Elite Culture

The Manipulator. I can manipulate the emotions of anyone who lets me. I will make you hurt, make you cry, make you laugh and sigh. But my words don't affect him. Especially not when I plead for him to leave. He's always there, watching and waiting. And I can never look away. Not when I want him to come closer. The Shadow. I didn't mean to fall in love. But now that I have, I can't stay away. I'm mesmerized by her smile, by her eyes, and the way she moves. I'll keep watching and waiting. Until I can make her mine. And once she is, I'll never let her go.

Welcome to the world of women's gymnastics and figure skating. From starvation diets and debilitating injuries to the brutal tactics of tyrannical gymnastics guru Bela Károlyi, Little Girls in Pretty Boxes portrays the horrors endured by girls at the hands of their coaches and sometimes their own families - and is now updated with a new introduction and foreword that address the sexual abuse scandal perpetrated by USA Gymnastics national team doctor, Larry Nassar.

The Program: Lessons from Elite Military Units for Creating and Sustaining High-Performance Leaders and Teams offers a hands-on guide to the winning techniques and tactics of The Program, the acclaimed team-building and leadership development company. Drawing on the actual experiences of The Program's instructors from their personal combat stories to working with world-class athletic teams and successful corporations, the audiobook clearly shows how The Program's training operations can help to achieve life goals and ambitions.

Americans are taught to believe that upward mobility is possible for anyone who is willing to work hard, regardless of their social status. Yet it is often those from affluent backgrounds who land the best jobs. Pedigree takes listeners behind the closed doors of top-tier investment banks, consulting firms, and law firms to reveal the truth about who really gets hired for the nation's highest-paying entry-level jobs, who doesn't, and why.

From politics to the personal, from fashion to food, from the campus to the locker room, the desire to be cool has infected all aspects of our lives. At its most harmless, it is annoying. At its worst, it is deadly, on a massive scale. The Cool are the termites of life, infiltrating every nook and cranny and destroying it from within. The Cool report the news, write the scripts, teach our children, run our government - and each day they pass judgment on those who don’t worship their coolness.

The leisure class has been replaced by a new elite. Highly educated and defined by cultural capital rather than income bracket, these individuals earnestly buy organic, carry NPR tote bags, and breast-feed their babies. They care about discreet, inconspicuous consumption. In The Sum of Small Things, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett dubs this segment of society "the aspirational class" and discusses how, through deft decisions about education, health, parenting, and retirement, the aspirational class deepens the ever-wider class divide.

Meet the elites. They think you're stupid. They think all freedom-loving Americans are stupid. They think patriotism is stupid. They think churchgoing is stupid. They think flag-flying is stupid. They think your SUV is evil - although theirs is absolutely necessary. They think owning a gun is criminal. They think George Bush is an idiot. But in this refreshing and blisteringly insightful look at the elites, Laura Ingraham reveals that it is they, not us, who are pickled in prejudice, morally blind, and outrageously hypocritical.

Sociologist and law professor Kevin Woodson knows firsthand what life at a top law firm feels like as a Black man. Examining the experiences of more than one hundred Black professionals at prestigious firms, Woodson discovers that their biggest obstacle in the workplace isn’t explicit bias but racial discomfort, or the unease Black employees feel in workplaces that are steeped in Whiteness. The Black Ceiling is a vital resource for leaders at preeminent firms, Black professionals and students, managers within mostly White organizations, and anyone committed to cultivating diverse workplaces.

Get a world-class approach to leading a business - any business - to exceptional and sustained success. Houston Texans President Jamey Rootes shares the principles and ideology that has made the Texans one of the most valuable professional sports franchises, both in the NFL and globally. Every new leadership opportunity you face is a chance to grow as a leader and as a human being.

Whether you are an accomplished sales executive leading a large organization or a sales manager leading a team, your ability to remove obstacles and speed the sales process will determine your success. High-Performance Selling is geared for the sales leader who has to persuade others to work as a sales force of one.

Without courage, there is no winning. After working over 5,000 hours with leadership teams in growth mode, Jill Young observed that true entrepreneurs thrive in courage rather than in fear. These business owners have a way of thinking that fuels larger-than-life ideas. They strived, failed, and fought their way to master the courage mindset. This is The Courage Advantage. In this book you'll discover three components that create the courage mindset - a valuable accelerator for heightening business excellence and company-wide innovation.

Amanda's recently published book It’s Not Me, It’s Graduate School: Surviving Graduate School the Sassy Way speaks to a generation of ambitious women who are caught in the depth of their academic careers and life goals. It gives renewed aspirations to the uninspired female student with clear objectives of excellence. Like bell hooks, her commitment to engaged pedagogy is an expression of her political activism.