Showing results by narrator "Timothy W. Bader" in All Categories

"It's like talking to a brick wall" and "We'll have to agree to disagree" are popular sayings referring to the frustrating experience of discussing issues with people who seem to be beyond the reach of argument. It's often claimed that some people - fundamentalists or fanatics - are indeed sealed off from rational criticism. And every month new pop psychology books appear, describing the dumb ways ordinary people make decisions, as revealed by psychological experiments.

Between 1865 and 1890, in the aftermath of the Civil War, virtually every important American labor reform organization advocated "cooperation" over "competitive" capitalism and several thousand cooperatives opened for business during this era. The men and women who built cooperatives were practical reformers and they established businesses to stabilize their work lives, families, and communities. Yet they were also utopians - envisioning a world free from conflict where workers would receive the full value of their labor.

In golf the playing field is also landscape, where nature and the shaping of it conspire to test athletic prowess. As golf courses move away from the “big business, pristine lawn” approach of recent times, Bradley S. Klein, a leading expert on golf course design and economics, finds much to contemplate, and much to report, in the way these wide-open spaces function as landscapes that inspire us, stimulate our senses, and reveal the special nature of particular places.

While trying to solve a family mystery, Dave Dyer uncovered a massive stock market scandal that had been forgotten by history. His great uncle Clayton Pickard vanished in 1923, and, in the process of researching him, the author found a collection of thousands of original documents and photos from Clayton's employer, the L. R. Steel Company. The documents, unopened since 1923, told the fascinating story of a visionary entrepreneur operating in the boom-town environment of Buffalo.