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This well written excerpt has grabbed my attention! As a feminist who also loves creative fantasy I love this story of a female elf who apparently challenges the myth of the male Santa Claus and who defies traditional expectations of women. I felt an instant bond with Sandra and her family and want to read more about their story. The author has written a story that I believe would appeal to both a young and old audience. I could see it as a movie!!

Finally, a new and interesting angle on an old story. I loved the easy to read style which makes the story approachable for both teens and adults. This set up is great and makes me I want to know what happens next. The voice of Sandra is one that I was immediately able to relate to. Can't wait to read the whole book - hopefully before the movie gets released!!!

Cindy McCallum Miller's "Sandra Claus Incorporated" envisions a 460-year-old half-elf, half-human woman as Santa Claus, and that's not something you see every day. Her story is written in the style of an autobiography in simple, straight-forward language equally suitable for both young and old audiences. The story is absorbing and draws the reader in immediately.

My one critique is that punctuation is haphazard in much of the story, particularly within quote marks. I suggest that the author get a copy of any good style manual (Words Into Type, or the Chicago Manual of Style) and revisit the subject.

Punctuation shortcomings aside, this is an enjoyable excerpt. I would like to see the story in print.

Okay, I'm not really up on all the Buffy, Angel, Charmed, whoever spin-off demon hunting kind of themes, so I wouldn't know if some of this is basic 'duh' information or not, but it appears to me that this writer has come up with some pretty elaborate back story, including 'how to do this' and 'what to do it with', that lends credibility and believability to a solid story line. And the story line thus far has me way interested! In fact, when the Hunter gets done, send him down to southern California. I've got a spooky patch of dirt around my pine tree in which nothing will grow either!

The narrative voice for the protagonist is simple and unpretentious which is exactly as it should be given who he is. But that is all the more reason to really sharpen the editing pencil on this piece. The reader needs less in general description and more in specifics. "That went back into my jacket along with the hunting knife and penlight." What are the chances that he's going to leave the knife and light? The bottle here is the focus: "That went into my inside jacket pocket for protection." On the flip side, jumping into the relationship with Jerry and Elise and Tex like the reader should already know about it and why she ditched him and what a Hunter is, well, unless for some psychic reason we should, it needs more leading and explanation. How is he carrying this "wicked long hunting knife"? Why should the reader know or care what a Hollie is? Also, a check in Strunk & White on the frequent use of the word 'than' will reveal there are some instances when the comparative use is missing a necessary preposition, and there are some cases where another word might be a better choice. Some punctuation errors, grammar, dialog that's a little forced, it's all little stuff, I know, but when it's a bunch of little stuff together it detracts from the story, and this one has all the potential of delivering a ball-busting ride! Bring it on!

Many books try to create the atmosphere of everyday life as a setting for fantasy, but this one succeeds. I think it's due to the carefully paced first scene, in which we get a chance to see narrator Jerry Dole at his very ordinary job. A few tantalizing asides suggest that there's something more to his life, but by the time his old friend Elise asks him to help her investigate a sinister piece of earth, we're fully in our own world and ready to suspend disbelief.

I do have a brief comment about Elise -- I'm wondering if she's to be an important character (I suspect she is). If so, I'd like to see more of her during her conversation with Jerry -- I know she's tall and redheaded but I would like to see her face and hear the quality of her voice. I'd like her to be as clear in my mind as the delightful Ronnie, Jerry's scrawny and earnest co-worker. My greatest joy came when Ronnie showed up wanting to work with Jerry on his *other* job -- a very pleasant surprise. Unfortunately for me, the excerpt ended just there. I can't wait to read more.

Heh, your dad's a dolphin. My favorite kind of books are ones that grip me with writing style and keep me captivated with their characters, and this is exactly the kind of book Skeleton Army is. In fact, Mr. Laukkonen, would you be willing to email it to me so I can read the whole thing?

This text does a great job at providing a general application exercise for junior and senior capstone level business students. The cases and activities contained in this book provide an in-depth look into some of America's most successful companies. Unfortunately the text is now several years old and most of the cases are a little out of date. We made great use of this fact, however, by assigning groups to study each company since the end of the case and present on how the company has performed in the past few years.

I was required to purchase this book for my strategic management course. I have to say, being a "book learner," this book is just excellent. It explains things thoroughly and is well organized. One of the best in the academic world. I had to take another strategic management course at the graduate level and that book sucked compared to this one. I also have used this book for my other classes especially when having to analyze cases. These authors are just amazing!

This is a great book. It teaches me how to analyze the competitive business environment we have today. It provides many good examples to illustrate the concepts. The book also includes many cases that tell me what strategies those big companies employ and how they succeed. I really like the book.

This piece has great potential and the writing is superb, but I couldn't follow the transitions from one scene to another. I also had trouble following the relationships between the many characters. I love the descriptions of some of the characters, especially of Elwood passing the cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other without pausing the profanity. This story has great potential, and I'm intrigued to see where it goes from here.

I want more - the rest of this book and more books from this writer.

This author grabs the reader's attention from the first sentence to catch them up in the stories of wife and mother Sandy Skinner and motherless young Billy Elwood. We don't yet know how their lives will intersect, but we already see similarities.

This is powerful, beautiful writing and a story that begs to be read and shared. Please do not overlook this book and this writer - a major talent.

Alan Gold's STRESS TEST requires some work on the part of the reader, and though this entry should be a finalist, I won't be surprised if it's not--this isn't a thriller, romance, mystery, shoot 'em up, or any other ordinary sort of genre book. It's the best of literary fiction, characters you can smell and sharp, fresh images--not a cliche in the whole of the excerpt. Given that last year's winner was a mystery, I suspect the judges go for salability rather than for fine writing, and that's a continuing shame in the book market in this country. This novel is a combination of fine writing, dark humor, rough-edged characters, and exquisite description...good luck, Alan Gold! Again I'm reminded that I'm up against tough competition. Reviewed by Anna Jean Mayhew, http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001UG39Q0/

I received the book in few days and in good condition. In my opinion, you can trust this seller.

This book is a must-have IT resource. It covers project management principles quickly and effectively and points out areas specific to the topic of Security throughout the PM process. In the later chapters, the author provides a very specific set of guidelines for developing any security-related project plan and provides examples of a broad-based corporate security initiative, a general IT security plan that can easily be customized to your own unique situation, an infrastructure security plan that can also be customized to address mission-critical infrastructure security issues. The book includes a wireless security plan to help you address the ever-changing and growing needs of wireless security in the organization. The final chapter might be the reason you buy the book - the operational security project plan. In many organizations (including the one I work in as well as those my friends work in), the operational piece is poorly planned and/or poorly executed so that all the work done through these meticulously planned security projects is put at risk through sloppy operational planning and implementation (after all, that's not very interesting to most of us in IT).

The book also addresses some of the legal issues surrounding security, which is great because it might alert you to things you might otherwise have overlooked or not known. The cost/benefit and risk analysis provided is also great ammo if you need to convince your management team as to why security spending is important (and shouldn't be subject to budget cuts anytime soon).

As with Snedaker's other books, this one is well-organized and written in a conversatational tone that you'll find a refreshing change from some of the other IT PM books out there. The chapters follow a logical flow and the information is presented in a way I found easy to implement. I previously purchased Snedaker's IT Project Management book last year and I have used it countless times. I have had this book for a few weeks and I can already tell by the dog-earred pages that I'll be using this one frequently as well.

I'd recommend this book to anyone in IT who deals with security or anyone who needs to "sell" their management on why security is important.

In this book author Susan Snedaker covers the complete project management spectrum from the overall plan to individual project plans for various areas. The book is divided in to various sections including Defining, Organizing, Planning, Initiating, and Managing Change. She does a really good job of pointing out the importance of defining the project up front. This is a critically important step that is often overlooked. This is where you define the mission, expected outcomes, optimal solution, and constraints. If you don't know where you are going then the path there can be very convoluted and this is a common problem with IT projects of all types. Another exceptional section is the one on planning. In that section she details breaking down the overall project into tasks and sub-tasks as well as defining the scope and determining the critical path. For each chapter the highlights are presented in a checklist format at the end. IT Security Project Management Handbook is recommended to anyone who is in charge of a large scale IT project whether security or otherwise.

DR Barksdale's Take A Chance left me wanting to read on to find out about Lia's birth family. At the age of two, she is left on the doorstep of Lord Jeffreys and his family. She bonds immediately with the family's child, Jane, and the mother, Sarah. The story quickly jumps ahead sixteen years when Jane is visiting friends and has left Lia behind for the first time. When Jane returns, Lia finds out that Jane has fallen in love. Despite living with them the majority of her life, she doesn't consider them to be her family. She referred to the parents as Lord Jeffreys and Lady Sarah. Her discovery of a ring with a crest may bring her, and the readers, on an adventure to find her birth family and find out why they had to leave her behind.

I enjoyed the entry. I thought the writing was superbly done. I am an avid reader and I cannot wait to see more from this author. The descriptions were wonderful and the characters were strong.

I found this story very interesting. Although i do not typically take a liking towards historical fiction, i found this one interesting and enticing. However, i dont not see how this connects with the past, so i do not understand how it is a historical fiction. Well written, with few mistakes.

Lisa Dawley's book The Tools for Successful Online Teaching is a valuable resource for online instructors, especially those new to teaching online. I don't usually describe textbooks as enjoyable, but this one was truly enjoyable. Her suggestions, experience, and recommendations were not only beneficial for one of my educational technology graduate classes, I integrated many of her technology and teaching ideas for an online class I currently teach. Students who are required to buy this text for an educational technology or instructional design class won't be disappointed. Dr. Dawley clearly advocates quality instruction for student success. Additionally, in my first professional job interview I was able to use "buzz words" and information I got from the text to answer many ed tech type questions -- and I got the job.

I ordered a number of books related to online teaching for two classes that I took about distance learning. And this text was the most helpful of the lot.

i found this book to be an excellent research reference for online teaching. It provides solutions that the author has personally used and integrated into her teaching methodology.

This book is superb and a must-have for those teaching in the information technology field. In their pro-active approach to the subject, the authors present a comprehensive examination of web based education and the impact it will have on traditional learning environments. It's the leading text on this emerging field and a valuable resource!

This book is a collection of articles, many of which don't cover any new ground if you've had some exposure to this field. Many of the articles are very general and really only argue for the validity of the web-based approach rather than offer any practical insights for those already involved as practitioners or support staff.
Interesting chapters (to me ) that offer a basis and inspiration for practical action include include one on Nestor, a web map building browser by Esnault & Zeiliger, France, and a chapter on audio/video streaming by Al Bentor, Univ of Baltimore.

Web-Based Learning and Teaching Technologies: Opportunities and Challenges is rich in terms of its breadth of coverage. The four parts of the book, with my favorites are: (1) Web-Based Learning, including one chapter on opportunities and one on the future; (2) Web-Enhancing Technologies, including two chapters on pedagogy; (3) Web-Based Learning Environment, including a chapter on assessment; and (4) Case Studies, including one on a programming course.

The book is likely to mean something different to readers depending upon their responsibilities. For course developers, the chapters on pedagogy and case studies might be most valuable. For policymakers, the chapters on opportunities, the future, and technologies might be most valuable.

The book is rich also in terms of the varied backgrounds of the authors. The "About the Authors" section contains one-paragraph biographies of the 41 contributors to the book.

A quote representative of the insight in this book: "Navigation in electronic information spaces is the process through which learners experience the domain content."

One HBR article I am inspired by is What Leaders Really Do by John P. Kotter. Summarizing the article:

"They don't make plans; they don't even organize people. What leaders really do is prepare organizations for change and help them cope as they struggle through it.

Leadership is different from management, but not for the reasons most people think. Leadership isn't mystical and mysterious. It has nothing to do with having "charisma" or other exotic personality traits. It is not the province of a chosen few. Nor is leadership necessarily better than management or a replacement for it.

Rather, leadership and management are two distinctive and complementary systems of action. Each has its own function and characteristic activities. Both are necessary for success in an increasingly complex and volatile business environment.

Most corporations today are over-managed and underled. They need to develop their capacity to exercise leadership. Successful corporations don't wait for leaders to come along. They actively seek out people with leadership potential and expose them to career experiences designed to develop that potential. Indeed, with careful selection, nurturing and encouragement, dozens of people can play important leadership roles in a business organization."

Interesting and from what I can see - true. My addition to this comment might be that leaders tend to also be managers so double duty is often in order. And what I have seen in some larger organizations is that management is more highly valued so there is a push to make leaders into better managers often to the detrement of the organization since it is the leadership that is more desperately needed.

John Kotter is Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Harvard Business School and a leading authority on leadership. He is author of several books on leadership. This Harvard Business Review-article was published in 1990.

The main difference between leadership and management is that "management is about coping with complexity ... leadership, in contrast, is about coping with change." Kotter explains the differences between leadership and management by making three comparisons: setting a direction vs. planning and budgeting, aligning people vs. organizing and staffing, and motivating people vs. controlling and problem solving. While discussing the differences, the author also discusses the relationships between leadership and management. He also touches slightly on the character requirements of leaders and managers. The author uses Lou Gerstner at American Express, Chuck Trowbridge and Bob Crandall at Eastman Kodak, and Richard Nicolosi at Procter & Gamble respectively as examples for these comparisons. "The real challenge is to combine strong leadership and strong management and use each to balance the other." In the final paragraphs, Kotter provides some insights in how leadership and leaders are developed. He also explains how organizations can "do a better-than-average job of developing leaders", such as pushing responsibility lower in an organization, create more challenging jobs, stress growth through new products and services, support and attention from senior executives, etc.

This article provides a very clear introduction between the two distinctive and complementary systems of action for leadership and management. Weakness is that it does not provide new insights into leadership and does not provide a detailed framework on how to create leadership within organizations. I would recommend this article to people who are moving into management and first-year MBAs. The article is written in simple US-English. Please note that this article runs on Acrobat eBook Reader software and is not a .pdf-file.

John P. Kotter is Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Harvard Business School. This Harvard Business Review article was originally published in 1990, this On-Point version was issued in December 2001.

"Leadership is different from management, but not for the reasons most people think." Kotter believes that leadership and management are complementary systems of action, and that both are essential for business success. Management is about coping with complexity, while leadership is about coping with change. Both system of action involves decision-making, but each in a different way. The author explains the differences by comparing setting direction vs. planning and budgeting, aligning people vs. organizing and staffing, and motivating people vs. controlling and problem solving. He uses Lou Gerstner at American Express, Chuck Trowbridge and Bob Crandall at Eastman Kodak, and Richard Nicolosi at Procter & Gamble as leadership examples. Kotter then continues to discuss the attributes required for leadership. He believes that a significant challenge early in careers (during their twenties and thirties) are most important. Later in their careers they need broadening, which means growing beyond the narrow base that characterizes most managerial careers. Kotter concludes that corporations should put an emphasis on creating challenging opportunities for relatively young employees. This could involve decentralization, since that pushes responsibility to lower areas in the organization. "Institutionalizing a leadership-centered culture is the ultimate act of leadership."

In his 1982-article 'What General Managers Really Do' Kotter researched how general managers spend their time. In this article, Kotter compares leadership with management. He uses the three main activities of leaders and managers for comparisons. Highly recommended to leaders, managers, people moving into management, and MBA-students. The author uses simple US-English.