Books by "Stephen Jay Gould"
5 books found
Este libro contiene una selección de los textos más importantes de Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), quizá el mayor paleontólogo del siglo XX. Desde El pulgar del panda, hasta La falsa medida del hombre, pasando por Un dinosaurio en un pajar o Las piedras falaces de Marrakech, los 55 trabajos que constituyen esta obra son los más representativos, los más esenciales, para conocer cabalmente las ideas del gran historiador natural norteamericano. A su legendaria capacidad para la divulgación científica -nadie ha hecho tanto por la difusión entre el gran público de las ideas, los entresijos y las maravillas de la biología, de la evolución, o de la historia y la filosofía de la ciencia-, Stephen Jay Gould añade el acervo de una amplísima cultura y una extraordinaria capacidad literaria que hace de la lectura de sus obras una verdadera delicia. Introducción, selección y traducción de Joandomènec Ros, catedrático de Ecología de la Universidad de Barcelona.
Three New York Times bestsellers chronicle the rise of America's most influential Jewish families as they transition from poor immigrants to household names. In his acclaimed trilogy, author Stephen Birmingham paints an engrossing portrait of Jewish American life from the colonial era through the twentieth century with fascinating narrative and meticulous research. The collection's best-known book, "Our Crowd" follows nineteenth-century German immigrants with recognizable names like Loeb, Sachs, Lehman, Guggenheim, and Goldman. Turning small family businesses into institutions of finance, banking, and philanthropy, they elevated themselves from Lower East Side tenements to Park Avenue mansions. Barred from New York's gentile elite because of their religion and humble backgrounds, they created their own exclusive group, as affluent and selective as the one that had refused them entry. The Grandees travels farther back in history to 1654, when twenty-three Sephardic Jews arrived in New York. Members of this small and insulated group—considered the first Jewish community in America—soon established themselves as wealthy businessmen and financiers. With descendants including poet Emma Lazarus, Barnard College founder Annie Nathan Meyer, and Supreme Court Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo, these families were—and still are—hugely influential in the nation's culture, politics, and economics. In "The Rest of Us, " Birmingham documents the third major wave of Jewish immigration: Eastern Europeans who swept through Ellis Island between 1880 and 1924. These refugees from czarist Russia and Polish shtetls were considered barbaric, uneducated, and too steeped in the traditions of the "old country" to be accepted by the well-established German American Jews. But the new arrivals were tough, passionate, and determined. Their incredible rags to riches stories include those of the lives of Hollywood tycoon Samuel Goldwyn, Broadway composer Irving Berlin, makeup mogul Helena Rubenstein, and mobster Meyer Lansky. This unforgettable collection comprises a comprehensive account of the Jewish American upper class, their opulent world, and their lasting mark on American society.
The Catskills (“Cat Creek” in Dutch), America’s original frontier, northwest of New York City, with its seven hundred thousand acres of forest land preserve and its five counties—Delaware, Greene, Sullivan, Ulster, Schoharie; America’s first great vacationland; the subject of the nineteenth-century Hudson River School paintings that captured the almost godlike majesty of the mountains and landscapes, the skies, waterfalls, pastures, cliffs . . . refuge and home to poets and gangsters, tycoons and politicians, preachers and outlaws, musicians and spiritualists, outcasts and rebels . . . Stephen Silverman and Raphael Silver tell of the turning points that made the Catskills so vital to the development of America: Henry Hudson’s first spotting the distant blue mountains in 1609; the New York State constitutional convention, resulting in New York’s own Declaration of Independence from Great Britain and its own constitution, causing the ire of the invading British army . . . the Catskills as a popular attraction in the 1800s, with the construction of the Catskill Mountain House and its rugged imitators that offered WASP guests “one-hundred percent restricted” accommodations (“Hebrews will knock vainly for admission”), a policy that remained until the Catskills became the curative for tubercular patients, sending real-estate prices plummeting and the WASP enclave on to richer pastures . . . Here are the gangsters (Jack “Legs” Diamond and Dutch Schultz, among them) who sought refuge in the Catskill Mountains, and the resorts that after World War II catered to upwardly mobile Jewish families, giving rise to hundreds of hotels inspired by Grossinger’s, the original “Disneyland with knishes”—the Concord, Brown’s Hotel, Kutsher’s Hotel, and others—in what became known as the Borscht Belt and Sour Cream Alps, with their headliners from movies and radio (Phil Silvers, Eddie Cantor, Milton Berle, et al.), and others who learned their trade there, among them Moss Hart (who got his start organizing summer theatricals), Sid Caesar, Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Joan Rivers. Here is a nineteenth-century America turning away from England for its literary and artistic inspiration, finding it instead in Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and his childhood recollections (set in the Catskills) . . . in James Fenimore Cooper’s adventure-romances, which provided a pastoral history, describing the shift from a colonial to a nationalist mentality . . . and in the canvases of Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Frederick Church, and others that caught the grandeur of the wilderness and that gave texture, color, and form to Irving’s and Cooper’s imaginings. Here are the entrepreneurs and financiers who saw the Catskills as a way to strike it rich, plundering the resources that had been likened to “creation,” the Catskills’ tanneries that supplied the boots and saddles for Union troops in the Civil War . . . and the bluestone quarries whose excavated rock became the curbs and streets of the fast-growing Eastern Seaboard. Here are the Catskills brought fully to life in all of their intensity, beauty, vastness, and lunacy.
The New World's earliest Jewish immigrants and their unique, little-known history: A New York Times bestseller from the author of Life at the Dakota. In 1654, twenty-three Jewish families arrived in New Amsterdam (now New York) aboard a French privateer. They were the Sephardim, members of a proud orthodox sect that had served as royal advisors and honored professionals under Moorish rule in Spain and Portugal but were then exiled from their homeland by intolerant monarchs. A small, closed, and intensely private community, the Sephardim soon established themselves as businessmen and financiers, earning great wealth. They became powerful forces in society, with some, like banker Haym Salomon, even providing financial support to George Washington's army during the American Revolution. Yet despite its major role in the birth and growth of America, this extraordinary group has remained virtually impenetrable and unknowable to outsiders. From author of "Our Crowd" Stephen Birmingham, The Grandees delves into the lives of the Sephardim and their historic accomplishments, illuminating the insulated world of these early Americans. Birmingham reveals how these families, with descendants including poet Emma Lazarus, Barnard College founder Annie Nathan Meyer, and Supreme Court Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo, influenced—and continue to influence—American society.
Chapter 11 corporate bankruptcy proceedings are commonly thought of as a tool to protect the broader economy from the failure of large firms, even though the biggest players reap the greatest rewards. In the conventional telling, modern corporate reorganization began in the 1890s, with J. P. Morgan leading a noble effort to protect bondholders from the depredations of corporate insiders. What does this story leave out, and how do the true origins of bankruptcy law shed light on its present-day uses and abuses? To Protect Their Interests is a groundbreaking historical account of how corporate bankruptcy became what it is today—a forum for battles between well-heeled insiders. Stephen J. Lubben strips away the myths surrounding the history of corporate restructuring, showing that it emerged a decade before Morgan, when the robber baron Jay Gould strove to keep control of his railroad by working out a compromise with a handful of wealthy investors. The 1885 restructuring of Texas and Pacific Railway set the pattern for future corporate reorganizations: insider dealing, elite manipulation of the legal system, and judicial deference. Lubben traces the evolution of the bankruptcy system through a series of major cases involving companies such as W. T. Grant and Toys “R” Us, demonstrating that it has always been a way for the powerful to maintain power. Revealing the sordid origins of bankruptcy law, this book also considers the limited prospects for reform.