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Me-too book!
Excellent business advice
if a cheapskate like me will buy it...With each store example they use to describe an marketing idea, a bulb went off in my head because the stores are my favorites, but I could never have made the connection of using the same ideas for our own businesses. Now that I am attuned to the concepts, I can appreciate the things that the small businesses we've been patronizing for 10 years have been constantly doing.


Stunningly VividI've loved this author for a long time, and consider this early work of his a special treat. Stories of the sea can be so magnificent! I kept thinking of the Old Man and the Sea when reading this. Very highly recommended! You won't be able to put it down.
A remarkable story of survivalThe book is written as the sailor's own first-person narrative. This is truly an amazing tale of endurance under some horrible conditions. Velasco describes his experiences in graphic detail: the harsh weather elements, the disorienting hallucinations, the times of despair. Particularly interesting are his encounters with a variety of marine animals. But it's not all suffering; there are moments of poetic beauty.
I've never experienced anything as harrowing as this. But as a U.S. Navy veteran, I can say that Garcia Marquez skillfully captures the wonder that can only be encountered at sea, far from land. An excellent book.
The best one hundred pages I've read in a long time...

A wild Australian boy and his animal accomplices
The Fantastic Story Of Midnite. And it's a bloody good book.
Deightful little book!Our hero is a bush ranger, like a highway man, though this is almost by default, and he is a very reluctant and to a certain extent inept bad guy. The other characters are equally delightful, especially his feline confederate, the siamese cat Khat, and the depictions of the Australian bush and the times in which they live are wonderful.
It is funny, it is enchanting, and I cannot reccommend it highly enough!


Another Powerful ParableIn typical Ken Blanchard fashion, the authors taught their important lessons through a logical and believable fictional story based on their years of research and experience. The story "guides readers step-by-step through one manager's struggle to discover the three essential keys to empowerment. By following the manager's odyssey to the Land of Empowerment, readers discover that they can take the same journey, which, like any heroic journey, is filled with paradox, challenge, and fitful stops and starts."
The authors defined empowerment as not giving power to people, but releasing the knowledge, experience, and motivation they already have. They then identified and explained the three essential keys for achieving true empowerment:
1.Share information with everyone
2.Create autonomy through boundaries
3.Replace hierarchical thinking with self-managed teams
These simple definitions are deceptively powerful when teamed with patience and persistence. I found the title of this book was most appropriate.
From my experience, the term 'empowerment' is frequently spoken, largely misunderstood, and rarely applied to its maximum extent. This book took the mystery out of the concept of empowerment and left me with a great appreciation for what true empowerment is and how it can be achieved. I am excited about what it could release in me and others who read it.
Highly Recommended!
Easy to read and put into practice.

words
Star Trek Brain Candy
School Library Journal Review

New Age or Christian???
The Jesus Code is a Sacred Gift to the World
The Jesus Code is a sacred gift to the world!

The difference between junk and junque is...
SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE!An unlikely candidate for "Queen of Junk," Ms. Carter is the Vice President of Advertising at Polo/Ralph Lauren. With her husband and two sons she maintains homes in New York City and Duchess County, New York, where, as she says, there's too much junk. Nonetheless, she abides by her motto "Never stop to think, do I have a place for this?"
With over 400 lush colored photographs and a state by state guide for junking forays, Kitchen Junk is the ultimate guide for shoppers. Helpful information offered includes a dress code and tips on haggling: "Most dealers worth their junk expect a bit of a tug-of-war."
One of the most appealing chapters, "A Checkered Life," is devoted to red and white checked items. These pages are replete with tablecloths, napkins, dish towels, aprons, gingham, oilcloth, mitts and even a rooster in those trademark all-American colors. Ms. Carter demonstrates how to set a table with these items and create an atmosphere based on "the fantasy of the farmyard."
Such aprons you have never seen - a bib apron embellished with a picture of a young girl cleaning her plate, a half apron fashioned of a cloth decorated with kitchen tools, a "Some Like It Hot" barbecue apron for him, a strawberry pattern for her. Prices of the items and where they were found are also noted.
Stating that 50% of kitchen time is spent at the sink, the author spruces up that area with an enamel soap dish found for $3.00 at a New York flea market, French agatewear bowls - a steal at $10.00 per, and vintage cut glasses discovered at garage sales for an average of 50 cents each.
Everyone knows what the staff of life is and bread boxes abound from "A hinged lift-top bread box decorated with a frieze of teapots and kitchen ware. It beckoned from a yard sale in Virginia for $3.00." to a "1930s English enameled bread bin."
Few how-to's and where-to's are overlooked in this enthusiastic paean to collecting. With Kitchen Junk in one hand and a Mapsco in the other many will prove the old saw that one man's trash is another man's treasure. Happy hunting!
The Martha Stewart of Junk...

This is a powerful book.. . .
AWESOME ANGEL BOOK!!!
Deeply Spiritual & Insightful

A Different Perspective
Readable introduction to the ideas of evolutionary medicineThe authors begin by asking, "Why, in a body of such exquisite design, are there a thousand flaws and frailties that make us vulnerable to disease?" Through evidence and insights from evolutionary biology, the authors carefully give a detailed answer to this question, which might be summed up thus: The mechanism of evolution fits our bodies for reproduction, not for optimum health. Furthermore the mechanism is imperfect and subject to mutation. Additionally we are in competition with other organisms, e.g, viruses, bacteria, etc., that work toward their fitness, sometimes at our expensive (the parasite-prey "arms race"). Noteworthy is the idea that natural selection cares little for the maintenance of the organism after the age of reproduction, and that sexual reproduction actually fosters mechanisms that increase the fitness of youth while neglecting the aged, leading to the phenomena of senescence and death.
Seeing disease from the viewpoint of evolution, the authors argue, helps us to understand disease and the mechanisms involved, which in turn can help us to fight disease. Allergy, for example, is a disease characterized by an over active immune system. Copious amounts of histamine are produced to fight off a few molecules of pollen. Why? The authors make the point that our immune systems operate on the principle that better an overreaction to something harmless than an under reaction to a real threat. It's like jumping at the sight of a piece of rope lying on the ground. It's not a snake, but better this little harmless error than being too slow to get back from the real thing.
Some other interesting ideas: Fever has a purpose. It raises body temperature enough to interfere with the chemistry of some pathogens, thereby killing them. If we take medicines that reduce fever, are we prolonging our illness? In some cases, the authors answer, yes. If we take medicines that suppress coughs and sneezing can that also prolong our illness? Again the answer is in some cases, yes. The point is that in treating the symptoms of disease we need to make a distinction between which are defensive mechanism of our bodies and which are not. Some pathogens, for example, make us sneeze or cause diarrhea in order to better spread themselves to the next victim. The rabies virus makes a dog bite other animals in order to spread itself. But our bodies cause us to cough and sneeze primarily to expel pathogens.
The authors see some of our health problems as the result of genetic "quirks," or evolutionary hangovers. Dyslexia as an example. In the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation back in the Stone Age, dyslexia was no problem because there were no books to read. Indeed, it might be that the dyslexic approach to some perception problems, is better than the "normal" one, allowing a quicker, better understanding of the objects being viewed. Other genetic quirks include our predisposition to eat too much fat when available because in the EEA there was precious little fat to be had so it made sense to eat as much as possible when it was available. Something similar can be said of alcohol. Before agriculture, and especially before the process of distillation, a predisposition to alcoholism was no danger because there was very little alcohol to be had. These "quirks" are examples of disease caused by "novel environments," much of the modern world being a novel environment to our Stone Age bodies.
Nesse and Williams show that the modern environment, which requires a lot of close work from all of us, especially the reading of books, is the cause of the epidemic of myopia that modern humans experience. I would like to add that it is possible that myopia under some conditions could be adaptive. In the rainforest it would probably be better to see well close at hand than far away (the opposite of what would be valuable on the savannah). Also those people who concentrated on things small and up close might well identify and process food sources overlooked by others.
While this is an excellent book, gracefully written and full of valuable information and insight, it is now a little dated (copyright 1994), and some of the ideas need reworking in light of recent discoveries. For example, while the authors discuss the ill effects of too much fat and sugar in our diets, they say nothing about the carbohydrate intolerance that leads to obesity. This too can be seen as an evolutionary quirk since there were no cultivated fields of amber grain in the prehistory, and the grains that were available were small and required a lot of hand processing so that it was very difficult to overindulge. Consequently there was no need for natural selection to evolve a protection against eating too much. Also their discussion of heart disease and how it is the result of genetic factors and faulty diet fails to mention the idea that heart disease might be caused by a bacteria. (See for example, Plague Time: How Stealth Infections Cause Cancers, Heart Disease, and other Deadly Ailments (2000) by Paul W. Ewald.)
All things considered, though, this is a classic of evolutionary literature, nicely presented to a nonspecialist, but educated public. Now if we can only get the doctors to read it!
An evolutionary approach to understanding medicine

Ross does it again!
A must
A very effective tool for introducing Corporate Finance.