On My Radar:

Fighting Back the Right: Reclaiming America from the Attack on Reason
by David Niose
Palgrave Macmillan
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

he political scene is changing rapidly in America. The religious right is on the defensive, acceptance of gay rights is at an all-time high, social conservatives are struggling for relevance, and more Americans than ever identify as nonreligious. What does this mean for the country and the future? With these demographic shifts, can truly progressive, reason-based public policy finally gain traction? Or will America continue to carry a reputation as anti-intellectual and plutocratic, eager to cater to large corporate interests but reluctant to provide universal health care to all its citizens? Fighting Back the Right reveals a new alliance in the making, a progressive coalition committed to fighting for rational public policy in America and reversing the damage inflicted by decades of conservative dominance. David Niose, Legal Director of the American Humanist Association (AHA), examines this exciting new dynamic, covering not only the rapidly evolving culture wars but also the twists and turns of American history and politics that led to this point, and why this new alliance could potentially move the country in a direction of sanity, fairness, and human-centered public policy.

In My TBR Stack:

Consider: Harnessing the Power of Reflective Thinking in Your Organization
Daniel Patrick Forrester
Palgrave Macmillan
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

There's an intangible and invisible market place within our lives today where the products traded are four fold: attention, distraction, data and meaning. The stories and examples within Consider demonstrate that the best decisions, insights, ideas and outcomes result when we make sufficient time to think and reflect.  While technology allows us to act and react more quickly than ever before, we are taking increasingly less time to consider our decisions before we make them.  Reflection supplies an arsenal of ideas and solutions to the right problems.  The organizations and leaders who can sustain thought upon the right problems, while they absorb the unknowns that will inevitably arise, will prove the most relevant and lasting in this already turbulent new century.

In My TBR Stack:

Beauty Queen: Inside the Reign of Avon's Andrea Jung
Deborrah Himsel
Palgrave Macmillan
Hardcover


From the publisher's website:

Andrea  Jung, the glamorous former  head of Avon, was arguably the world’s  most charismatic and effective CEO, credited with the astonishing turnaround  of the venerable brand. Avon’s  board was filled with tough-minded, successful CEOs and other high achievers, but when Jung walked into a room wearing her Chanel suit, custom- blended lipstick  and signature pearls, every head  turned  and she had them eating out of her hand. She seemed incapable of making a wrong move, until, amid declining sales, an investigation by the SEC, and a brand in crisis she stepped down in late 2012. In Beauty Queen, former Avon VP Deborrah Himsel uses Jung’s story as a case study for two timeless leadership questions: What  makes great leaders great? And what makes them fail? She explores both Jung’s early years of success as well as the combination  of missteps that led to her downfall, including her failure to nurture  Avon’s  direct selling channel, the erosion of trust that occurred as a result of frequent decision reversals, and her ignorance of operational details, including  how her people secured a license to conduct door-to-door  sales in China, that led to a federal investigation. Through  interviews with other CEOs, Avon executives past and present, and leadership experts, she explores the unique challenges Jung faced as a female Fortune 500 CEO; the thin line between pride and hubris; and the danger of the so-called “halo effect” in our high-stakes times.

In My TBR Stack:

Taking Down the Lion: The Triumphant Rise and Tragic Fall of Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski
Catherine S. Neal
Palgrave Macmillan
Hardcover

As the widely-admired CEO of Tyco International, Dennis Kozlowski grew a little-known New Hampshire conglomerate into a global giant. In a stunning series of events, Kozlowski suddenly lost his job along with his favored public status when he was indicted by legendary Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau -- it was an inglorious end to an otherwise brilliant career. Kozlowski was made the face of corporate excess in the turbulent post-Enron environment when he was publicly castigated for his extravagant lifestyle. Kozlowski was ultimately convicted of grand larceny and other crimes that, in sum, found the former CEO guilty of wrongfully taking $100 million from Tyco. His life, once rags-to-riches success story, was irreversibly rewritten.

Taking Down the Lion shines a bright light on the Tyco corporate scandal -- it is the definitive telling of a largely misunderstood episode in U.S. business history. In an unfiltered view of corporate America, Catherine S. Neal reveals a world of big business, ambition, money, media and an epidemic of questionable ethics that infected not only business dealings but extended to attorneys, journalists, politicians, and the criminal justice system.

When the truth is told, it’s clear the "good guys" were not all good, and the "bad guys" not all bad, and that chasing the American Dream can lead to a tragic end.

Author Bio
Catherine S. Neal, author of Taking Down the Lion: The Triumphant Rise and Tragic Fall of Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski, is an Associate Professor of Business Ethics and Business Law in the Haile/US Bank College of Business at Northern Kentucky University. She is a graduate of the University of Cincinnati College of Law where she was a Corporate Law Fellow. Professor Neal was granted unprecedented access to Dennis Kozlowski, his papers, attorneys, family, friends, and former Tyco colleagues, as well as transcripts and evidence from two criminal trials. Neal's research included interview with former Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau, the foreman of the jury that convicted Kozlowski, and key Tyco insiders.

For more information please visit http://www.denniskozlowskibook.com, and follow the author on Facebook and Twitter

Reviews
"If you read Taking Down the Lion, you need to be prepared to stay awake late into the night. This is the painful yet riveting story of the government's professionally petty, jealousy-driven, crowd pleasing, yet utterly wrong and immoral destruction of an economic genius; and it is well told by Catherine S. Neal. Dennis Kozlowski created jobs and wealth in a political environment in which his work and his rewards became an obstacle for the government. This book is a tour de force in the terrors of justice which should never have happened in America. It is a story we all need to know. It could happen to any of us."
-- Hon. Andrew P. Napolitano, Senior Judicial Analyst, Fox News Channel

"In Taking Down the Lion, business ethics Professor Catherine S. Neal has the guts to take down the conventional history of the tragic fall of Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski. Kozlowski sits in prison longer than murderers, the victim of his outsized greed, betrayal by his Board, and unbridled prosecutorial excess. This is a contrarian view that casts a shadow on whether greed and hubris translated into criminal behavior. A riveting read, with a rigorous case that Kozlowski was railroaded."
-- James O. Campbell, Host of nationally syndicated Business Talk with Jim Campbell

BookSpin Giveaway!

I recently promoted this book here.



The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage
by Graham A. Rayman
Palgrave Macmillan
Hardcover

Palgrave Macmillan has graciously offered 3 copies of The NYPD Tapes to readers of BookSpin.  If you want to be eligible to win, you need to do one of three things:

1.  Retweet my tweet about the giveaway.  If you don't already, you can follow me @Book_Dude.

2.  Comment to this post with your desire to win.

3.  Publicize the giveaway on your Facebook page and email me a link.  My email address is located at the top right of this page.

I will contact the winners to get mailing addresses, no need to include them on your entry.

Good luck!

Many thanks to Rachel from Palgrave Macmillan for her hard work and assistance with this giveaway.

On My Radar:

The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage
by Graham A. Rayman
Palgrave Macmillian
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

In May 2010, NYPD officer Adrian Schoolcraft made national headlines when he released a series of secretly recorded audio tapes exposing corruption and abuse at the highest levels of the police department. But, according to a lawsuit filed by Schoolcraft against the City of New York, instead of admitting mistakes and pledging reform Schoolcraft’s superiors forced him into a mental hospital in an effort to discredit the evidence. InThe NYPD Tapes, the reporter who first broke the Schoolcraft story brings his ongoing saga up to date, revealing the rampant abuses that continue in the NYPD today, including warrantless surveillance and systemic harassment. Through this lens, he tells the broader tale of how American law enforcement has for the past thirty years been distorted by a ruthless quest for numbers, in the form of CompStat, the vaunted data-driven accountability system first championed by New York police chief William Bratton and since implemented in police departments across the country. Forced to produce certain crime stats each quarter or face discipline, cops in New York and everywhere else fudged the numbers, robbing actual crime victims of justice and sweeping countless innocents into the police net. Rayman paints a terrifying picture of a system gone wild, and the pitiless fate of the whistleblower who tried to stop it.

Praise

"Adrian Schoolcraft joined the NYPD for old-fashioned reasons, to have a good job while protecting the people. Instead, he ran up against police bosses who cared more about low crime statistics than public safety. That collision, as devastatingly described by Graham Rayman, is a tale of crime prevention turned upside down in the Bloomberg era. Rayman has invented a new genre: the police misprocedural."--Tom Robbins

"Not only has Graham Rayman told the incredible story of Adrian Schoolcraft, whose forced hospitalizaiton by the NYPD in a mental ward is reminiscent of the Sovet Union's KGB, but Rayman puts that sad and frightening incident into a larger context: how the NYPD systemically downgrades crimes to make New York City appear to be safer than it actually is."--Leonard Levitt, author of NYPD Confidential and Conviction 

"Graham Rayman's a great reporter and Adrian Schoolcraft’s story was one of the most gripping things we've ever put on This American Life. The NYPD Tapes tells more of what happened, and reveals the full extent that officials were willing to go in their cover-up.”--Ira Glass, host of public radio’s This American Life

Biography

Graham A. Rayman is a writer for The Village Voice who has covered the New York City Police Department for 17 years. His NYPD Tapes series has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the Polk Award, the Harvard Goldsmith award, and a half-dozen other prizes. Previously, he was at Newsday, covering Ground Zero on the day of the 9/11 attacks and writing about the start of the Iraq War after being embedded with a US Marine Corps. He lives in New York City. 

On My Radar: Tuesday Edition

iDisorder: Understanding our Obsesssion with Technology and Overcoming its Hold on Us
by Larry Rosen, Ph.D.

Palgrave Macmillan
Hardcover

From time to time, I get contacted by publicists or agencies to consider reviewing certain books that they are promoting.  A lot of the time, the books are not remotely interesting to me, or they are fiction (!), and I respectfully decline.  But sometimes the books cover subjects that fit within my narrow reading scope.
When contacted about iDisorder, I knew immediately I wanted to see it.  The subject is one I have often entertained on my own, and it is nice to find a book to help me make up my mind.  I am currently reading this book and will publish a review as soon as I can.  --BookDude

From the publicity:

iDisorder: changes to your brain's ability to process information and your ability to relate to the world due to your daily use of media and technology resulting in signs and symptoms of psychological disorders - such as stress, sleeplessness, and a compulsive need to check in with all of your technology.

Based on decades of research and expertise in the "psychology of technology," Dr. Larry Rosen offers clear, down-to-earth explanations for why many of us are suffering from an "iDisorder." Rosen offers solid, proven strategies to help us overcome the iDisorder we all feel in our lives while still making use of all that technology offers. Our world is not going to change, and technologywill continue to penetrate society even deeper leaving us little chance to react to the seemingly daily additions to our lives. Rosen teaches us how to stay human in an increasingly technological world.

- - - - - 

Each chapter of iDisorder is devoted to a different psychological disorder such as narcissistic personality disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, addiction and social phobias. Dr. Rosen identifies the symptoms of each disorder, how technology use can bring them out in us, and how they can be curbed. Readers will learn:  

• What your activity on Facebook can tell you about how narcissistic you are 
• How to tell when your cell phone obsession actually borders on OCD 
• How accurate your online dating persona is, and why it might not truly reflect who you are 
• Ways to increase ?virtual empathy? and avoid the common pitfall of ignoring the feelings of others
• How to tell when social networking and reality TV are making you too much of a voyeur for your own good