Stanley Books

I purchased the combination Plain English Seminars on Selling a Business and Business Valuation so this was included with the package. While the Selling a Business seminar does a terrific job of explaining how to sell a business and protect yourself, the software makes it much easier to understand how to set a price for the business. The software comes with a guide that explains just how valuation models are determined and which type should be used for different businesses and at different stages. The software just requires that you fill in some basic information about your business and then it calculates a business price based on actual recent sales for each industry.

I purchased this product primarily for the explanation of business valuation but was happy to get the valuation software that came with it. The explanations are straightforward and easy to understand with examples and suggestions of when the different valuation models should be used with different situations. The information appears up to date and the software is very easy to use. I've purchased other Plain English Seminar products in the past and have been extremely impressed with how they stick to that description.

I've read other books on business valuation and got lost in the mumbo jumbo. This author gives easy to understand explanations of how to value a business and why various multiples are used. This is the clearest explanation I've ever read. The software was extremely easy to use and works even on new businesses.

I recently spent considerable time with Beethoven's piano sonatas and string quartets and wanted to read the essays in this book devoted to these genres to supplement my listening. William Kinderman's essay: "The piano music: concertos, sonatas, variations, small forms" deals briefly but insightfully with Beethoven's body of work for the piano, focusing on the first three sonatas of opus 2, the "Waldstein and Appassionata" sonatas from Beethoven's mid-career, and the final three sonatas, opus nos. 109, 110, 111. John Daverio's essay, "Manner, tone, and tendency in Beethoven's chamber music for strings" is a difficult study which uses literary and critical theory to show the differences between the quartets of Beethoven's early and middle period on the one hand and the final quartets on the other hand. Both these essays were challenging and helped me with my listening.

But I couldn't stop with the two essays and proceeded to read the entire book, part of a series which presents the best of musical scholarship and thought on the great composers. This book of studies of Beethoven is edited by John Stanley of the University of Connecticut and consists of 17 essays by 16 scholars (Stanley has two essays) devoted to Beethoven's life and music. If there is a theme running through this varied collection, it is that each essay tries to put Beethoven in a musical or historical context.

The book is divided into four parts. The first part, "A Professional Portrait" consists of three essays discussing Beethoven's life, his compositional techniques (the use of sketchbooks), and the traditional division of his works into three periods. This part of the book includes a detailed and useful chronology of Beethoven's life.

The second part of the book, "Style and Structure" consists of three essays which deal broadly with Beethoven's works and which discuss similarities and differences between Beethoven and Haydn and Mozart. There is an excellent essay by Roger Kamien on Beethoven's use and development of thematic material which is technical but not beyond the reach of the devoted music lover.

The third part of the book, called "Genres" consists of seven essays which examine each of the major genres in which Beethoven composed. As I mentioned, the essays on the string quartets and the piano sonatas initially drew me to the book. The remaining essays cover Beethoven's symphonies, focusing on his imaginative orchestration, the genesis of Beethoven's opera "Fidelio", the chamber music with piano, including the violin sonatas, cello sonatas, and trios and their development over Beethoven's career, the religious music, and the songs. I particularly enjoyed this last essay by Amanda Glauert, "Beethoven's songs and vocal style" which traces Beethoven's songs from their origins in folk music and shows how Beethoven transformed the form. Beethoven's songs, I think, still are insufficiently appreciated.

The final section of the book, "Reception" consists of four essays which discuss the influence of Beethoven on other composers, different performance practices for Beethoven's music, the various ways in which Beethoven's music and personality have been viewed by the public (an excellent essay by Scott Burnham), and another excellent essay by David Dennis, concluding the book, which discusses Beethoven's influence on the arts, philosophy, and politics.

In reading this volume of essays, I was reminded of the great appeal Beethoven has exerted, and continues to exert on many people. Unlike most other composers of art music, his work has been an inspriation to people of all nationalities, ages, and walks of life from the most learned to the untutored. His music has the capacity to draw listeners in, to make them involved, and to demand a response. I got to know Beethoven's music, and something of his life, as a child and his hold upon me has continued. This book helps to develop and to explain the devotion Beethoven continues to inspire. As Scott Burnham states at the conclusion of his essay, "The Four Ages of Beethoven" (p.291)

"Even now, after a century seemingly intent on annihilating all formerly comforting illusions of greatness and transcendent authority offered by the leading figures in our history, we have not yet managed to put the Beethoven myth behind us. For Beethoven continues to require that we grapple with him, continues to ask much of us, to call us out. This, more than anything, is why we cannot let him go: his music remains a sounding provocation to what we are pleased to think of as our better selves."

This book will be of most immediate interest to those readers who already know Beethoven's music and who have read some of the many excellent basic studies of his life and works, such as the recent biographies by Maynard Solomon, Barry Cooper, and Lewis Lockwood, among others.

Robin Friedman

This product is a collection of essays by various Beethoven scholars. They tend to be on a general subject and appropriate for music students at a college level or beyond. You do not have to be a Beethoven expert or a seasoned musicologist to understand this work.

With the superfulity of books on a great subject like Beethoven, it can be difficult to know where to start. Well, start here!

This is really a nice book filled with authoritative essays on the Master. It's recent, the information up-to-date, and it has a very scholarly ambience of respect and admiration for the great artist, but with a clear-eyed common-sense approach unmuddied by mythos. Highly recommended.

I searched the topic Call Reluctance on Google and "stumbled" across Tammy Stanley's website and book, Carpe Phonum (which means, "Seize the Phone"). It is truly different from anything else I have read or heard. She discusses Call Reluctance and all of its causes in a way that made a difference in both how I was looking at the subject and how to, finally, deal with it in a useful and practical manner - in other words, how to Seize the Phone and seize it now, rather than waiting until tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, etc. She concludes the book with the words, "(Those who read this book)leave not only motivated; they leave incapable of returning to self-sabotage without catching themselves in the act!" Very true. Yes, the book does an excellent job of providing solutions for finally dealing with this very insideous and seemingly incurable problem. But, without telling the reader, Tammy's book does more-it provides useful ideas that can be used for dealing with some of life's typical issues as well. I can highly recommend investing in this inexpensive, well written, life applicable book. I was very pleased. If it does for you what it did for me, you will be pleased, too. I even purchased an extra copy, after reading the first few pages, and had it sent by Amazon to my son in law. He called me back after reading it cover to cover and marking all the great concepts, and was very excited and pleased. And he typically doesn't like to read things like this. That says it all. Great book! PS - my wife and I work with couples to help them strengthen their marriages. There are concepts in this book that help in that part of life, too.

This is a very deceptive book. It looks thin and easy to read. On one level it is. But somehow Ms Stanley has cut right to the heart and soul of every salesman. She speaks of that voice inside your head we all have. Inside these pages you will find the type of attitudes and beliefs needed to not only carry through but win the day. I was surprised how long I took to read this book. It is clear, well written, but it makes you stop and think. If you have to overcome obstacles in your day and life , this little book is one you need beside the phone or on your desktop. You can get it from the author. or Amazon US, not Canada.

I got much more than I had hoped for in Tammy Stanley's book "Carpe Phonum". Tammy details areas of your personality that keep you from using the phone as an effective tool for business sucess. With Tammy's guidance I explored what my hang ups are and how to overcome them. "Carpe Phonum" is not another self help book, it is more accurately described and a self exploration book with real life solutions to a problem all businesspersons face. Well worth your time and money.

This is the Book version of "Perry Mason" Episode 7 that Guest Starred Barbara Eden who played the role of "Carla Adrian" in the Episode and it is a good Mystery Book and if you are a Barbara Eden Fan you would like this book for your collection since it is the Book version of the episode that Barbara Eden Guest Starred in in 1957.

Background: The stylistic heritage of the Perry Mason mysteries is the American pulp magazines of the 1920s. In the early Mason mysteries, Perry - a good-looking, broad-shouldered, two-fisted, man of action - is constantly stiff-arming sultry beauties on his way to an explosive encounter that precipitates the book's climactic action sequence. In the opening chapters of these stories, Gardner subjects the reader to assertive passages that Mason is a crusader for justice, a man so action-oriented he is constitutionally incapable of sitting in his office and waiting for a case to come to him or to develop on its own once it has - he has to be out on the street, in the midst of the action, making things happen, always on the offensive, never standing pat or accepting being put on the defensive. These narrative passages - naïve, embarrassingly crude "character" development - pop up throughout the early books, stopping the narrative dead in its tracks, and putting on full display a non-writer's worst characteristic: telling the reader a character's traits instead of showing them through action, dialogue, and use of other of the writer's tools.

Rating "Ground Rules": These flaws, and others so staggeringly obvious that enumerating them is akin to using cannons to take out a flea, occur throughout the Gardner books, and can easily be used (with justification) to trash his work. But for this reader they are a "given", part of the literary terrain, and are not relevant to my assessment of the Gardner books. In other words, my assessments of the Perry Mason mysteries turn a blind eye to Erle Stanley Gardner's wooden, style-less writing, inept descriptive passages, unrealistic dialogue, and weak characterizations. As I've just noted, as examples of literary style all of Gardner's books, including the Perry Mason series, are all pretty bad. Nonetheless, the Mason stories are a lot of fun, offering intriguing puzzles, nifty legal gymnastics, courtroom pyrotechnics, and lots of action and close calls for Perry and crew. Basically, you have to turn off the literary sensibilities and enjoy the "guilty" pleasure of a fun read of bad writing. So, my 1-5 star ratings (A, B, C, D, and F) are relative to other books in the Gardner canon, not to other mysteries, and certainly not to literature or general fiction.

"The Case of the Angry Mourner": A+

"The Case of the Angry Mourner" is Gardner's masterpiece, one of the two or three best pure detective story he ever wrote. He is at his deftest in presenting the actual murderer's motive and opportunity in such a way that the reader is looking the other direction for the villain. Against the rural setting of this story, he plays by all the "rules" of detective fiction, never lying to the reader, and above all never hiding evidence that is crucial to the solution of the puzzle. He even one-ups us by repeatedly returning to important clues to the solution, but returning to them in such cunning ways that we constantly misinterpret them to arrive at the wrong conclusion.

The story is straightforward enough. Perry is on vacation at a cottage in the woods when a woman from a neighboring cottage calls upon him to defend her daughter against the charge of murdering a playboy who had become a bit too insistent after an intimate dinner at his rural retreat on the other side of the lake. The scene of the crime is positively cluttered with clues suggesting how the wheelchair-bound bounder met his end. Gardner uses one of his favorite detective story devices: a forensic "expert" who reads the clues and weaves them into a net that snares Perry's client. In this case the expert has two stages on which to strut his stuff: the interior of the murder cottage, and the back-road where the snow around the automobile abandoned by Perry's client tells the expert who came and went on the fateful night. Gardner truly enjoys laying out a set of clues that can plausibly be interpreted in a number of different ways, and his own guilty pleasure is in gently making fun of these experts and deflating the pomposity and closed-mindedness with which they typically deliver their chiseled-stone-tablet conclusions.

Fine stuff all around, with the only letdown being minor: the courtroom scenes are quite good in their own right, but they don't pack quite the punch of some of Perry's urban encounters.

The Case of the Angry Mourner is one of Earl Stanley Gardener's best works in his Perry Mason series. The premise of the book is very simple, the action is straightforward and suspenseful, and plot keeps you guessing until the very end. The book is a real piece of classic detective fiction because the reader is never lied to and is given all the evidence so that a cunning reader could potentially solve crime before Perry Mason. In fact, Gardener repeatedly gives clues to the ending, but uses his literary genius to present them in such a way that the reader jumps to a false conclusion. In The Case of the Angry Mourner, Perry Mason finds himself on vacation when his rest is suddenly disrupted by a murder. The millionaire Arthur Cushing, who was an infamous playboy, was murdered in his own home. A woman from a neighboring cottage, Belle Adrian, calls upon Mason to defend her daughter Carlotta, who she believes shot Cushing after he became too insistent during an intimate dinner. Carlotta believes that her mother killed him in a vindictive fury and police agree with her conclusion. Its is up to Perry Mason to sort of the clues and determine which woman, if either, killed Arthur Cushing. This book is a great murder mystery because of its presentation of the evidence. Unlike many Agatha Christie and Murder, She Wrote mysteries, the reader does not have to spot a single line of dialogue where the killer slips up and reveals himself or herself. Instead, The Case of the Angry Mourner depends heavily on circumstantial evidence. Gardner laying out a set of clues that can be interpreted in numerous ways and quickly deflates the "experts" who narrowly interpret the evidence against his client.

Snappy, sophisticated, and fast-paced. In this late (1965) Perry Mason mystery, Perry helps out a helpless young client who turns out to have a backbone of steel and a tricky streak a mile wide. I like this one better than I have liked other late books in the series; it has all the fun and patter that I demand from Gardner as a writer.

Perry Mason is nearly perfect literary comfort food. It is a separate reassuring universe where Perry is always unpredictable, Della is always sensible, and the clients are always a little too beautiful. Recommended.

A young woman has just returned from a 3-month vacation cruise in Hawaii. Daphne Shelby has a letter from her Uncle Horace ordering her to met Perry Mason immediately to draft a new will. Uncle Horace's stepbrother, his wife, and a friend came for an extended stay. During Daphne's absence they had Uncle Horace declared incompetent and put in a nursing home. Stepbrother Borden was now in charge of the Shelby fortune, and Daphne was ordered out of the only home she ever knew! The check given to Daphne is for a closed account. There is a suspicion that Borden's wife Elinor has drugged Uncle Horace to make him senile. Perry Mason files a paper to question the court judgment. The bank manager is ready to testify that Horace was competent, and Daphne has a good business head. But Borden Shelby reveals a surprise about Daphne that could prevent her suit. The court appointed a psychiatrist to settle the question. But Uncle Horace disappears!

Soon a dead body turns up. Daphne is suspected of murdering her uncle for the inheritance. But the body turns out to be Borden's friend! Perry placed investigators on all the people, and learns the facts needed to clear his client, and discover where Uncle Horace was hiding. The final scenes in the Preliminary Hearing clears up the mysteries. Another long suppressed scandal is the source of these problems. This is another roller-coaster ride of a story designed to keep your interest until its surprising conclusion.

A woman walks unannounced into Perry Mason's office seeking assistance. Her plight moves Della Street's heart and Mason agrees to hear her story. For years, she has taken care of her wealthy uncle and then some other relatives arrive. They encourage her to take an extended trip and while on that trip, they maneuver to strip her uncle of all authority and push her out of the inheritance structure. While on the trip, she receives a letter from her uncle that lists some of the problems. However, when she gets back, all accounts have been cleaned out and she has nothing.
Of course, Mason takes the case and it once again takes him to the edge of the law. He enlists the aid of many sympathetic people, including a bank president, but things suddenly change. The uncle has been drugged and committed to an institution, and the girl cleverly manages to free him and hide him from everyone. However, one of the evil people is found dead where the uncle was hiding and all evidence points to either the girl or the uncle as the murderer.
The case takes many twists and turns and this is one of the best Perry Mason stories. While it is clear that neither of the prime suspects committed the murder, what makes this interesting is that they could have. A slight miscalculation could have caused the death, so until the end, there is the lingering possibility that they are guilty of something.
I really enjoyed this story, it kept me up very late at night until I finished it. The best Perry Mason stories are those where you always believe that his client(s) are innocent, but doubt remains until the last few pages.

The Case of the Long-legged Models, by Erle Stanley Gardner

This book is dedicated to Michael Anthony Luongo, M.D. who is a senior member of the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard Medical School, an associate pathologist for the Massachusetts State Police, and certified by the American Board of Pathology. Dr. Luongo is famous of his desires for Truth and Justice.

A young lady inherits shares in a gambling place at Las Vegas. Her father had refused to sell out, and was murdered. Now the daughter is asked to sell her shares to a stranger. She seeks help and advice from Perry Mason. Perry has another client who also owns a part of this gambling place, and begins to investigate. But his client went out of town and can't be found. Perry locates him by telephone, and carries on a secure conversation; the result is that Perry will protect the young heiress. Perry meets the potential buyer to discusses the price, but nothing is resolved. While sitting outside in his car, he sees his client enter this apartment house, and then leave. Then the young heiress enters, and rushes from the house; Perry picks her up and discusses her visit. The next morning the would-be buyer is found murdered in his apartment.

Read this novel to learn why Erle Stanley Gardner was such a popular author; it is a good example of his work. Gardner was a lawyer who found fame and fortune writing about a heroic lawyer roughly based on the life of Earl Rogers. You will learn a few things about law and lawyers as part of this story. Could these tactics be possible today? The fact of blood clotting after a murder is still relevant today. "The police rarely solve gangster killings" (Chapter 1). The story follows the convention of denoting the villain as one guilty of some other crime.

Erle Stanley Gardner has a way of keeping you guessing up until the very end, and this Perry Mason novel is no exception. Even when you think you know "whodunit," you probably don't. A fun, fast read, and one of Gardner's better ones -- although they're all great!

Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970) wrote more than one hundred novels over the course of his long career. A trial lawyer himself, Gardner's best known creation was Perry Mason, a flamboyant criminal defense attorney who earns his large fees by virtue of a remarkable talent for using the law to uncover the truth on the witness stand.

Stephanie Falkner's father was murdered and the crime was never solved. She has inherited the forty percent interest he owned in a small Las Vegas casino and hotel--and now someone is buying up the remaining interest and seems determined to have her share no matter what. It isn't long before murder enters the scene, and once again Perry Mason has to earn his fee the hard way.

Like all the Mason novels, THE CASE OF THE LONG-LEGGED MODELS is essentially genre fiction pure and simple, written in a workman-like manner with an emphasis on staccato dialogue. But Gardner was the peak of his powers in the 1950s, and in this 1957 title he has added a certain sparkle that raises the book above the pack: a combination of twisty plot and twisty legal angles that mix to create a fast and furious read. This one is easily among his best!

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

This is the best Perry Mason I've read! (But I have to qualify that -- I've only read about 30 of the 70 or so Gardner wrote.) Facing a perjury charge after he gives some tap-dance testimony to a grand jury, and this close to a murder charge, Perry has never been so close to both ruin and prison, and Hamilton Burger has never been so happy! If you only ever read one Perry Mason mystery, this is the one to get. Right away.

or so he thought. Burger's legal aruguement was sound, but then he got the shock of his life, when Mason turned it against him. With Burger pleading to get a look at documents Mason produced, he put Mason on the stand against his own client. However, Mason was both clever enough to avoid a criminal charge... and use his own testimony to get his client aquitted...

Typical Perry Mason mystery with the eccentric opening, the thrilling development and the pleasant victory. Mason is severely cornered; the circumstantial evidence shows that the murderer is either Mason himself or his client, the sunbathing girl. D.A. Hamilton Burger cannot restrain himself from laughing triumphantly. Although I know it is Mason who laughs last, I enjoy the thrillingness very much.

This is the best mystery book ever. It's fun for all ages and gets you thinking.You won't regret buying it. you might even read the stories more htan once.

This is a great book! The stories are not to hard, but not to easy. Perfect!I strongly recommend this book to any readers who love solving mysteries!

Perfect beachread. Read just or three pages in this little hard cover book, and you have a mystery to solve.Simple, logical, and sometimes with twists,it is a perfect beach book. As a hard cover book, the pages won't blow and blow.Read the mystery, and then close the book, roll over, bask in the sun, and ponder the solution. The answers are in the back of the book. Read another mystery, apply more lotion, have a lovely beverage, and ponder the solution to that story.Answers are formatted in the back of the book. Mysteries are indexed both by story and solution.With close to one hundred "Whodunits"...you'll have enough reading to keep you busy for your whole vacation.

This is a great book to learn the basics of College Physics I and II, based on Algebra, and not on Calculus. The book is divided up into 30 chapters, ranging from Vectors to Nuclear Physics. It is formatted in outline form, and is really written with the reader in mind.

At the beginning of each chapter, there is a little box that states in large, bold font "this chapter is about," and lists the topics covered in the chapter. Each topic is then quickly explained in clear terms (summaries for one topic are between half a page to a page long). As the summary progresses, there are some fully solved, relatively simple, example problems interspersed in the text that help you solidify your understanding of a concept as you review it. I found that the explanations were short, but that they were really helpful, and more clear than other review books I have come across, such as the Schaum's Outline for College Physics. And the example problems, while simple, really helped me build a solid foundation, so I could tackle more advanced problems later.

At the end of each chapter, there is a table that lists all of the formulas covered in the chapter, and a quick summary of what each formula means. What is even better is that this is followed by a second table called "Raise Your Grades," which makes sure you understand key terms, concepts, and problem solving techniques covered in the chapter. It will ask, for example, if you can define "kinetic energy," and whether you can "calculate the kinetic energy of a moving object," etc. If it was in the charts, it was usually on my test, and so these charts have been of infinite help to me, and have helped me raise my grades.

These table are then followed by some solved problems, and unsolved supplementary exercises with the answers listed at the bottom of the page. The thing that must be said though, is that the problems in themselves are not very difficult. They aren't meant to trick the student, but to just make him or her understand the material. If you are looking for a book with difficult problems, I suggest looking at the Schaum's Outline for College Physics or at one of those books with 3000 Physics Problems. Personally, I found that the problems in this book have really helped me approach my own teacher's problems with greater ease and confidence because I had a good grounding in the basic concept.

This book also has 2 "midsemester" and 2 "final" exams printed in the text, with complete solutions. They are formatted in a manner similar to the example and practice problems from the pertaining chapters. They are, once again, not worded in a way to trick you, but to make sure that you can approach basic problems with confidence and ease.

In the beginning of the book the authors tell you to "use" the outline instead of "reading" it. And I have to agree. Passive skimming generally won't help you in Physics, but if you are actively involved in the text, in doing, and analyzing problems, in planning the steps to solve the problems, etc. you will be better off. This book really tries to give you simple problems that solidify your understanding of the material, so you will be better prepared for anything more difficult that may come up down the road.

Also, it is really important to understand that this book isn't a substitute for your regular textbook and your teacher. While it is a good resource, it's intended as a supplement (you could say it's like a study guide), and can gloss over some points that your teacher may choose to emphasize. When used in conjunction with your textbook and teacher, it will really help you learn Physics. This book can actually be read before you attend lecture, or before you read your own textbook, as a quick way to introduce yourself to the material.

All in all, I can see this book helping almost anyone, whether or not you are a first time Physics student, and I highly recommend it.

Thanks for reading my review! Please rate or comment to let me know if it was of any help to you.

This book will help you who want to study physics by yourselves so much. You can be familiar with physics as you answer many questions in the book. As the author said, to understand physics well, you should not just read the book but use it(that is, answer questions many times!).

I found the methods of explaining problems in this book to be clear, concise and very helpful. Though this is more or less the basics of physics, it would be useful to any senior in an advanced level physics class.

Excellent Reference

This book is really one excellent reference to who want to know about dry wall. It's complete to technical specification and very good pratical too.

Great book !

This helped me very much with little tasks i had to complete in my house. Very handy book. Quick transaction.

This book has everything to get you started. Great introduction, excellent section divisions, nice photos, details and pro-tips. This book will get you through all of the phases of drywalling. Personally, I leave the final finishing (i.e., top coats) up to the pros, since this aspect is the most talent intensive. I suppose with time and following the instruction, you could master all of the drywall techniques. Also, all of the other "Stanley" DIY books are great! Great price too!