Englishman Robert Livermore jumped ship in Southern California in 1822, yet just 15 years later became the respected owner of the 40,000-acre Las Positas land grant. Here he built his new Californio wife an adobe house in 1839. The wealth that flowed into California during the gold rush allowed Livermore to import a two-story house around the Horn, but entrepreneurs and squatters flowed in as well. Nathaniel Patterson opened the first hotel in the old Livermore adobe, frequented by miners on their way from the South Bay to the Sierra gold mines. Laddsville, a village built where the roads to Stockton and Dublin met, was also a going concern until the Central Pacific pushed over the Altamont Pass. On this line grew the town founded by William Mendenhall in 1869, named for pioneer Livermore, who had died more than a decade earlier. Soon Livermore became the valley's commercial center for hay, wheat, barley, wine grapes, and ranching.

Mid-century Livermore saw a demographic shift from farms and ranches to suburbanization and continuing support of the existing health care industry, New Deal programs, a naval airbase, and two national laboratories. The health care industry flourished with the dedication in 1925 of a veterans' hospital, which is still operational today; the Livermore Sanitarium for the treatment of alcoholism and mental disorders; and the Del Valle Sanitarium for the treatment of tuberculosis. During the 1930s, Livermore residents supported the Hetch Hetchy Project and numerous efforts of the Works Progress Administration. A naval airbase for training pilots was established in 1942, during World War II. This base became the Lawrence Livermore Radiation Laboratory in the 1950s and was soon accompanied by an extension of Sandia National Laboratories across the street.

Born in 1877 Jesse Livermore began working with stocks at the age of 15 when he ran away from his parent’s farm and took a job posting stock quotes at a Boston brokerage firm. While he was working he would jot down predictions so he could follow up on them thus testing his theories. After doing this for some time he was convinced to try his systems with real money. However since he was still young he started placing bets with local bookies on the movements of particular stocks, he proved so good at this he was eventually banned from a number of local gambling houses for winning too much and he started trading on the real exchanges. Intrigued by Livermore’s career, financial writer Edwin Lefevre conducted weeks of interviews with him during the early 1920s. Then, in 1923, Lefevre wrote a first-person account of a fictional trader named "Larry Livingston," who bore countless similarities to Livermore, ranging from their last names to the specific events of their trading careers. Although many traders attempted to glean the secret of Livermore’s success from Reminiscences, his technique was not fully elucidated until How To Trade in Stocks was published in 1940. It offers an in-depth explanation of the Livermore Formula, the trading method, still in use today, that turned Livermore into a Wall Street icon.

The searing memoir of an extraordinary woman who served as a nun for eleven years in Mother Teresa's order, Hope Endures is a compelling chronicle of idealistic determination, rigid discipline, and shattering disillusionment. InÊher life's journey from certainty to doubt, Colette Livermore enters the Missionaries of Charity order in 1973 with unwavering faith and total surrender ofÊher will and intellect after seeing a documentary on the order's work in India. Only eighteen at the time, Livermore has been studying to enter medical school -- a lifelong goal -- but virtually overnight severs her many ties with family, friends, and the life she's known in beautiful, rural New South Wales in order to train as a sister to aid the poor. In the process, she also gives herself over to the order's unexpectedly severe, ascetic regime, which demands blind obedience and submission. Given the religious name Sister Tobit, Livermore serves in some of the poorest places in the world -- the garbage dump slums of Manila, Papua New Guinea, and Calcutta -- bringing hope and care to people who are desperately ill, hungry, abandoned, and even dying, and comforting whomever she can. Although she draws inspiration and strength from her humanitarian work, Livermore and other nuns risk their own physical health, as they are sent to dangerous areas while being unschooled in the languages and cultures, untrained in medical care, and sometimes unprotected by vaccines. Livermore herself succumbs to bouts of drug-resistant cerebral malaria that almost kill her and to a new strain of hepatitis. Over time she also beginsÊto notice that the order's rigid insistence on unquestioning obedience harms the young sisters mentally, emotionally, and spiritually -- and she experiences a terrible inner struggle to find the right path for herself. As she tries to respond to the suffering around her, she often falls into an incomprehensible conflict between her vow to obey and her vow to serve, between religious strictures and the practice of compassion, between authority and personal conscience. Pressured to stay with the order by Mother Teresa and other superiors, as well as by the younger nuns, Livermore nonetheless decides to leave at age thirty and attain her medical degree, continuing to take health care and relief to impoverished people in remote areas -- the isolated aboriginal communities of the Outback and war-torn East Timor. Even as she serves others as a medical doctor, she continues in a crisis of faith thatÊeventually leads her to become an agnostic. Hope Endures is the eye-opening, deeply affecting story of a brave woman's search for meaning in a world that is rent with tragedies and contradictions. It is also an unflinching critique of any faith that insists on blind obedience. For true hope to endure, Dr. Livermore demonstrates, we must always strive to question, to face the hard truths, and to discover the courage to follow our convictions.

Time Magazine described Jesse Livermore as the most fabulous living U.S. stock trader. His progress from office boy to Wall Street legend - his trading lessons - his triumphs and disasters - is probably the most fascinating of any of Wall Street's stories. Even today, many stock and commodity traders owe Jesse Livermore a deep debt of gratitude for sharing his experiences in this book. The techniques he made public have endured through many decades right up to today; his trading rules earned him millions of dollars, provided he stayed faithful to them. Livermore also lost his entire fortune on more than one occasion, when he ignored his own trading rules. Jesse Livermore was a self-made man trading with his own money - not other people's money, like modern investment banks and hedge funds. Depending how you measure it, his fortune peaked between 1.1 and 14.0 billion dollars in today's money.

An intercultural ministry expert demonstrates the necessity of Cultural Intelligence for effectively serving an increasingly diverse church and world.

Livermore started trading in securities when he was fourteen years old. He made his first thousand when a mere boy. He has practiced every device known to the active speculator, studied every speculative theory, and dealt in about every active security listed on the New York Stock Exchange. He has piled up gigantic fortunes from his commitments, lost them, digested, started all over again—and piled up new fortunes. He has changed his market position in the twinkling of an eye—sold out thousands of shares of long stock, and gone short of thousands of shares more on a decision which required reading only the one word, “but,” in a lengthy ticker statement. If his later experiences were not enough to catch the public fancy, Livermore would have won it by his greatest feat of all: beating the bucket shops. Beating the cheaters, in fact, was Livermore’s pet plan after things had gone against him and he was forced to start anew on a small-lot basis.