{"title":"Books by David Farber","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781108444064","title":"Crack","description":"A shattering account of the crack cocaine years from award-winning American historian David Farber, Crack tells the story of the young men who bet their lives on the rewards of selling 'rock' cocaine, the people who gave themselves over to the crack pipe, and the often-merciless authorities who incarcerated legions of African Americans caught in the crack cocaine underworld. Based on interviews, archival research, judicial records, underground videos, and prison memoirs, Crack explains why, in a de-industrializing America in which market forces ruled and entrepreneurial risk-taking was celebrated, the crack industry was a lucrative enterprise for the 'Horatio Alger boys' of their place and time. These young, predominately African American entrepreneurs were profit-sharing partners in a deviant, criminal form of economic globalization. Hip Hop artists often celebrated their exploits but overwhelmingly, Americans - across racial lines -did not. Crack takes a hard look at the dark side of late twentieth-century capitalism.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43204226875570,"sku":"9781108444064","price":17.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781108444064_7628c8df-fed5-431d-9b70-fbb67745a3a6.jpg?v=1786018516"},{"product_id":"sloan-rules-alfred-p-sloan-and-the-triumph-of-general-motors","title":"Sloan Rules – Alfred P. Sloan and the Triumph of General Motors","description":"Alfred P. Sloan Jr. became the president of General Motors in 1923 and stepped down as its CEO in 1946. During this time, he led GM past the Ford Motor Company and on to international business triumph by virtue of his brilliant managerial practices and his insights into the new consumer economy he and GM helped to produce. Bill Gates has said that Sloan's 1964 management tome, My Years with General Motors, \"is probably the best book to read if you want to read only one book about business.\" And if you want to read only one book about Sloan, that book should be historian David Farber's Sloan Rules.   Here, for the first time, is a study of both the difficult man and the pathbreaking executive. Sloan Rules reveals the GM genius as not only a driven manager of men, machines, money, and markets but also a passionate and not always wise participant in the great events of his day. Sloan, for example, reviled Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal; he firmly believed that politicians, government bureaucrats, and union leaders knew next to nothing about the workings of the new consumer economy, and he did his best to stop them from intervening in the private enterprise system. He was instrumental in transforming GM from the country's largest producer of cars into the mainstay of America's \"Arsenal of Democracy\" during World War II; after the war, he bet GM's future on renewed American prosperity and helped lead the country into a period of economic abundance. Through his business genius, his sometimes myopic social vision, and his vast fortune, Sloan was an architect of the corporate-dominated global society we live in today.   David Farber's story of America's first corporate genius is biography of the highest order, a portrait of an extraordinarily compelling and skillful man who shaped his era and ours.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57593892176245,"sku":"9780226238050","price":16.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780226238050.jpg?v=1790000667"},{"product_id":"chicagos-tough-jews","title":"Chicago's Tough Jews","description":"The untold story of the immigrant Jewish boys and men who fought back against violent neighborhood gangs in early twentieth-century Chicago.   In Chicago’s Tough Jews, Farber tells the story of how first- and second-generation Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe fought their ethnic rivals on Chicago’s mean streets. These Jewish immigrants used their fists and, when necessary, bats and pipes to defend themselves and their neighborhoods.   Farber first heard these stories from his grandfather and his grandfather’s cronies. Jewish Chicagoans, he was told, tried to get the city authorities to stop the vicious antisemitic attacks on peddlers, merchants, and school kids. When that failed, they decided to physically fight to claim their place in the city. Farber vividly details these street battles, particularly with Polish and Irish gangs, up into the 1920s. Ultimately, he argues, “Jewish hard men” were part of a larger community-wide self-defense struggle against violent Jew bashers, antisemites, and an indifferent political and legal system.   Today, when questions of antisemitism and Jewish identity are again being fiercely debated across the country, this account of a past generation’s struggles in Chicago presents a thought-provoking recasting of American Jewish history.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57680101409141,"sku":"9780226856285","price":23.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-david-farber.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}