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.
Peter Brooks Books
Peter Brooks is the author of numerous books exploring themes such as Henry James Goes to Paris, Realist Vision, and Troubling Confessions. His work delves deeply into narrative structures and psychological motivations, examining how stories shape our understanding of reality and ourselves. Brooks focuses on the melodramatic imagination and the ways literature engages with complex human emotions and moral dilemmas. His writing offers valuable insights into the power and influence of storytelling.
A book which should appeal to both literary theorists and to readers of the novel, this study invites the reader to consider how the plot reflects the patterns of human destiny and seeks to impose a new meaning on life.
Metrics for IT Service Management
- 202 pages
- 8 hours of reading
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.