Meyer Books

The authors remind us that personal development can fall short if there is no follow through. With their practical suggestions and easy-to-follow techniques, readers improve their retention of what they need to learn. Know Can Do! is worth the investment.

I am a great fan of Mr. Ken Blanchchard. I have read his most of the books. And this book "Know Can Do!" is also a one of the great books, which explained that how, Repetition, positive attitude and followup can fill the gap of learning into actions. Must read.

- Thanks Rajiv

I must confess I am a Blanchard fan. The Situational Leadership, One Minute Manager, and other series are concise, helpful, and easy to put into action. Know Can Do gives one the tools to put knowledge into action. Many people are constantly looking for the next best thing instead of really putting an effort into what they already know. The author, using a story, of course, shows how to learn, review, and apply learning. By learning and reviewing a few things instead of shallowly learning a lot of things, you will accomplish more real change. all real accomplishment comes from focus, and this book will help internalize that concept.

Blanchard books are great on CD as well and will yield more return than the morning radio show. Plus, now Amazon is giving better prices on audiobooks than ever before!! A win/win.

Years of walking with the Lord and studying God's word are evident in the book Life Lines by Dave Meyer. Mr. Meyer selects some of the most poignant and relevant scriptures from the pages of the Bible on which to reflect, giving readers extra insight into God's word. These encouraging and challenging truths shoot arrows straight into their intended targets.

Mr. Meyer writes insightful meditations sure to stir a Christian's heart. Start your day with Dave and his understanding of what God has in store for you.

Do you seek wisdom and insight for your daily living? DO NOT pass up this book!! Truly one of the best books I have read, and as a reviewer, that is saying something! This is one book that will be on your "do not ever dispose of" shelf, and one you will refer back to many times. Comprised of a short saying, a Bible reading, and a short paragraph or two describing more about the saying and verse, this book is best experienced by reading one or two, pondering them for awhile and coming back for more, even though you will hunger for more and more as you begin reading. Dave Meyer has a winner in this book , and I am greatly impressed with his tremendous insight into God's word. The phrases themselves are truly touching, and though-provoking too. The Bible verses he has chosen are wonderful ones, and I have walked away a much more involved Christian because of reading this book. I will NEVER get rid of this book, and have refered back to it several times already, when discussing Bible studies with my group. Definitely am looking forward to more offerings by this God-touched author, which is not surprising with Joyce Meyer as his wife and soulmate.

This book is one of my new favorites. I like this book because it challenges me to go higher with God. This is a mature book written by a mature man. His years walking with the Lord are definitely shown in his writing and revelation from the Word of God. This book is definitely not for the christians who don't want to grow. This book is easy to read and gives you meat instead of milk. :) Don't read this if you don't want to go to the next level.

This is a great book of stories. I like to read before bedtime in the evenings, and usually I take several evenings to finish a single story. However, with this book, I found myself wanting to read more than one story in an evening.

I use a benchmark to decide whether or not a story is good. If I keep thinking about it for hours (or days) afterwards, that means it was a good read. The stories in this book produced images that stand out so vividly that, in memory, it is as if I saw them in a movie or even in real life ... the boy charred by lightning, dangling from the windrower as it goes round and round ... the deer carcasses hanging from trees in the night.

No other author has produced lingering images in my mind that are any more vivid than those generated by these stories. The only other author who did as good a job of that (for me) was Isaac Bashevis Singer.

I've had the opportunity to meet Kent Meyers in person. He gave a talk for Northern Hills Writers, our little group here in Lead, South Dakota. It's amazing how much effort he puts into his work, and it has paid off in this collection of stories. Reading Kent's work is not, however, a lazy affair. Your mind's eye must be open.

This is my 3rd Kent Meyers book and I can't recommend them highly enough. What a writer! His works are as emotionally jarring as those by Chuck Palahniuk without all the violence and the craziness. This is a book of short stories and each one packs a wallop.

One of my favorites was "Abiding by Law" which speaks to the universality of human emotions, our fear of the unknown and love for the safe and familiar, the strong drive to protect those in our family. This story has a wonderful aha moment, when a man's protective shell is cracked by a smile and a bow, a gentle nudge from one of those amazing people who are able to form bridges between people, and he is able to reach out a helping hand to his neighbor.

In "Making the News" a farmer creates sculptures out of cars.
"We were in the grove. Mammouths Resurrected come into view. Ed'd turned three cars into mammoths, put thick legs and trunks on them, and tusks,and he'd half-buried one so it looked like it was climbing out of the earth, and the second one was leaping like it'd just shook free, and the third was in full run, its trunk raised. From a distance they really did look like mammoths. The rock pile of all the rocks Ed's father and Ed and Gray had picked out of the fields was in the center of the group, and second mammoth looked like she was leaping over it, her front legs curled up for the leap.

'I don't see how he does it,' Paul Alcorn said. 'Everywhere you turn, there's something new.'

We stood looking at the sculpture, the wind making light scatter through the trees.

'It's like he's trying to bring it all back,' Paul Alcorn said. 'That's what it feels like. Everything that ever happened here.
Everything that's lost, he's trying to retrieve it.'"

A fine and very satisfying collection of stories with a strong sense of place (southern Minnesota) and the people who inhabit it. Meyers' stories represent the narrative tradition found in "Winesburg, Ohio" and "The Spoon River Anthology." He has a gift for capturing the way rural Midwesterners speak, and each of the stories is a dramatic monologue in a distinctly different voice. He also has a remarkable ability to evoke in words the experience of physical sensations -- qualities of air and movement, nuances of deeply felt emotion and memory.

There are frequent references to the topography of the land and the traces left behind of geological ages past. This awareness of prehistory and the cycles of seasons, migratory birds, and extremes of weather, frame the lives of characters who live and work in rural communities and on family farms. A young man is struck by lightning while operating a combine. A crew boss at a corn processing plant must deflect the mounting rage of an itinerant employee. A young woman struggles with her father to hang onto a farm he no longer wants. A young farmer restores a section of his cornfields to wetlands, so geese will stop again on their seasonal flights. Two bored teenagers invent a death-defying game played out nightly on country roads.

Although often haunted by isolation, loss, and regret, these are richly experienced lives, lived by people reminded daily of their vulnerability by the vast, open land around them and their dependence on one another.

Jan explains, describes, and personifies a different sense of obeidance than I have read anywhere. After reading her book I not only have a better sense of what obeidance looks like I am finding myself listening and "leaning in" to Him better. It is one thing to read a book that helps you understand something like obediance but it it is another thing to read one that pulls out of your heart better desires. Jan's writing is captivating and comfortably compelling.

I was familiar with Jan Meyers' writing through my wife (who was impacted by Jan's other book 'The Allure of Hope'). I hoped that Listening to Love would also be thought provoking reading (it is for men and women), but I had no idea how important the book would be for me personally. This book has helped me with the tension I have felt for a very long time as a Christian, and has helped me to not be apologetic for that tension. The tension for me has been this: I want more freedom as a Christian, but I don't want to lose sight of what my freedom is all about. I want to fight for good things, but I know at some point I must hand over the outcome to God. My favorite chapter was "Listening to Reality - Losing our Religion" - it revealed how we all can make religions out of anything, even very precious, good things, instead of worshipping Jesus himself. I also appreciated the chapter "Recognizing His Touch - Relinquishing our Ideas about Healing" - full of examples of how God's beauty shows up in many situations that we, in our limited sight, would say are "unhealed." Take your time with this book. It will challenge you, and give you rest, even as you battle.

Jan must have been reading my journal. Every day, I eagerly awaited time in her book, or as I called it, "Coffee with Jan." She seemingly knew my dilemma before I did. I was stuck trying to hear from God. I was fruitlessly trying to live with more passion. I wanted more of God's goodness, but the old places that I had found it were trickling it out in diminishing amounts. Jan eloquently drew me back to the heart of the story. She incorporated humorous and painfully true stories of Jesus moving through lives. In profound ways, Jan talks of how easy it is for us to go to completely good, holy things rather than to Jesus. How? Because we begin to make God in the image of those good things rather than allow him to be as big and mysterious as he truly is. I understood through the scripture references, music and movie references and the incorporation of the landscape scenes from the American west. Jan was also a close friend of Brent Curtis (co-author of The Sacred Romance), a man I have respected and loved from afar. Thank you, Jan, for telling about and giving me memories of a truly good and honorable man. And for helping me stand under the weight and beauty of Jesus, who can be both known intimately but not fully known. This one is right up there with Wild at Heart for me in number of jaw-dropping revelations.

As a "grown mom" and an avid reader, it's been a long time since I've laughed so hard reading any book!!! I laughed, and laughed...trying to "share" with my family...who were giving me strange looks...especially at the tears streaming down my cheeks, because I was laughing so hard! Delightful! Definitely not "politically correct"!! I'm so glad that a friend told me about it, and hope that it will be re-published again...soon!

I bought this book in grade school, about 20 years ago. I still pick it up from time to time, whenever I want to laugh and cry. The author is very talented at depicting a realistic view of the relationship of two pre-teen brothers without overdoing the story or dwelling on "lessons of life". I truly hope this book comes back into print so another generation may become attached to it.

This book like its predecessor, "Me and Caleb" is a charming collection of tales about boyhood. Finding and nursing a sick dog, fighting the bully, fishing with Grandpa. The stories are well written and appealled to my sensibilities as a father as well as those of my young son and daughter.

As a good introduction to the field of critical discourse analysis, and its various aims, philosophies, and methods, this book is to be highly recommended. I particularly appreciated the examples - detailed and interesting, they are a tremendous aid in learning to use the methods covered.

The book provides a very clear view of all the directions in Critical Discourse Analysis, according to the different scholars.However, they all have in common, their concern with social inequalities and their aim to create awareness of injustice and abuse of power.
Text analysis serves the purpose of showing the relationship between language and power.
I highly recommend this book to those readers who are doing research into discourse analysis like myself.

As a beginning student of CDA, I was pleased to read this volume, which almost serves as a personal valet welcoming one into this growing area of Linguistics. In a short and very readable book, we get the latest theories and methods in concise language that covers a lot of ground quickly. If you have read Titscher, Meyer, Wodak, and Vetter's "Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis" (Sage, 2000), you'll be relieved to see that this book is more focused and, for the most part, less technical. That's not to say that it's any less powerful, because the flip-side is that with this volume's emphasis only on CDA, we are reminded again and again of the ethical and emancipatory imperative of the CDA researcher.

Wodak herself introduces CDA's geneaology up to the present. Meyer then provides a concise discussion of methods, winding up his chapter with the admonition that CDA is not yet a unified discipline, but is nonetheless a constellation of approaches and methods that are likely approaching something resembling more of a singularity that at present - if more research is done in the field. Siegfried Jager's chapter on Discourse and Knowledge is a nice surprise from a lesser-known German analyst, who fortifies and corrects some of Foucault's conceptualizations about discourses and dispositifs and provides a trialectical model for looking at action, discourse, and manifestation. We then get a sound overview of Wodak's Historical CDA method and van Dijk's more social-cognitive method, followed by an overview of Fairclough's sociologically-oriented theory and Ron Scollon's micro-social critical discourse analysis.

The book is honest about CDA's "growth areas" and the criticisms it has received, and calls rather commonsensically for more research in order to shore up some of its weaknesses or areas that have not yet been fully explored. For the beginning researcher in CDA who is unsure about how to design his or her research proposal, this book provides solace via its characterization of CDA as hermeneutic rather than positivistic. In other words, there is always room for improvement.

A stunning and brilliant book, this is THE essential work on minimalism.

This book is already becoming the standard work on the etiology of the movement. Meyer combines a complete mastery of the period's theoretical issues with a sleuth's approach to its historical narrative. Essential.

This history of minimalist theory and thought is based on the contention that the question of what constitutes minimalism has remained unresolved since the 1960s. Chapters trace the movement, examine its major qualities, and considers the presence of minimalism as a debate or argument developed in response to works of others.

This is a masterwork by Dr. Wilhelmina Feemster Jashemski and Frederick G. Meyer that looks at the Roman cities destroyed by Vesuvius in 79 AD from the perspective of the Bay of Naples area's natural environment of the time. The many color plates in this large work also portray the artwork that was preserved in hundreds of houses and public buildings in Pompeii and Herculaneum. But the real focus of the book is the landscape, gardens, and fauna that existed in the Roman period. Millions of natural, as well as man-made, objects were preserved in the molten ash that fell on those towns and the authors have provided hundreds of illustrations of these items which add up to a comprehensive look at Pompeii's everyday surroundings--street, garden and rural hinterland. It's an amazing work the will be of interest to anyone who is a student of Roman history, architecture, botany or horticulture.

Dr. Jashemski is a professor emeritus of the University of Maryland which is currently involved in the excavation of the last town major town still completely covered by Vesuvian ash--Stabiiae. The potential to find some spectacular artworks on that site is considerable as it was the most upscale neighborhood on the Bay of Naples in that period.

Jashemski has worked for many years in Pompeii's gardens - and produced many publications. This volume not only brings together a summary of all of her work, it is complemented by robust ancilliary studies from experts in paleosols, pollen and fauna. Beautiful pictures, well-referenced - an academic book that also is of interest to other readers. THE must have of all Pompeii publications in recent times.

Partly art history, partly botany and zoology, and partly forensics, THE NATURAL HISTORY OF POMPEII is a beautiful comprehensive work including the writings of archeologists and others who have examined the ruins at Pompeii and Herculaneum with the goal of establishing the nature of daily life as lived by the inhabitants of the two doomed settlements. This collection of scholarly papers was assembled into a fine book edited by W.F. Jashemski and Frederick Meyer. Jashemski is Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she pioneered the field of ancient Roman garden archeology, and a former senior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in DC which houses a wonderful collection of Pre-Columbian Art as well as stunningly landscaped grounds. Dr. Meyer is the former Supervisory Botanist in charge of the Herbarium at the National Arboretum also in Washington DC.

Selected chapters from the book cover a description of the site before the eruption in A.D. 79 based on the archeological, literary and Epigraphical Evidence. We know some of what we know about the fateful day owing to correspondence between Tacitus and Pliny the Younger, whose uncle Pliny the Elder perished in the catastrophe. Other chapters cover the flora and fauna of the area (both Pompeii and Herculaneum were affected). Archeologists have determined the identity of extensive numbers of plants (including trees, vines, edible foodstuffs and culinary and medicinal herbs), mammals, amphibians and reptiles, birds (grey parrots and love birds were kept as pets).

The book is filled with drawings and illustrations, as well as photographs of human and other animal, and plant remains; frescos from the villas and public buildings; jewelry and household items; and site shots including photos of the area surrounding the forum in Pompeii (including those taken from a balloon - with buildings clearly marked), as well as pictures of the archeologists at work capturing and preserving the natural material uncovered at the two sites.

If you are about to embark on a trip to Pompeii, have an interest in Roman life as it was lived in the first century, or an interest in archeological forensics, you will find this book enlightening, but perhaps it is more suitable for the Art History or Classics section of a school library than a coffee table book as one of my colleagues suggested.

I thought this book was an exciting book because in every part of the book there was something happening. I also liked it because it had a lot in it about biking and how to get started in biking with out showing it directly. It also showed that if your a kind of lazy person who just sits and watches television all the time that you can get out and do something to make yourself proud like doug did on the book.

Olympic Dream by Matt Christopher is an extremely amusing, in my opinion. This book takes place in a small town in the U.S., late 1980's. It is about an adolescent boy. Doug, who meets a man, Red, that completely changes his life. They become friends and Red teaches Doug to ride a bike. The reasons I am recommending this book are, that the author was very descriptive on every part including the characters and setting. He went into superb detail about each characters personality. He described the setting which was the town so that you could visualize it as you were reading it. For instance he described the arcade and old wooden shack with 6 arcade machines each costing a quarter to play. He also made this book have a wonderful moral. This book teachers a lesson that stuck in my head and sticks in others heads too. The moral was never give up and never stop trying. Even though he described the book well he didn't describe it enough to make it boring. Some people say that the problem with this book is that there wasn't a main character. That can be exceptional or miserable but in my opinion that is extraordinary. I think having more than one main character is remarkable because the story isn't focused on one person but on three or four people. This makes the story more absorbing. The three main characters lives all connect. One is the best man in Doug's sisters wedding. Doug is taught to ride a bike by Red (the best man) and they all support each other and it shows different points of view.

This book was fantastic! It really explains how to become a true Olympian. I really encourage people to read this great book!

The quality of the reproductions is high. The larger images allow the viewer to study brushwork and broken color. Including images of Bongart and his suroundings is also appreciated.

This lavish book is in character with its subject! A multitude of gorgeous images of Sergei's work and the sweeping account of his remarkable life will fill your heart and mind with inspiration. In addition, the section compiled from his students' recollections offer his philosophy and priceless concepts on painting and fine art. If you like color, he was the master of masters! As a bonus, this comprehensive book includes some of his poetry and compositions on art. Superb!

Also, don't miss
Sergei Bongart - Profiles in American Art ** RARE SIGNED LIMITED EDITION **
Eight Russian-American Artists [Exhibition, Newman & Saunders Galleries, Sept. 17 - Oct. 15, 1983]
Internet 101 for the Fine Artist with a special guide to Selling Art on eBay

Susan F. Greaves
susanfgreaves.com

Mary Balcomb has written an intriguing story of the life and times of Sergei Bongart, a widely respected "artist's artist". The layout of the book is also very well done. This book was not cheap to make, as there are tons of images to look at, many taking up the whole page. If all art books were laid out like this, I think there'd be a lot more satisfaction from the art community. Definitely not stuffy museum literati! Buy it now!