America is still a land of opportunities, when you have good friends and schoolmates, appreciative bosses who value your potential to contribute to their enterprise,regardless of your race,national origin or speaking English with foreign accent. But it is not inevitable that you can have a great journey in America. God luck will make it happen. This is a true story of Joe's lucky journey in America. Joe came to Seattle with a foreign student visa from Taipei in 1960. His first job in Seattle was a night shift janitor at Doctors Hospital so he might go to school during the day. Two years later his physics laboratory partner got him a job as a part time technician at Being Airplane Company. the Boeing experience got him a teaching assistantship in electrical engineering department of Johns Hopkins university in 1963. He finished his Ph.D. dissertation in 1968. He taught Communication Systems at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1968 -1969. Not by planning he luckily entered into American military industrial complex world beginning 1970. First Joe received his security clearance from US Department of Defense in 1970 at Page Communications Engineering company in Washington, D.C. and then the clearances from the US Navy, US Army and US Department of Energy. He was naturalized to be American citizen in July of 1970. Between 1970 and 1987 he worked hard as a system analyst, operational analyst and project director for the US Navy and the US Army, reaching the top rank of GS-18 in Senior Executive Service of the US Government. He received one Outstanding civilian Service Medal from the Department of the Army and a Distinguished Public Service Award (medal) from the Secretary of the Navy. During this period he travelled all over the world for his job, by air, by land, on water and under water of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In 1987 he was hired as manager of strategic planning at Westinghouse Defense Group in Baltimore and chairman of Westinghouse annual R and D symposium(1988-1995). He was also appointed President of Westinghouse Electronic Systems International Marketing Company (1988-1992). He marketed electronics system of F-16s for more than twenty F-16 user countries. Grumman purchased Westinghouse Defense Group in 1995 and made him Director of special projects pursuing business opportunities in the post Soviet market in Moscow of New Russia and Cape Town of the new Republic of South African. Joe's interest in global technology issues took him to Planetary Defense workshop in 1995 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. the workshop was co-chaired by Dr. Edward Teller ( father of hydrogen bomb } and Dr. Eugene Shoemaker (discoverer of short comet). His interest in the future of defense industries attracted him to attend in 1996, the NATO Conference on defense industry conversion strategies at Perthshire of Scotland, UK in 1996. Joe retired from Grumman on march 1, 1998. It had taken him more than fifteen years to acknowledge in this book that how lucky he had been .

In this New York Times bestselling memoir, the announcer of the biggest sporting events in the country—including the 2017 Super Bowl and this century's most-watched, historic, Chicago Cubs–winning World Series—reveals why he is one lucky bastard. Sports fans see Joe Buck everywhere: broadcasting one of the biggest games in the NFL every week, calling the World Series every year, announcing the Super Bowl every three years. They know his father, Jack Buck, is a broadcasting legend and that he was beloved in his adopted hometown of St. Louis. Yet they have no idea who Joe really is. Or how he got here. They don’t know how he almost blew his career. They haven’t read his funniest and most embarrassing stories or heard about his interactions with the biggest sports stars of this era. They don’t know how hard he can laugh at himself—or that he thinks some of his critics have a point. And they don’t know what it was really like to grow up in his father’s shadow. Joe and Jack were best friends, but it wasn’t that simple. Jack, the voice of the St. Louis Cardinals for almost fifty years, helped Joe get his broadcasting start at eighteen. But Joe had to prove himself, first as a minor league radio announcer and then on local TV, national TV with ESPN, and then finally on FOX. He now has a successful, Emmy-winning career, but only after a lot of dues-paying, learning, and pretty damn entertaining mistakes that are recounted in this book. In his memoir, Joe takes us through his life on and off the field. He shares the lessons he learned from his father, the errors he made along the way, and the personal mountain he climbed and conquered, all of which have truly made him a Lucky Bastard.

The inside story of the historic 2020 presidential election and Joe Biden’s harrowing ride to victory, from the #1 New York Times bestselling authors of Shattered, the definitive account of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Almost no one thought Joe Biden could make it back to the White House—not Donald Trump, not the two dozen Democratic rivals who sought to take down a weak front-runner, not the mega-donors and key endorsers who feared he could not beat Bernie Sanders, not even Barack Obama. The story of Biden’s cathartic victory in the 2020 election is the story of a Democratic Party at odds with itself, torn between the single-minded goal of removing Donald Trump and the push for a bold progressive agenda that threatened to alienate as many voters as it drew. In Lucky, #1 New York Times bestselling authors Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes use their unparalleled access to key players inside the Democratic and Republican campaigns to unfold how Biden’s nail-biting run for the presidency vexed his own party as much as it did Trump. Having premised his path on unlocking the Black vote in South Carolina, Biden nearly imploded before he got there after a relentless string of misfires left him freefalling in polls and nearly broke. Allen and Parnes brilliantly detail the remarkable string of chance events that saved him, from the botched Iowa caucus tally that concealed his terrible result, to the pandemic lockdown that kept him off the stump, where he was often at his worst. More powerfully, Lucky unfolds the pitched struggle within Biden’s general election campaign to downplay the very issues that many Democrats believed would drive voters to the polls, especially in the wake of Trump’s response to nationwide protests following the murder of George Floyd. Even Biden’s victory did not salve his party’s wounds; instead, it revealed a surprising, complicated portrait of American voters and crushed Democrats’ belief in the inevitability of a blue wave. A thrilling masterpiece of political reporting, Lucky is essential reading for understanding the most important election in American history and the future that will come of it.

In this hilarious, laser-sharp comedy, the Emmy-winning writer and producer of Frasier sends up Hollywood pretense higher than it's ever been sent before.

Joe Ricketts, founder of TD Ameritrade, shares the epic inside story of how a working-class kid from the Nebraska prairie took on Wall Street’s clubby brokerage business, busted it open, and walked away a billionaire. Joe Ricketts always had the gift of seeing what others missed. The son of a house builder, he started life as a part-time janitor, but by the age of thirty-three he saw the chance to challenge the big brokerage firms by offering Americans an inexpensive way to take control of their own stock trading. Nowadays, we take for granted that Main Street is playing right there on Wall Street, but Ricketts made that happen. His company, begun with $12,500 borrowed from friends and family, took off like a rocket thanks to an early embrace of digital technology and irreverent marketing. But Ameritrade also faced a series of near-disasters: the SEC almost shut him down; his partners tried to force him out because of his relentless risk-taking; penny brokers swindled the company; the crash of 1989 nearly cost him everything; and he was almost shut down again when a customer committed massive fraud. By the time of the dot-com bust, he had proven that his strategy based on frontier values could survive just about anything. The Harder You Work, The Luckier You Get offers a view inside Joe Ricketts’ mind, giving readers a visceral understanding of how entrepreneurs think and act differently from the rest of us—how they see the horizon where we just see a spreadsheet. As unvarnished as the prairie he comes from, Ricketts also talks honestly about his shortcomings as a manager, the career sacrifices his wife made for his business, the complexity of being a father, and the pain of splitting with his mentor and of his brother’s death from AIDS. Overcoming these and other challenges, he built a company now worth $30 billion. A must-read for anyone who’s ever dreamed of starting their own business, The Harder You Work, The Luckier You Get is the ultimate only-in-America story.

‘What a story and what an inspirational human. Ed is a total legend.’ Joe Wicks ‘A life-affirming story . . . inspirational’ Tim Peake As seen in the Daily Mail From tragedy to triumph, one step at a time – an inspirational story of triumph over adversity against the odds