Working Together (Harper Collins), gives us a tremendous and invaluable insight as to why great partnerships succeed. Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner reveals not only how professional partnerships have contributed to his success, but we are also privileged to hear the stories of nine other highly successful business collaborations, including Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, Valentino and Giancarlo Giammetti, Bill and Melinda Gates, Joe Torre and Don Zimmer, and Brian Grazer and Ron Howard.
In business there are always unique individual achievers, but pull down the veil and you’ll often find someone alongside them. Michael Eisner uses his own collaboration with Frank Wells at Disney as a launching point for examining other famously successful partnerships. Eisner offers us an intimate and deeply personal look at some of the most rewarding business partnerships, uncovering what makes them tick, providing unconventional wisdom and unexpected insights. In this essential book Eisner weaves together ten separate narratives— from investment gurus to entertainment impresarios, fashion designers to bigbox retailers—into a larger story about the true nature of achievement in life and in business.
Poker Face, The Rise and Rise of Lady Gaga, by Maureen Callahan (Hyperion), takes us on the showbiz ride of the decade, filled with contradiction, ambition and pure unadulterated determination.
“Stop feeding me bullshit. Tell me the truth.” —Lady Gaga, 2009
“I hate the truth. I hate the truth so much I prefer a giant dose of bullshit any day over the truth.” —Lady Gaga, 2010
In little over a year, Stefani Germanotta, a once struggling performer in New York’s Lower East Side burlesque scene, has become the global demographic-smashing pop icon known as Lady Gaga. She is a once-in-a-decade artist, a gifted singer, composer, designer, and performance artist who mixes high and low culture, the avant-garde with the accessible, authenticity with artifice. She is a twentyfour- year-old woman whose stage mantra—“I’m a free bitch!”—is the polar opposite of who she is offstage: isolated, insecure, and unable to be alone. She is an outré artist who wanted to be a sensitive singer-songwriter, whose musical heroes include Britney Spears, Billy Joel, and Bruce Springsteen. She is a woman who says no man can ever compete with her career, and claims not to care what people think, but spends her downtime online, reading what people have to say about her. She sees herself as a con artist and yet utterly authentic. She is never less than compelling. Based on over fifty original interviews with friends, employees, rivals, and music industry veterans, Poker Face is the first in-depth biography of the extraordinary cultural phenomenon that is Lady Gaga.
A Peculiar Tribe of People, Murder and Madness in the Heart of Georgia by Richard Jay Hutto (Lyons Press), is a shocking Southern true crime tale of racism, murder, and taboo sex. On May 12, 1960, as John F. Kennedy campaigned for the presidency, Chester Burge—slumlord, liquor runner, and the black sheep of the proud (and wealthy) Dunlap family of Macon, Georgia—lay in a hospital bed, recovering from surgery. He listened to the radio as the news reported that his wife had just been murdered. Police soon ruled out robbery as a motive, and suspicion centered upon the Ku Klux Klan, which two weeks earlier had descended upon his house to protest his renting of homes in white neighborhoods to black families. On June 1, Chester was charged with the murder, and when the trial finally began, the sweet Southern town of Macon witnessed a story of epic proportions— a tale of white-columned mansions, an insane asylum, and a volatile mix of taboo interracial relationships and homosexuality.
As fantastical as a Greek tragedy, this true story is told in riveting detail. After weaseling his way to be the caretaker of the last Dunlap sister and forcing his way into her will, Chester Burge and his family inherited a fortune as well as the family mansion. Then came his numerous liaisons with men—including his black chauffeur— and, either single-handedly or with help from a lover, the murder of his wife. The trial would spawn the first testimony in Georgia history of a black man disclosing that he had been a white man’s sexual partner. Burge would be acquitted of murder, but convicted of sodomy. This Southern grotesque tale takes even more twists and turns before coming to an explosive conclusion.
