change Books

I am doing this study for the third time. This study has changed my walk with the Lord. Kay Authur is an amazing teacher. This study is easy fast and deep. Don't miss it if you are a Christian.

Our Bible study group began this book in late fall 2007. We were looking for something that would encourage our spiritual growth, and one that would allow for sharing our insights as we studied together. This has probably been the best study we've done together - it's created an excitement in meeting, and there has been real growth - spiritually and numerically as well. It opens Scripture in a unique and thoughtful way, causing the members to really think about it.

I am a new christian and find this book speaks to me through the writer's words. I am finding myself anxious each day for the time to draw near to God through this author's words. I have never read any of her other books. I find this book makes me look at my life like I have never looked at it before. It makes me look at God as I have never dreamed possible. I am ordering 15 copies of this book and we are going to have a 9 week devotional on character at my church on Tuesday nights. I have showed it to other members of my church (only 98)and all interested will be taking the class with me. Whether you are now a christian or just became a christian I think most all would feel the same way after reading only the first chapture. You can not get enough of it.

I knew when I ordered this study I would be facing a great spiritual challenge and I am. As a christian I know of the Sermon of the Mount and it's great blessing but this study digs very deep and very deep into my walk with Jesus. It was a painful journey at first and very humbling, even unto tears, but there is great joy in these beatitudes that I had been missing. If you want the "truth" about God and your heart, then prepare yourself for a great study!

Kay Arthur is an amazing author that is truely blessed by God. Having grown up in a home that didn't have God and was completely in the ways of the world, I discovered I need to do a lot of changing once I became a Christian and this book has totally helped me to not only discover the changes I need to make, but the scriptures I need to read to help me make the changes. I have since bought several more or her Bible Studies and cannot wait to get into them.

Great process easy and fast the book was received in great shape and a quick ship.

I've read a lot of books on leadership. This one covers similar topics as others, but if you are the kind of reader who likes to hear another persons perspective of a subject then the book will complement your library. If you are new to leadership as a subject, then by all means this book will help you.

All the best.

I really enjoy this series. It has good books that don't mess around with fluff. This book gets right to the point and doles out some good basic information about management. I enjoyed the style of writing. It is a quick but enjoyable read. Highly recommend!

I highly recomend this book for people who want to be better managers especially effective managers or leaders. It is clearly written and a very easy read. To the point, educational and very heplful to build better skills so you can be a much more effective leader.

I found this book only provides common sense stuff, not very insightful. There are numerous grammatical errors throughout this book.

This is a good introductory book into the principles and practice of leadership. It teaches about the leadership skills that are critical in today's highly dynamic operating environment where change is the only constant. In this case, it is essential to have leaders (rather than managers) who can provide the vision for the organization, show the direction and motivate people towards the realization of the vision.

The author clearly explains the critical attributes of a leader which include team building, good communication skills, decision making ability, and the ability to motivate and coach others for the effective accomplishment of goals.

The book is a good investment for those who in leadership positions, particularly those who are at the beginning of their careers in this field without much experience or previous training. The author gives useful tips which are excellent guide readers. The checklist at the end of each chapter is a useful tool to reinforce what the reader would have studied in the text.

I highly recommend this book to all who are searching for a peaceful and praying life and forthe holy spirit's gudance.

This book is okay, but not great. She spends so much time quoting Jack Hayford he should get a cowriting credit.

I was looking for more meat. This one is pretty light weight.

"Worship is a choice we make. Whether we worship God or not, is always an act of our own will. Our will determines whether we make it our first reaction to things that happen to us - or don't happen to us - or a last resort. If we do not make it our first reaction, then we cannot possibly make it a way of life. And if we do not make praise a way of life, we will never experience all God has for us."


This book was a Christmas gift which I thoroughly enjoyed as I have never read any of the author's works. Stormie Omartian writting is incredible and she is bent on showing us how practical praising God and worshiping Him can affect all our lives. Because God dwells and inhabits the praises of His people we are sure that He is near, and as we send our praises up He sends His blessings down to us. There is no Praise that God the Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit are unaware of. He empowers us and draws us closer to Him. When we are closer to Him we yearn to be just like Him and we get the very sense of the Kingdom. Stormie Omartian walks us through the many reasons why we should praise God, and she allows us to know when praise is crucial.
Another thing I loved about this book was after each chapter there was a nice long prayer of Praise, then a study to make sure we understood what we had just read, and bible verses to dwell on. This book was well laid out and well written, and can be used as a devotional if you care to. Very well done. I look forward to reading more of Stormie Omartian's work. May God continue to bless her and use her towards the honour and glory of His Kingdom. For surely we can be made better and brighter christians by following her teaching.
Reviewed by Heather Marshall Negahdar (SUGAR-CANE 29/01/07)

This book has a different approach to prayers. It mainly concentrates in praising GOD under all circumstances. It is a very good book.

This book is a "must have" for every Christian. This book teaches you how to worship and praise God no matter what is happening around you.

This was a required text for a literacy studies graduate class. The context was pedagogically provoking along the threads of progressive modern education standards that are taught to budding teachers. Some repetition was present as it is a lengthy text with a primary focus and one author. My classmates and I were a bit disappointed with the lack of example and proposals for the curriculum/pedagogy changes being presented. This is a text to be read for establishing perspective not for quick tips or golden ticket ideas.

Maxine Greene defends the role of the arts as social medicine and advancement. She brilliantly argues for maintaining art in curriculum. Art often requires of us to imagine things which do not exist in reality. This excercise is vital in creating social change. In order to create a new and better world, we must first imagine it. We must encourage our children (and adults for that matter) to imagine. That's the first step and I feel society becoming less imaginative and more homogenized. PLEASE READ THIS BOOK!!! AND BUY A COPY FOR A TEACHER.

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.

Don't get me wrong. I love reading about mother-daughter relationships and all the complicatedness that goes in between women. This is just another typical book ~~ very entertaining though, but doesn't offer any new insights or thoughts to relationships. If you like a good story, this would do. It is not the best fiction I have ever read nor did I expect it to be. It is just an entertaining story about a mother and a daughter, how they became the persons they are in the novel and how it concluded to "happily ever after." It is cute and endearing. It is definitely relatable (especially if you have a relationship with your mom or daughter).

Babs is the runner-up to the Cotton Queen in high school. She married the true love of her life ~~ a charming, all-American boy, who tragically died within a few years of their marriage. Struggling to raise her daughter alone after his funeral, she encountered a man who changed her life for the worse. However, she moves back to McKinnely and marries a former admirer, Acee. Their marriage was a sham from the beginning as Babs could never tell Acee her deepest secret. She wouldn't even admit it to herself.

Laney is Babs' daughter. She was forced to endure the trauma of being a Cotton Queen but as soon as she could, she escaped the little town and headed to Houston for college. There Laney tried to build upon her dreams and build a career in the 80s. She falls in love and marries, only to have everything taken away from her. She returns home to McKinley and finds happiness there.

This novel explores their relationship with one another ~~ Babs wanting nothing more than to protect Laney for the evils of the world and Laney wanted nothing more than to be her own person. This book deals with that struggle as well as telling the stories of two strong women who finally forge a friendship with one another.

It is a quick read and entertaining ~~ but it is just another typical novel about mothers and daughters.

11/9/2007

A story about the relationship between mothers and daughters, life in the South (Texas in particular) - very well written and true to life. I could not read it fast enough ...

They advise writers to get their character up in a tree and then throw rocks at her. In this book there are too many rocks for my comfort. I wasn't able to continue beyond the first few chapters, it upset me so.

I have been reading Pamela Morsi's books for years,and she has NEVER written one I didn't like. This one is no exception! The story of a mother and daughter and their conflicts had me stopping every now and then and thinking of my own mother, and how I pulled away from her until I grew up and came to realize that no one ever could love me more than she does. Ms. Morsi moved me to laughter and tears with this one. I can't wait for her next book!

I couldn't put this book down!! I finished it in two day and that's with working 8 hours a day! The storyline is fantastic and it shows how people look at things differently. Both mother and daughter had such different points of view, yet were so much alike in other ways. I say HOORAY!! Read this for sure!!!!!

As always, Thomas comes through with these great mantra CDs. This one is excellent again, though I do wish he would have gone into ALL the planets and what parts of the body they rule. It was all very interesting and my favorite of the mantras is the Apadamapa one. Thomas' CDs always have so much content, you really get your money's worth.

Sharon Elaine
author of "The Book of Affirmations" and "Ready, Click, Win"
www.unleashedminds.com

This form of meditation is not suited to everyone. It requires the ability to sustain new habits for an extended period of time. It also seems almost ridiculously simple. Given my busy life, simple looked good to me.

I could easily fit this form of meditation into my long commutes and it worked amazingly well to calm my mind and clear my thoughts. On that score alone it was well worth the time & cash investment, but there have been other changes of great significance that developed during my first 40 day chanting practice. Internally I found it possible to accept a formerly challenging situation of many years duration and even turn it into a pleasurable and productive activity, and to my amazement at the same time some difficult neighbors we've had for a very long time were given an eviction notice!

At the very least mantra practice is a natural tranquilizer, and at the very best it might actually work with vibration to modify psychic and social structures. I would say the purchase and use of this product has really changed my life, and could not recommend it more highly to one who is willing to work at it and give it some time.

I bought this CD to get a mantra. There are several to choose from. I don't have a guru. I practiced two mantras for the 40 day period and noticed no change in my life. One mantra appeals to Ganesha, a Hindu elephant headed god. I find this stupid. I'm very spiritual and find more value in praying to the Lord directly. It may work for other people ...

The CD contains mantras with explanation how to use them and how they are suppose to work. Each mantra is chanted by the author at least 7 times (7~108) depending on the importance or length of the mantra, I guess)so you can get the feeling and get the pronunciation right. Mantras help me personally to quiet down chattering in my mind.

In this 80 page primer on Mantra meditation, Ashley-Ferrand admirably covers all the bases and provides numerous Mantras to work with. The book includes several chapers on spiritual phychology, destiny, the aims of human life, and the discipline of Mantra practice. He then offers chapters of Mantras for abundance, karma, dharma and so on. For each Mantra he gives a nice explanation of the goal of the Mantra and each element of the Mantra. The CD is excellent and is the only way you are really going to know how to recite the Mantras accurately without a personal guide. As usual, the Sounds True qualtiy is excellent.

Joanna Harris creates a rich and vibrant description of a rural French village with all its petty rivalries and traditional, narrow-minded boundaries on thought and behavior. Each of the main characters is hemmed in by these restrictions and must keep certain devils from their past or present lives secreted away so as not to become more of an outsider than they already are and in particular so as not to incite the condemnation of the local parish Priest. Into this scenario comes Mademoiselle Rocher who, despite having her own devils to deal with, brings the promise of freedom embodied in the delights of the chocolate she sells. The characters are inspiring, the descriptions full of life and vigour and the narrative sparkling. The way each of the characters deals with their respective devils makes this a total feel-good novel, but one which is not only enthralling, but also thought-provoking from start to finish.

I'd always heard how wonderful the movie is, though I haven't seen it myself. But if the movie is wonderful, it must be one of those rare instances where a film has outdone the book that inspired it. I didn't dislike Chocolat per say, but it was very paint-by-numbers. Characters for the most part were bland and incredibly undeveloped. The best is Armande, the old woman, and Guillaume the dog lover. No one else is likable or hatable, not even the narrator (whom is certainly not a witch at all, I have no idea what people who think so have been reading) and her daughter. The plot seems to be very superficial and it makes the book seem like an abridged version. Things happen but they happen fast and quick and usually with very little sense if doing anything more than skimming.

As said, I did like this book, it was fun, quirky, maybe even a bit 'magical'. But it was also very flawed and shouldn't carry expectations of anything more than a quick, light read.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book - the added detail and mood created a story far superior to the movie, which just skimmed the surface of the concepts here. I love the contrast of the restrictive, hatefulness of the minister and church-goers with the pagan protagonist's generous love and unconditional giving - it spoke volumes to me about the hypocracy of the church and its so often hateful, exclusory ways. Love and generosity know no religion; they are choices we each make in how we treat one another. The ending in particular packed a whallop for me. Powerful, great read.

It really is hard to imagine a less important book than this. Perhaps the tedious Mills & Boone catalogue owns triviality, but this comes close.

I'm a fan of the movie with Johnny Depp and Juliet Binoche, but reading this book made me realise that has more to do with the colours, styling and performances than anything else. After the movie, I was left with a feeling of magic. The book has no such charm.

This story of an enigmatic woman and her daughter opening up a chocolate store in a small French town has all the appeal of setting and background story. It's quaint and it's lyrical, and that's the promise of this novel.

In reality, it's a dead-boring, formulaic, and utterly superficial story about a set of characters it's almost impossible to care about. The abused woman who leaves her husband; the old grandmother going blind; the prissy priest and the stuck-up town gossips. To say these are stereotypes does no justice to the depth of how cliched they actually are.

The central characters -- the chocolate proprietor and the river gypsy -- have some deeper layers, but more like a wafer biscuit than a chocolate cake.

In the end, one is left feeling nothing. Like the bland chocolate the book is at pains to differentiate the wares of its shop from, this book is a cheap thrill. And not even much of one.

Years after seeing Chocolat the movie, I have finally read Chocolat the book. As usual, the book was way better than the movie. While Chocolat the movie implies that Vianne is a witch, the book makes it abundantly clear that Vianne has magical powers. She turns the small French town on its head when she opens a chocolate shop. The book focuses much more on the issue of Lent and giving up chocolate. Another key difference is that the book features two or three short chapters told from Vianne's point of view and then one short chapter told from the priest's point of view. I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys good women's fiction, especially those featuring a bit of magic.