The Man With the Golden Touch: How The Bond Films Conquered the World

As the dominant venture capitalist of Silicon Valley, Tom Perkins had seemingly done it all—from amassing a billion-dollar fortune to getting himself convicted of manslaughter in France. But his ultimate dream was to create the biggest, fastest, riskiest, highest-tech, most self-indulgent sailboat ever built.

With keen storytelling and biting wit, bestselling author David A. Kaplan takes us inside the mind of an American genius and behind the scenes of an extraordinary venture: the birth of Perkins's $130 million marvel The Maltese Falcon. This modern clipper ship is as long as a football field and forty-two feet wide, with three rotating masts, each twenty stories high, and a bridge straight out of Star Trek. The riveting biography of a remarkable ship and the remarkable man who built it, Mine's Bigger is an unforgettable profile of ambition, hubris, audacity, and the imagination of a legendary entrepreneur.

Our world has been transformed beyond recognition, particularly in the twentieth century, and so were our lives and our aspirations. Throughout JAMES MAY'S MAGNIFICENT MACHINES James May explores the iconic themes of the past hundred years: flight, space travel, television, mechanised war, medicine, computers, electronic music, skyscrapers, electronic espionage and much more. But he also reveals the hidden story behind why some inventions like the Zeppelin, the hovercraft or the Theremin struggled to make their mark. He examines the tipping points - when technologies such as the car or the internet became unstoppable - and gets up closeξto theξnuts and bolt of remarkable inventions. Packed with surprising statistics and intriguing facts, this is the ideal book for anyone who wants to know how stuff works and why some stuff didn't make it.

More than two-thirds of the new airports under construction today are being built in China. Chinese airlines expect to triple their fleet size over the next decade and will account for the fastest-growing market for Boeing and Airbus. But the Chinese are determined to be more than customers. In 2011, China announced its Twelfth Five-Year Plan, which included the commitment to spend a quarter of a trillion dollars to jump-start its aerospace industry. Its goal is to produce the Boeings and Airbuses of the future. Toward that end, it acquired two American companies: Cirrus Aviation, maker of the world’s most popular small propeller plane, and Teledyne Continental, which produces the engines for Cirrus and other small aircraft.
 
In China Airborne, James Fallows documents, for the first time, the extraordinary scale of this project and explains why it is a crucial test case for China’s hopes for modernization and innovation in other industries. He makes clear how it stands to catalyze the nation’s hyper-growth and hyper- urbanization, revolutionizing China in ways analogous to the building of America’s transcontinental railroad in the nineteenth century. Fallows chronicles life in the city of Xi’an, home to more than 250,000 aerospace engineers and assembly workers, and introduces us to some of the hucksters, visionaries, entrepreneurs, and dreamers who seek to benefit from China’s pursuit of aerospace supremacy. He concludes by examining what this latest demonstration of Chinese ambition means for the United States and the rest of the world—and the right ways to understand it.