Monday, May 23, 2022

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley

Jimmy Soni (Author), Jonathan Todd Ross (Narrator)
online access from EBSCOhost Ebook
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National Bestseller * New York Times Editors’ Choice *Financial Times “Books to Read in 2022”

“A gripping account of PayPal’s origins and a vivid portrait of the geeks and contrarians who made its meteoric rise possible” (The Wall Street Journal)—including Elon Musk, Amy Rowe Klement, Peter Thiel, Julie Anderson, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, and many others whose stories have never been shared.


Today, PayPal’s founders and earliest employees are considered the technology industry’s most powerful network. Since leaving PayPal, they have formed, funded, and advised the leading companies of our era, including Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, SpaceX, Yelp, Palantir, and LinkedIn, among many others. As a group, they have driven twenty-first-century innovation and entrepreneurship. Their names stir passions; they’re as controversial as they are admired.

Yet for all their influence, the story of where they first started has gone largely untold. Before igniting the commercial space race or jumpstarting social media’s rise, they were the unknown creators of a scrappy online payments start-up called PayPal. In building what became one of the world’s foremost companies, they faced bruising competition, internal strife, the emergence of widespread online fraud, and the devastating dot-com bust of the 2000s. Their success was anything but certain.

In The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, award-winning author and biographer Jimmy Soni explores PayPal’s turbulent early days. With hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to thousands of pages of internal material, he shows how the seeds of so much of what shapes our world today—fast-scaling digital start-ups, cashless currency concepts, mobile money transfer—were planted two decades ago. He also reveals the stories of countless individuals who were left out of the front-page features and banner headlines but who were central to PayPal’s success.

Described as “an intensely magnetic chronicle” (The New York Times) and “engrossing” (Business Insider), The Founders is a story of iteration and inventiveness—the products of which have cast a long and powerful shadow over modern life. This narrative illustrates how this rare assemblage of talent came to work together and how their collaboration changed our world forever.

(Excerpt from amazon.com)

藏在地名裏的香港

木木
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優美散文:作者精選數十處香港地名,從中撰文探究香港歷史文化,講述在港生活諸多趣事。
手繪地圖:每篇文章文首配有手繪水彩地圖,標註著名景點與人文古跡,文藝清新,直觀介紹香港各地風貌。
古體詩詞:作者對古體詩詞頗有研究,文中插入許多作者

(摘錄自博客來網路書店)


Monday, May 16, 2022

French Braid: A novel

Anne Tyler
online access from ProQuest Ebook Central
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NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From the beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning author—a funny, joyful, brilliantly perceptive journey deep into one Baltimore family’s foibles, from a boyfriend with a red Chevy in the 1950s up to a longed-for reunion with a grandchild in our pandemic present.


The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever leave home, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband, Robin. Their teenage daughters, steady Alice and boy-crazy Lily, could not have less in common. Their youngest, David, is already intent on escaping his family's orbit, for reasons none of them understand. Yet, as these lives advance across decades, the Garretts' influences on one another ripple ineffably but unmistakably through each generation.

Full of heartbreak and hilarity, French Braid is classic Anne Tyler: a stirring, uncannily insightful novel of tremendous warmth and humor that illuminates the kindnesses and cruelties of our daily lives, the impossibility of breaking free from those who love us, and how close—yet how unknowable—every family is to itself.

(Excerpt from amazon.com)

圖解嶺南建築

崔俊, 倪韻捷
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本書挑選了嶺南建築中的民居、園林、學宮、古塔、宗祠等類型, 並以西關大屋、騎樓、圍龍屋、清暉園、揭陽學宮、廣濟橋等經典建築為例,用圖解的形式向讀者呈現出嶺南建築清新明快、中西合璧、務實求變等鮮明的特點,從建築物中了解嶺南建築文化的價值和歷史地位。

(摘錄自博客來網路書店)


Monday, May 9, 2022

The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine

Serhii Plokhy
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"An exemplary account of Europe's least-known large country" (Wall Street Journal) by an award-winning historian.


Ukraine is currently embroiled in a tense fight with Russia to preserve its territorial integrity and political independence. But today's conflict is only the latest in a long history of battles over Ukraine's territory and its existence as a sovereign nation. As the award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy argues in The Gates of Europe, we must examine Ukraine's past in order to understand its present and future.

Situated between Central Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, Ukraine was shaped by the empires that used it as a strategic gateway between East and West—from the Roman and Ottoman empires to the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. For centuries, Ukraine has been a meeting place of various cultures. The mixing of sedentary and nomadic peoples and Christianity and Islam on the steppe borderland produced the class of ferocious warriors known as the Cossacks, for example, while the encounter between the Catholic and Orthodox churches created a religious tradition that bridges Western and Eastern Christianity. Ukraine has also been a home to millions of Jews, serving as the birthplace of Hassidism—and as one of the killing fields of the Holocaust.

Plokhy examines the history of Ukraine's search for its identity through the lives of the major figures in Ukrainian history: Prince Yaroslav the Wise of Kyiv, whose daughter Anna became queen of France; the Cossack ruler Ivan Mazepa, who was immortalized in the poems of Byron and Pushkin; Nikita Khrushchev and his protege-turned-nemesis Leonid Brezhnev, who called Ukraine their home; and the heroes of the Maidan protests of 2013 and 2014, who embody the current struggle over Ukraine's future.

As Plokhy explains, today's crisis is a tragic case of history repeating itself, as Ukraine once again finds itself in the center of the battle of global proportions. An authoritative history of this vital country, The Gates of Europe provides a unique insight into the origins of the most dangerous international crisis since the end of the Cold War.

(Excerpt from amazon.com)

動漫摘星錄

黃夏柏
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零距離接觸
當代日本、中國、歐美動漫畫大師


盧子英作為香港資深動畫人,自七十年代起多次出訪日本,親炙多位當代日本動漫畫大師,包括手塚治蟲、宮崎駿、藤子不二雄、永安巧、永井豪……等,好些更結成好友,長期以書信來往。其後他亦有很多機會接觸中國和歐美的動漫界頂尖人物,如中國動漫之父萬籟鳴、中國水墨動畫片之父特偉,以及美國Pixar《Toy Story》的導演John Lasseter等。

本書將從他第一身角度,述說這班影響近代動漫界深遠的大師們的為人處事、工作態度、創作歷程等,每篇輔以大師生平簡介及作品點評;另外,本書收錄了盧氏多年來珍藏的大量相關動漫產品,當中更有各位大師們的親筆簽名畫,彌足珍貴。

(摘錄自博客來網路書店)