change Books

This little book is a quick and great read. It gets down to the point and brings encouragement to "busy" people working for God - and lets us know that there is more to it than busy-ness, and that it is an adventure and our gifts and talents are the key to enjoying the journey.

Growing up in a church, it's easy to "go along" with everyone else's ideas of who you should be as a Godly woman. Somehow the stereotype seems to be: quiet, submissive, kind of fading into the background, busy with motherhood but little else. While those traits may be valid at times, Godly womanhood includes other roles, duties, and yes --- even attitudes.

Lynne Hybels has written a powerful little book about how to escape from the trap of other people's expectations (even when well-intentioned) and discover the woman God created you to be. Easy reading -- but you'll find yourself setting the book down often, just so you can think about and process what Lynne is saying.

Extremely well written --- buy this book for your college-age or older daughters --- or other young women you know and love. Readers of all ages will discover truth in a new way. Thanks, Lynne!

Lisa & David Frisbie
The Center for Marriage & Family Studies
Authors of 8 books, including Raising Great Kids on Your Own: A Guide and Companion for Every Single Parent

This is one of the best books I've read in a long time. My husband and I read it together and had many meaningful sometimes teary conversations along the way. I recently bought 8 copies for some of my friends. All of them loved it. They don't want to be nice girls anymore either. This book is powerful and honest. Thanks Lynne, for honestly telling your story. It's given me the courage to do the same.

What I liked most about this book is that it motivated me to get moving. Over the past year, I've been on a journey of self-discovery and this book helped me verify a lot of important issues, the main one being that my voice does matter! It's short and so simple to read, yet filled with life long lessons. Who wants to watch life pass them by? Not me and obviously not Lynne Hybels either. I'd strongly suggest this book to read alone or in a book club. It's not set up for discussion, but there's no doubt that you'll have plenty to talk about. So, get moving!

Lynne Hybels writes with great insight and vulnerability. I truly appreciate her willingness to share the wisdom she has gained with her journey. O that young girls would be taught these truths early on by their mothers, and especially their fathers, and be able to hold onto their unique, God-given sense of self throughout their lives.

All that creative energy and intelligence unleashed...well, it would change the world.

While there are several things about this book that disappoint me, specifically the author's apparent inability to call a person by their proper pronouns or names and the idea that people who were abused are not/cannot be transsexual, it's a good place to start as long as you keep in mind that basing your entire opinion on a subject based on the views in ONE book is NOT a good idea.

The book is fairly easy to read, can have it's shining moments and can be a great help to both transsexual and their family and friends alike. It shouldn't be shunned, but it also shouldn't be taken as the Gospel Truth-- it's not, but that doesn't automatically make it worthless.

I would recommend "Trans Forming Families" (I forget the author) over this book, but as a resource, True Selves is still useful. It's a well-meaning book, despite it's (few, but glaringly obvious) flaws, and in my opinion, at least the author's didn't make transsexuals out to be psychotic freaks of nature.

Much like a former reviewer I feel like on could nitpick the book to death however, as a bridge from knowing absolutely nothing about trans people (much like my mother) one I believe could do worse.
This book was a recommended read for my mother and I by my/our therapist,which was a good call but I still had to explain lots of things myself.

This book arrived in a good state,very quickly and was most helpful to those who have read it

I purchased this book after a close family member announced that he was transsexual. I knew very little about transexualism and was spending hours online looking for any information I could find about it. This book was enormously helpful to me in learning about an experience I knew nothing about. I am encouraging members of my family to also read it as they like me want to understand to the best of our ability how to support our family member. The book is wonderfully organized starting with an explanation of terms (e.g. transsexual, transgendered, transvestite) then moving into a description about what transsexuals typically experience during their lives. Starting from childhood and moving through life stages, the authors provide a thoughtful and thorough explanation of what life often entails for transsexuals. The author's are very clear in saying when experiences are common to men or women, and take every effort to not overly generalize experiences across all transsexuals. The last few chapters of the book provide a helpful overview of the medical procedures some transsexuals choose to do and how and why they may or may not officially change their gender. I wish I could more eloquently describe how thorough and well written this book is but I hope that those reading this review can at least hear in my words how very helpful I have found this book. I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand transexualism regardless of whether or not they personally know someone who is.

'True Selves' is a unique and excellent book. The book cover says "For Families, Friends, Coworkers, and Helping Professionals".

It is that and so much more. It is a great resource for learning or teaching about trnassexualism. But, it is also a great guide for those who are transgender or transsexual. It covers personal feelings, the feelings of others and also how to transition from coming out to the ultimate step of sexual/gender reassignment surgery. It discusses coming out, hormones, living full-time and covers every aspect of what is means to be transsexual.

I cannot say enough about this book. I would recommend this book be on anyone's list that is transgender or is dealing with a transgender individual.

The author gives the impression that the old teaching methods
are outmoded. This is not true in my experience. The standard
lecturing and case study methods are employed because their
use facilitates covering extensive bodies of material in a short
period of time. The work is correct in supplementing existing
methods with innovative approaches to learning. Several examples are cited. i.e.
- students visit a nursing home and paint pictures for the residents
- a final exam may contain a mock trial for critique by the students

The author divides students into classic groups . i.e.
- learners
- true believers
- pluggers
- rebels

The pluggers struggle with the material and rarely learn it
comprehensively. Rebels resent classic teaching methods and
act out their feelings accordingly.

This work has value to teachers/administrators willing to
admit weaknesses in the current system in favor of some
new and innovative approaches. The book also supplements existing
methods with fresh approaches to teaching by the formal lecture method. The author did not emphasize the role of technology
sufficiently . A future version of this book should integrate
computer teaching and teacher technological assessments into
the overall presentation.

This was a very interesting read, however there are several points I definitely don't agree with. The author basically said that there's nothing we should be doing now to prepare for the end times, because we're already doing it. I think meditating and such is very helpful for people, even though the other says to not bother.

Also, supposedly the 4th dimension "closed" either in 2005 or 2006. I know that this is not true, so I don't quite understand why he would say this.

The author also states that this is the only handbook written in regards the subject material, and we don't need to read anything else about it. I've read NUMBEROUS books about this subject, and it's VERY helpful to read other people's perspectives in order to get a better grasp on things.

Since I strongly feel that several things he stated are incorrect, it makes me wonder if everything else in the book is a bunch of hooey.

So, I would recommend reading this in addition to other books on the subject. Everyone has different opinions, and every book states something different. I have no idea what will happen in 2012. I'll be disappointed if NOTHING happens, but also relieved in a way. So, I guess we'll just wait and see, won't we?

The author makes some wonderful points that are excellent food for thought in challenging traditional beliefs. Reincarnation, karma, life review and planning your next life are fairly common themes in many world religions. And it's certainly becoming more difficult to deny the existence of UFO's. Much of what he wrote resonated as truth to me, but once he started talking about the spiritual world being an artificial creation just for Earth inhabitants, that it was "cancelled" or disbanded in 2005, and since then those who died are going to ufo ships instead, I questioned his logic. At that point it started sounding like a cult, like those people who killed themselves in 1999 because they had to do so in order to be brought to the mother ship that was coming to get them. It also reminded me of my Catholic upbringing where they cancelled Limbo for babies. Additionally, he seems to contradict himself in several points that he makes. I've only read the book once and can't recall exactly where the contradictions were but they were pretty obvious as I read them. He encourages people to read the book several times but it's doubtful that I will do so. He really lost me on the 2005 cancellation of the spiritual world and putting people on a space ship after that. I was thinking, "Hey Scotty, beam me up now." I gave it three stars because I think it's entirely possible that Earth is an educational area where people reincarnate to learn lessons. But again, the space ship thing is a bit out there.

The good: As other reviews have already expressed, Jang's narrative serves as an introduction to other possible truths of reality, humanity, and why we are here and the way history and science are not as reliable as we were raised to swallow- it can also serve as fuel for those who are well on the search for the real meaning of those concepts.

The questionable: Redundant writing, egotistical point of view, at times hypocritical, evasive Q/A section and pretty opaque for a book about ether. Every time he expresses that many writers or channelers have tried to send this message, but have failed until he came into the picture, he really lost credibility with me. And he expresses this several times. He proclaims this to be the most unusual book ever written- more ego. Telling the story of the love in his past life that was madly in love with HIM and thus because of her problem they couldn't maintain a relationship in this life- hmm, more ego and then some deflection of blame. The only way one can reach spiritual awareness of higher dimensions/frequencies and the truth of existence is through traumatic experience, (just like how HE awakened) and not through meditations like Buddha... although yoga helps awaken us to the truth?! He contradicts himself on a few points like this. If the Origin knows all, why give us Christ to bring us back to spirituality and away from the materialist way of thinking, only to result in the worsening of the problem? And I have one good question- if the system of reincarnation is no longer in place... does that mean all the babies born since 2005 have no ether (souls)? I won't argue reincarnation, but contrary to his claims there are a lot of gaps, holes, inconsistencies in his recounting of how the system is operating. Maybe he got his messages from one of his negative thought forms or lower-dimensional beings that he thinks are to blame for the failure of all other writers on the topic.

I read this on my trek to finding something that makes sense. From his writing, I learned that maybe I don't need to search- it will find me. Some of his anecdotes were easy to identify with, and I have been reminded to live in the 'now' because that is the most effective way to learn from experience. He DOES NOT give anything near to a specific date and mentions 2009 more than 2012- so if you are looking for these kind of prophecies don't look here.

This guy has some of the most outlandish ideas which belong more to the realm of Scientology than spirituality. I was very interested when I saw this book for sale, but once I got through chapter 2 I lost all interest. I read on, thinking he might have at least a little insight, but no, he did not offer anything of real value. His method of receiving this information is also very suspect. If you are truly interested in knowing what will happen in the coming Earth Changes, listen to the CD's of Ramtha's 'Change, The Days That Are Here' or read what Edgar Cayce and Gordon Michael Scallion had to say. You'll be much more prepared...and hopeful.

Well, after the first time I read this I had some challenges.

I guess you could say I didn't fully understand all of the concepts of dimensional realms and was for some reason scared of them..

Yet, as I keep focusing on my growth, I re-read this book to notice that it has some very powerful concepts. It does a great job explaining some of the 2012 information and how Gaia is proceeding in her evolution.

I wouldn't say it was the easiest read, but something you will want to get through because of the information it holds. So I would recommend my friends to purchase it, yet it wouldn't be a book I would tell them to rush out and get.

Dale E Sarna
Author of Evolve

Bookstar2122 that is who i used to purchase the book from. One they don't give prompt service and they have no refund policy. It took me close to 105 days to resolve this issue. They refused to refund my money back even after they signed for the book.

Yes, I know it's very expensive, but it is the single best resource for current research on psychotherapy...what works, and for which populations. If you feel a little squimish when you hear the words "evidence based practice" this will put you in the know. I would only recommend it for experienced psychotherapists who have some basic knowledge of research methodology. Would not be helpful for the general public. Especially helpful if you have to do battle with insurance company reviewers.

Inertia and status quo will undermine, need innovation.

2. Organization crisis often triggers substantial innovation and change.

3. Companies proactively generate crises and opportunities by creating and solving problems.

4. Excellent managers are those whose unit have no performance gaps today but are able to define future opportunities to energize the organization now.

5. Managers must be clear about products, markets, technology, and timing and define objectives or standards to access performance.

6. A vision people can believe in can add passion and enthusiasm to an organization. A vision people do not understand or believe in undermines management's credibility and is a source of great cynicism.

7. When vision helps create the core values of an organization, it can provide the foundation for the culture or social control system essential in rapidly changing environments.

8. The essence of a vision company is the translation of ideology into goals, strategy, tactics, and policies, processes, and every thing that the company does.

9. Vision must be accessed against actual performance.

10. Managers prioritize performance gaps and make clear the most critical problems.

11. Managers can create opportunities gaps by raising performance standards.

12. Organizational learning is about finding good-enough solutions to important problems.

13. If strategy or vision is wrong, no amount of diagnosis and root cause analysis will help.

14. If a diagnosis reveals in congruencies between one or two organizational building blocks, incremental change is possible.

15. Norms are widely shared and strong held social expectations. Compliance to the norm is considered right. Noncompliance is punishable. Variance exist across an organization and its subunits.

16. Organizations with widely shared norms and values often show great consistency of attitudes and behavior. When core values are diffuse, operating norms are apt to be diffuse.

17. It is difficult to actively shape core values and culture without a clearly articulated competitive vision.

18. Finding the right strategy, vision, and purpose are essential for long-term success and have important motivational properties.

19. Without credible strategy and profit, people won't pay much attention to any so-called noble purpose.

20. Widely shared norms can be powerful determinants for attitudes and behavior.

21. Control comes from the knowledge that someone who matters to us is paying close attention to what we are doing and will tell us how we are doing.

22. A social control system's effectiveness is measure against whether is supports or hinders managers in accomplishing their critical tasks.

23. Providing clear and consistent signals about what is important and should be attended to and what is inappropriate and should not be tolerated is how managers help people focus.

24. People want to contribute their talents at work. "What America does right"

25. In a study of 2,000 managers from Asia, Europe, Africa, and the United States managers recognized the importance of designing workplaces that stimulate creativity and implementation of new ideas. Groups that had comparatively strong norms were rated as most innovative.

26. Managers recognized to stimulate creativity, one had to be prepared to encourage risk taking and accepting failures.

27. The managerial challenge is to design rewards consistent with underlying values of the employees.

28. In 1991, FedX 5,000 employees generated 7,500 suggestions for improvement.

29. A companies future success depends on its ability to develop new technology and improve substantially the reliability of the product line and customer service.

30. Employees need to give the help customers wants, not the help a policy or procedure dictates.

31. Systems of participation and involvement lead people to feel responsible.

32. Behavior leads to attitudes. A series of small commitments progressively builds into larger commitment patterns.

33. Getting people involved and excited about their jobs increases productivity. People see their ideas count and they feel important, a sense of dignity prevails. Jack Welch, "If you're not thinking all the time about making every person more valuable, you don't have a chance."

This book exemplifies the business of the Harvard Business School. It draws snippets from many case studies (available for purchase separately), it ties into seminars and tailored sessions sold at fancy prices to industry, and it presents one of several competing but overlapping theories of what divides successful and unsuccessful companies. It is often compared with Clayton Christensen's book "The Innovator's Dilemma" (obliquely referenced in the preface, but not appearing in the index or bibliography), and indeed both deal with the question of how established companies deal with technologies (in the loosest sense) that change markets. Of the two, I vastly prefer Christensen's book because he tells coherent stories that reach conclusions. This book introduces situations without enough detail to get a true feel for what is going on. In one extreme case ("... John Torrance at Medtek ...", p. 61), a reference is introduced that has no antecedent. The authors of books in this genre like to name drop to show you how broad and deep is their knowledge; therefore you should regard their version of gospel as more credible than their rivals. (How about a case sometime on business school professors?) There are "figures" and "tables" which I suspect are PowerPoint pastes from their lectures. Some of them are referenced (weakly) in the text -- most of them have no direct connection to the exposition. In short, the book gives the impression of being slapped together in haste. For the most part, it is well edited -- a few punctuation lapses notwithstanding. But it needed more editing for content. The table on page 13 says that the "Winchester" company fell victim to its success in disk drives, but the term "Winchester disk" refers not to a company but the code name of a very succesful product prior to its announcement. (Cf. http://www.....htm among other similar web references.) On page 163 they say that IBM lost key control to Intel and Microsoft by betting on the wrong PC design. The conclusion is true, but has nothing whatever to do with the false premise. Now these are all throwaway lines in the book, but they undermine the credibility of the main argument. As an earlier reviewer here put it, the book is about five chapters too long, again, I suspect, because it was produced in haste in order to sell to HBS program participants and in order to get on to the next piece of work. For those who haven't been exposed to the basic ideas (e.g., culture matters), it may well be invaluable, but it ain't the one, true gospel.

I read many business books - from Drucker to Peters, etc., but this one is very insightful, practical, and easy to follow! One day I will own my own business and this book will be by my side!

Captivating stories. Could have reduced the length of the book by 5 or so chapters to avoid repeating the same concepts.

Many successful companies continue to live onto their past success stories and forget the drastic changes taking place in the market. This symptom ultimately makes their successes short-lived and their market positioning easily challenged,and overtaken, by other not-so-famous competitors. To evade such perils, this book explains lucidly the idea of discontinuous innovations through which "culture of innovation" can be obtained and finally reach to an ambidextrous organization. Without innovation no organization can ever think of surviving in this cut-throat competitive market. The concepts in the books are easy to understand via appropriate examples and related explanation.

David is the first speaker on Part 2 of Library of Congress Series on the Digital Future: Collection

Three years after publication, the march of technology has not made this book obsolete. Levy correctly identified the sore spots that technological change has rubbed on our sense of civilized society, and pointed out to what degree the problems were realized 100 years ago. Previous reviewers complained about pointlessness, but I appreciate Levy's many small points as well as his few large ones. However, I wouldn't buy a copy; this is the kind of book that public libraries are good for.

The first contribution of David Levy's book is to provide insight on what exactly IS a document. Like many common and prosaic words, the idea of what constitutes a document proves to be more than a little challenging. (Here are a couple of definitional challenges. On the one hand, an entire paper document can be reproduced as a single Web page or split into numerous parts and therefore many Web pages. Alternatively, an encyclopedia could be interpreted as a single document in one case, or each of its split-out articles as separate documents in their own right.)

Levy illustrates the real role of a document as an artifact of historical fixity by the case of the lowly sales receipt, dozens of which pepper our daily lives and go without notice. The paper receipt most often contains information on the amount, location, for what and time of the transaction, say for buying a deli sandwich. But through the Middle Ages and into the 1700s, witnesses (wit, to know) were required to vouch (act as a witness) that any economic transaction had indeed taken place. In other words, a simple and taken-for-granted paper document such as the sales receipt (or voucher) was a key enabler in oiling the wheels of commerce. A simple slip of paper replaces the hassle and expense of a physical witness.

Other documents, of course, enabled coordination of train schedules, ledger accounting and other economic benefits, plus, also of course, the spreading of ideas and knowledge, fiction and non-fiction. Levy tells similar stories regarding the emergence of greeting cards, post cards and the postal service.

Levy works best when he attempts to fulfill his stated aim of placing documents within their own cultural time and place. The story is thus anecdotal and diverse from Woody Allen's Annie Hall to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The result is this book is a surprisingly literal treatment given the author's doctoral background and then professorship in information science.

While attempts are made to relate this material to information and library science, indeed to the emergence of the digital age, the book ends up feeling fragmented and scattered, lacking an articulated thesis. For example, no mention whatsoever is made of Elizabeth Eisenstein's 1979 classic book, "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change," which postulated the role of written documents in the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, among other historical epochs. The concluding chapters ramble from earthquakes to car advertising to "existential/religious perspectives." After a promising start, I felt like the air had been let out of the balloon by book's end.

I recommend this book to others mostly because of its episodic keen insights, though more of the mark could have been hit. Finally, I should note that any book with documents as its subject should take the time to include an index -- shame, shame.

The changing face of documents and images in the digital age is considered in a title which covers all kinds of documents and the changes they face from the digital world; from recipes and letters to business memos and other writings. Is the book doomed? Is paper to disappear? Scrolling Forward: Making Sense Of Documents In The Digital Age by David M. Levy examines documents of all kinds as they relate to culture, history and technological changes.

This meditation on the changing role of documents in our lives is simply marvelous--wide-ranging, literate and even profound. Levy is no Luddite--quite to the contrary--but his essays here will change the way you think about the digital revolution. I might add that the prose is a model of what writing of this kind should be: modest, inviting and free of academic jargon or posturing. Nicely done.