The words "Goudchaux's/Maison Blanche" conjure up a wealth of fond memories for local shoppers. At this landmark Louisiana department store, clerks greeted you by name; children received a nickel to buy a Coke and for every report-card A; families anticipated the holiday arrival of the beloved puppet Mr. Bingle almost as much as Santa; teenagers applied for their first job; and customers enjoyed interest-free charge accounts and personal assistance selecting attire and gifts for the most significant occasions in life -- baptisms, funerals, and everything in between. While most former patrons have a favorite story to tell about Goudchaux's/Maison Blanche, not many know the personal tale behind this beloved institution. In We Were Merchants, Hans Sternberg provides a captivating account of how his parents, Erich and Lea, fled from Nazi Germany to the United States, embraced their new home, and together with their children built Goudchaux's into a Baton Rouge legend that eventually became Goudchaux's/Maison Blanche -- an independent retail force during the golden era of the department store and, by 1989, the largest family-owned department store in America. With a mercantile line extending back five generations to a small shop in eighteenth-century Germany, the Sternbergs were born to be shopkeepers. In 1936, as Nazi harassment of Jews intensified, Erich smuggled $24,000 out of Germany and settled in Baton Rouge. His wife and three children joined him a year later, and in 1939, Erich bought Goudchaux's and set about transforming it from a nondescript apparel shop into a true department store. He made buying trips to New York for quality fashions and furs, introduced imaginative sales promotions, and coached his staff in impeccable customer service, while also training his children to follow in his footsteps. Hans details the manifold challenges of operating the store -- from planning financial strategies and creating marketing campaigns to implementing desegregation and accommodating the repeal of blue laws. Through many transforming events -- Erich's death in 1965, expansion into suburban shopping malls, the purchase in the 1980s of New Orleans retail icon Maison Blanche -- the Sternbergs successfully maintained the company's core values: quality merchandise, employee loyalty, and superior customer service. At its height, Goudchaux's/Maison Blanche operated twenty-four stores in Louisiana and Florida and employed more than 8,000 people. With the economic downturn of the early 1990s, Hans made the difficult decision to sell the business, thus bringing to an end the Sternbergs' centuries-long mercantile tradition. Supplementing the fascinating narrative are the recollections of former customers and employees, a wealth of pertinent photos, and even Hans's tried-and-true guidelines for negotiating a business transaction. At once a family, business, and community story, We Were Merchants richly recalls a bygone era when department stores were near-magical wonderlands and family businesses commanded the retail landscape.

A new history of English trade and empire—revealing how a tightly woven community of merchants was the true origin of globalized Britain In the century following Elizabeth I’s rise to the throne, English trade blossomed as thousands of merchants launched ventures across the globe. Through the efforts of these "mere merchants," England developed from a peripheral power on the fringes of Europe to a country at the center of a global commercial web, with interests stretching from Virginia to Ahmadabad and Arkhangelsk to Benin. Edmond Smith traces the lives of English merchants from their earliest steps into business to the heights of their successes. Smith unpicks their behavior, relationships, and experiences, from exporting wool to Russia, importing exotic luxuries from India, and building plantations in America. He reveals that the origins of "global" Britain are found in the stories of these men whose livelihoods depended on their skills, entrepreneurship, and ability to work together to compete in cutthroat international markets. As a community, their efforts would come to revolutionize Britain’s relationship with the world.

The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on such areas as public health, environmental science, and issues affecting quality of life. These scientists have produced landmark studies on the dangers of DDT, tobacco smoke, acid rain, and global warming. But at the same time, a small yet potent subset of this community leads the world in vehement denial of these dangers. Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. Remarkably, the same individuals surface repeatedly-some of the same figures who have claimed that the science of global warming is "not settled" denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. "Doubt is our product," wrote one tobacco executive. These "experts" supplied it. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science, roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how ideology and corporate interests, aided by a too-compliant media, have skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era.

From the author of the award-winning The Master Switch, who coined the term "net neutrality”—a revelatory, ambitious and urgent account of how the capture and re-sale of human attention became the defining industry of our time. "Dazzling." —Financial Times Ours is often called an information economy, but at a moment when access to information is virtually unlimited, our attention has become the ultimate commodity. In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of efforts to harvest our attention. This condition is not simply the byproduct of recent technological innovations but the result of more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention. Wu’s narrative begins in the nineteenth century, when Benjamin Day discovered he could get rich selling newspapers for a penny. Since then, every new medium—from radio to television to Internet companies such as Google and Facebook—has attained commercial viability and immense riches by turning itself into an advertising platform. Since the early days, the basic business model of “attention merchants” has never changed: free diversion in exchange for a moment of your time, sold in turn to the highest-bidding advertiser. Full of lively, unexpected storytelling and piercing insight, The Attention Merchants lays bare the true nature of a ubiquitous reality we can no longer afford to accept at face value.

"A compelling history of America's famous Jewish shopkeeping families shows how the Filenes, Gimbels, Marcuses, and others created renowned retail empires out of small pushcart beginnings, powerfully evoking the social changes that were transforming America early in the century."--

There was a time when humanity looked in the mirror and saw something precious, worth protecting and fighting for—indeed, worth liberating. But now, we are beset on all sides by propaganda promoting a radically different viewpoint. According to this idea, human beings are a cancer upon the Earth, a horde of vermin whose aspirations and appetites are endangering the natural order. This is the core of antihumanism. Merchants of Despair traces the pedigree of this ideology and exposes its pernicious consequences in startling and horrifying detail. The book names the chief prophets and promoters of antihumanism over the last two centuries, from Thomas Malthus through Paul Ehrlich and Al Gore. It exposes the worst crimes perpetrated by the antihumanist movement, including eugenics campaigns in the United States and genocidal anti-development and population-control programs around the world. Combining riveting tales from history with powerful policy arguments, Merchants of Despair provides scientific refutations to all of antihumanism’s major pseudo-scientific claims, including its modern tirades against nuclear power, pesticides, population growth, biotech foods, resource depletion, and industrial development.

The gripping and definitive in-the-room account of the revolution that has swept the news industry over the last decade and reshaped our world. The last decade has seen the News industry face unprecedented change. The sometimes-century old institutions which were once the bastions of truth have had their dominance eroded by vast innovations in viral technology and, as millennial appetites force the industry to choose between principles of objectivity and impartiality, the survivors must confront the horrifying cost of their success: sexual scandal, fake news, the election of President Trump and the shaking of democracy. Taking us behind the scenes at four media titans - BuzzFeed, VICE, The New York Times and The Washington Post - Abramson reveals the human drama behind this shift: one involving deal-making tycoons, thrusting reporters, hard-bitten editors, egomaniacs, bullshitters, provocateurs and bullies, with some surfing and others drowning in the breaking wave of change. 'A cracking, essential read... Abramson knows where most of the bodies are buried and is prepared to draw the reader a detailed map' Guardian