Friday, December 26, 2008

The Informant or Dance of the Dissident Daughter

The Informant: A True Story

Author: Kurt Eichenwald

In The Informant, award-winning investigative reporter and New York Times bestselling author Kurt Eichenwald tells the outrageously true story of greed, corruption, and conspiracy that left the FBI and Justice Department counting on the cooperation of one man. Now headed for the silver screen, the film adaptation of The Informant is being directed by Academy Award-winning director Steven Soderbergh, with Matt Damon set to portray Marc Whitacre, the executive who wore a wire for the FBI as they tried to bring down corporate giant Archer Daniels Midland—but whose dark secrets and hidden agenda threatened to unravel one of the largest price-fixing cases in history.

BusinessWeek - Mike France

Using loads of new evidence and indepth interviews with players on every side of the drama, Eichenwald constructs one of the most compelling business narratives since Barbarians at the Gate.

Booknews

A reporter reveals the script-like convoluted tale, complete with a cast of main characters, of an Archer Daniels Midland executive who acted as an FBI informant to uncover a price- fixing conspiracy at this powerful US corporation in the mid-1990s. Lacks an index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

New York Times Book Review - Bryan Burrough

Eichenwald has written what may be the best business narrative since the early 1980's . . . The writing is lean, spare and without pretense.

New York Times - Allan Sloan

...within a few pages the reader is hooked. I knew how the story ended, but I still couldn't put the book down...The Informant is a good and valuable book. Its reporting is extraordinary and sucks you in. It shows how in big business life can imitate art. And Mr. Eichenwald didn't even have to make any of it up.

What People Are Saying

Liz Smith
I'm going to recommend a dilly of a book. Kurt Eichenwald's The Informant ... This is the true tale of how one man, Mark Whitacre, became a secret goverment witness in the Archer Daniel Midland conspiracy. (ADM was scheming to steal millions from its customers.) The book reads like John Grisham on acid, and once begun, you can't put it down. On par with A Civil Action, it would also make a fascinating movie. Super agent Freya Manston has a hit with author Eichenwald. Critic Bryan Burrough said, "One of the best non-fiction books of the decade."




New interesting book: Mathematical Methods and Models for Economists or The Mathematics of Money

Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine

Author: Sue Monk Kidd

"I was amazed to find that I had no idea how to unfold my spiritual life in a feminine way. I was surprised, and, in fact, a little terrified, when I found myself in the middle of a feminist spiritual reawakening." ––Sue Monk Kidd

For years, Sue Monk Kidd was a conventionally religious woman. Then, in the late 1980s, Kidd experienced an unexpected awakening, and began a journey toward a feminine spirituality. With the exceptional storytelling skills that have helped make her name, author of When the Heart Waits tells her very personal story of the fear, anger, healing, and freedom she experienced on the path toward the wholeness that many women have lost in the church. From a jarring encounter with sexism in a suburban drugstore, to monastery retreats and to rituals in the caves of Crete, she reveals a new level of feminine spiritual consciousness for all women– one that retains a meaningful connection with the "deep song of Christianity," embraces the sacredness of ordinary women's experience, and has the power to transform in the most positive ways every fundamental relationship in a woman's life– her marriage, her career, and her religion.

This Plus edition paperback includes a recent interview with the author conducted by the book's editor Michael Maudlin.

Murray Stein

Out of reflections and words like these in The Dance of the Dissident Daughter the new forms of Christianity will be born. This work is packed with experience and insight, and it is bound to add to the gigantic shift in consciousness taking place as the millennium turns and a transformation of spiritual consciousness takes hold of the human population on a global level.

Christiane Northrup

A masterpiece of womens wisdom.

Lauren Artress

The psycho-spiritual redefinition that takes place when we expand our understanding of the Christian tradition to embrace the gracious challenge of the Sacred Feminine is an invisible process. Sue Monk Kidd courageously articulates this unseen path so all who read this book will understand this painful and rewarding journey.

Publishers Weekly

The author's journey to capture her feminine soul and to live authentically from that soul makes a fascinating, well-researched and well-written story. Kidd's successful pilgrimage from her Southern Baptist roots and away from the patriarchal and fundamentalist Christian religious systems surrounding her is an account of anger turned to courage, creativity and love. A mid-career realization that she had lived without "real inner authority" and with "a fear of dissension, confrontation, backlash, a fear of not pleasing, not living up to sanctioned models of femininity" produced in Kidd the new mindset that made her journey possible. Additionally, her extensive knowledge of many subjects, including theology, mythology and the arts, made possible the copious references and cross-references that will prove invaluable for readers who wish to follow her in this same search. While Kidd cautions that each woman's path will be unique, there is no question but that many women will find in her book a mirror of their own present conditions and a hopeful call to self-discovery. (June)

Library Journal

What happens when the wife of a Southern Baptist minister, a loyal adherent to his religious tradition, suddenly discovers an alternative religious tradition that speaks more strongly to her spiritual longings? Kidd (When the Heart Waits, HarperSanFrancisco, 1991) recounts her own journey of anger, fear, and joy from her traditional Baptist upbringing to her new discovery of the power of nontraditional feminine religious experiences. Along her journey, Kidd encounters some of the most powerful feminist religious voices of her times, from Phyllis Trible to Carol Christ, and records these voices as guideposts on her journey. A graceful account of awakening and transformation. Recommend for most libraries.



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