In the tradition of Pour Your Heart Into It and How Starbucks Saved My Life, a surprising and inspiring memoir from the founders of Banana Republic. With $1,500 and no business experience, Mel and Patricia Ziegler turned a wild idea into a company that would become the international retail colossus Banana Republic. Re-imagining military surplus as safari and expedition wear, the former journalist and artist created a world that captured the zeitgeist for a generation and spoke to the creativity, adventure, and independence in everyone. In a book that’s honest, funny, and charming, Mel and Patricia tell in alternating voices how they upended business conventions and survived on their wits and imagination. Many retail and fashion merchants still consider Banana Republic’s early heyday to be one of the most remarkable stories in fashion and business history. The couple detail how, as “professional amateurs,” they developed the wildly original merchandise and marketing innovations that broke all retail records and produced what has been acclaimed by industry professionals to be “the best catalogue of all time.” A love story wrapped in a business adventure, Wild Company is a soulful, inspiring tale for readers determined to create their own destiny with a passion for life and work and fun.

When William Sydney Porter faces prison for embezzlement in Austin, Texas, he catches the first tramp steamer to Central America. The year is 1905. He washes up in the town of Coralio, in a country with no extradition treaty with the U.S. and a government at the mercy of American scoundrels, drunks, and robber-barons. Porter establishes himself as a newspaper printer, despite violent opposition from the most powerful individual in the country--Walter Whitaker, the president of the Vesuvius Fruit Company. Whitaker sees Porter's newspaper as a threat to his plans to overthrow the government and install a puppet who will give him concessions to build a railroad to the new Panama Canal. Loosely based on the history of U.S. intervention in the "banana wars" of the early twentieth century, as well as on the life and stories of O. Henry, Banana Republic is a comic tale of greed, ambition, and gunboat diplomacy.

In this new analysis of Honduran social and political development, Dar degreeso Euraque explains why Honduras escaped the pattern of revolution and civil wars suffered by its neighbors Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Within this comparative framework, he challenges the traditional Banana Republic 'theory' and its assumption that multinational corporations completely controlled state formation in Central America. Instead, he demonstrates how local society in Honduras's North Coast banana-exporting region influenced national political development. According to Euraque, the reformism of the 1970s, which prevented social and political polarization in the 1980s, originated in the local politics of San Pedro Sula and other cities along the North Coast. Moreover, Euraque shows that by the 1960s, the banana-growing areas had become bastions of liberalism, led by local capitalists and organized workers. This regional political culture directly influenced events at the national level, argues Euraque. Specifically, the military coup of 1972 drew its ideology and civilian leaders from the North Coast, and as a result, the new regime was able to successfully channel popular unrest into state-sponsored reform projects. Based on long-ignored sources in Honduran and American archives and on interviews, the book signals a major reinterpretation of modern Honduran history.

Towards Water Wisdom makes a fervent plea for an urgent and radical transformation of our thinking on water. The author redefines the projected water crisis as one of mismanagement rather than scarcity, and calls for a more equitable, harmonious and sustainable management of the resource. Water-related conflicts are also discussed, including the Indus Treaty, the differences over Baglihar, the Cauvery and Ravi-Beas disputes, and rehabilitation problems in the Narmada Valley. The author questions the idea of property rights in water and argues that the fundamental or human right to water must take precedence over contractual and economic rights. The inadequacies of India`s water laws and policies are examined and a case made for a constitutional declaration on water and a national water law. Finally, the author widens the perspective and draws attention to a changing world that makes a change in our thinking imperative.

Depicted as braggart, brute, and bore in The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan has gotten a bad rap and means to correct the record. That weak-kneed, simpering cousin of his wife's, with his prattling about some lost idealized American individualism and rectitude, was not only a fool and a liar, but worse: a failed bond salesman. Pathetic. But by 1924 Tom has bigger problems than the pathos of the summer of '22. First, there's Aunt Gertrude, who has assumed control of the Buchanan fortune. Second, what with Daisy getting jowly and the maids indiscreet, there's little tranquillity at home. Third, a revolution is brewing in Nicaragua that's threatening to ensnare the family investments. So when Tom is dispatched to maneuver among Nicaragua's international corporate intrigues, machine-gun-toting rival political parties, and competing American intelligence agencies, he spies his chance. A rollicking, outrageous, and altogether brilliant perversion of known facts, Banana Republican sends the sexist, racist, elitist Buchanan careening through America's brilliantly mismanaged intervention in Nicaragua in the early twentieth century. Eric Rauchway bends history to Buchanan's memoir as Tom blunders, shoots, and screws his way through the historical record and makes the case that greed and amorality have always been at the heart of the American dream.