Directors Books

With the increased scrutiny on company accounting practices, executive compensation, and the Board's role in setting strategy, this book on corporate governance is an extremely timely and important one. The authors thoughtfully detail the issues Boards face, how best to work with CEOs and plan for their successor, and develop strategies for effective leadership. There's even a section on Boards for companies outside the U.S., which I found extremely valuable.

For anyone interested in how Boards work and the steps they need to take going forward (and I think any shareholder should be), this is essential reading. Highly recommended.

This is a superb book. Comprehensive and well-written, it addresses a vitally important topic with innovative ideas and practical solutions. In a field increasing crowded with prescriptions for solving the dilemmas of corporate governance, Building Better Boards stands out as a book worth reading.

As a spiritual director, one always wonders how others perform their art. This book was insightful and rewarding in that regard. The reader is allowed to be behind closed doors to sit in on the sessions with the directee, experiencing both the responses of the director and nuanced interactions. One is not TOLD how direction is done but SHOWN how it is done in a variety of scenarios. The author provides a myriad of situations/needs and the issues span across human experience. My only suggestion for improvement would have been placing the directees' spiritual direction journeys sequentially instead of having to locate the next installment several chapters away. I understand her desire to give us three separate phases of direction, but it made for challenging reading.

Susan S. Phillips' Candlelight: Illuminating the Art of Spiritual Direction, is the book I wish I'd had when I first became interested in spiritual direction and it is a book I wish I'd had when I was learning to be a spiritual director. By following nine people from their entry into a spiritual direction relationship until the conclusion of the relationship, it is easy to see what spiritual direction looks like; the difference between spiritual direction and therapy or pastoral counseling; and the ways the person receiving direction grows in relationship with God. At every step, Susan makes explicit the assumptions and methods that are important in spiritual direction. In addition, this book also clearly shows the way the director's own internal experience in each session informs his or her responses to the person being directed. During my training and in the first days of my own direction practice, this internal listening was the most difficult and elusive part of spiritual direction for me. In all my reading, until this fine book, I had never read or heard such a helpful description of the director's decision making within a session.

Susan was my director for several years while I lived in California. Much of what I know about doing spiritual direction, I learned from Susan as she helped me orient myself toward God. Now, reading her explicit description of doing direction, I find my understanding of my own work as a director is enlarged.

Candlelight is a great read, probably even for those who don't practice spiritual direction. What's so terrific about this book?

* Great stories make great books, and this book is structured around nine readable, captivating stories. Will Charles find a mate? Is Jim's health going to hold? Will I, when the time comes, be able to die as beautifully as did ... well, I won't ruin the ending. But it is beautiful.

* Held gracefully within the context of these stories are short but excellent discussions of suffering, theodicy, Sabbath, death, decision-making, evil, Keats's "negative capability," the prayer of examen, the "middle voice" as a metaphor for the life of engaged faith, ... etc. etc. The book's one fault is its lack of an index. When I reread the book I plan to create my own rough index as I go along.

* Candlelight gives a view into what normally cannot be observed. As a spiritual director, it is extremely difficult for me to know whether my practice is like or unlike that of my colleagues. Just what ARE those spiritual directors doing behind those closed doors?? Well, read Candlelight and sit in on sessions with a master. Your style might differ, or you might disagree with Phillips's approach at points, but merely finding out exactly what she does during direction sessions is fascinating.

* Candlelight offers helpful definitions of spiritual direction, as do many other books and web sites. What is special here is that Candlelight offers definitions of spiritual direction as practiced by the erudite, mature, faithful, humorous Susan Phillips. Seen through her eyes, spiritual direction takes on a whole new glow.

* Phillips uses words beautifully and seems to know precisely what they all mean. She's not just flinging them around.

* Finally, and maybe best of all, Candlelight shows God in action. Maintaining faith in God's goodness can be challenging for those of us who hope to do so; it's delightful to have a book that says, over and over, in concrete terms, "Look over there, at that faint light! Just a bit to the left ... there! Do you see it now? THAT is the benevolent God at work." Reading Candlelight is like looking at the world through God-vision goggles. Transcendent goodness, purpose, and beauty can shine, sometimes quite subtly, through human experiences and suffering, and we need all the help we can get if we are to stop and pay attention long enough to see them.

This is the secong not-for-profit organization that I have directed. I have used this guide and the subsequent Carver guides to help with organizing and direction setting. Volunteer board members always respond well to the material. It is easy to understand yet the Carver model is very comprehensive. I would recommend this to any organization that is engaged in charitable work.

This first in a 12-part series of general guides on Policy Governance is a great introduction to author John Carver's new approach to nonprofit board development. Basically, this approach clearly separates the roles of board and staff as they go about their separate but related jobs of organizational governance and management. Policy Governance clarifies these roles through policy development and permits the board---governing as a body---to control the management and direction of the organization in a global policy approach. This guide is a good start in grasping the concepts of the approach.

Much time and research went into this work. Listing almost everyone associated with the film industry who are interred in Los Angeles' cemeteries was an incredible feat. In addition, how the author got the grave sites of celebrities buried in Forest Lawn (Hollywood) and (Glendale) is beyond me! Workers there won't even give out names of those interred. I highly recommend this book.

Having read most of the books published re: celeb grave hunting, I can easily say this is the very best. Mr. Ellenberger has managed to consolidate all the positives contained in the books that have preceded this one, added additional information and new entries, and has come up with the ultimate grave hunting guide for the Los Angeles area. He has clearly researched and verified his information and relied on additional information supplied by various knowledgeable contributors. Information includes dates and locations of birth and death, grave location (cemetery, section and plot numbers), cause of death, and identifiable screen role(s). The only possible shortcomings are lack of cemetery maps and pictures of the deceased, and these are probably due to the high publishing costs associated with these features. The one thing that I really liked was the addition of many fine actors who never attained star status such as Harry Davenport and Sara Allgood. This is absolutely great for all diehard movie fans out there.

Graceful and quick as a read - this is an essential read for fans of Satyajit Ray.

Translated by Ray's wife, CHILDHOOD DAYS was first published in the Bengali children's magazine "Sandesh," and is primarily geared towards a young audience.

But Ray sheds light upon his own very fascinating, rather bohemian upbringing, and after reading this one will easily spot the many strands of disguised autobiography surfacing in many of Ray's films.

CHILDHOOD DAYS is expanded or augmented with additional writings on the making of "Pather Panchali," and also "Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne," which was his first children's film - and this section of the book is of particular interest as well. "Goopy" has paradoxically become one of Ray's most popular films in India, and is a major entry in his overall body of work, in spite of being very rarely screened internationally. This portion of the book is a fairly direct address to kids who would have loved this magical and mesmerizing film, but also serves to pique the curiosity of non-Indian film aficionados of all ages (I was only able to locate a copy of the film after extensive searching).

In any case, CHILDHOOD DAYS manages to serve as several things - foremost a shimmering, smart bit of writing for young audiences, and simultaneously, a fascinating yet unpretentious creative autobiography.

I have biases towards Ray's films and writing, but I still recommend.

-David Alston

This is Ray's autobiography ,translated by his wife Bijoya Ray.
Ray paints his childhood days (from very little age till when he crossed 16 years) with such minute details and interesting incidents that one has to finish this book in one go.

His passion for cinema(Ray is a world-known director)is grown in these earlier years thanks to those Hollywood movies coming regularly to Calcutta at that time.
One can get the live sights and sounds and life of Calcutta in this book during the time period of 1926-1936.

This is a great work.

Read this book if you want to make sense of what is happening in the world today - It is funny, magical, strong and sometimes bewildering. Why do some immigrants find it hard to become Americans? Read it and find out.

November 17, 2003
I really appreciate the opportunity to read Geraldine's
book over the past few days. I can tell you this, it has been a long,
long time since I was able to "feel" a book I was reading. I was "in the
picture" the whole time. I guess the time span (which pretty much matched
my own) helped because I remember so much of what those times were like.
I found that being a Sicilian-Scotch Catholic wasn't so different from
being Irish Catholic in America. We all had so many of the same

experiences that we are truly all nearly the same. Geraldine's book
unfolded in my hands and I felt excitement and worry for Michael Joe as he
followed his heart and became a renegade and a hero. I would love to have
met him. Everything was so counter balanced by Nellie. It broke my heart
a little when he lost her and followed soon after. What a testament to
love and "being one". I feel like I've learned so much about what Ireland
must really be like....not the travel stuff that we all know, but the true
heart, spirit and geography of what must be an incredible land......What a truly delightful clan. I hope this
book does very well. People need to have this kind of experience...My
only regret, having finished the book, is what now?
Thanks, again, to you for bringing the book to me and, certainly, thanks
to Geraldine for putting it all down on paper.
Don Senger

houston, texas

Martin Scorsese has influenced so many directors in Hollywood that it's mind-blowing.and the casts that he has put together speak Volumes.he is as Important as anyone in the History of film.he takes the Streets and turns it into his own vision.he has directed some of the most important films ever.and he still has a classic or two that he hasn't even begun on yet.a great book.

This is a excellent book which covers Martin Scorcese's film's.I found it to be an excellent reference book. If you enjoy Scorcese's films get this book.

I picked this book up in manila, i found it very well written and informative. It is made up of interviews with some of todays most talented and succesful DOPs, they talk about their experiences in film, their own innovative techniques and styles and also what launched them into this career. The book also includes production notes, storyboards and other interesting technical camera issues. Well worth reading, once youve read it youll find your self picking it up all the time to have another read.

I checked this book out because I'm currently an art student unsure of which direction to pursue as far as career, but leaning towards film. This book features background and interviews with several influential cinematographers and proved extremely helpful to me. The film stills featured (from movies like The Godfather, Taxi Driver, The Piano,etc) stand alone as works of art and work exquisitely when combined with the text and other illustrations from the film making process (storyboards and angle sketches) to show how a good movie should be put together. This book would probably be enjoyed by most interested in film or storytelling.

Book is simply awsome. Intriguing characters, especially Hanna. Is she ready? Is she ready???

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is known the world over mostly for his novels, especially "One Hundred Years Of Solitude," and one non-fiction book on the drug wars in Colombia, but one of the least recognized of his jewels is "Clandestine In Chile: The Adventures Of Migue Littin," it is both a chronicle of an exiled artist's return to his homeland and a study of what Chile was like under the right-wing dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. So infuriated was the regime when the book was published that Pinochet ordered thousands of copies to be burned Nazi-style. Like Marquez's novels, "Clandestine In Chile" is poetic and lush, heartwarming and heartbreaking as Littin returns to Chile in disguise to shoot a film on Chile under Pinochet and finds himself wandering a nation changed by rabid capitalism and silenced by intense fascism. In one tense moment Littin lies down in his hotel room bed, only to realize that the city of Santiago is DEAD SILENT after Pinochet's curfew is implemented, no cars, not even dogs make a sound. In beautiful prose Marquez describes the epic landscapes of Chile, of the Andes and the mining communities where the workers almost breath fire from the coal they mine. He chronicles the revolutionary days of Salvador Allende, Chile's and the world's first elected socialist president who sparked the fury of the Nixon White House and was overthrown in a September 11, 1973 coup by Pinochet's forces. We meet Chile's poor as they remember Allende and secretly keep mementos from his days in office before "The Terror" came and the Mapucho river flowed with the corpses of the fascist junta's innocent, often young victims. The passages where Littin and his crew shoot their film under the guise of an environmental documentary team are exciting as they try not to be discovered by the regime's informants and police force. At one point they film inside La Moneda presidential palace and come an inch away from Pinochet himself. Marquez obviously respects Littin very much and his admiration for the man and his work is palpable, and being a friend of Cuba's Fidel Castro, Marquez's contempt for Pinochet and the fascist system that was then in Chile is also evident. This adds a unique emotional intensity to the work, like the best non-fiction he brings history to life instead of just providing a kind of academic report. Film buffs will also enjoy this book for Littin's insights into the guerrilla filmmaking process as he gets his shots by any means necessary, always avoiding getting caught even under the most dangerous circumstances. "Clandestine In Chile" is a masterful book, and of the more underappreciated titles in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's remarkable catalogue.

Why do I regard the publisher's remarks about this text being unabridged (read: sanitized to corporate "standards") with such lingering skepticism? Is is a question of having no faith in corporate ethics, or one of needing, however subconsciusly, to deny Sontag's virtuosity of intellect? If the transcribed interviews are reliably authentic, here is a mind quite literally capable of extemporizing sophisticated philosophical discourse. No wonder Camille Paglia attempted to make a cottage industry of ridiculing, belittling, and otherwise attacking this author, who not only anticipated many of Paglia's themes by decades, but who has also shown herself capable of stating in a few laconic phrases what takes Paglia (for all her verbal music) hypomanically-digressive chapters. This is a refreshingly intimate encounter with what "Hurricane Camille" herself has dubbed "one of the great minds of the Twentieth Century", in addition to being far more engaging reading than I had anticipated. Read Paglia's more serious endeavors to exercize your right brain; but read Sontag (this compilation included) to exercise your left. My only regret is noting that certain of the interviews included here were translated back into English from other languages: The smoothness of translation, for good or for ill, gave no clue.

These essays of Sontag's deal in a small part with questions of taste in the fields of art and literature. Also with the encroachments of post modernism onto the Enlightenment education Sontag received in the nineteen fifties. Also, they provide a little context to some of the books Sontag wrote during her lifetime. Sontag always took her subjects and her work seriously, in a culture that frequently asks that we ridicule ourselves and our work.