad factors that have led this country to its current state.

"Brings together the disciplines of art, music, and history to explore the importance of the past to conceptions of the present in the central Middle Ages"--Provided by publisher.

This study of class during the Great Depression is the first to examine a relatively neglected geographical area, the northern plains states of North and South Dakota, from a social and cultural perspective. Surveying the values and ideals of the old midd