"The author of The Blunder Book and The Book of Lies is back - with his most entertaining "human foible" book yet! The Complete Book of Greed romps through the history of human avarice to expose a trove of unimaginable extravagance." "From the ancient Egyptian pharaohs - who filled their massive burial pyramids with gold in hopes of "taking it with them" - to today's oil sheiks and corporate chieftains, Goldberg humorously details the bizarre lifestyles of the rich and greedy down through the ages, including the wife who was awarded the largest divorce settlement in history - $950 million plus property; the billionaire who installed a pay telephone in his mansion for use by his guests; the maharajah who made his six Rolls-Royces into garbage trucks; the spectacular swindle that caused Barbara Walters, Alan Alda, Barbra Streisand, and the chairmen of Pepsico, Citicorp, and General Electric to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars; and the $100 million party that was held in 62 tents spread over 160 acres." "With the droll style and amusing caricatures that Goldberg's readers enjoy, The Complete Book of Greed is an entertaining odyssey through the annals of conspicuous consumption."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Should we care that wealth in the United States is unequally distributed ” and getting more so every year? Should we worry that America's most wealthy, in just a generation, have more than doubled their share of the nation's wealth?Our nation's highest leaders certainly don't think so. They either ignore, or dismiss, the huge gaps in income and wealth that divide us. But these gaps, author Sam Pizzigati shows in his compelling new book, are undermining nearly every aspect of our lives, from our health to our happiness, from our professions to our pastimes, from our arts to our Earth.Greed and Good both reveals the horrific price we pay for tolerating inequality and dissects the case for greed, the old saws that apologists for inequality regularly trot out to justify the mammoth concentrations of wealth that tower all around us. These concentrations, Greed and Good argues, can and must be cut down to democratic size. And Greed and Good, in clear-headed and fascinating prose, even shows how.

The Seven Deadly Sins have sliced up the dictionary and taken what's theirs. No one vice is too greedy as each volume prides itself on having more than 500 entries. Word lovers will lust after these richly packaged volumes--and once you've collected all seven, you'll be the envy of all your friends. Greed: A Dictionary for the Selfish Surprisingly, it didn't claim every word in the OED (although if it could, it would). This pocket-sized dictionary swipes only the most worthy of syllables, as well as the reader's attention.

"How the two richest families in the world, the Hunts of Texas and the House of Saud, tried to corner the silver market--how they failed, who stopped them, and why it could happen again"--Jacket subtitle.

Grasping. Avarice. Covetousness. Miserliness. Insatiable cupidity. Overreaching ambition. Desire spun out of control. The deadly sin of Greed goes by many names, appears in many guises, and wreaks havoc on individuals and nations alike. In this lively and generous book, Phyllis A. Tickle argues that Greed is "the Matriarch of the Deadly Clan," the ultimate source of Pride, Envy, Sloth, Gluttony, Lust, and Anger. She shows that the major faiths, from Hinduism and Taoism to Buddhism and Christianity regard Greed as the greatest calamity humans can indulge in, engendering further sins and eviscerating all virtues. As the Sikh holy book Adi Granth asks: "Where there is greed, what love can there be?" Tickle takes a long view of Greed, from St. Paul to the present, focusing particularly on changing imaginative representations of Greed in Western literature and art. Looking at such works as the Psychomachia, or "Soul Battle" of the fifth-century poet Aurelius Clemens Prudentius, the paintings of Peter Bruegel and Hieronymous Bosch, the 1987 film Wall Street, and the contemporary Italian artist Mario Donizetti, Tickle shows how our perceptions have evolved from the medieval understanding of Greed as a spiritual enemy to a nineteenth-century sociological construct to an early twentieth-century psychological deficiency, and finally to a new view, powerfully articulated in Donizetti's mystical paintings, of Greed as both tragic and beautiful. Engaging, witty, brilliantly insightful, Greed explores the full range of this deadly sin's subtle, chameleon-like qualities, and the enormous destructive power it wields, evidenced all too clearly in the world today.

The Power of Greed recommends a shift away from the moralistic way we often go about doing international development. It says we can be too focused on our own ambitions for others and too unaware of what they’re up to on their own behalf. It argues that the desperate and greedy behaviours of the poor and their oppressors are not the enemies of international development, but its potential allies. It also says we ought to resist taking sides in defence of the poor. Productive alliances between oppressed and oppressor are possible if the conditions are right. Furthermore, it says that we need to tie national institutional and economic strengthening measures to the creation of sustainable interest groups at the grassroots. Only they could be in a position to prevent greed and corruption at the top in a sustainable way. For these reasons, The Power of Greed tries to get us to focus on doing more about the opportunity structure in the developing world and, for the rest, to rely on the opportunism of the population.

War corrupts. Endless war corrupts absolutely. Ever since 9/11 America has fought an endless war on terror, seeking enemies everywhere and never promising peace. In Pay Any Price, James Risen reveals an extraordinary litany of the hidden costs of that war: from squandered and stolen dollars, to outrageous abuses of power, to wars on normalcy, decency, and truth. In the name of fighting terrorism, our government has done things every bit as shameful as its historic wartime abuses -- and until this book, it has worked very hard to cover them up. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. FDR authorized the internment of thousands of Japanese Americans. Presidents Bush and Obama now must face their own reckoning. Power corrupts, but it is endless war that corrupts absolutely.