Steve Katz Books

The extensive maps and information in this book are very helpful to a Kansas City cyclist. It is worth every penny!

SWANNY'S WAYS is, among other things, a cattle-run of characters so warm they sit on your knee as you read. Through a series a character-rich vignettes linked by Swanny's quest for a lost love, Katz's fiction is a twirl of ontology, memory, love, and forgetting better even than Milan Kindera's best even.

I can not understand the good reviews or the appraisal on the book cover. The book is very boring, repetitive, and too metaphoric, in the sense that it writes about actual lions and actual lion tamers. I can not say that I learned anything new, and the book could be easily compressed into 50 pages. Don't waste your time!

It's not difficult to imagine yourself as a lion tamer, equipped with the traditional whip and chair, matching wits with lions like leaders, bosses, and customers. You have to keep your wits about you in your relationships with these cats. It's a lot like real-life lion taming. And yes, the consequences of angering a lion in business can be comparatively just as devastating as angering a lion in the circus cage.

OK, cute analogy. It shouldn't be that difficult to draw a few analogies and crank out a clever book. Perhaps, but Steven Katz went further...much further. It's obvious as you turn page after tempting page that this author did his homework. The lion tamers he consulted and learned from are named in the acknowledgements, and their influence is felt throughout the book. Whether the topic is the big cats with four feet or two, the lessons are plentiful, clear, and appropriate. The transition back and forth between lions and humans is smooth and natural. Learning Katz's lessons is comfortable, not forced.

We're surrounded by lions. "Being a lion is not a specific position, it is a state of being." It's essential to understand that lions have four senses beyond sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell: dominance, territory, survival, and social standing. You'll gain a deep appreciation of these elements in the three sections of this fast-moving paperback: Lions are Never Tame, The Art of Lion Taming, and Lion Taming is Really Lion Teaming. You can see the flow just from those section titles.

The book is filled with lessons that apply the fundamentals of lion taming to leadership, management, and other relationships. Conveniently, the lessons are all listed at the end of the book to pull it all together. Well worth the time to curl up with this book cover-to-cover.

LIONTAMING is an entertaining "users manual" for igniting leadership at all levels of an organization. Through the lens of an analogy as powerful as Aslan in Narnia, author Steve Katz boldly takes you on a journey into the workplace as a lions den. Unlike Dilbert's facetious approach to Catbert, Dogbert and other "manajerks", Steve ratchets the risk up a notch and deals with the ferocious realities of the King of the Jungle himself. Drawing on years of experience with leaders at the highest levels of government, Steve explores the role of office staff way beyond merely managing their managers or following their leaders by bringing fresh insights into workplace survival tactics. After Steve's presentation at American University's Institute for the Study of Public Policy Implementation, I promptly bought his book and featured him at both an Interagency Regulatory Forum and the US-EPAs Transformational Leadership Conversations series. If you enjoy reading LIONTAMING, you'll be amazed at how it can come alive in a discussion.

Steve Katz's "Lion Taming" fills a real void in the literature on management, which focuses primarily on leadership, strategy, and implementation of change. His focus is on the close, personal advisors to powerful decision makers within corporations, government, and nonprofit entities. His purpose is to identify the principles by which such key staffers can increase their effectiveness while retaining their integrity. His analogies to "lion taming" are not a stretch. As I read Steve Katz's book, I relived whole episodes in my own career and suddenly perceived how they fit together into a broad and comprehensive analytical pattern. I am just sorry that this book wasn't available thirty years ago when I was a freshly-minted MBA!

Imagine these scenarios: Your corporate leaders are always "difficult." You butt heads with your superiors and even your clients. As a middle manager, you have trouble figuring out what the boss wants. You seem to fight too much with your spouse. If any of these examples are familiar, you need to learn how to tame the "lions" in your life. Using analogies from training actual lions in the circus ring, author Steven L. Katz shows you how to work with human lions - people who demand dominance and control - from a bossy supervisor to a stubborn spouse. This is intended to be a textbook for the study of human psychology and interaction. Though you might wish it were a little deeper, the jungle beast analogy keeps it interesting. We recommend it to those who want to learn how to stand their ground in business, politics or modern day culture.

This book not only presents a serious topic in a very humorous and creative fashion, it contains some of the absolutely best germ cartoons I have ever seen. My first grader really enjoys it and I can't stop showing it off at work. I am an Infection Control RN specialist and find that it is perfect to communicate to healthcare workers the need to always wash their hands! I am getting copies for the hospital where I work. It is a super book!

The germs illustrations presented by Steve Bjorkman are amusing, consisting of strange looking creatures in pastel colors, reminding me of characters from the television show Sponge Bob Square Pants. The hands on the girls and boys in Germs!Germs!Germs! appear oddly shaped, as noted by the way the girl is holding the pencil on the cover.

Consisting of thirty-eight pages the Germs! Germs! Germs! motto throughout the book centers on, " We're on the ground. We're in the air. We're GERMS and we live everywhere!" Although germs cannot be seen, unless through a microscope they are still strong and mean. The drawing shows these rather odd sorted creatures with one or two eyes hovering about waiting for the right opportunity to spread Germs! Germs! Germs! on anyone.

One silly illustration has a yellow germ arriving at the front door, although no mention on how germs can be found on doorknobs. Germs! Germs! Germs! is more a book about what happens when the germs enter our body and reminds the reader of how germs jump about making people sick. My seven-year old has learned from reading the book "Germs are so nasty that they make you sick with a tummy ache and a cold".

It is possible that these illustrations along with the story can accomplish quick tooth brushing skills along with the use of tissues and proper hygiene. My son will grab Germs! Germs! Germs! to explain to a visitor how their germs can spread on clothing or furniture if that person has sneezed in his presence. This copy of the book has been to his classroom a few times to share with them just how mean germs can be as well as make you worse when you are sick.

Germs! Germs! Germs! is a handy book for my son who has learned a great deal from reading and following the journey these outrageously looking germs make through the pages. This makes a good introductory book for the age group of six to eight.

This is my 3 1/2 year old daughter's favorite book. We came across it at her preschool and have bought a copy for home. It has really improved her hygiene- she has become much more conscientious about brushing her teeth and washing her hands to "get rid of the bad germs"! Cute book, I'm buying a copy for friends, too.

My daughter and I love this book. At 5 years old, she easily understood what this book was trying to tell her. She's 8 now and we still read it. We even use some of the terminology to remind each other to stay healthy. She'll say "Mama, you're being a 'meal skipper'". It is NOT a scary book and it is a fun way to talk about germs with your kids.

This book repeatedly emphasizes that germs are mean and that they are everywhere and that their sole purpose is to GET YOU. Very scary, actually. It puts them in your body, in your food, in the air and the miminally addressed topic of keeping yourself clean does not banish them. The next page just puts them all back somewhere else. It is not clear at all that handwashing, not letting other people sneeze on you, washing the floor, not leaving food overnight on the counter are effective ways to keep healthier. The emphasis is on a ton of very cute cartoony germs in multitudes. The health aspects are implied only--and poorly at that. Behaviors like nose-picking are RIDICULED. Not good for kids up to about age 10, especially if you're trying to teach health and cleanliness issues.

This is an excellent and very practical text on the subject. It covers everything from the basics to high level detail on technical aspects of how to overcome problems which those of us face in this area. Being written by arguably the world's most experienced and respected vitreo-retinal surgeon, it is a gold mine of gems and short cuts which Steve Charles has evolved over many years of research and passed on to the reader. This edition is up to date with the latest information and technology on everything from 25 gauge vitrectomy to anti-VEGF's, and it is both easy to read and well referenced.

I am a vitreoretinal surgical fellow, and I was looking for an introductory text to vitreous surgery. This book was adequate for that purpose. The fundamental concepts are clearly and concisely described, and at just over 200 pages with excellent illustrations, it's worth the read. However, it is not a book I would keep as a resource. Though Dr. Charles is eminently qualified to write this book, he need not continually describe how he benefited the vitreoretinal community with his contributions. He gives the perception that all surgical problems can be solved solely with his method. To add weight to his arguments, he quotes surgical statistics that are impressive but not entirely honest. For instance, he describes that he created no posterior retinal tears with his "inside-out" method of peeling epiretinal membranes and compares this to the 6-7% rate of retinal tears in the literature. However, he is comparing posterior tears to any tears, and he freely admits he has a 6-7% rate of postoperative retinal detachment, which must have come from intraoperative peripheral retinal tears. His bias is clearly towards Alcon products, and it is well known that he receives considerable compensation from them for his support of 25 gauge technology.

In conclusion, at $200 it's worth your time but not your money. Much of the same information can be found in the 3rd volume of Stephen Ryan's Retina.

Dr. Charles is very candid regarding his opinions on various subjects. The book is well written but wordy at times. The organization is pretty good. The discussions are primarily based on his own clinical experience although there is mention of study results. I particularly liked many of the illustrations, which I have seen in chapters of other retina texts that Dr. Charles has co-authored. For those pursuing retina, this book is an excellent introductory text.

Understanding Steve Katz' particular brand of humor, as well as knowing when he's being totally serious, is not an easy task. But reading avant-garde fiction is never easy, and that's what I love about Katz; he's not easy to read. His fictions challenge our notions of what fiction should look, sound, and even act like.

In "Parcel of Wrists" he imagines himself receiving a package containing dozens of human wrists, but the return address seems to indicate the point of origin as a city that doesn't exist. So the author goes on a long quest to find the mysterious city while his wrists are at home brewing up a surprise for him when he returns. "Death of the Band" is a sharp satire of postmodern music. The protagonist is a detective searching for a famous composer who ends all of his musical compositions by killing the members of his orchestra.

Katz is a deft wordsmith whose stories have the rhythm of jazz compositions. "43 Fictions," which does not contain 43 fictions but instead refers to the author's obsession with the number 43 (it plays a prominent role in many of his books), is not the best Steve Katz book out there, but it's a good introduction to his virtuoso style and unique wit. Excerpting books like "Moving Parts" and "Exagggerations of Peter Prince" does not do the original books justice. "Saw" in particular does not lend itself to snippets for anthologies. I'd recommend "Stolen Stories" as a better introduction to Katz, but "43 Fictions" does present the breadth of his work in a condensed form, which is both a strength and a glaring weakness.

This is a humorous way to let kids know about lice and what to do to prevent or get rid of an infestation. Most 1st or 2nd graders should be able to read this book with little help (there are a few words in it which they might need assistance with) and the illustrations are terrific.

My only complaint is that some of the rhyming text didn't flow smoothly which might be bothersome to young readers.

The story is written well and is captures your attention, expecially so if you were born and raised in the upper Manhattan neighborhood known as Washinton Heights. Unfortunately, the author ran out of steam at the end and the story falls flat on its face with a rather amateurish close. I'd still recommend it for anyone who grew up there between 1950 and 1970