The Millionaire Mind
Author: Thomas J Stanley
Stanley Takes Us Inside The Millionaire Mind
It pays to be different.
In The Millionaire Mind, Dr. Thomas J. Stanley shows how self-made millionaires have surmounted shortcomings such as average intelligence by carefully choosing their careers, taking calculated risks, living balanced lifestyles—and maintaining their integrity.
Building on his research from the best-selling The Millionaire Next Door, Dr. Thomas J. Stanley delves further into the psyche of the American millionaire with a groundbreaking new study, The Millionaire Mind.
Dr. Stanley takes a close look at the top one percent of households in America and tells us what makes them tick. His findings on how they reached their financial success are based on in-depth surveys and interviews with more than 1,300 millionaires.
Library Journal
In The Millionaire Next Door, read by Cotter Smith, Stanley (Marketing to the Affluent) and Danko (marketing, SUNY at Albany) summarize findings from their research into the key characteristics that explain how the elite club of millionaires have become "wealthy." Focusing on those with a net worth of at least $1 million, their surprising results reveal fundamental qualities of this group that are diametrically opposed to today's earn-and-consume culture, including living below their means, allocating funds efficiently in ways that build wealth, ignoring conspicuous consumption, being proficient in targeting marketing opportunities, and choosing the "right" occupation. It's evident that anyone can accumulate wealth, if they are disciplined enough, determined to persevere, and have the merest of luck. In The Millionaire Mind, an excellent follow-up to the highly successful first analysis of how ordinary folks can accumulate wealth, Stanley interviews many more participants in a much more comprehensive study of the characteristics of those in this economic situation. The author structures these deeper details into categories that include the key success factors that define this group, the relationship of education to their success, their approach to balancing risk, how they located themselves in their work, their choice of spouse, how they live their daily lives, and the significant differences in the truth about this group vs. the misplaced image of high spenders. Narrator Smith's solid, dead-on reading never fails to heighten the importance of these principles that most twentysomethings should be forced to listen to in toto. Highly recommended for all public libraries. Dale Farris, Groves, TX Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Book review: Every Bite Is Divine or Doing It All Isnt Everything
Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World
Author: Jill Jonnes
In the final decades of the nineteenth century, three brilliant and visionary titans of America’s Gilded Age—Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse—battled bitterly as each vied to create a vast and powerful electrical empire. In Empires of Light, historian Jill Jonnes portrays this extraordinary trio and their riveting and ruthless world of cutting-edge science, invention, intrigue, money, death, and hard-eyed Wall Street millionaires. At the heart of the story are Thomas Alva Edison, the nation’s most famous and folksy inventor, creator of the incandescent light bulb and mastermind of the world’s first direct current electrical light networks; the Serbian wizard of invention Nikola Tesla, elegant, highly eccentric, a dreamer who revolutionized the generation and delivery of electricity; and the charismatic George Westinghouse, Pittsburgh inventor and tough corporate entrepreneur, an industrial idealist who in the era of gaslight imagined a world powered by cheap and plentiful electricity and worked heart and soul to create it.
Edison struggled to introduce his radical new direct current (DC) technology into the hurly-burly of New York City as Tesla and Westinghouse challenged his dominance with their alternating current (AC), thus setting the stage for one of the eeriest feuds in American corporate history, the War of the Electric Currents. The battlegrounds: Wall Street, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Niagara Falls, and, finally, the death chamber—Jonnes takes us on the tense walk down a prison hallway and into the sunlit room where William Kemmler, convicted ax murderer, became the first man to die in theelectric chair.
Empires of Light is the gripping history of electricity, the “mysterious fluid,” and how the fateful collision of Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse left the world utterly transformed.
Publishers Weekly
Jonnes, a historian at Johns Hopkins (We're Still Here; Hep-Cats, Narcs and Pipe Dreams), details the rise and fall of the three visionaries who harnessed electricity, while also offering a critique of corporate greed. Her tale emphasizes the "War of the Electric Currents," in which Thomas Edison sought to defend the primacy of his direct current electrical system against George Westinghouse's higher-voltage and more broadly applicable alternating current system. Nikola Tesla, the somewhat kooky Serbian genius (and former Edison man), joined the fray on Westinghouse's side with his AC induction motor. Jonnes serves up plenty of color in an engaging and relaxed style, detailing how Edison capitalized on the "deaths by wire," or accidental electrocutions, from the AC system, sensationalized in the newspapers of the time. As she shows, Edison's "holy war" led to Westinghouse's AC being used in the first prison execution by electric chair, in 1890-which proved considerably more grisly and less humane than originally billed. For Jonnes, this history culminates neatly in a rather trite moral lesson: that corporate greed is bad. She contrasts it with the three public-minded men sketched here, who embody what Jonnes believes capitalism ought to be. Edison wanted only "the perfect workshop"; Westinghouse was interested "in helping the world" and giving his workers disability benefits; Tesla wanted to "liberate the world from drudgery." Jonnes's titans loom as monumentally as the allegorical Good Capitalists in an Ayn Rand melodrama. For those who view history as less tidy, this may strain the patience at times. 16 pages of photos not seen by PW. (On sale Aug. 19) FYI: Much of this story was covered, with more emphasis on the first execution by electric chair, in Richard Moran's Executioner's Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair, published last October. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
After documenting America's "romance" with illegal drugs in Hep-Cats, Narcs and Pipe Dreams (1996), Jonnes now addresses the era of urban electrification and its three giants of invention and industry. The author (History/Johns Hopkins) correctly senses and attacks the major flaw in public perception of such vast, life-changing processes-that it all somehow happens with the wave of a hand. On the contrary, Jonnes demonstrates errors and setbacks were all too common. For example, when J. Pierpont Morgan decided to have his New York City mansion wired for lights by the Edison Electric Company, this marvelous opportunity to attract investors was nearly ruined by an imperfect contact that set fire to Morgan's expensively furnished library. Even more revealing is Jonnes's picture of Lower Manhattan in the 1880s when Edison began his major urban project. Poles of varying height above the streets already bore webs of dangling wires, the frayed remains of failed attempts to make "arc" lighting a commercial success. Electrification, Jonnes stresses, had to meld new technology with vast capital resources to gain a commercial footing. All three of the giants-dogged Thomas A. Edison, optimistic proto-magnate George Westinghouse, and brilliant Nikola Tesla, the Serbian immigrant Westinghouse backed and exploited-learned the same lesson: good p.r. is everything. As Edison became the champion of direct current, rival Westinghouse used Tesla's alternating current technology to win a growing list of clients. Edison's unethical attempts to label AC as a "deadly" alternative were instrumental in the first use of electrocution to execute a condemned man in 1890, but the tide had already turned. Westinghousewas later kicked out of his own company by its board, and the tragic Tesla, who literally wired Niagara Falls as a generator, died penniless. Thoughtful and well paced, with the exception of a digressionary review of scientific developments in electricity from the Greeks to Faraday that temporarily slows the narrative to a crawl. Agent: Eric Simonoff/Janklow & Nesbit
Table of Contents:
| List of Scientific Diagrams | ||
| Introduction | ||
| 1 | "Morgan's House Was Lighted Up Last Night" | 3 |
| 2 | "Endeavor to Make It Useful" | 17 |
| 3 | Thomas Edison: "The Wizard of Menlo Park" | 51 |
| 4 | Nikola Tesla: "Our Parisian" | 87 |
| 5 | George Westinghouse: "He is Ubiquitous" | 117 |
| 6 | Edison Declares War | 141 |
| 7 | "Constant Danger from Sudden Death" | 165 |
| 8 | "The Horrible Experiment" | 185 |
| 9 | 1891: "Fear Everywhere of Worse to Come" | 215 |
| 10 | The World's Fair: "The Electrician's Ideal City" | 247 |
| 11 | Niagara Power: "What a Fall of Bright-Green Water!" | 277 |
| 12 | "Yoked to the Cataract!" | 301 |
| 13 | Afterword | 335 |
| Acknowledgments | 371 | |
| Bibliography | 375 | |
| Notes | 379 | |
| Photograph Credits | 399 | |
| Index | 401 |
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