When Grendel is drawn up from the caves under the mere, where he lives with his bloated, inarticulate hag of a mother, into the fresh night air, it is to lay waste Hrothgar's meadhall and heap destruction on the humans he finds there. What else can he do? For he is not like the men who busy themselves with God and love and beauty. He sees the infuriating human rage for order and recognises the meaninglessness of his own existence. GRENDEL is John Gardner's masterpiece; it vividly reinvents the world of Beowulf. In Grendel himself, a creature of grotesque comedy, pain and disillusioned intelligence, Gardner has created the most unforgettable monster in fantasy.

One reason for the exacerbation of recent stock market crises is a lack of understanding by investors of financial ratio analysis and what it can reveal about the way companies operate. Stock markets are efficient in that they incorporate, and even anticipate, information about companies based on financial accounting data that is provided by companies. However, market efficiency results from extensive analysis performed by financial analysts. Much of this financial analysis is based on the analysis of company-provided financial information that is then analyzed using financial ratio analysis. The goal of this book is to provide a detailed step-by-step demonstration of how to download data from Internet sources, transfer the data into a spreadsheet, and conduct a financial ratio analysis. The company selected for financial analysis is Coca Cola but the same process outlined in the proposed book could be applied to any company. The data retrieved from the financial statements is copied to a worksheet and used to compute and to graph the financial ratios. The ratios and graphs are used to determine the performance drivers of Coca-Cola. The proposed book can be used as a supplement to basic courses in Corporate Finance, Financial Statement Analysis or in a variety of executive education courses dealing with financial accounting and corporate finance.