Andrew Gordon

The definitive biography of the British naval commander who masterminded the evacuation of Dunkirk and was the operational genius behind the Allied landings at NormandyAdmiral Bertram Ramsay may not be the most familiar World War II commander, but he was critical to the Allied victory. He orchestrated the dramatic evacuation of British expeditionary forces at Dunkirk, planned the invasions of North Africa and Sicily, and worked closely with General Dwight Eisenhower on Operation Neptune, the Allied landings on the beaches of Normandy. In this magisterial biography, over a decade in the making, Andrew Gordon captures Ramsay's complex, conflicted nature. Born into a family with a military heritage but little money, Ramsay joined the navy at fourteen. As a junior officer he developed the obsessive standards of discipline that would characterize his career, managing his ships more through regulation than charisma. He had frequent run-ins with his seniors, including a notorious dispute in 1935 with the Commander-in-Chief Home Fleet that forced his retirement. Brought back to service in August 1939, Ramsay would oversee operations in the English Channel, where his talent for logistics proved vital. Though Ramsay's acerbic manner could generate friction, Eisenhower would later write that "not only was he outstanding as an able sailor and a wonderful teammate in this Allied Force, but he was my warm personal friend." Gordon offers a penetrating study of command dynamics as he covers the key engagements of the war. The first full-life biography of Ramsay in over sixty years and the most authoritative portrait we are ever likely to have, Neptune's Admiral restores this great naval commander to his essential place in World War II history.

The definitive biography of the British naval commander who masterminded the evacuation of Dunkirk and was the operational genius behind the Allied landings at NormandyAdmiral Bertram Ramsay may not be the most familiar World War II commander, but he was critical to the Allied victory. He orchestrated the dramatic evacuation of British expeditionary forces at Dunkirk, planned the invasions of North Africa and Sicily, and worked closely with General Dwight Eisenhower on Operation Neptune, the Allied landings on the beaches of Normandy. In this magisterial biography, over a decade in the making, Andrew Gordon captures Ramsay's complex, conflicted nature. Born into a family with a military heritage but little money, Ramsay joined the navy at fourteen. As a junior officer he developed the obsessive standards of discipline that would characterize his career, managing his ships more through regulation than charisma. He had frequent run-ins with his seniors, including a notorious dispute in 1935 with the Commander-in-Chief Home Fleet that forced his retirement. Brought back to service in August 1939, Ramsay would oversee operations in the English Channel, where his talent for logistics proved vital. Though Ramsay's acerbic manner could generate friction, Eisenhower would later write that "not only was he outstanding as an able sailor and a wonderful teammate in this Allied Force, but he was my warm personal friend." Gordon offers a penetrating study of command dynamics as he covers the key engagements of the war. The first full-life biography of Ramsay in over sixty years and the most authoritative portrait we are ever likely to have, Neptune's Admiral restores this great naval commander to his essential place in World War II history.

Bertram Ramsay has acquired almost mythical status in the history of the Second World War, firstly as the principal organizer of the Dunkirk evacuation and then as naval commander of the Allied invasion of Normandy - in the eyes of many, 'the organizer of victory'. But because Ramsay was killed in January 1945 and never wrote his own memoirs, his life has until now been difficult to pin down. Andrew Gordon, prize-winning author of The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command, writing with the help of Ramsay's descendants, now describes the career of this intense and territorial man in full, for the first time establishing his true role in the two great tests of his life and conveying his very particular personality. This is a superb biography of a naval officer, which also illuminated afresh British history in the first half of the twentieth century.

Jutland and British Naval Command

In this groundbreaking volume, one of Japan's most insightful contemporary labor analysts assesses the ?light and shadow? of Japanese-style management, explaining why Japanese employees have stood apart from workers in other industrialized countries. Kumazawa brings to life the intense combination of competition and community within Japanese workpl

A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, Fourth Edition, paints a richly nuanced and strikingly original portrait of the last two centuries of Japanese history. It takes students from the days of the shogunate--the feudal overlordship of the Tokugawa family--through the modernizing revolution launched by midlevel samurai in the late nineteenth century; the adoption of Western hairstyles, clothing, and military organization; and the nation's first experiments with mass democracy after World War I. Author Andrew Gordon offers the finest synthesis to date of Japan's passage through militarism, World War II, the American occupation, and the subsequent economic rollercoaster.

Have you ever considered becoming a freelance interim ? Or have you already taken that first step ? You need to read this bookE The Interim ManagerOs Guide to Success is exactly what it says in its title. Its author, Andrew Gordon, has enjoyed a highly successful 14-year career as an interim, and his book contains the lessons he learned the hard way. By reading this book you get to learn them the easy way. How to win new contracts, how to calculate and maximise your fee rate, and how to manage the client / interim relationship to your advantage. Mr Gordon takes the reader step by step through a typical interim engagement and explains the crucial doOs and donOts, in plain and unpatronising English. Interim management can be a great career choice that can change your life. By reading this book you will undoubtedly increase your chances of success.

A compilation of original song lyrics written over a lifetime - comic, tragic, nostalgic, about love and love lost and lots more.

My Pomonok is a personal memoir of growing up in a Queens NY housing project during the 1950s and 1960s. It was a time before video games, personal computers, and smart phones, when the concept of a play date was unheard of, with always enough kids downstairs in your court for a choose-up game of punch ball or football, or just a one-on-one game of stoop ball or skelly. It was a paradise for kids, but far from Leave it Beaver or Father Knows Best.

This engaging and straightforward text enhances your awareness of changes happening throughout the world, all by examining the microcosm of a single community. You will hear the conversations, view the changing scene that villagers experience, and hear directly from those who try valiantly, and sometimes fail, to change the lives of villagers. The book contains four case studies, each featuring the author's exploration of a different initiative intended to effect community change. You will gain an understanding about how adopting an anthropological perspective may help you improve your daily life and be a more responsible and effective observer and participant in society, regardless of the occupation you choose, as a member of a household or workplace, or as a citizen of a community, nation, or the world.

Winner of the Longman's History Today Book of the Year Award and the inaugural Westminster Medal for Military Literature More than a century had gone by since the Battle of Trafalgar. Generation after generation of British naval captains had been dreaming ever since of a 'new' Trafalgar - a cataclysmic encounter which would decisively change a war's outcome. At last, in the summer of 1916, they thought their moment had come... Andrew Gordon's extraordinary, gripping book brilliantly recreates the atmosphere of the British navy in the years leading up to Jutland and gives a superb account of the battle itself and its bitterly acrimonious aftermath.

Foreword by Admiral Sir John Woodward. When published in hardcover in 1997, this book was praised for providing an engrossing education not only in naval strategy and tactics but in Victorian social attitudes and the influence of character on history. In juxtaposing an operational with a cultural theme, the author comes closer than any historian yet to explaining what was behind the often described operations of this famous 1916 battle at Jutland. Although the British fleet was victorious over the Germans, the cost in ships and men was high, and debates have raged within British naval circles ever since about why the Royal Navy was unable to take advantage of the situation. In this book Andrew Gordon focuses on what he calls a fault-line between two incompatible styles of tactical leadership within the Royal Navy and different understandings of the rules of the games.

Since its early days of mass production in the 1850s, the sewing machine has been intricately connected with the global development of capitalism. Andrew Gordon traces the machine's remarkable journey into and throughout Japan, where it not only transformed manners of dress, but also helped change patterns of daily life, class structure, and the role of women. As he explores the selling, buying, and use of the sewing machine in the early to mid-twentieth century, Gordon finds that its history is a lens through which we can examine the modern transformation of daily life in Japan. Both as a tool of production and as an object of consumer desire, the sewing machine is entwined with the emergence and ascendance of the middle class, of the female consumer, and of the professional home manager as defining elements of Japanese modernity.

Andrew Gordon goes to the core of the Japanese enterprise system, the workplace, and reveals a complex history of contest and confrontation. The Japanese model produced a dynamic economy which owed as much to coercion as to happy consensus. Managerial hegemony was achieved only after a bitter struggle that undermined the democratic potential of postwar society. The book draws on examples across Japanese industry, but focuses in depth on iron and steel. This industry was at the center of the country's economic recovery and high-speed growth, a primary site of corporate managerial strategy and important labor union initiatives. Beginning with the Occupation reforms and their influence on the workplace, Gordon traces worker activism and protest in the 1950s and '60s, and how they gave way to management victory in the 1960s and '70s. He shows how working people had to compromise institutions of self-determination in pursuit of economic affluence. He illuminates the Japanese system with frequent references to other capitalist nations whose workplaces assumed very different shape, and looks to Japan's future, rebutting hasty predictions that Japanese industrial relations are about to be dramatically transformed in the American free-market image. Gordon argues that it is more likely that Japan will only modestly adjust the status quo that emerged through the turbulent postwar decades he chronicles here.

In this groundbreaking volume, one of Japan's most insightful contemporary labor analysts assesses the ?light and shadow? of Japanese-style management, explaining why Japanese employees have stood apart from workers in other industrialized countries. Kumazawa brings to life the intense combination of competition and community within Japanese workplaces. He highlights dilemmas facing Japanese labor on the shop floor and in the labor movement. His discussion ranges from the role of women to issues of quality control and self-management. Highly critical of the hierarchical and undemocratic nature of Japanese industry, he offers a sympathetic view from the inside of the difficulties of surviving in the workplaces of contemporary Japan.

"Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan" examines the political role played by working men and women in prewar Tokyo and offers a reinterpretation of the broader dynamics of Japan's prewar political history. Gordon argues that such phenomena as riots, labor disputes, and union organizing can best be understood as part of an early twentieth-century movement for 'imperial democracy' shaped by the nineteenth-century drive to promote capitalism and build a modern nation and empire. When the propertied, educated leaders of this movement gained a share of power in the 1920s, they disagreed on how far to go toward incorporating working men and women into an expanded body politic. For their part, workers became ambivalent toward working within the imperial democratic system. In this context, the intense polarization of laborers and owners during the Depression helped ultimately to destroy the legitimacy of imperial democracy. Gordon suggests that the thought and behavior of Japanese workers both reflected and furthered the intense concern with popular participation and national power that has marked Japan's modern history. He points to a post-World War II legacy for imperial democracy in both the organization of the working class movement and the popular willingness to see GNP growth as an index of national glory. Importantly, Gordon shows how historians might reconsider the roles of tenant farmers, students, and female activists, for example, in the rise and transformation of imperial democracy.