Bowles Books

I needed this book for a language course. I had to cancel my Amazon order because Amazon changed the delivery date to one which was after the course was finished. I had to go to my local Barnes and Noble to purchase the book.

I'm 70 years old since age is a criterion for this review.

The publishers of Teach Yourself finally fixed - in this course at least - one of the consistent glaring problems with their format, namely delving into dialogs without even a slight introduction to the vocabulary or grammar concepts employed in the dialog. THANK YOU!

And what a difference, in TY Beginner's Italian the chapters begin with very manageable vocab lists and some insight into useage and THEN offer the dialog. This just works so much better than having 10 lines of a dialog with absolutely no context or preparation for what is being said.

The other thing that's great about this course is the structure. The first 10 units are foundational in the Italian language and cover the most important basics of communication. Then there are 10 more chapters that can be covered in any order you wish, that build upon the foundation of the 1st 10.

Again, very logical, and very useful. The chapters are bite-sized and move you through the program easily. The amount of material offered in each chapter and the pacing feel just right to me; not too much, nor is the program dumbed-down.

Overall this is an excellent intro to Italian, and in my view this is the perfect choice if you are preparing for a trip and want to make small talk, or you are planning on studying Italian seriously. Very cleanly and attractively presented, you can get a lot out of this program.

Having never studied Italian before, I am finding the Beginner's Italian audiopackage to be a nicely paced introduction to the language. Each chapter introduces a manageable amount of new vocabulary and builds upon the lessons of the preceding chapter. Although I haven't looked into the Pimsleur Italian series, it would probably complement the Teach Yourself Italian well.

My primary criticism (and reason for giving 4 rather than 5 stars) is of the rather slim dictionary at the back of the book. At the very least, this should contain all of the vocabulary introduced in the text. As it stands, I have to hunt through past chapters when I invariably forget some of the vocabulary.

John Evelyn's diary is a wonderful source-book for 17th Century England. It covers far more of the period than Peyps' diary (but is a little drier!)and gives a comprehensive picture of life in those turbulent times. Guy de la Bedoyere has done a fine job of editing this diary.

Evelyn is very different from Pepys, whom he knew. Unlike Pepys, Evelyn was a strait-laced fellow, so we get no juicy stories of his amours. He hardly speaks of his wife and consequently never mentions any arguments they might have had. He tells few personal anecdotes. He also has little to say about the great plague year or the great fire of London. Pepys gives a lot more detail on these subjects.

What he does deal with rather extensively are the meetings of the Royal Society, of which he was a member. It was hard for me to get excited about these. Nevertheless, it is good to have this book available.

It is a pitty that Samia Mehrez, Professor of Modern Arabic Literature at the American University in Cairo had been accused for assigning to her class this book. This is a misterious and very important work; should be advised anyone interested in real Arabic literature.

I liked this book. That surprised me. This speaks directly to strength in narration and artistry of Mr. Choukri, who shows us, in this first volume of his autobiography, the despair brought about by ignorance and poverty. Our young man's apparent lack of hope for a better future is made clear from the start. In his teens, born in Marocco, during the French domination, he struggles to find the rules and reasons for the world around him. I say apparent lack of hope, because after the first few paragraphs we already know that he is sensitive, smart and will attempt to survive as best he can, without any help from his family or society. In this respect, I was satisfied early on, for I sensed it would be all right to attach my emotions to this hero; that he would not betray my confidence. Mr. Choukri's narration is also masterful in the depiction of the most despicable acts of violence both physical and moral. He is detached. So we can also keep our safe distance.

I confess to having a special reason for reading this book. Since I spent some time in the early 1980s in Oran, Algeria, I have been intrigued with the peoples of North Africa. And this book takes place in many of the cities and towns that are familiar to me. What surprises is to see that even though there was a good thirty years difference between the time this story took place and the 1980s, there were vestiges that for some, things still remained. I can only hope that there has been considerable improvement in the past 20 years.

This is a book that makes us think. And even though the subject: a disenfranchised youth in the life of petty crimes in the fringe of society is not unusual in the literature of developing countries, it is important to return to these themes once in a while, getting out of our comforatble, well educated bubbles, and rethink our own contributions to world around us.

I am a better person for having read this book. That's a sign of excellence.

One of the rare books I could read in one breath. It is short, inspiring, and imaginative. Choukri's writing is very simple, like a dessin, in a diary style. Simple, yet it tells so much about so many things, mainly about Genet and how he relates to people, what he thinks about literature. It also tells a good deal about Morocco. The translation is excellent, I think. The beauty of the language is well preserved.
One will sense the respect Choukri has for Genet, and his compassion, sensitivity and warmth toward the society. There are a few pictures of the author with Genet and his friends also, which is a treat.
A great page turner. Couldn't put it down. One of the most beautiful proses I've ever read. Now I'm looking for more books by Choukri.

This book details the encounters of Choukri with Jean Genet in Tangier over a short period of time. The prose describing the encounters and the selection of details to include in the description is masterful - in a slim volume one gains both a feeling of Morocco's bureaucrats, of the author's respect for Genet and of Genet himself. There is no hint of "gossip column" or "me with a big shot" - both of which are dangers for this type of writing. This is book is well worth your time.

Mrabet teeters like an innocent child on the edge of paranoia and madness. These disturbed visions, bubbling up from the very hashish inspired dreams that Mrabet describes, provide insight into the bizarre world of Tangier and the Rif mountains where western values merge in an unsettling medley with ancient Berber traditions anchored in superstition, hallucination, and deceit. Bowles and his intrinsic understanding of this bizarre culture have brought us a most valuable translation that otherwise might never have reached western minds.

Paul Bowles was a great writer who also did us the service of translating many Morroccan writings. One of these writers is Mohammed Mrabet. This little title Mhashish was put out by the City Lights label many years ago. It contains tales largely revolving around the use of kif (or hashish as Americans would call it) It is a delightful collection of tales. Mrabet is a talented writer. He draws up some tantalizing tales that delve into the positive and negative of this state of mind. It is a good introductory volume for the novice (admittedly I am a novice myself) of Morroccan literature. Mr Bowles did us a great favor in translating numerous works by Mrabet. Let us pray to Allah that City Lights finds it in their hearts to reissue these fine collections of exotic literature.

Blame the poor for their own poverty, and we can justify enjoying our own opulent lifestyles without an excess of guilt. Economics teaches us that poverty is a choice, so we can give the poor opportunities, but we cannot force them to take advantage of those opportunities. Thus the moral responsibility for poverty rests with the poor, rather than those who control and consume the majority of resources. This achievement model of income determination places the mechanisms that determine an individual's socioeconomic prospects mostly within his or her control, but it does little to explain the growing disparity in income between and within nations:

"Income inequality in the world as a whole has increased substantially over the past two centuries, with the richest 10 percent receiving over half of world income today, while the poorest 50 percent receive less than 10 percent. In the United States, home of the rags-to-riches tale, the son of a person born to parents in the poorest decile of income earners is twenty-four times more likely to achieve an income in the lowest decile than in the highest decile when he grows up."

Economic competition, liberal democratic institutions, and free trade should result in convergence in economic outcomes, but the persistence of poverty has required new theories to address "both the question of how whole economies may fail to develop, and how subgroups within rich economies may fail to share in overall prosperity." These mechanisms that cause poverty to persist-"poverty traps"-are the subject of the eight articles contained within the present volume of the same name. The editors introduce the volume with a helpful introduction outlining the overall problem and the scope and direction of the articles which they group into three explanatory categories: critical thresholds, dysfunctional institutions, and neighborhood effects.

Part One of the book deals with threshold effects, in which physical and human capital must be developed to a minimal level to enable positive returns on investments and economies of scale. Foreign aid programs that have invested in education and capital development have shown, however, that productive opportunities alone are not sufficient to escape the poverty trap. Economic development also requires mechanisms to create ever-new future opportunities. Parts Two and Three address this issue.

Part Two contains four articles looking at the effect of institutions 1) historically in the Americas, 2) modeled in a predator/producer ecosystem, 3) as products of traditional, kin-based societies, and 4) within a general evolutionary framework in which institutions that perpetuate inequality persist unless upset by large, collective action.

Part Three looks at neighborhood effects with three articles. The first article explains how in the "memberships theory of poverty", "peer effects, role model influences, and other factors that operate at the level of the group" and perpetuate poverty can be counteracted by "associative redistribution" policy measures, including affirmative action and the development of charter and magnet schools. The second article in Part Three looks at the spatial neighborhood effect in a Chicago neighborhood and the relationship between two social process outcomes, "collective efficacy" and "cynicism", and changing levels of poverty from the 1970s onward. The final chapter of the book looks at the "conceptual difficulties in evaluating public policies designed to promote socioeconomic integration of communities" when small public policy experiments moving poorer families to more affluent neighborhoods are used as models for larger-scale relocations.

The editors and authors of this important volume offer empirically argued causal mechanisms for the creation of poverty traps, each of which must be addressed by intelligent policy intervention, some of which are hinted at in this volume. But as the editors readily acknowledge, "So while this volume makes clear that the Horatio Alger view that poverty can always be escaped through hard work and determination really is fiction in many contexts, we have far to go in terms of understanding what is to be done."

"Poverty Traps" is a collection of research papers on the subject of, well, poverty traps, edited by Bowles, Durlauf and Hoff. Each of these are known for their use of orthodox methodology against the economic orthodoxy itself in substantial terms, and that is also the approach taken in this book. The book consists of a small number of fairly large essays, more or less thematically organized, which seek to explain how poverty traps come into being and how they are reproduced. In this context, a poverty trap is defined as a less-than-optimal solution which is nonetheless an equilibrium, where there also exists an optimal (or at least better) equilibrium.

By far the best part of the book is Part II, which discusses institutions and how they serve to create and reinforce such poverty traps. Engerman & Sokoloff have a fascinating article on the importance of land policies and the crops produced in different parts of the American continent since colonization as a cause of the strong discrepancies in wealth between the North and the Middle/South. Mehlum, Moene and Torvik use classic orthodox methods to show that in African nations, there can be a poverty trap as a result of organized crime, militias etc. being parasites on productive companies, where they keep each other balanced at a suboptimal level. Hoff & Sen have an excellent essay on the problems with kin systems in Africa and Asia and the way in which they can inhibit modernization. And finally Samuel Bowles himself uses a game theoretical mathematical approach to show how suboptimal social conventions can be very hard to change in circumstances of great inequality, despite the amount of people benefiting from the conventions are very few in proportion to those negatively affected. Also of great interest is the first essay in Part III, by Steven Durlauf, which deals with how group pressure and neighborhood influences can account for the continuing bad situation in very black areas of the United States.

What is frustrating about this book is that the authors are so clearly constrained by the faux 'rigor' of orthodox economics in fully developing their case. Reading between the lines this seems to have been the case for some of the authors themselves as well, but it will certainly strike any reader that about half the book is devoted to mathematically describing and modelling arguments which are perfectly sensible and easily understood in just their regular written form. The added value of making a model with a host of unworldly and absurd assumptions to prove a particular point that could just as easily be proven in terms of "people tend to behave like X under Y circumstances, because of social cause Z" is unclear, and it is one of the many unfortunate products of the academic atmosphere in the field of economics. What passes for 'rigor' is in reality a useless and failed attempt to imitate physics and to impress the noninitiated. It is a pity that this draws smart minds, as the cases of Moene (associated with 'Analytical Marxism') and Bowles (the leader in behavioral economics) show - both are approaches which want to do good social science, uninhibited by liberal dogma, but which are hampered by their own insistence on methodological orthodoxy. This is a good scientific work, but its own methodology hinders it.

Good quality, really almost new. Highly satisfied, only wish it had arrived a little quicker. Ordered another used book at the same time from another Amazon source and it arrived 3-4 days sooner.

By definition, a "raving fan" is a customer that is so happy with your company that they praise your actions to anyone who might possibly listen. They are the best form of advertisement and the hardest to acquire. Changing your customer service strategy so that you have raving fans rather than customers is the point of this book and the story is told in parable form.
The two main characters are Area Manager and Charlie, his male fairy "godmother." Using the magic that all fairy godmothers possess, Charlie takes Area Manager to several companies that generate their own raving fans. The strategy is common and ubiquitous across industries; treat your customer as a coveted and valued asset rather than a source of revenue to be squeezed.
Another very important point is that to be successful in the area of customer service, you must first decide what you want to do. A fundamental component of this is to realize that not all potential customers are desirable ones. The fact is that some people are simply unsuitable as customers. Decide up front that they are not what you want to do and don't do it. Focus on what you can and want to do well.
Ken Blanchard has once again been an author of a book that points the way to success in business. The path to success is by providing quality service that appears costly, but that is a mirage. Good customer service is one of the best ways possible to make money and save time by spending money and using time to provide it. This is one of the best management books ever written, made even better by the simplicity of the presentation.

This is one of the most informative and fun-to-read books I've ever read. There is so much to be learned and to think about. Really gets your energy and mind going.

I bought this in lieu of buying th book and am glad I did. We slipped it in and played it while on a day trip on the road. We are Amazon booksellers and found the information very helpful in our applying it to our bookselling business. The narration is story form which helps keep it interesting as well.

This book has a rather flimsy message. Simply stated it is that you can smash your competition and achieve exceptional success in sales by adhering to a deceptively simple formula: Know what you want; know what the customer wants, deliver beyond the client's expectation, and never stop enhancing your service. The message is delivered in a writing style known as "mystical realism" in the fiction world, and which doesn't work quite as well in the non-fiction world. There is some real magic here, though, and it's on the cover of the book, "More than One Million copies sold." This probably relates to the fact that the target audience is, in fact, probably not all that literate, that it reduces an MBA in Marketing to a 75 minute read, that the print is large, and of course the whimsical and all too frequent references to the game of golf. The fact is that salesfolk periodically need to have their batteries recharged, and this book is a quick-charge. It gives the reader the feeling that he has learned something new, and that the business world is really much less complex than appearances would suggest. I read it as mandatory preparation for a Xinnix seminar, and if they thought this book had exceptional value, I'm worried about how simplistic their seminar might be.

High Five is a quick read. It is a good book for mentoring a team of supervisors.

As with all Blanchard books, he works with the other authors and does a great job sharing simple effective solutions within the framework of a story. High Five is a foundational read for all our team building clients and I have ordered the book for our football coaching team as well. It was a nice recognition of the need to adapt the basic learning points of the PUCK acronym Providing Purpose and Values, Unleashing and Developing Skills, Creating Team Power and Keeping the Accent on the Positive to one fit for business, POWER - Purpose/Values, Empowerment, Relationships & Communications, Flexibility, Optimal Performance, Recognition and Appreciation and Morale. While none of this is new, there is always something to learned from the story. And like anything else, if anyone can execute on these fundamentals, great teams can be the result.

Team Work - Everyone knows the importance but yet more often than not, our own individuality gets in the way. How much more can be achieved if everyone behaves for the collective good of the group rather than for himself?

In this charming story, we follow the journey of Alan Foster, a top producer at work but very much a solo player. Because of this, he loses his job. Soon, he gets a job of coaching his son's ice hockey team, which interestingly, is bottom of the league due to it's lousy teamwork. Through a series of practice sessions and with the help of a former girl's basketball coach, Alan sees the problem with the hockey team and in the process realises his previously same problematic behaviour at work. As with all fairy tales, the team undergoes a transformation after they finally manage to get their act together. As an icing on the cake, Alan somehow also gets invited back to his former company to give a speech on teamwork! Did he finally return to his former company to work? Read the book to find out but of course, do not forget about the main lesons on teamwork! As the saying goes, "None of us is as smart as all of us."

Recommendation: Read this and start working on your team immediately! No point paying so much money to consultants. Get the soft cover version or try to borrow from the library if you are really low on budget. :)

Book written to be easily read by adults and students. Love the context and the teamwork tips that have been incorporated. Read with your coworkers, or with your class of students when wanting to build teamwork skills.

While I have read other Ken Blanchard books, this one truly got my attention and was wonderful. As a student collegiate athelte myself, Blanchard and Bowle's book was easy reading and very easy for me to connect with based on my own experiences. The book allows one to follow a main character that starts off by being fired from his job, then gets involved coaching a young hockey team and calls on a coach he remembers from his school days to assist and turn the team around. With the assistance of this "coach" the main character begins to understand what it takes to make a successful team. He realizes the importance of maintaining a positive attitude and building team pride. This is a book that you can't put down, it can be read quickly and easily and I do feel everyone would be able to associate with parts of the book. Blanchard and Bowles do a great job at using the hockey team to teach the readers about team building yet simultaneously showing how these same principles can be applied to a work site. One is taken through the steps of team building and given examples time and time again on how these steps can be applied. There are very interesting twist throughout the book that keeps one's attention. I recommend this book to everyone.

This book is a wonderful and colorful example of what the first Lady chose to wear for her official duties in the US and abroad. Until one sees the pictures you are unable to appreciate the beautiful designs, fabric, and colors that made up Mrs. Kennedy's wardrobe. Just such an enjoyable book.
Lucinda

This book is the bomb for Jackie Lovers- the clothes are fantastic and the stories behind them bring them to life. You realise that they are quite severe and plain ( altho beautiful) and how she really brought them to alive and made them sparkle. My favourite clothing book EVER.

Oh let me count the ways I adore this book! It has large pictures in full color of Jackie's dresses and the details about the occasion she wore them to. I really like how it shows one dress on each page letting you take in the beauty of each dress rather that multiple pics on one page. I think it is a superb buy if you enjoy pretty things like I do. Perfect coffee table book.

Beautiful photographs of the dresses, suits, coats, hats and gowns worn by Jackie before and during the White House years. Descriptions of the fabrics and the construction of each garment reveal the thought and attention to detail that this most stylish of our first ladies gave to her clothing. No fashion victim was she. It is clear from the narrative that Jackie had a perfect sense of who she was and a definite idea of how she wanted to look. Amazing when one considers she was only 31 when she entered the White House. Truly deserving of her iconic status.

Presented as a fashion journal, this book is surprisingly insightful of Jackie's personality, charisma and intelligence. It is a presentation of her poise and strength as an influence on the nation (and the world,) both politically and artistically. Personally, looking back on those years, I am able to see and understand the changes within our society based on the Kennedys aesthetic. I highly recommend this book as a review of the times when we as a nation were in Camelot.

Paul Bowles's fourth novel, Up Above The World (1966) is probably the best of his four major novels, all of which are significantly flawed in some way. Bowles was a far better short story writer than a novelist, though he was always an excellent writer of the language regardless of the medium.

Bowles is still best known for his first novel, The Sheltering Sky (1949), though that book is only three-fourths a good novel, being one that sadly degenerates into unintentional parody as it approaches its climax (it's easy to tell exactly where in the narrative Bowles stopped drawing heavily on his own personal experiences in northern Africa: once Kit is imprisoned by the very Arabs who initially appear to be her saviors, the writing takes on clumsy, ersatz tone that wouldn't be out of place in a fourth installment of a 1950s B-movie Tarzan franchise).

Bowles's second novel, the unfocused Let It Come Down (1952), also dealt with troubled expatriates in North Africa, while his third and longest novel, the sprawling The Spider's House, addressed the conflict between Moroccan nationalism and French colonialism.

Thus, it was a good idea for Bowles to minimize the length of Up Above The World, especially since the reader once again finds himself confronted with American citizens awkwardly traveling in foreign lands, a troubled marriage, a mother and son haunted by unresolved incestuous conflicts, brutal non-Americans, existential and nihilistic anxieties, and other fairly shop-worn Bowles motifs.

Up Above The World is the story of elderly Dr. Slade and his much younger wife, Day, who, shortly after their marriage, travel to Central America for pleasure. Neither Dr. Slade or Day wholly embrace what they find on their journey: each constantly complains about the heat, the humidity, the food, the travel arrangements, and the habits, mores, and appearance of the local people, leaving the reader to wonder why the ostensibly intelligent Slades selected Central America as a destination in the first place.

Day befriends a coarse, overweight woman and fellow travelor that Dr. Slade finds entirely repugnant, a woman later killed in a hotel fire after the Slades have departed.

As a result of this brief acquaintanceship, the Slades are unknowingly targeted, stalked, and manipulated by the dead woman's handsome, apparently wealthy son Vero--also known as Grove and Grover throughout the text--and his lower-class sidekick, Thorny.

Once Vero has figuratively seduced the Slades, the plot of Up Above The World weakens considerably. The previously cautious, savvy, and discerning Slades suddenly begin to act carelessly and foolishly, even after both become extremely ill after their first meal at Vero's lavish mountain apartment, and are thus unable to leave or continue their travels.

Shortly afterward, Dr. Slade mysteriously falls sick a second time, and as he is a medical doctor, readers may find it difficult to believe that neither the doctor nor his wife even remotely suspect they have been poisoned, especially when Bowles has made it abundantly clear that this is exactly what has occurred.

Spiders of various kinds and sizes appear continually throughout the novel, thus acting as rather heavy-handed symbols of the kind of sociopathic human beings that Vero and Thorny are in fact. Before the novel's end, it is obvious that, in Bowles's conception, the Slades are flies caught in the web-like 'Thorny Grove' that the obsessive Vero has weaved to entrap them.

Beautifully written but often implausible, Up Above The World nonetheless represents Bowles's greatest achievement in the novel format.

The first 100 pages of Up Above The World follows the travelings of Taylor and Day two Americans very reminiscent of Port and Kit of Sheltering Sky. In the last 150 pages after meeting a strange couple Taylor and Day are no longer in control of their lives but prisoners of the strange couple. Exactly how this imprisoning takes place and for what reasons only become clear in the very last pages. Only a minimal plot description can be given as the pleasure is in finding things out in the order they are meant to be found out. Having been a longtime fan of Sheltering Sky and all of his stories I hesitated reading any of his other novels as I heard they were not as good as his first. But reading this I find I am reminded not so much of the eerie and desolate majesty of Sheltering Sky which is a far better novel but of Bowles short stories, especially the ones which take place in South America as this novel does. This is not Sheltering Sky caliber fiction but it is a very competent novel and will appeal to those who admire Bowles very modern and often horrific short stories full of deviant psychologies and drugs and all sorts of sordid and often primitive "truths" about human nature. The novel reads like an extended short story really. Occasional details peculiar for being so precise stand out as always in Bowles writing. He describes the sound a cricket makes as coming from the back of its black throat. The Bowles vision is as bleak a vision as exists in serious modern fiction but it is immensely appealing as gothic things often are. I doubt many people really feel the world is as Bowles describes it. He grasps at only one side of human nature, the side the sun never reaches. Not a place you want to live but an intriguing place to travel through.

I leapt upon this book when I saw it at a used bookstore, having been blown away by Bowles' pivotal work, "The Sheltering Sky", which would have to rate as one of the best books I have ever read. I have to say I was underwhelmed by this one - very different in tone and style, not as compulsively readable, but still a good way to pass a few hours on a Sunday afternoon. I do have to give Bowles kudos for his ability to accurately represent some of the seamier consequences that can occur when Americans are placed in unsettling surroundings and act without plan or forethought and his ability to highlight cultural differences in entertaining yet subtle ways. He is definitely a writer whose works I shall continue to seek out.

Paul Bowles spent a lot of time in Morocco and, I believe, other areas of the Middle East. A long time ago, I read a book of his short stories which were based on indigenous Moroccan myths. The stories were bizarre and hard to fathom, much like what I've encountered of American Indian and other indigenous tales.

When I stumbled across this book (Up Above the World), I recognized the author's name and was curious to see what other kind of writing he had done. It didn't hurt that the back cover touted Bowles as having "undoubtedly one of the finest gifts of all men writing in English" (St. Louis Dispatch). I was somewhat disappointed, though. The book, a tale of murder in a Central American banana republic, contains some masterful passages, but I felt the plot was rather weak. Still, it was an interesting read.

Bowles' work is not for the squeamish or the weak-minded. He knew that. He wrote for those of us capable of understanding and accepting the base nature of man and dealing with it in an intellectual capacity. This is a great work of literature for those intelligent enough, tough enough and honest enough to comprehend the big picture. The ideas may be harsh, but the storytelling is so eloquent and the conjuring of imagery creates such beautiful pictures in the mind amongst the psychological and physical carnage that it demands to be read. This is a GREAT work. It takes a Graham Greene vibe and extrapolates it in an admirably frightening way. READ THIS BOOK! Paul Bowles is one of the five greatest writers of the 20th century. Read him.