History's Worst Decisions: And the People who Made ThemAllen & Unwin, 2005 - 256 pàgines The 64 A.D. burning of Rome during the reign of Nero ... Winston Churchill's ill-conceived and disastrous World War I plan to invade Turkey at Gallipoli ... the Maginot Line, built in France in 1929-34 in a foolhardy effort to prevent the feared German invasion ... the 1950s thalidomide pharmaceutical disaster that resulted in at least 20,000 babies born with deformities ... the 1989-91 misappropriation of company funds by publishing executive Robert Maxwell, and the collapse of his financial empire ... the Enron scandal of 2000 that brought down a yet larger business empire. Chronicled in these pages are stories of corporate chicanery, poor military decisions, engineering disasters, diplomatic blunders, and other appalling, large-scale mistakes that resulted in ruin and misery for countless innocent bystanders. Here are baleful tales motivated by false hope, anger, greed, pride, lust, and many other instances of erratic human behavior. A selection of approximately 50 disastrous decisions are presented, each grim account summarized in a report of roughly a half-dozen pages and enhanced with sidebars and thumbnail-sized cartoon-style illustrations. Each account opens with its cast of characters, then sets the story's background before reporting the grim details and concluding with the unhappy moral. Here is a page-turner of a book that recounts some of history's most dramatic-but also catastrophic-moments. |
Des de l'interior del llibre
Resultats 1 - 5 de 11.
Pàgina 9
... took Route A instead of Route B. And a lot of those decisions " seemed like a good idea at the time . " But there were also some monumentally stupid things . This book takes a journey through the sheer idiocy of humanity . Not honest ...
... took Route A instead of Route B. And a lot of those decisions " seemed like a good idea at the time . " But there were also some monumentally stupid things . This book takes a journey through the sheer idiocy of humanity . Not honest ...
Pàgina 15
... took place , as the archaeological evidence proves . Homer wrote The Iliad some five centuries after the fact . It would hardly be surpris- ing that he would have appealed to contemporary sensibilities and introduced the gods into a ...
... took place , as the archaeological evidence proves . Homer wrote The Iliad some five centuries after the fact . It would hardly be surpris- ing that he would have appealed to contemporary sensibilities and introduced the gods into a ...
Pàgina 16
... took Helen , the beau- tiful wife of Menelaus , away with him . His mother dreamed that the baby would destroy his own homeland ( pretty good prophecy , as it turned out ) and left him on a mountaintop to die . Brought up by the usual ...
... took Helen , the beau- tiful wife of Menelaus , away with him . His mother dreamed that the baby would destroy his own homeland ( pretty good prophecy , as it turned out ) and left him on a mountaintop to die . Brought up by the usual ...
Pàgina 17
... took Menelaus and Odysseus almost as long to get back to Greece as it did to fight the war . This was fortunate for literature in that the costly jealousy of Menelaus inspired three major fixtures in the canon of literary masterpieces ...
... took Menelaus and Odysseus almost as long to get back to Greece as it did to fight the war . This was fortunate for literature in that the costly jealousy of Menelaus inspired three major fixtures in the canon of literary masterpieces ...
Pàgina 22
... took . His impetuosity was both a wonderful triumph and the seed of his ultimate failure . He made one fatal mistake along the way that CHARACTER THAT HANNIBAL cost him half his army , most of his animals , and left him unable to ...
... took . His impetuosity was both a wonderful triumph and the seed of his ultimate failure . He made one fatal mistake along the way that CHARACTER THAT HANNIBAL cost him half his army , most of his animals , and left him unable to ...
Continguts
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10 | |
14 | |
20 | |
27 | |
32 | |
The First Real Estate Scam | 37 |
Pope Sylvester and the End of the World | 41 |
Disease in the Crimea | 73 |
Mutiny and Beef Fat | 78 |
Thomas Austins Rabbits | 83 |
General Custer and Little Big Horn | 88 |
King Leopold and the Scramble for Africa | 94 |
Nicholas Alexandra and the Mad Monk | 100 |
Ismays Lifeboats | 105 |
The Assassination of Franz Ferdinand | 110 |
Pope Alexander and the Search for Prester John | 45 |
George Podiebrad the Last Bohemian and World Peace | 49 |
Moctezuma and the Returning God | 55 |
The Worst Deal Ever Made | 60 |
Lord North and King George Ills Tea Party | 64 |
Napoleon the March to Russiaand Frankenstein | 68 |
Winston Churchill and the Disaster at Gallipoli | 116 |
Trench Warfare General Haig and the Battle of the Somme | 120 |
Maginots Line | 126 |
The Map of Iraq | 131 |
Stalin and the Great Purge | 136 |
Altres edicions - Mostra-ho tot
History's Worst Decisions and the People who Made Them Stephen Weir Previsualització no disponible - 2008 |
History's Worst Decisions and the People who Made Them Stephen Weir Previsualització no disponible - 2009 |
Frases i termes més freqüents
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