Clubs and Organizations Books

This book was trash. Shallow, implausible, moronic plotlines and a writing style that is simulatiously glib and overwritten. The characters were heavy-handed and one-sided. A waste of three hours. And somebody please tell this guy to quit using the phrase "fait accompli"--once is enough.

Little did I know this would be a good diversion from my usual mystery stories. This is about corporate America from which I happily retired over five years ago.

Jack Fallon's wife of twenty-four years is divorcing him, and his employer, Waters Cable, is trying to rid the payroll of the `older', high salaried employees. Charlie Waters hired Jack when the company was just starting up; Charlie is still the CEO and Chairman and has pretty much forgotten Jack's efforts the past twenty-some years. Carter Bennett (born to wealth and snobbery) is the CFO and a smarmy, self-righteous prick who Charlie has hired to get rid of the alleged dead weight, while covering up the blatant age discrimination as best he can. Jack's entire marketing division has been targeted, so his band of not-so-merry cohorts form The Dinosaur Club and put up a fight to expose Charlie and Carter's ulterior motives.

This book was written in 1997 when `workforce imbalance corrections' (a/k/a downsizing) was one of the many corporate games played. The tactics used by management are somewhat true and the targeted employees' reactions are real. If you've ever worked in a large corporation, you'll get a kick out of this story.

kinda fun still. pls read michael moore's two non-fictions 'downsize this', 'dude, where's my country?' and then read donald westlake's 'the ax', to get a more realistic picture of america's corporates downsizing process started from the 90s, then you have to read some other books about america's 'outsourcing' problem in 21st century. i just don't know how long america could survive the prosperity, if all the working class simply can't find jobs anymore in this country.

The book was an ok read but ultimately was unsatisfying. THe love interest was a little pat. And he totally went overboard with the ending. I bought it based on the idea which I thought was fresh and topical. Ultimately I thought he could have been more clever with it.

The premise for this book is compelling: A group of middle-aged business executives fight back against being downsized.

Don't be seduced by this premise however: While this book may have some entertainment value for a reader who prefers not to be intellectually challenged, it makes no attempt whatsoever to deal with the premise seriously.

Instead, the protagonist gets to go on a power and sex trip that must be a wet dream for some regrettable men in their mid-life crisis, and the whole deal comes entirely guilt-free because his ungrateful and exploitative wife, children, and boss basically forced him to act the way he did. In the end, he comes away with a deal that is convenient for him, though neither particularly realistic nor of any benefit to anybody else.

Despite all of this, this book would not really be all that odious - the world needs a supply of shallow books, and writers like Heffernan have every right to make a living off writing them - if it didn't promise to discuss a very real and serious problem - downsizing - and so utterly reneged on that promise.

Sounds very one-sided; has anyone else read this book? Is there a non-biased view of the Wise Use movement?

Antitoxics activist Paula Siemers remembers the night two men attacked and knifed her on a Cincinnati street near her home, following earlier incidents of harassment in which she'd been stoned and her house set on fire... "After they cut my throat they poured water in it from the river and said, 'Now you'll have something to sue about,'" says Stephanie McGuire, an activist who was raped and tortured by three men in camouflage after she protested water pollution on the Fenholloway River... "We think it was murder," says a friend of Leroy Jackson, a Native American environmentalist whose body was found by the side a New Mexico highway several days before he was scheduled to fly to Washington to testify against clear-cut logging on the Navajo reservation... "I was driving home from a concert and saw a glow in the mist. By the time I got to my house a mile and a half in from the highway it was burned to the ground," recalls Greenpeace USA's toxics coordinator Pat Costner of the arson fire that destroyed her home... "We were told if we killed any of them there was $40,000 that was there to defend us in court or to help us get away," says Ed Knight, an ex-logger and Hell's Angel describing how he was hired to lie in ambush with an Uzi, waiting to shoot Earth Firsters in the California woods... And on and on the stories go, told in crystal clear prose, documented with footnotes abundant, by this veteran journalist and private investigator, David Helvarg. Had I come across this book before reading "Toxic Sludge is Good for You" and "Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future," these stories would seem less credible, but the vast accumulation of evidence supporting corporate violence against ordinary citizens and envrionmentalists is now beyond dispute. This bafflingly unavailable book is ESSENTIAL READING for anyone attempting to understand the environmental movement and its challenges.

This is really a terrific book to own for Lions Club members. It contains a terrific amount of reference material and history of the organization. Of course, time does not stand still, and the new programs that Lions Clubs are involved in cannot possibly be described. The flavor of the early days are well accounted for which continue to bring meaning and spirit to community service.

I would have rather received We Serve; A book of the Lions Clubs instead of The Lion of Wall Street. I guess when the sale is farmed out, sometimes the results aren't so good.

Michael McCloskey has had a huge influence on conservation and environmentalism in America, and he's truly eligible to be the subject of an informative biography. Unfortunately, he should have had someone else write it. I am a volunteer officer with Sierra Club, active at both the local and state levels, with an interest in the organization's history. For that reason I was attracted to this autobiography of the man who served faithfully with Sierra Club and other important groups for some 40 years, and was one of the Club's most influential Executive Directors. However, even I had trouble keeping up my interest as this book dragged along, and I can't imagine any general reader (who may very well crave knowledge about conservationist history) being able to hold more than a polite semi-interest. This is because McCloskey's story, as told by himself, becomes an interminable list of brief reports, presented strictly in chronological order. Milestones and achievements are presented monotonously with an unchanging focus toward their importance and influence, or lack thereof, and there are very few deeper insights or analyses of historically important trends in conservation.

Granted, there are a few useful tidbits here and there, especially in Chapter 13 in which McCloskey discusses how environmentalists can build alliances with labor, minorities, the poor, and business interests; while in a few other places he has some good advice on the specific financial and tax challenges face by non-profit advocacy groups. But on the other hand, most of the book dwells on minutiae of dubious usefulness, most notably the tedious coverage of several decades of internal power struggles within the Sierra Club leadership - passing strife that now means little to current Sierra Club members and even less to the interested layperson. McCloskey is also regularly prone to an underlying, yet subtle, self-righteousness. Once again, McCloskey is immensely influential in American conservationism, he was a strong leader of an important organization, and his lifetime of accomplishments is ripe material for a biography. But in the form of a self-aggrandizing autobiography, his story does not receive the insight and analysis that could be delivered by a professional biographer or historian. [~doomsdayer520~]

Book compiles and briefly profiles 1,001 oddly-themed group, fan clubs, and other assorted organizations. A few are funny, more are odd, but the rest are just boring. Are Elvis fan groups all that surprising given his iconic status in today's culture? The information provided about the groups is almost usless at times because no or limited contact information is given. You (theoretically) might find a group to your liking in here, but there's a good chance you'll have a hard time getting in touch with them using this book. Mildly diverting for a few minutes, but ultimately tedious, the book would have been better served by more in-depth looks at some of the even weirder groups out there.

This book is ok but it's not a must have or a must read!!