...Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game Michael Lewis For Billy Fitzgerald I can still hear him shouting at me Lately in a wreck of a Californian ship, one of the passengers fastened a belt about him with two hundred pounds of gold in it, with which he was found afterwards at the bottom. Now, as he was sinking-had he the gold? or the gold him? —John Ruskin, Unto This Last Preface I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. But the idea for the book came well before I had good reason to write it—before I had a story to fall in love with. It began, really, with an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games? For more than a decade the people who run professional baseball have argued that the game was ceasing to be an athletic competition and becoming a financial one. The gap between rich and poor in baseball was far greater than in any other professional sport, and widening rapidly. At the opening of the 2002 season, the richest team, the New York Yankees, had a payroll of $126 million while the two poorest teams, the Oakland A's and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, had payrolls of less than a third of that, about $40 million. A decade before, the highest payroll...
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...22000 ESSENTIAL WORDS FOR IELTS AND TOEFL Cũng có 1 chút kinh nghiệm về kỳ thi IELTS, nên hôm nay chia sẻ cùng mọi người. Muốn đạt điểm cao ở kỳ thi IELTS, có 1 điểm rất quan trọng mà Bear nghĩ ai cũng biết: LUYỆN TẬP THƯỜNG XUYÊN. Tuy nhiên, cũng có 1 điểm cực kỳ quan trọng mà đa số thường không chú trọng lắm. Đó là phần từ vựng dạng ACADEMIC (học thuật). Nên để đạt điểm cao trong kỳ thi IELTS, ôn luyện từ trong quyển 22.000 từ THI TOEFL/IELTS của Harold Levine là cực kỳ cần thiết. Mỗi ngày chỉ cần học 3 từ, thì lượng từ vựng của bạn sẽ tăng đáng kể. Số từ vựng này giúp bạn trong cả 4 phần thi LISTENING / SPEAKING / READING / WRITING. Ví dụ: Nếu bạn dùng từ: SIMULTANEOUSLY thay cho từ AT THE SAME TIME, hay PORTABLE thay cho từ EASY TO CARRY hay MITIGATE thay cho từ LESSEN … trong phần WRITING và SPEAKING thì điểm của bạn sẽ cao chót vót không ngờ luôn đấy. Chưa kể, nhất là trong phần READING, những từ trong quyển sách này xuất hiện nhiều lắm, và cả LISTENING nữa chứ. Sự lợi hại của quyển sách này, chắc chắn chỉ khi nào học rồi, bạn mới thấy rõ. Quyển này (nhà xuất bản TPHCM) đã hết bán rồi. Nên nếu bạn nào cần phôtô thì liên lạc Uyên Uyên: UyenUyen@englishtime.us Tuy nhiên mỗi tuần Bear vẫn sẽ post lên đây 20 từ trong quyển sách đó, để nếu bạn nào ở xa, vẫn có thể học được. Đương nhiên mỗi người có 1 cách học riêng và trí nhớ khác nhau. Có người nhìn qua là nhớ liền, có người nhìn hoài vẫn không nhớ, nên Bear suggest...
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...Contents Title Page Dedication Prologue CHAPTER ONE: Republicans and Democrats CHAPTER TWO: Values CHAPTER THREE: Our Constitution CHAPTER FOUR: Politics CHAPTER FIVE: Opportunity CHAPTER SIX: Faith CHAPTER SEVEN: Race CHAPTER EIGHT: The World Beyond Our Borders CHAPTER NINE: Family Epilogue Acknowledgments About the Author Also by Barack Obama Copyright Prologue IT’S BEEN ALMOST ten years since I first ran for political office. I was thirty-five at the time, four years out of law school, recently married, and generally impatient with life. A seat in the Illinois legislature had opened up, and several friends suggested that I run, thinking that my work as a civil rights lawyer, and contacts from my days as a community organizer, would make me a viable candidate. After discussing it with my wife, I entered the race and proceeded to do what every first-time candidate does: I talked to anyone who would listen. I went to block club meetings and church socials, beauty shops and barbershops. If two guys were standing on a corner, I would cross the street to hand them campaign literature. And everywhere I went, I’d get some version of the same two questions. “Where’d you get that funny name?” And then: “You seem like a nice enough guy. Why do you want to go into something dirty and nasty like politics?” I was familiar with the question, a variant on the questions asked of me years earlier, when I’d first arrived in Chicago to work in low-income neighborhoods. It signaled a cynicism...
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...A**HOLE'S GUIDE DAN I N D A N T E AND KARL MARKS ST. MARTIN'S GRIFFIN N EW Y O R K A**HOLE'S GUIDE THE COMPLETE A**HOLE's GUIDE TO HANDLING CHICKS. C o p y r i g h t © 2 0 0 3 by Dan Indante and Karl Marks. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. www.stmartins.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Indante, Dan. The complete a**hole's guide to handling chicks / Dan Indante and Karl Marks. p . cm. ISBN 0-312-31084-6 1. Man-woman relationships. 2. Interpersonal relations. I. Tide: Complete a**hole's guide to handling chicks. II. Marks, Karl. III. Title. HQ801.M37135 307-dc21 2003 2002045213 10 9 8 CONTENTS Introduction: Chicks, What the Fuck? Fifty Tips on Being a Better Asshole ix xiii 1. From Birth to Beating Off The Birth of an Asshole The Purest Form of Asshole Gimme My Toy, You Bitch! Crossing the Dance Floor How Do I Get Her? The Beginning of the End Roughing Up the Suspect 1 1 1 2 3 4 6 2. High School Welcome Mat Firsts The Back-Seat Boogie Chicks Are the Enemy Watch Your Back—Your Friends Won't 8 8 9 15 16 20 vi C O N T E N T S Pecking Order Your First Pincushion So You're Looking to Get Laid High School Final...
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...reputation and what the country knows about the candidate’s background is initially determined by the work of local and regional media. Generally, those journalists do a competent job of reporting on the prospect’s record. In the case of Governor George W. Bush, Texas reporters had written numerous stories about his failed businesses in the oil patch, the dubious land grab and questionable funding behind a new stadium for Bush’s baseball team, the Texas Rangers, and his various political contradictions and hypocrisies while serving in Austin. I was one of those Texas journalists. I spent about a decade trying to find accurate information on Bush’s record in the Texas National Guard. My curiosity had been prompted by his failure to adequately answer a question I had asked him as a panelist in a televised debate with Ann Richards during the 1994 gubernatorial campaign. Eventually I published three books on Bush and his political consigliere, Karl Rove. During Bush’s presidency, many other...
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