Vans Books

This is a very understandable--and geologically accurate--guide to "geology" as most of us find it--in pebbles and other rocks that we pick up along our hikes and explorations. Written for east coast lithologies (rock types) this is a lucid, understandable, but not overwhelming, succinct guide to understanding the pebbles found in and around many New England streams--and also in the abundant glacial tills of the area. Covers the basics of what the rock is made of, and how OLD it's likely to be--and of course, what it's called. It's fun, it's portable, and it's a great field companion for kids (AND adults) on any hike--or even a stroll around the back yard.

"A Field Guide To The Identification Of Pebbles" by geologist Eileen Van der Flier-Keller (Associate Professor in Earth Sciences at the University of Victoria) is a very nicely illustrated laminated fold-out pamphlet specifically and effectively designed to help children identify twenty-eight various rocks and pebbles commonly encountered on beaches and along rivers. "A Field Guide To The Identification Of Pebbles" is an ideal gift and 'kid friendly' reference for youngsters involved in beach and backyard explorations of the rocks, minerals and pebbles they come across.

This is about what happens when life suddenly changes in a most unexpected way, and how to handle disapointment, broken dreams, lost love and taking a new path of life and perhaps in the end, becoming a stronger, yet more humble, person.
Read and read again and enjoy the story and beautiful language!

This book is not one that holds your attention so strongly that you can't put it down. It's instead a very reflective work of tragedy that grows rapidly into fruition equal to the speed of the cancer which is overtaking its heorine, Celia, who in her last moments tries with the aid of her former lover to recover a sense of meaning for all that has in effect been stolen from her in a family and society of unrelenting deception which included the machinations of her daughters. So much so that in the end she couldn't rely on her daughters, all of whom are grown with families of their own. One of the scenes is so compelling that one wonders how much a human can withstand? It has to do with the "heoric" surgery that has been performed. Her former lover David having heard by chance of her last irreversible struggle forgives and forgets everything and rushes back from Europe to be with and help her. It ends tragically but magnificently in spite of all the lies.

Financial Custody: You, Your Money, And Divorce by Certified Divorce Planner Joan Coullahan and Certified Financial Planner and Chartered Financial Consultant Sue van der Linden is an absolute "must-read" for anyone undergoing or about to undertake a divorce. Chapters cover the basics of legal procedures, the importance of getting organized, child support and alimony, negotiation and settlement, and much, much more. Written by experienced professionals in clear, accessible language accessible to the non-specialist general reader, Financial Custody is crucial, recommended reading for anyone who doesn't want to end their divorce flat broke.

As Joan and Sue point out, divorce is seen a primarily a legal process. In my opinion, that is because the attorneys have the strongest union which services divorcing couples. But as Certified Financial Planners, these dedicated professionals have shared a new perspective on how to approach the emotionally and financially difficult transition of dissolving a marriage. This book is not a "do it yourself" divorce kit, but instead helps couples be good consumers of divorce advice from a variety of professionals and prepares them for the decisions ahead. These concepts are covered in the first half of the book. The second half discusses practical financial planning advice that newly divorced individuals will need to consider, especially if their new "ex" was the financial manager in the marriage. As a financial counselor, I have always helped my clients look for solutions that will preserve their marriages, if at all possible, because divorce is never cheap. But when it is inevitable, this book will save them thousands of dollars as they reduce their dependence on expensive legal proceedings and make good financial choices that attorneys may never advise....

"Unlocking your personal power is one of the great gifts of yoga practice." ~Bruce Eric Van Horn

After reading three of Bruce Eric Van Horn's books, this has to be the funniest in the series. Not only does he sing on the CD, he tells some hilarious stories about his dad wanting him to have a better life.

Perhaps his father is seeing the dream come true. His son is now an author and CEO of Yoga for Business, a company dedicated to individual and organizational growth. Soon after a midlife crises, he left his "business" job to become a Yoga Instructor. He now works with cancer patients who are seeking forms of healing through yoga.

Bruce has created a series of books to empower his readers. He has the unique ability to uncover limiting belief systems with humor.

The Contents Include:

1. Four Step Program for Individual and Organizational Wellness: Humor, Art, Music and Self Acceptance.
2. The Workplace Environment
3. Spiritual Capitalism
4. Evaluating our Belief Systems
5. Change Management
6. Dysfunction in Organizations
7. Tools to Overcome Organizational Dysfunction
8. The Right Season and Developing Synchronicity

In this book, we are taken into the area of the changing marketplace. Ships seem to be sinking all around us and often we can feel vulnerable and quite stressed. You can either leave the ship or encourage a healing environment in the workplace.

I like the concept of "Spiritual Capitalism." The cartoons in this book will be especially enjoyable to any employee or manager in the business world. If you are familiar with some of the yoga postures, the cartoon on page 34 is pretty good!

Some Ideas I found useful:

Keep trying different solutions until successful.
Change the type of books we read
Work for a company that has the same goals we do. Heal the world instead of hurting the world.
Change our interpretation of situations and put things in perspective
Use love to overcome great obstacles
Unburden Yourself from "poverty consciousness."
Change our motivation from fear to love.
OWN YOUR POWER ? I love this list!

This book will help you:

Improve your mental clarity
Focus on what is Important
Concentrate on the Spiritual
Enhance your Communications Skills
Gain Emotional Control
Increase Your Confidence
Understand how termination could be a blessing in disguise.
Treat people as ?whole beings.?

"Firm Footing" is really a book to encourage disenfranchised employees to find a new purpose and source of power. After talking to my husband about some of his past jobs, I soon realized "that environment" was completely unhealthy. Marriages were being destroyed and employees were leaving due to a huge burden of stress.

Bruce knows what he is talking about. Management practices definitely need to change. The list on page 100 is quite amazing. If employees really took this list to heart, I think employees would have a much better workplace environment.

A beautiful approach to Workplace Empowerment. A book for every manager and employee.

This is perhaps the most exciting book in the series. Imagine a world filled with happy employees! Give this book to everyone you know! This is a real winner and will encourage positive change in the world.

~The Rebecca Review

Firm Footing is the second volume in the Healthy Living Wellness Program addressing how to use Yoga for business. This book will be most valuable to those who already use Yoga or have read Introduction to Daily Yoga Practice. In this volume, Mr. Van Horn addresses how to use humor, art, music, pets and self-acceptance to inject spirituality to help eliminate harmful, unnecessary stress from the work place. That said, the book's focus will make the most sense in small, family owned businesses. I have graded it for that application.

If you like Dilbert cartoons, you will probably enjoy this book. It takes some of the most stressful moments in a person's business life and makes them humorous through a series of cartoons that lampoon the usual short-sighted management approaches that we've all grown to hate. In fact, the "case study" on pp. 15-45 is almost all one long cartoon of what usually happens.

Like the predecessor volume, this one also has a CD that includes meditations and music to help you create a more constructive mood. One meditation encourages you use thoughts about a tree to develop a more positive attitude toward change. Another meditation encourages you to see customers and fellow workers with loving kindness.

If you like your "management advice" to be traditional, like a coat and tie, you may not like this book. I thought the humor helped make the case for change more compelling.

My only complaint about the book is that the appendix material on Ayurvedic constitutions is way over-simplified -- so much so as to be misleading to beginners. Most people who are diagnosed by an Ayurvedic physician or healer will find that their constitution is made up of more than one of these types. The means for bringing your type into balance is also usually a little more complicated than the appendix makes it seem.

My favorite part of the book was where you are shown how to take stressful situations and turn them into humor . . . for your own sanity!

After you finish laughing along with this book, think about where your own behavior may cause others unnecessary stress. How can you share with others your desire to make their lives more blessed . . . so that when you make a mistake in adding stress that they will know to treat it lightly?

An excellant first book for the soon to be fly fishing addict. Clear, concise and extremely well illustrated, "Fishing Nymphs, Wet Flies & Streamers: Subsurface Techniques for Trout in Streams", introduces the novice fly fisherman to terminology, fly presentation, stream entomology and an understanding of the stream environment enough so one could enter their local fly shop and feel they have a starting point from which to ask questions. The photos and illustrations are not gratuitous but lend extreme clarity to the trouts behavior. The text is concise enough to move you through a broad introduction to the subject quickly and clearly but you will certainly want to explore more books on the sport to round out your understanding. I wish this series by "The Complete Fly Fisherman" (check out the other titles) had been my first books because they are so clear. Buy them as a gift for yourself or someone you know that is starting out. They'll like it.

I have several books in this series called "The Complete Fly Fisherman." Most of the books, including this one have been very useful to me. I have been fly fishing for about 2+ years. I found the second half this particular book very enlightening as it goes through various casting techniques for subsurace fishing in different kinds of water (deep, shallow, runs, pools, etc). I had known about other casting techniques for dry fly fishing. The book has opened up a new door for me to explore out from. I found the first half of the book to be kind of a review of things I had already learned but it was a good refresher. I enjoy this "series" because they have lots of excellent color photos as well as useful information.

If ever there were an author who could wedge a knife into the cracks of the human soul, it must be Shusaku Endo.

In these five stories -- Unzen, A Fifty-Year-Old Man, Japanese In Warsaw, The Box, and The Case of Isobe -- Endo draws back the curtain on a group of people obsessed with such themes as cowardice, sex, martyrdom, death and the love of animals.

With bleak eloquence and hard-edged compassion, Endo creates a banquet of irony and emotion that succeeds in filling the void created by 95% of modern fiction.

If you are weary of the predictable and formulaic fiction churned out by the big publishing houses, I recommend this slim volume. Shusaku Endo's stories feel like a gust of cold, clean and pungent mountain air from the top of Japan's highest mountains.

Mr. Endo is a rarity: a Japanese Catholic novelist, a literary Sadao Watanabe. His Catholicism and literary studies in Europe have made him the most accessible of Japanese novelists to the western reader. Those who know and appreciate his work will welcome these five short stories, and will recognize his usual style and typical concerns. A novelist retraces the steps of the Christian martyrs of Shimabara, but he is more interested in and identified with the apostate who agonizes spiritually because he did not have the faith to suffer physically. Japanese tourists on the make and their impassive guide wander Warsaw and find in the strangest of places St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish missionary to Japan who died in Auschwitz. A box of old postcards uncovers the secret life of a missionary's daughter during wartime Japan. A fifty-year old man takes dancing lessons amid intimations of mortality. A man who could not share his feelings with his wife watches her die and then wonders about her possible reincarnation. The last of these short stories is in fact the opening chapter of the novel "Deep River," but it becomes more intriguing on its own. Those who don't know Endo yet will find this a tasty and representative sampling of his work. Van C. Gessel, who has translated at least six Endo novels, has provided a very readable text.

I have the English-Vietnamese version and was thrilled to discover it at a used book sale. I fell in love with the simple story of a bunny who was different, yet turned out to be very accepted by his peers. The illustrations are simple and superb. If you have bilingual children, I highly recommend this book... even if not... I'm sure the simple English version is great as well. Floppy is a great teacher for kids.

This book is one that my mother use to read to me when I was about 5 or 6 years old. Recently I chose to use this book in my Foundations of Exceptional Lives college class for a bibliothereapy report. This book displays Flop Ear as a rabbit who is different from all others and gets teased and picked on as a result of his uniqueness. In the end, the other rabbits see him as a rabbit and not just for his differences. This book is a good one to beginning teaching your children the important principle that even though other children may look and appear to be different from them, they should still show acceptance to the other child. If you look real carefully, you will see that we all have differences.

A Jewish woman credits her survival as a Dutch teenager during
the Holocaust to small miracles and human kindness, which she
chronicled in this deeply personal book.
The saga got only modest attention when published in 1998 and
sold 3,000 copies, but now the story by Flory A. Van Beek is getting
international buzz, with word that ABC and actor-director Mel Gibson's
production company are eyeing it for a miniseries in 2007. Now, the 81-year-old retired legal secretary says, "I am happy that
someone is interested in my book as TV special, because it keeps the story of the
Holocaust alive."

Read the book and weep. An important addition to the literature of that time. Oich!

This is a gripping, moving book which must be read by descendants of Holocaust sufferers in order to fully appreciate what their relatives experienced. My parents were also in hiding in Rotterdam, but were never able to describe their ordeal with the graphic detail that Ms. Van Beek uses. While it is often unpleasant reading, the book enlightened me as to the utter dehumanization that my parents and others like them were subjected to. "Anne Frank" was written through the eyes of a young girl who was probably spared many of the gory details her parents did not want her to know. "Flory" provides us with the unabridged version. The pictures and the documents Ms. Van Beek was able to save and reproduce help to paint a fuller picture. One can only thank Ms. Van Beek for having the courage to share her experiences with those who have the need to know.

I have several books in this series called "The Complete Fly Fisherman." Most of the books, including this one have been very useful to me. I have been fly fishing for about 2+ years. I bought this book when I started and found it extremely useful to use. It helped me select equipment and prepare me for a Trout Unlimited Fly Fishing Class. I would highly recommend this book (and the series) to beginning fly fishers!

As a newcomer to fly fishing I had many questions about what gear I needed. This book provides the answers quickly. This book is well written by a seasoned veteran and it's a quick read. The quick guides to selecting the right gear allowed me to select a rod and reel that will provide versatility for several fish. This isn't the last book I'll read on fly fishing but it got me started in no time at all. Thanks John!

Mason's characters always sparkle with diversity. Sung Wing-kei is a native of Hong Kong who is an offspring of a concubine belonging to a favorite general of Sun Yat-sen. He got his start in business by collaborating with the Japanese. Nina Tizzard is an exotic oriental ballet dancer whose career has been spent mostly in Europe. Add to this a generous sprinkling of smugglers, socialites, soldiers of fortune, ex-patriots and the usual line-up of military types, both foreign and domestic, and you have the ingredients of a typical Hugh North adventure.

Hugh North solves his twntieth case in the GRACIOUS LILY AFFAIR. The story bears the usual Mason trademarks of thorough research, exotic locales, a smorgasbord of intriguing characters and a plot that includes a series of murders and a puzzle to solve within the larger riddle. Bermuda is where it all begins when a Portuguese plane carrying a courier crashes offshore. What stands out most in a Colonel North story is the attention to detail.In this instance we are introduced to more than sixty sites between Bermuda and the Far East. There are also some interesting tidbits on local ethnic customs.