The Money Game in Old New York

The Money Game in Old New York PDF Author: Clifford Browder
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813187893
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
"I got to be a millionaire afore I know'd it hardly," remarked the Wall Street financier Daniel Drew (1797-1879). An uneducated farm boy from Putnam County, New York, he became in turn a successful cattle drover, a circus clown, tavern keeper, a shrewd Hudson River steamboat operator, and an unscrupulous speculator. As the colorful "Uncle Daniel" of Wall Street-his whiskered face seamed with wrinkles and twinkling with steel-gray eyes—time and again he disrupted the financial markets with manipulations whereby he either won or lost millions of dollars. Having "got religion" upon hearing a scary hell-fire sermon at the age of fourteen, Drew was also a fervent Methodist. Rumors of his financial operations—epic struggles that pitted him against Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and Jim Fisk, and that subjected him to threats of arrest and even kidnapping, and on one occasion to a most undignified flight from the state-baffled and disturbed the Methodists, who admittedly had little grasp of Wall Street but knew firsthand Brother Drew's tearful repentance at prayer meetings and his generosity in founding churches and seminaries. With its dual commitment to religion and rascality, Drew's career is a rich study in contradictions, an exciting chronicle of high drama and low comedy capped by bankruptcy. To understand Drew in his complexity, the author argues, is to get a grip on the heady and exploitative age that produced him—the yesterday of "smartness" and "go ahead" that helped engender the America of today. Based on primary sources, this is the first full-fledged biography of Drew, who hitherto has been known chiefly through a fictionalized and fraudulent account of 1910.

The Money Game in Old New York

The Money Game in Old New York PDF Author: Clifford Browder
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813187893
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 492

Get Book Here

Book Description
"I got to be a millionaire afore I know'd it hardly," remarked the Wall Street financier Daniel Drew (1797-1879). An uneducated farm boy from Putnam County, New York, he became in turn a successful cattle drover, a circus clown, tavern keeper, a shrewd Hudson River steamboat operator, and an unscrupulous speculator. As the colorful "Uncle Daniel" of Wall Street-his whiskered face seamed with wrinkles and twinkling with steel-gray eyes—time and again he disrupted the financial markets with manipulations whereby he either won or lost millions of dollars. Having "got religion" upon hearing a scary hell-fire sermon at the age of fourteen, Drew was also a fervent Methodist. Rumors of his financial operations—epic struggles that pitted him against Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and Jim Fisk, and that subjected him to threats of arrest and even kidnapping, and on one occasion to a most undignified flight from the state-baffled and disturbed the Methodists, who admittedly had little grasp of Wall Street but knew firsthand Brother Drew's tearful repentance at prayer meetings and his generosity in founding churches and seminaries. With its dual commitment to religion and rascality, Drew's career is a rich study in contradictions, an exciting chronicle of high drama and low comedy capped by bankruptcy. To understand Drew in his complexity, the author argues, is to get a grip on the heady and exploitative age that produced him—the yesterday of "smartness" and "go ahead" that helped engender the America of today. Based on primary sources, this is the first full-fledged biography of Drew, who hitherto has been known chiefly through a fictionalized and fraudulent account of 1910.

The Money Game in Old New York

The Money Game in Old New York PDF Author: Browder
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780783757995
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description


Seven Games: A Human History

Seven Games: A Human History PDF Author: Oliver Roeder
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324003782
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
A group biography of seven enduring and beloved games, and the story of why—and how—we play them. Checkers, backgammon, chess, and Go. Poker, Scrabble, and bridge. These seven games, ancient and modern, fascinate millions of people worldwide. In Seven Games, Oliver Roeder charts their origins and historical importance, the delightful arcana of their rules, and the ways their design makes them pleasurable. Roeder introduces thrilling competitors, such as evangelical minister Marion Tinsley, who across forty years lost only three games of checkers; Shusai, the Master, the last Go champion of imperial Japan, defending tradition against “modern rationalism”; and an IBM engineer who created a backgammon program so capable at self-learning that NASA used it on the space shuttle. He delves into the history and lore of each game: backgammon boards in ancient Egypt, the Indian origins of chess, how certain shells from a particular beach in Japan make the finest white Go stones. Beyond the cultural and personal stories, Roeder explores why games, seemingly trivial pastimes, speak so deeply to the human soul. He introduces an early philosopher of games, the aptly named Bernard Suits, and visits an Oxford cosmologist who has perfected a computer that can effectively play bridge, a game as complicated as human language itself. Throughout, Roeder tells the compelling story of how humans, pursuing scientific glory and competitive advantage, have invented AI programs better than any human player, and what that means for the games—and for us. Funny, fascinating, and profound, Seven Games is a story of obsession, psychology, history, and how play makes us human.

The New York Times Bridge Book

The New York Times Bridge Book PDF Author: Alan Truscott
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312331078
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
A guide to the popular card game includes anecdotes about great players, major tournaments, scandals, and strategies that make bridge so legendary.

The Money Game

The Money Game PDF Author: Adam Smith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description


The Continental Op - 1923

The Continental Op - 1923 PDF Author: Dashiell Hammett
Publisher: www.PulpFictionBook.Store
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
The first five Continental Op stories, written in 1923 by Dashiell Hammett and published in The Black Mask magazine.Written in first person, these are the stories of an unnamed operative for the Continental Detective Agency. The operative deals with the gamut of human crime and cruelty. Arson Plus (1923) Crooked Souls (1923) Slippery Fingers (1923) Bodies Piled Up (1923) It (1923)

Iron Empires

Iron Empires PDF Author: Michael Hiltzik
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
ISBN: 0544770315
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 453

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Book Description
From Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Hiltzik, the epic tale of the clash for supremacy between America's railroad titans.

Reared in a Greenhouse

Reared in a Greenhouse PDF Author: Dorothy B. Wexler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135678588
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 453

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Book Description
Beloved as the family storyteller, Dorothy Winthrop Bradford left behind at her death in 1987 diaries, letters, scrapbooks and memorabilia that date back to the Civil War and provide a picture of a way of life long gone - of a period when leisure time was plentiful and cars were few, when her hometown of Hamilton, Massachusetts was open country and Boston a closed society. These materials provide an intimate view of the vanished lifestyle of the upper classes between the two world wars. At the heart of the story is Dorothy Bradford's own life, and the 82 years she spent in the small town where she was born. It was a life, however, set against the vast canvas of her extened family, whose stories transport the reader back to colonial times, where one of her ancestors was the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and far across America and to the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa. From the Civil War to the Second World War, from turn-of-the-century Puerto Rico to the glories of the still-unspoiled West, the book is a virtual who's who of American h istory, filled with cameos by Teddy Roosevelt, Edith Wharton, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry James, Thomas Jefferson, and many more. Richly illustrated with more than 300 photographs, this intriguing volume looks at a woman who's life may have seemed, on the surface, narrow and predictable, but in reality, touched upon many of the great currents of American history.

The Making of the American Dream, Vol. 2

The Making of the American Dream, Vol. 2 PDF Author: Lewis E. Kaplan
Publisher: Algora Publishing
ISBN: 0875866972
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Any history that touts itself as unconventional is bound to raise some hackles when it challenges traditional interpretations of our nation?s past. Yet history is continually under revision. This 2-volume work, covering America's first 300 years, differs from others in seeking to debunk numerous flattering and conventionally accepted myths.℗¡Reading between the lines of what we've all been taught as US history, the author probes a little deeper into what perhaps was never denied? but was never spelled out, either. Some inconvenient questions emerge. Was lust for land the driving force behind e.

The Kings of New York

The Kings of New York PDF Author: Michael Weinreb
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9781592402618
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
An award-winning sportswriter takes you inside a year with the nation’s top high school chess team.With strict admission standards and a progressive curriculum, Brooklyn’s Edward R. Murrow High School has long been one of New York’s public-education success stories, serving a diverse neighborhood of immigrants and minorities and ranking among the nation’s best high schools. At Murrow, there are no sports teams, and the closest thing to jocks are found on the school’s powerhouse chess team, which annually competes for the national championship.In The Kings of New Yorksportswriter Michael Weinreb follows the members of the Murrow chess team through an entire season, from cash games in Washington Square Park to city and state tournaments to the SuperNationals in Nashville, where this eclectic bunch competes against private schoolers and suburbanites. Along the way, Weinreb brings to life a number of colorful characters: the Yale-educated calculus teacher (and former semipro hockey player) who guides the savants while struggling to find funding for his team; an aspiring rapper and tournament hustler who plays with cutthroat instinct; the team’s lone girl, a shy Ukrainian immigrant; the Puerto Rican teen from the rough neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant who plays an ingenious opening gambit named the Orangutan; and the Lithuanian immigrant and team star whose chess rating is climbing toward grandmaster status.In the bestselling tradition of such books as Word Freakand Friday Night Lights, The Kings of New Yorkis a riveting look inside the world of competitive chess and an inspiring profile of young genius.