The San Francisco experience is not an encounter you can enjoy in an hour or a day or at a particular time or location. It is a composite of innumerable experiences over long periods of time in the entire region around the bay. San Francisco as a social and cultural entity long ago spilled over the political boundaries that were drawn up a century ago for another era. Nearly one-third of the people who during the day work and shop within the city limits go home at night beyond the bay or down the Peninsula. Nearly all of the tourists and visitors who come to the city also visit the far shores. Even the relatively few who do not venture across the bridges experience something of the far shores when they gaze across the bay from Nob Hill or Russian Hill or through the big windows at the Top of the Mark or the Crown Room of the Fairmont. —from the Preface
The tsunami of laundered drug money surging through the US financial system has a profound corrupting effect on everyone it touches. Fuelled by Americas unquenchable thirst for cocaine, more than $500 billion dollars of laundered money is present in the system, according to FBI estimates. DDM recounts the intrigue and human tragedy that results when Mexicos ruthless cocaine cartel collides with Americas white-gloved world of private banking. Chris Callen, the protagonist is a thirty-year-old investment manager with Goldman Sachs New York office. After five years with the firm, he is on the fast track, destined to make partner. But the rarified environment of college, business school and Wall Street while equipping him with technical skills and polish has not taught him street-smart survival skills and savvy. He arrogantly but mistakenly believes he is a match for one of Americas premier entrepreneurs. When Jorge Ruiz, a wealthy Mexican businessman is found murdered on a deserted road in Northern Mexico, a tale of coercion, betrayal and manipulation unfolds. Ruiz, faced with the certain bankruptcy of his auto dealerships by nervous Mexican banks, turns to a shadowy Mafia-controlled finance company to bail him out. The drug lord Carlos Jimenez, who needs to launder his drug profits, controls the finance company. In return for bailing out Ruiz company, Jimenez coerces him to launder his drug money through Ruiz US investment management account with Stafford Securities (SS). The founder and owner of SS is Bill Stafford, Ruiz oldest and closest friend and one of San Franciscos most successful entrepreneurs. Stafford Securities is the leading investment management firm on the West Coast. Stafford, 56, built the business single-handedly through his own drive, cunning, determination and intelligence. He is a self-made centimillionaire used to getting his own way. Stafford discovers his firm has laundered millions of dollars through the account, unwittingly. Convinced that the FBI wont believe he was unaware of the laundering operation at his company, Stafford and his socialite wife Elaine, fear they will be jailed and their company seized by the Feds. The prospect of forfeiting their wealth, power, social standing and prestige spurs the couple to seek a solution. But in todays very stringent regulatory environment, where US courts have convicted private bankers of money laundering based on the notion that they OUGHT TO HAVE KNOWN THEIR CLIENTS TRUE SOURCE OF WEALTH, Stafford concedes that pleading ignorance is no defence. Further, once rumors circulate among his wealthy San Francisco clientele that he and his firm are under investigation for laundering money, he fears his clients will desert him. Stafford and Elaine craft a plan to shift blame to Chris Callen whom they hire as a partner at SS on the pretext of setting up the international division. Chris Callen struggles with accepting the rich offer, but eventually succumbs to Staffords aggressive wooing. Originally from San Francisco, the lure of a partnership interest in Stafford Securities and a generous compensation package, cause him impulsively to accept the job offer. A love interest, Ming Chan, a San Francisco fashion designer, is another motivation to accept the job in San Francisco, leaving New York. Chris is smart, materialistic and driven to succeed, though impulsive and arrogant. Once he takes the new job, Stafford manipulates Chris weaknesses (impulsiveness, materialism and arrogance) to position him to take the blame for the money laundering operation.
Interrelated essays by the Nobel Laureate on his adopted home of California, which Lewis Hyde, writing in The Nation, called "remarkable, morally serious and thought-provoking essays, which strive to lay aside the barren categories by which we have understood and judged our state . . . Their subject is the frailty of modern civilization."
"Ellen Schrecker shows how universities shaped the 1960s, and how the 1960s shaped them. Teach-ins and walkouts-in institutions large and small, across both the country and the political spectrum-were only the first actions that came to redefine universities as hotbeds of unrest for some and handmaidens of oppression for others. The tensions among speech, education, and institutional funding came into focus as never before-and the reverberations remain palpable today"--
The End of San Francisco breaks apart the conventions of memoir to reveal the passions and perils of a life that refuses to conform to the rules of straight or gay normalcy. A budding queer activist escapes to San Francisco, in search of a world more politically charged, sexually saturated, and ethically consistent—this is the person who evolves into Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, infamous radical queer troublemaker, organizer and agitator, community builder and anti-assimilationist commentator. Here is the tender, provocative and exuberant story of the formation of one of the contemporary queer movement's most savvy and outrageous writers and spokespersons. Using an unrestrained associative style to move kaleidoscopically between past, present and future, Sycamore conjures the untidy push and pull of memory, exposing the tensions between idealism and critical engagement, trauma and self-actualization, inspiration and loss. Part memoir, part social history and part elegy, The End of San Francisco explores and explodes the dream of a radical queer community and the mythical city that was supposed to nurture it. "Mattilda is a dazzling writer of uncommon truths, a challenging writer who refuses to conform to conventionality. Her agitation is an inspiration."—Justin Torres, author of We the Animals “Author Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the artistic love child of John Genet and David Wojnarowicz, deconstructing language swathed in unbridled sensuality, while flinging readers into a disrupted, chaotic life of queer anarchy.”—Gay and Lesbian Review "Bring on The End of San Francisco! And Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, whose new book has reinvented memoir without the predictable gloss of passive resolution. This book is undeniably brave and new, and the internal energy churning at its core is like nothing you've seen, heard or read before. I swear."—T. Cooper, author of Real Man Adventures "We hear so much about coming-of-age narratives that we seldom think about going-of-age—the shutting down and closure, the making sense of where we've been. Written with grace, reserve and the honest tremblings that come when things matter, Mattilda shows us that The End of San Francisco is really the beginning of joy."—Daphne Gottlieb, author of 15 Ways to Stay Alive "It would be easy to describe The End of San Francisco as a Joycean 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Queer' (although the book's intense stream of consciousness is reminiscent of the later, more experimental, Joyce) . . . but this is misleading. This journey of a life that begins in the professional upper-middle class (both parents are therapists) and the Ivy League and moves to hustling, drugs, activism—Sycamore was active in ACT UP and Queer Nation—and queer bohemian grunge, is profoundly American. At heart, Sycamore is writing about the need to escape control through flight or obliteration."—Michael Bronski, San Francisco Chronicle
In San Francisco Year Zero, San Francisco native Lincoln Mitchell deftly weaves together the personal and the political, tracing the city's current state back to three key events that all occurred in 1978: the assassination of George Moscone and Harvey Milk occurring fewer than two weeks after the massacre of Peoples Temple members in Jonestown, Guyana, the explosion of the city's punk rock scene, and a breakthrough season for the San Francisco Giants.
‘Readers will come away startled at just how fragile the online infrastructure we all depend on is and how much influence China wields – both technically and politically' – Jason Q. Ng, author of Blocked on Weibo 'An urgent and much needed reminder about how China's quest for cyber sovereignty is undermining global Internet freedom’ – Kristie Lu Stout, CNN ‘An important and incisive history of the Chinese internet that introduces us to the government officials, business leaders, and technology activists struggling over access to information within the Great Firewall’ – Adam M. Segal, author of The Hacked World Order Once little more than a glorified porn filter, China’s ‘Great Firewall’ has evolved into the most sophisticated system of online censorship in the world. As the Chinese internet grows and online businesses thrive, speech is controlled, dissent quashed, and attempts to organise outside the official Communist Party are quickly stamped out. But the effects of the Great Firewall are not confined to China itself. Through years of investigation James Griffiths gained unprecedented access to the Great Firewall and the politicians, tech leaders, dissidents and hackers whose lives revolve around it. As distortion, post-truth and fake news become old news James Griffiths shows just how far the Great Firewall has spread. Now is the time for a radical new vision of online liberty.
