Biography & Autobiography : Business

Following modern executives as they push themselves to the limits in life and in business. In To the Limits , adventure writer Jim Clash examines the phenomenon of corporate leaders and millionaires who test their limits through high-end, risky adventure-and links the life and business lessons they have learned along the way. more...

Price: $27.95

The true story of an immigrant family's rise to prominence and the brand that rewrote the rules of wine. Harvesting the Dream tells the inspirational story of the Trinchero family and its Sutter Home winery, now among America's largest and most successful vintners. More than just a business success story, it's also the tale of an immigrant family's half-century journey to achieve the American Dream. Against all odds, Sutter Home's light and sweet White Zinfandel became America's bestselling wine and a staple at tables across the country. more...

Price: $24.95

The remarkable saga of the wine and people of Beaujolais and Georges Duboeuf, the peasant lad who brought both world recognition. Every third week of November, wine shops around the world announce “Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé” and in a few short weeks, over seven million bottles are sold and drunk. Although often scorned by the wine world’s snob set, the annual delivery of each year’s new Beaujolais wine brings a welcome ray of sunshine to a morose November from New York to Tokyo. The surprising Cinderella tale behind the success of Beaujolais Nouveau captures not just the story of a wine but also the history of a fascinating region. At the heart of this fairy tale is the peasant wine grower named Georges Duboeuf, whose rise as the undisputed king of Beaujolais reads like a combination of suspenseful biography and luscious armchair travel. I’ll Drink to That transports us to the unique corner of France where medieval history still echoes and where the smallholder peasants who made Beaujolais wines on their farms battled against the contempt of the entrenched Burgundy and Bordeaux establishment. With two bottles of wine in his bike’s saddlebag, young Duboeuf set out to revolutionize the stodgy wine business, becoming the richest and most famous individual wine dealer in France. But this is more than one man’s success story. As The Perfectionist used Bernard Loiseau to tell the layered history of French haute cuisine, here Chelminski uses Duboeuf’s story to paint the portrait of the often endearing, sometimes maddening but always interesting inhabitants of a little-known corner of France, offering at the same time a witty, panoramic view of the history of French winemaking. more...

Price: $27.50

How the world’s most powerful media mogul really thinks. The third book in Portfolio’s new series looks at Rupert Murdoch, the controversial chairman and CEO of News Corp. He is the subject of endless gossip, speculation, and criticism, but what really drives his bold (and usually successful) gambles?. Based on comments from News Corp. executives and competitors, and interviews with Wall Street analysts, investors, and other media experts, Paul La Monica’s book explores some of the most fascinating questions about Murdoch. For instance:. • How did he grow a small Australian newspaper company into a global media empire?. • Why did he challenge the TV establishment with the Fox Network and Fox News Channel—for profits or for deeper reasons?. • Did his obsession with The Wall Street Journal lead him to overpay for Dow Jones?. • How has he dealt with detractors and enemies, including Ted Turner and John Malone?. • Was he smart to acquire MySpace to launch his Internet strategy?. • Why does he still work so hard at age 77 with a net worth of $8.8 billion and nothing to prove? more...

Price: $24.95

John Nelson was an entrepreneur born in the mid-seventeenth century--a man, in Richard Johnson's words, "operating ahead of the government and settled society from which he came," who "responded to conventions and conditions derived from several different and often competing cultures." For Nelson, this meant trading out of Boston to the French and Indians of Canada, pursuing his family's dreams of the proprietorship of Nova Scotia, and promoting schemes of espionage and military conquest on both sides of the Atlantic. In the course of a long and adventurous life, Nelson served as middleman between Canada and New England; led an uprising that toppled the royal government of Massachusetts in 1689; and passed years in French prisons, including the Bastille, and then at court in London as a player in the complex European diplomacy of the time. Nelson's career reveals in bold colors the political and economic pressures exerted upon colonial America by the expansion and bitter conflict of European empires--he himself complained of being "crusht between the two Crownes." Yet it also shows how one man fashioned a life as "spy, speculator, multinational merchant, memorialist, politician, prisoner, parent, friend, and gentleman." Gracefully written and widely researched, the book is both a fine example of the new Atlantic history and a vivid recounting of the fortunes of an exceptional individual.  more...

Price: $125.00