Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa by Peter Godwin is a story of a boy becoming a young man in the middle of civil war. Below is the fragment of his conversation with Ramona Koval where he discovers the true past of his father: Peter Godwin: It is one of those things where it all makes sense in retrospect, but what happened was that after this incident where he had this heart attack he actually recovered. He then hammered up this old sepia print on the wall, a framed picture on the wall of our sitting room, and when I had a look it was of three people I didn't recognise; a kind of young middle-aged couple and a little girl of about 11. It turned out that they were in fact his parents and his sister and that the secret that he was concealing was that, far from being this sort of pucker Brit that he was actually a Polish Jew and that his family had perished in the Holocaust. He had survived really quite by chance, that his father had decided...his father was a great admirer of Churchill and decided that...my father's family lived, by the way, in Warsaw in Poland, and they decided that English was going to be the language of international commerce in the future and that Dad would spend a summer at a kind of language crammer on the Sussex coast of England.
So off he went to do that and it was the summer of 1939 and my father was about 14, and on the 1st of September Hitler invaded Poland and Dad never got back and his family never got out. My father joined the Free Polish Army ultimately and had a very active war fighting after D-day up through Normandy and everything but ultimately never getting back to Poland, which was obviously occupied by the Soviets. We later discovered that his mother and sister had died in Treblinka concentration camp and his father died shortly after the war. When he met my mother, she was from a very posh Anglo family from I think four generations of Church of England vicars, including the chaplain general of the fleet at one point. Her family was sort of appalled that she'd taken up with this Jew, and so she was ostracised and disinherited, and that was what persuaded them just to leave and go to Africa to try and get a new life.
David A. Aaker from University of California - Berkeley has written a sequel to his Managing Brand Equity. In this offering he tells how to deal with the fragmentation of markets by building brand identity and creating brand personality. With extensive case studies and illustrations of companies' ads, he emphasizes positioning a brand personality to match that of the consumer being targeted. Healthy Choice created the perception that healthy foods can taste good. Saturn developed from a new company in an old industry and had to "sell the company, not the car." Aaker's well-written book is for specialists in the field of marketing and brand management.
This week, I would like to share a story with you that international speaker Bob Pike shares in his keynote speach, "Seven Attitudes of High Performing Managers". This story highlights the importance of the business relationships you create, no matter who they are and how they assist your business. We may not get the story word for word, but it goes something like this...
Imagine you are working on a really important project, your deadline is looming, and you'd like it finished within the next 30 minutes so it's done, and you can go home to your family.
The Managing Director of the company you work for calls you and says "I have some great news that I'd like to share with you, can I come over and talk with you now for about 20 minutes?" Naturally you say "Yes of course." And right now you're probably thinking "Wow, the MD wants to speak with me about some great news. How exciting. I wonder what it could be." Any thoughts of you leaving in half an hour has gone out the window, and it no longer matters.
Once the MD is there chatting with you, do you think you would look at your watch and think 20 minutes has gone by ... start getting anxious, oh no 40 minutes has gone by ... I really have that project I need to finish. Do you think you would say ... Hey Mrs MD, could you please leave, I have a project I need to finish, and would really like to get home! Chances are that wouldn't happen. Instead you'd be so flattered that the MD wanted to share that amount of time with you, and you even hope your colleagues walk by and see you! Now imagine that exact same scenario, but this time when the phone rings it's the cleaner, and they say to you "I have some great news that I'd like to share with you, can I come over and talk with you now for about 20 minutes?" Would you pay the cleaner the same courtesy and enthusiasm that you paid the Managing Director? Probably not.
But let us ask you ... who would you miss most if they were gone for 12 months with no replacement?
Great story, isn't it? Everyone is important, and they all play a role in your success. Your clients, your suppliers, your support team, all the people who do the jobs you don't like doing!
A Perfect Mess by Eric Abrahamson - The Hidden Benefits of Disorder - How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place. This book will help you to assess what is the right amount of disorder for a given system, and how to apply these ideas in life. A Perfect Mess combines great expertise with stories from everyday life to provide a striking new view of how our world works. Ever since Einstein's study of Brownian Motion, scientists have understood that a little disorder actually makes systems more effective. But most people still shun disorder, or suffer guilt over the mess they create. Neatness is no longer a virtue in itself... the costs of being neat and well-organized frequently outweigh the benefits. A Perfect Mess is a book written for the general reader in comprehensible prose. The authors' thesis won't necessarily surprise readers. If you think about it, it's obvious enough that there must be some optimal level of order for every situation. But it's not so much the conclusion that matters here as the guided tour through the messy worlds of city planning and hardware stores and trombone tuning and so on: you'll almost certainly learn something along the way, and in the end you may feel a little better about letting the dishes pile up.
The 8-Week Cholesterol Cure: How to Lower Your Blood Cholesterol by Up to 40 Percent Without Drugs or Deprivation by Robert E Kowalski and Albert A Kattus has lot of information on one of the most dangerous diseases our times. The beauty is they are treating this condition without any medicine and their program works excellently. They also give you some recipes which are very effective. All you have to do is to make some changes to your life style, exercises and stick to them. It will help you to maintain your blood cholesterol at the desired level. The Niacin and Oat Bran regimen that Robert Kowalsky writes about is good to find out about because it can have these effects that I desired. I started with a Total cholesterol level of 288, and in 120 days it measured 161 at the same lab. This is a diminution of 44%! And the ratio went from 50% over "dangerous" to 50% over "protective." Triglycerides went from 209 down to 97. I am pleased as punch. This treatment is so simple and so inexpensive that one wishes to evangelize for it. I believe this book could save many lives; I would like to give it as a little gift to friends who have elevated levels, and whom I would like to keep as friends for many more decades.
The 8-Week Cholesterol Cure: How to Lower Your Blood Cholesterol by Up to 40 Percent Without Drugs or Deprivation by Robert Kowalski
Michael Hewitt-Gleeson is one of Australia’s best-selling business authors. His recent book "WOMBAT Selling" which means: Word-of-Mouth-Buy-and-Tell is the new buzz in sales and marketing. It is an essential reading for anyone who wants to dramatically increase profitability and customer satisfaction. It has been the sacred belief of the selling profession that the primary job of the salesperson is to close the sale. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The salesperson cannot close the sale - it is the customer. This is the revolutionary insight behind W.O.M.B.A.T. Selling - Word-Of-Mouth-Buy-And-Tell. In this volume, the author provides clear advice and insight as to how customer satisfaction and profitability can be multiplied ten-fold using word of mouth strategies. Also included is advice on how to make the on-line word-of-mouth environment work for your business.
Thomas Jerome Newton is a humanoid alien who comes to Earth seeking to construct a spaceship to ferry others from his home planet, Anthea, to Earth. Anthea is experiencing a drought after many nuclear wars, and the population has dwindled to few hundreds. Like all Antheans, he is super-intelligent, but he has been selected to complete this mission for his strength, due to the harsh climate and gravity of Earth compared small Anthea. Newton first lands in the state of Kentucky and quickly becomes familiarized with the environment and aspires to become an entrepreneur. Newton uses advanced technology from his home planet to patent many inventions on Earth, and rises as the head of a technology-based conglomerate to incredible wealth. This wealth is needed to construct his own space vehicle program in order to ferry the rest of the Anthean population. Along the way he meets Betty Jo, a simple Kentucky woman. She falls in love with him. He does not share these feelings, but takes her, and his curious fuel-technician Nathan Bryce, as his few friends while he runs his company in the shadows. Betty Jo introduces Newton to many customs of Earth culture, amongst them church-going, fashion, and alcohol. However, his appetite for alcohol soon invokes much emotional instability, as he is forced to deal with intense human emotions with which Antheans are unfamiliar.
His secret identity as an alien is discovered by Nathan Bryce, but Newton, aware that he has been discovered, is relieved to reveal his identity to someone for the first time. He explains that, according to readily apparent predictions, Earth will soon succumb to an enormous war when, in the upcoming presidential elections, the Republican Party will take power and transform the USA into a militaristic war-machine within ten years. The Antheans he will ferry to Earth will flourish and hopefully make use of their superintelligence to influence Earth to peace, prosperity, and safety from the apocalypse. However, the CIA arrests Newton, having followed him since his appearance on Earth and having recorded this private conversation with Bryce. They submit him to rigorous tests and analysis, but ultimately find that, despite much conclusive evidence of his alien identity, it would be pointless to release the results because the public would not believe the truth. Such claims would also reflect poorly on the Democratic Party, responsible for the capture. The CIA releases Newton, but no sooner than he tries to exit his building, the FBI, uninformed by the CIA that Newton is exempt from further tests, commences their own brief examinations. Their final examination is ultimately an X-ray test of Newton's eyes. Newton, whose eyes are sensitive to X-rays, tries to stop them to no avail and is blinded. The story of Newton's blinding reaches the press in a frenzy, and, ironically, the story is used by the Republican Party to depict the Democrats as being corrupt, and leads to their seizure of power, which is to inevitably lead to apocalypse. Newton, in a final confrontation with Bryce, is bitterly unable to continue his spaceship project due to planetary alignments having changed during captivity and the troubles of his blindness. He creates a recording of alien messages which he hopes to be broadcast via radio to his home.
As products become increasingly similar, companies are turning to branding as a way to create a preference for their offerings. Branding has been the essential factor in the success of well-known consumer goods such as Coca Cola, McDonald's, Kodak, and Mercedes. In fact, these brands are worth many times more than the book value of the property used to make these brands. Now it is time for more industrial companies to start using branding in a sophisticated way. Some industrial companies like Caterpillar, DuPont, Siemens, GE have led the way. But industrial companies must understand that branding goes far beyond building names for a set of offerings. Branding is about promising that the company's offering will create and deliver a certain level of performance. The promise behind the brand becomes the motivating force for all the activities of the company and its partners. Thus if Motorola promises six sigma quality, then everyone at Motorola is driven to create and deliver this level of performance. Thus branding is the road that a company must travel to define what it wants to be excellent at and how its offerings differ from competitors. Branding is the outward expression of the company's earlier decisions on positioning its products and articulating its value propositions to buyers. When branding works, the sales people enter the offices of customers already well-known and respected who stand ready to give them a hearing. This book is one of the first to probe deeply into the art and science of branding industrial products and it provides the concepts, the theory, and dozens of cases illustrating the successful branding of industrial goods.
It's a summer of record-breaking heat in Charlotte, North Carolina and Dr Temperance Brennan is looking forward to her first vacation in years. She's almost out the door when the bones start appearing. First there's the newborn skeleton found in a wood stove. Who put the baby there? The mother, hardly more than a child herself, has disappeared. Next, a small plane flies into a rock face on a sunny afternoon. Both pilot and passenger are burned beyond recognition, their bodies covered with a strange black substance. What could it be? What sinister mission might the two have been on?
Most puzzling is aIt's a summer of record-breaking heat in Charlotte, North Carolina and Dr Temperance Brennan is looking forward to her first vacation in years. She's almost out the door when the bones start appearing. First there's the newborn skeleton found in a wood stove. Who put the baby there? The mother, hardly more than a child herself, has disappeared. Next, a small plane flies into a rock face on a sunny afternoon. Both pilot and passenger are burned beyond recognition, their bodies covered with a strange black substance. What could it be? What sinister mission might the two have been on?
Most puzzling is a cache of bones unearthed in a remote corner of the county. Some animal, some human, the bones are enough to keep Tempe busy for a long time. All the pieces of the mystery seem to lead back to an isolated farm. But what happened there and who will be the next victim? Tempe must find the answers by teasing secrets from the bones - if only she can decipher them in time. A superb new thriller from the number one bestselling author of 'Grave Secrets'.
This book written by Ethel Turner stands out from other children's books because the children seems to be just like ordinary kids, getting into all sorts of mischief, but no morals are drawn. At least not overtly, and those that can be drawn are more along the lines of "this is what can happen when you stifle your children's originality and natural exuberance" than the more usual "this is what happens to naughty children". Not that the parents are horrible, but the father is somewhat stern and withdrawn - typical of many fathers even nowadays. He features mostly as someone who gets angry at the children's mischief, or who has to be applied to for funds. The stepmother is just lovely, although you get the feeling that the father married her more because he needed someone to look after his kids and satisfy his lusts (just because she's young and pretty, lusts are not mentioned in the book) than because they were in love. But then as far as I can see love didn't really come into marriage much in those days.
In this truly funny novel, Bridget Jones again recounts the ups and downs of the single life. During this period she has a somewhat steady boyfriend; however, the joys of having a man in her life are tempered by his seeming indifference to her at times. To her consternation she discovers that he is spending time with another woman. Besides the trials and tribulations of this relationship, Bridget must contend with confrontations with an obstinate boss, dealings with a weird contractor, working on her apartment, and the unpleasant experiences during the worst vacation of her life. Through it all Bridget is supported by her married and unmarried friends. Her comments, often overstated, are both harsh and humorous. Reader Tracie Bennett does an outstanding job with the characterizations of the variety of personalities, from Bridget's rather reserved boyfriend to her outspoken female acquaintances. The Edge of Reason is great entertainment and certainly worth reading. I seriously could not put it down. This is a lively and entertaining work suitable for popular fiction collections.
More about Helen Fielding. British author, born February 19, 1958 in Morley, West Yorkshire, best known as the author of the novel Bridget Jones's Diary and its sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason. The Bridget Jones books had their origins in a column published in The Independent and The Daily Telegraph in 1997 and 1998. In August 2005, her weekly column was re-introduced by The Independent. A collection of the new columns is expected in late 2006. Olivia Joules and The Overactive Imagination was published in 2004, a spoof on the spy genre. Fielding graduated from St. Anne's College, University of Oxford with an English degree, and worked in television journalism for several years before writing her first novel, Cause Celeb. She was for a time the girlfriend of screenwriter Richard Curtis, who went on to write Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and the Blackadder series. The director of the film adaptation of Bridget Jones's Diary, Sharon Maguire, also appeared in the column/book as one of Bridget's friends, 'Shazzer'. Fielding also remains close friends with the writer Nick Hornby.
In 2003, she was listed in The Observer as one of the 50 funniest acts in British comedy.
In February 2004, she gave birth to her first child, a boy named Dashiell Michael, with longtime boyfriend Kevin Curran, a writer for The Simpsons. Their second child, a daughter, was born July 16, 2006. In the early 2000s, Fielding appeared in The Simpsons episode "A Star is Born-Again" as herself.
The author George Negus has set out to demystify the issues, the misconceptions and prejudice that have set the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds against each other. In doing so he exposes the mutual ignorance between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds.
