David john schaap biography books

by Rosie Schaap

€ 24.99 

ISBN: 9780358097457

From the acclaimed author of the “wonderfully funny and openhearted” (NPR) Drinking with Men comes a poignant, wrenching, and ultimately hopeful book—equal parts memoir and social history—that follows the author, after a series of tragic losses, to Northern Ireland, where she finds a path toward healing.

Rosie Schaap had a solid career as a journalist and a life that looked to others like nonstop fun: all drinking and dining and traveling to beautiful places—and getting paid to write about it. But under the surface she was reeling from the loss of her husband and her mother—who died just one year apart. Caring for them had claimed much of her daily life in her late thirties. Mourning them would take longer.

It wasn’t until a reporting trip took her to the Northern Irish countryside that Rosie found a partner to heal with: Glenarm, a quiet, seaside village in County Antrim. That first visit made such an impression she returned to make a life. This unlikely place—in a small, tough country mainly associated with sectarian strife—gave her a measure of peace that had seemed impossible elsewhere.

Weaving personal narrative and social history, The Slow Road North is a moving and wise look at how a community can offer the key to healing. It’s a portrait of a complicated place at a pivotal time—through Brexit, a historic school integration, and a pandemic—and a love letter to a village and a culture.

320 pages.

In Stock.

Usually despatched in 2-5 working days.

Date of Publication: 13/02/2025

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies
in a Silicon Valley Startup
John Carreyrou

Trust me, after you’re halfway in, you won’t put this book down for dinner. Published in mid-2018, Bad Blood is a compulsively readable account of Theranos Inc., a Silicon Valley unicorn that truly was a fairy tale. Its charismatic young founder persuaded an A-list of wealthy people to invest hundreds of millions of dollars on a pipe dream: her spurious claim that a small, portable machine could accurately, speedily diagnose hundreds of diseases from a drop of blood.

At one point Theranos was worth $9 billion, and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, a Stanford University dropout with no medical or scientific training, was briefly worth more than $4.6 billion. She was hailed as the next Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg all rolled into one; in a nod to her hero Jobs, she even wore the same brand of black turtleneck sweaters that Jobs wore, and she got around Palo Alto in a black Audi sedan lacking license plates, only hers came with a chauffeur. Still in her 20s, she had a private Gulfstream jet at her disposal, she never went anywhere without a security detail, and her face was on the cover of national magazines.

Today, in her mid-30s, she is disgraced, broke, and, along with the company's president and chief operating officer, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, under federal indictment for fraud. As leaders, Holmes and Balwani did everything wrong. They lied, they cheated, they intimidated, they manipulated. They were self-aggrandizing, and they were arrogant. They were paranoid, secretive, amoral, insecure, and temperamental. Far from sophisticated, they were naive simpletons who picked a highly regulated industry with life and death implications for their shenanigans. But through shameless audacity and sheer force of her magnetic personality, Holmes persuaded a Who's Who of otherwise sophisticated investors to pour millions into her high-tech fantasy. They included Carlos Slim, George S

American sportswriter, broadcaster, and author (1934–2001)

Richard Jay Schaap (September 27, 1934 – December 21, 2001) was an American sportswriter, broadcaster, and author.

Early life and education

Born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, and raised in Freeport, New York, on Long Island, Schaap began writing a sports column aged 14 for the weekly newspaper Freeport Leader, but the next year he obtained a job with the daily newspaper The Nassau Daily Review-Star working for Jimmy Breslin. He would later follow Breslin to the Long Island Press and New York Herald Tribune.

He attended Cornell University, where he served as editor-in-chief of The Cornell Daily Sun, the student newspaper. He obtained a letter in varsity lacrosse playing goaltender. During his last year at Cornell, Schaap was elected to the Sphinx Head Society. After graduating in 1955, he received a Grantland Rice fellowship at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and authored his thesis on the recruitment of basketball players.

Career

Schaap began work as assistant sports editor of Newsweek. In 1964, he began a thrice-weekly column concerning current events. He became editor of SPORT magazine in 1973. It was then that he set in motion the inspiration for the eccentricities of Media Day at the Super Bowl. Opposing the grandiose and self-important nature of the National Football League's championship match, he hired two Los Angeles Rams players, Fred Dryer and Lance Rentzel, to cover Super Bowl IX. Donning costumes inspired by The Front Page, "Scoops Brannigan" (Dryer) and "Cubby O'Switzer" (Rentzel) peppered players and coaches from both the Minnesota Vikings and Pittsburgh Steelers with questions that ranged from the clichéd to the downright absurd. Schaap was also a theatrecritic, causing him to quip that he was the only person ever to vote for both the Tony Awards and the Heisman Trophy.