Peter Brooks Books

In this spiritual sequel to his influential Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks examines the dangerously alluring power of storytelling. “There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. Nothing can defeat it.” So begins the scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks’s reckoning with today’s flourishing cult of story. Forty years after publishing his seminal work Reading for the Plot, his important contribution to what came to be known as the “narrative turn” in contemporary criticism and philosophy, Brooks returns to question the unquestioning fashion in which story is now embraced as an excuse or explanation and the fact that every brand or politician comes equipped with one. In a discussion that ranges from The Girl on the Train to legal argument, Brooks reminds us that among the powers of narrative is the power to deceive.

The narrative centers on Henry James' transformative ten-month journey across the United States during the Gilded Age, as recounted by critic Peter Brooks. After years abroad, James returns to a rapidly changing America, exploring its diverse landscapes and cultures. His observations, which culminate in the ethnographic work "The American Scene," reveal his evolving perspective on American identity, materialism, and democracy. Brooks blends biography and literary criticism to highlight the lasting significance of James's insights in contemporary society.

Enter the mind of French literary giant Honoré de Balzac through a study of nine of his greatest characters and the novels they inhabit. Balzac's Lives illuminates the writer's life, era, and work in a completely original way. Balzac, more than anyone, invented the nineteenth-century novel, and Oscar Wilde went so far as to say that Balzac had invented the nineteenth century. But it was above all through the wonderful, unforgettable, extravagant characters that Balzac dreamed up and made flesh—entrepreneurs, bankers, inventors, industrialists, poets, artists, bohemians of both sexes, journalists, aristocrats, politicians, prostitutes—that he brought to life the dynamic forces of an era that ushered in our own. Peter Brooks’s Balzac’s Lives is a vivid and searching portrait of a great novelist as revealed through the fictional lives he imagined.

A book on the experience of reading Honore de Balzac's La Comedie humaine which recounts the process of Peter Brooks's own discovery of Balzac.

This book considers the design and implementation of metrics in service organizations using industry standard frameworks. It uses the ITIL process structure and many principles from the ITIL and ISO20000 (BS15000) as a basis. It is a general guide to the use of metrics as a mechanism to control and steer IT service organizations. A major reason for covering this topic is that many organizations have found it very difficult to use metrics properly. This book will deal with the causes of the difficulties to implementing metrics and will present workable solutions. It provides a general guide to the design, implementation and use of metrics as a mechanism to control and steer IT service organizations. It also provides specific recommendations for applying metrics across the ITIL, ISO20000 (BS15000) and other processes, discussing the rationale of the recommendations. This enables an organization to implement the metrics as described directly as a first-pass solution that can be benchmarked against other organizations. But they can also be used as a starting point for customizing particular metrics. Badly designed metrics can be actively harmful to an organization's proper functioning. Producing a set of metrics that avoids the pitfalls and delivers genuine value is not easy. This book will make that task much simpler and less error prone.