HAVE YOU BEEN DRINKING, SIR? Officer Kevin Burns made a remarkable 1,590 DWI arrests in his 27-year career working for the town of Southbury, CT, from 1989 to 2016. Early in his career, fed up with being called to accidents caused by drunk drivers, he decided to do something about it. He determined the best way to prevent such accidents was to stop drunk drivers before they crashed. "I saw DWI detection enforcement as preventing homicide/suicide/assault with a motor vehicle." Such an illustrious achievement should be celebrated by law enforcement, and Kevin Burns crowned a hero. Instead, he suffered discrimination at the hands of his department, including being unjustly accused of offenses that earned him a sixty-day suspension. Failure to Drive Right tells the stories of over one hundred of Officer Burns's more memorable DWI arrests in his career. From the lady partying after an AA meeting to the one with a baby strapped in the backseat, and the man driving drunk on a lawn tractor to the one Burns arrested eight times, Burns's stories are compelling and perhaps even familiar to those from the Southbury area. Burns includes a chapter revealing both the details of his unjust suspension and how he missed out on a well-deserved promotion. He also debunks the myths associated with Officer Burns, and explains how to beat a DWI.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MICHIKO KAKUTANI, THE NEW YORK TIMES • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MORE THAN 45 PUBLICATIONS, INCLUDING The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • NPR • The New Yorker • San Francisco Chronicle • The Economist • The Atlantic • Newsday • Salon • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Guardian • Esquire (UK) • GQ (UK) After three acclaimed novels, Gary Shteyngart turns to memoir in a candid, witty, deeply poignant account of his life so far. Shteyngart shares his American immigrant experience, moving back and forth through time and memory with self-deprecating humor, moving insights, and literary bravado. The result is a resonant story of family and belonging that feels epic and intimate and distinctly his own. Born Igor Shteyngart in Leningrad during the twilight of the Soviet Union, the curious, diminutive, asthmatic boy grew up with a persistent sense of yearning—for food, for acceptance, for words—desires that would follow him into adulthood. At five, Igor wrote his first novel, Lenin and His Magical Goose, and his grandmother paid him a slice of cheese for every page. In the late 1970s, world events changed Igor’s life. Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev made a deal: exchange grain for the safe passage of Soviet Jews to America—a country Igor viewed as the enemy. Along the way, Igor became Gary so that he would suffer one or two fewer beatings from other kids. Coming to the United States from the Soviet Union was equivalent to stumbling off a monochromatic cliff and landing in a pool of pure Technicolor. Shteyngart’s loving but mismatched parents dreamed that he would become a lawyer or at least a “conscientious toiler” on Wall Street, something their distracted son was simply not cut out to do. Fusing English and Russian, his mother created the term Failurchka—Little Failure—which she applied to her son. With love. Mostly. As a result, Shteyngart operated on a theory that he would fail at everything he tried. At being a writer, at being a boyfriend, and, most important, at being a worthwhile human being. Swinging between a Soviet home life and American aspirations, Shteyngart found himself living in two contradictory worlds, all the while wishing that he could find a real home in one. And somebody to love him. And somebody to lend him sixty-nine cents for a McDonald’s hamburger. Provocative, hilarious, and inventive, Little Failure reveals a deeper vein of emotion in Gary Shteyngart’s prose. It is a memoir of an immigrant family coming to America, as told by a lifelong misfit who forged from his imagination an essential literary voice and, against all odds, a place in the world. Praise for Little Failure “Hilarious and moving . . . The army of readers who love Gary Shteyngart is about to get bigger.”—The New York Times Book Review “A memoir for the ages . . . brilliant and unflinching.”—Mary Karr “Dazzling . . . a rich, nuanced memoir . . . It’s an immigrant story, a coming-of-age story, a becoming-a-writer story, and a becoming-a-mensch story, and in all these ways it is, unambivalently, a success.”—Meg Wolitzer, NPR “Literary gold . . . bruisingly funny.”—Vogue “A giant success.”—Entertainment Weekly
Driving is a fact of life. We are all spending more and more time on the road, and traffic is an issue we face everyday. This book will make you think about it in a whole new light. We have always had a passion for cars and driving. Now Traffic offers us an exceptionally rich understanding of that passion. Vanderbilt explains why traffic jams form, outlines the unintended consequences of our attempts to engineer safety and even identifies the most common mistakes drivers make in parking lots. Based on exhaustive research and interviews with driving experts and traffic officials around the globe, Traffic gets under the hood of the quotidian activity of driving to uncover the surprisingly complex web of physical, psychological and technical factors that explain how traffic works.
What are the secrets of successful teams? Why do some teams achieve remarkable success while others fail or are consigned to mediocrity? To find the answers, Carl E. Larson and Frank M.J. LaFasto conducted a three-year study of teams and team achievement. Interviewing a wide range of teams, including the space shuttle Challenger investigation team, executive management teams and a championship football team, Larson and LaFasto discovered a surprising consistency in the characteristics of effective teams. In Teamwork, they explore the eight properties of successful teams: a clear, elevating goal; a results-driven structure; competent team members; unified commitment; collaborative climate; standards of excellence; external support and recognition; and principled leadership. A final chapter examines the priority of the steps that lead to the building of a high performance team. The authors strive to make the concepts concrete, coupling solid theory with straightforward, practical advice on how to apply it and with lively, fascinating anecdotes. The volume will appeal to practitioners, scholars, and advanced students in the areas of organization studies and management, as well as interpersonal communication.
An expert in business turnaround shares his inspiring approach to problem-solving: “A fascinating read” (Mitt Romney). Visionary leader Greg Brenneman believes that true business success and personal fulfillment are two sides of the same coin. The techniques that will grow your business will also help you achieve a rich, purposeful, and integrated life. Here, Brenneman takes what he’s learned from turning around or tuning up many businesses—including Continental Airlines and Burger King—and distills it into a simple, clear, five-step roadmap that anyone can follow. He teaches you how to: *prepare a succinct Go Forward plan *build a fortress balance sheet *grow your sales and profits *choose all-star servant leaders *empower your team For more than thirty years, Brenneman has seen these steps foster dramatic results in a variety of business environments. But he also came to realize that he could apply these same principles to improve his life and build a lasting moral legacy. He found he could make better decisions by carefully taking the most important facets of his life—faith, family, friendship, fitness, and finance—into consideration. Brenneman’s inspiring examples, from both his business and his life, demonstrate the astounding effects these steps can have when you apply them—right away and all at once.
Driving is a privilege and not a right. Drivers must drive responsibly and safely, obey traffic laws, and never drink and drive. Finally, make sure that you and your passengers are properly buckled up - it's the law! Today's vehicles are loaded with technology that was unheard of even a decade ago. Systems that warn when you are drifting from your lane, assist you in parallel parking, automatically brake in emergency situations and provide 360 degrees of vision around the vehicle via a camera are becoming standard, even on moderately priced vehicles. As remarkable as these leaps in automotive technology are, the truth is that the most important safety feature in any vehicle remains you as the driver. Therefore, it is to your benefit to continue improving and expanding your knowledge of traffic laws and safe driving practices. Driving is a privilege. Once you have been issued a driver's license, you have the responsibility to continually demonstrate the skill and knowledge to drive safely. Whether you have been behind the wheel for decades or are just starting to venture out, driving is a discipline that requires judgment, knowledge, physical and mental self-awareness, and practice. "What Every Driver Must Know" is an excellent resource for assisting you on this lifelong journey.
Why do we make mistakes? Are there certain errors common to failure, whether in a complex enterprise or daily life? In this truly indispensable book, Dietrich Dörner identifies what he calls the “logic of failure”—certain tendencies in our patterns of thought that, while appropriate to an older, simpler world, prove disastrous for the complex world we live in now. Working with imaginative and often hilarious computer simulations, he analyzes the roots of catastrophe, showing city planners in the very act of creating gridlock and disaster, or public health authorities setting the scene for starvation. The Logic of Failure is a compass for intelligent planning and decision-making that can sharpen the skills of managers, policymakers and everyone involved in the daily challenge of getting from point A to point B.
BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.
Originally written in 1938 but never published due to its controversial nature, an insightful guide reveals the seven principles of good that will allow anyone to triumph over the obstacles that must be faced in reaching personal goals.
