Thirty years after his death, private correspondence between Albert Einstein & his first wife, the Serbian mathematician Mileva ...

Thirty years after his death, private correspondence between Albert Einstein & his first wife, the Serbian mathematician Mileva ...

I looked around & people's faces were distorted...lights were flashing everywhere...the screen at the end of the room had three or four different films on it at once, & the strobe light was flashing faster than it had been...the band was playing but I couldn't hear the music...people were dancing...someone came up to me & I shut my eyes & with a machine he projected images on the back of my eye-lids...I sought out a person I trusted & he laughed & told me that the Kool-Aid had been spiked & that I was beginning my first LSD experience... ...

Elijah longs to be a scientist, to follow in the footsteps of his heroes. But as a member of the Horebite church such dreams will never be possible. Instructed by his father & his church to listen for The Still, Small Voice that will inform his life, Elijah finds himself trapped between a modern world & an ancient belief system; until the discovery of his hidden scientific apparatus brings these two worlds together with unexpected results... ...

Elijah longs to be a scientist, to follow in the footsteps of his heroes. But as a member of the Horebite church such dreams will never be possible. Instructed by his father & his church to listen for The Still, Small Voice that will inform his life, Elijah finds himself trapped between a modern world & an ancient belief system; until the discovery of his hidden scientific apparatus brings these two worlds together with unexpected results... ...

' This latest offering is a joy to read. It is one of those rare things, a book by a management author that you want to devour at one sitting.' Ambassador' Its eclectic style makes it extremely enjoyable to read.' The Irish Times' He has that rare gift among business writers
- able to talk sense & leave out the jargon
- This title will appeal to a very wide audience, because it is everything a business book should be
- very readable & thought provoking.' Business & Computer Bookseller Charles Handy's best-selling new book looks at how individuals (the fleas in his analogy) relate to multi-national conglomerates (the elephants). In addition to addressing how & why we work today, he covers a wide range of preoccupations & issues including the increasing fear of big business: 'it is easy to see why many observers think that the big corporations are now both richer & more powerful than many nation states. They worry that these new corporate states are accountable to no-one
- that their financial clout makes governments beholden to them.. . The elephants, people feel, are out of control.'



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' This latest offering is a joy to read. It is one of those rare things, a book by a management author that you want to devour at one sitting.' Ambassador' Its eclectic style makes it extremely enjoyable to read.' The Irish Times' He has that rare gift among business writers
- able to talk sense & leave out the jargon
- This title will appeal to a very wide audience, because it is everything a business book should be
- very readable & thought provoking.' Business & Computer Bookseller Charles Handy's best-selling new book looks at how individuals (the fleas in his analogy) relate to multi-national conglomerates (the elephants). In addition to addressing how & why we work today, he covers a wide range of preoccupations & issues including the increasing fear of big business: 'it is easy to see why many observers think that the big corporations are now both richer & more powerful than many nation states. They worry that these new corporate states are accountable to no-one
- that their financial clout makes governments beholden to them.. . The elephants, people feel, are out of control.'



...

We are faced with a tug-of-war between our desire for a separate identity & our need for combination. We want to be ourselves, but, to survive in a bigger world, we also need to be part of something bigger. Fleas need elephants, just as elephants need fleas to keep them alert & dancing.' This applies to my own life story, as I found elephants too imprisoning to my eventual freedom as a flea. But the idea also applies to economies who need both, to business which has to structure itself to allow fleas to co-exist with the elephants, to society which needs to encourage individualism but needs the conformity of the elephant, to education, to religion, to marriage & other relationships, & to all people seeking to structure their lives. ...

When a man's favourite elephant vanishes, the balance of his whole life is subtly upset; a couple's midnight hunger pangs drive them to hold up a Mc Donald's; a woman finds she is irresistible to a small green monster that burrows through her front garden; an insomniac wife wakes up to a twilight world of semi-consciousness in which anything seems possible
- even death. In every one of the stories that make up The Elephant Vanishes, Murakami makes a determined assault on the normal. He has a deadpan genius for dislocating realities to uncover the surreal in the everyday, the extraordinary in the ordinary.
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