Independent Books

The response from designers and press owners has made me proud of this book. The widely-praised file prep information remains vital for 2002 and beyond. Much of the machine-oriented information will remain helpful and applicable to future models of Indigo's presses, equipped with their continually-advancing technology. Thank you and happy reading!
(This book includes the 97-point file setup checklist with an expanded and detailed explanation of each point, an illustrated description of how Indigo technology works, an advanced topics section, and organizational features such as the table of contents, an exhaustive index, and cross-references within the text. When you're through reading the sections you like, you can keep the book handy for years to come, using it as a well-organized reference work.)

At that point, I purchased his book and found it very informative. It is a must-have for anybody who creates files for an Indigo digital press. After a while, it seems to become repetative, and there is an extensive amount of cross-referencing. All in all, the author tells his reader how to create quality files to achieve the needed outcome, and look good in the eyes of the Indigo vendor.

Alaolmolki has written a great introduction to a part of the world whose strategic importance is becoming clearer as time goes on. The book covers all of the former Soviet "-Stans," like Kazakh, Uzbek,Kyrgyz, etc. and provides brief introductory histories on them and their populations. It also covers contenders for regional supremacy which includes the traditional Russia, Iran and Turkey and newer regional players like China and the US. Interestingly, one learns that the goal of US Middle Eastern policy seems more intent on keeping Iran weak and unstable more than anything else. "Life After the Soviet Union" serves as a good, short-and-sweet introduction to a fascinating (to me, anyway) part of our planet. I read it for personal pleasure and to expand my own knowledge of the area, and though it is a poli-sci text it is very readable. Very much recommended.

If you have an academic or casual interest in the Newly Independent states, this book is a gem. I purchased it for my own reading and enjoyment, and found it a pleasurable read. It covers economic and political issues with brevity and clarity, and provides an excellent quick look at these states. I recommend it to anyone, as the reading level is not as pedantic as some political science books tend to be and could as easily be enjoyed by a casual reader as a student of political science.

Meetings.

Just the utterance of the word is enough to make most people dread it. And that's because many meetings fail to deliver what they promise due to poor decision making, the wrong participants, the wrong strategy or any number of reasons.

Meetings are a fact of working life, and there will be times when enterprising writers not only attend but also conduct them ~ be they meetings with clients, business pitches or seminars and workshops promoting your services.

This book will give you the foundation you need to conduct and participate in meetings with success. While some of the material is common sense, it covers the subject admirably, offering a variety of tips, techniques and strategies that cover all kinds of encounters. Topics include:

* Preparing for a meeting
- defining the agenda
- deciding how to run the meeting

* Conducting a meeting
- how to present
- behavioral aspects of a meeting
- communication and leadership styles

* Participating in a meeting

* How to deal with difficult people and situations
- conflict resolution style
- problem solving meetings
- multicultural meetings

* Communication skills
- Assertiveness
- Non-verbal communication
- Persuasive strategies

Of particular interest to freelancers are the chapters ~ 'Making a Presentation' and 'Strategies, tools and activities', which provide solid advice on structuring material, opening and closing remarks, answering questions as well as using audio-visual aids.

Also of importance are the chapters ~ 'Taking Minutes' and 'Writing it all up and getting action' ~ which deal with note-taking and reporting of the minutes. While the chapters include rudimentary guidance on writing (ie use active voice rather than passive, etc), they do offer helpful information on how to structure the minutes of a meeting and ensure items are actionable and people are accountable.

This is a handy reference guide which is easy to read and understand. 'Making Meetings Happen' is primarily designed to be used as a workbook. It features checklists in every chapter as well as worksheets and exercises, so that readers can workshop and hone their skills.

-- Michael Meanwell, author of the critically-acclaimed 'The Enterprising Writer' and 'Writers on Writing'. For more book reviews and prescriptive articles for writers, visit www.enterprisingwriter.com

Our company library included a copy of Robert Burns' "Making Meetings Happen". This book offers busy professionals everything they should need to improve the meetings they lead and the meetings they attend. Although some of the material is common sense or "you've heard it before", Mr. Burns takes a fresh approach to the topic of meetings and presents it in a very easy to read, concise, entertaining way. Excellent real life examples of meeting situations and how to improve one's approach to handling difficult attendees, hidden agendas, and the inevitable time wasters. Mr. Burns provides many checklists and other practical tools to use for analyzing meetings. I would recommend this book to everyone that attends or conducts meetings.

Once again the people in charge of the NMS series bless us with another great addition to the series... keep it up guys... thankyou

It is very excellent book for your surgery rotation exam, especialy of you have limited time, But not very usful to be use in round as it is written on its cover!!

Detailed, methodical book about movie production. Great for a handbook/manual which I can refer to again and again. Quite useful and I highly recommend it. The appendices are simply brilliant (detailed pro forma financial statements, sample contracts and other essential docs).

The authors TRIED to spice up the text with an anecdote here and there, but it still reads somewhat like a textbook. Thus, buy the book if you're looking for real content, not juice.

This is one of the best books I have read in the industry and I own MANY . It is direct straight to the point and informative . I highly recommend

One would think that American universities would be centers of free speech, where all sorts of views could be stated freely. Well, that hasn't been entirely the case recently. And this book examines some of the problems that have arisen.

I would have thought that the fundamental issues would be simple. Most speech is inoffensive. Some speech is actually illegal (sedition, incitement, or whatever). The line between illegal speech and legal speech may be a subject of debate, but that line exists somewhere. And some speech is in between: it is offensive but not illegal. And those who are offended have plenty of options: they can shun such people, or tell others about their bad manners, and so forth.

As this book points out, once one has rules against offensive speech, not just against intimidation (or worse), that leads to thought control. And there are some examples of what has been happening along these lines.

One spectacular example is the 1993 "water buffalo" case at the University of Pennsylvania. A Penn freshman got in trouble for using the term "water buffalo" in response to students who were making too much noise at midnight outside his dormitory. Although a simple apology from him would have been the most reasonable resolution, Penn made this into a major case. So did much of the nation! The result was not only a victory for the accused student, but the removal of the "speech codes" at Penn. It seems that the speech codes were doomed by the idiotic claims of Penn officials, including the Penn President, that they were merely following due process in the water buffalo case.

Downs describes how speech codes were removed at the University of Wisconsin as well. And there is some fascinating material about the University of California, Berkeley. The campus newspaper ran an ad that offended some people, and then compounded the problem by apologizing for it (offending even more folks). And then, there was a speech by well-known conservative David Horowitz. An assistant chancellor warned Horowitz that he might be shouted down "because the right of free expression also" belonged to those that disagreed with him! I find it incredible that such censorship could be called "free expression." Others were similarly censored just for having "politically incorrect" views. A striking example was former Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was prevented from speaking to 2000 waiting ticket holders by a couple of hundred foes of free speech. One of these people, when challenged about what she had done replied that she didn't "believe in free speech for war criminals." By the way, given Netanyahu's record, I find such a charge against him ludicrous. And I wonder if genuine criminals, such as Yasir Arafat, would have been shouted down at Berkeley.

One more topic in the book is the sexual misconduct policy at Columbia University. That's another university that has a problem with taking political correctness too seriously. But in this case, the issue was simply that people accused of sexual misconduct were denied due process, including the right to hear the testimony against them or to cross-examine. That policy eventually had to be scrapped. Still, the incident serves to show the moral blindness of some of those who create policies on campus.

I found this book very interesting and I strongly recommend it.

The main purpose and content of this book is to present four case studies. In the first two, those of U. Penn and U. Wisconsin, thanks to efforts made by faculty and students in the last few years, gains were made in restoring some degree of free speech and other Bill-of-Rights protections to faculty and students. In the other two, Columbia and Berkeley, no such efforts have been made and the status quo continues. The author states that most or all other campuses resemble the latter two.

Also, in introductory chapters, the author gives a precis of what has happened to colleges and universities since 1987:

(1) the redefinition of the mission of the university from the search for truth and knowledge to the transforming of individuals into sensitive members of the community from whom all racism, sexism and homophobia has been washed away.

(2) the redefinition of speech as action. One doesn't state an opinion, one offends another person or harasses another person. So, codes against harassment and creating a hostile environment include saying anything of which the censors disapprove.

(3) "critical race theory", the view that racism is endemic to liberal society and that such notions as individual, reason, merit, etc. are racist notions and should be suppressed.

The author, like many others, states that the motive for the de facto repeal of the Bill of Rights at universities was that the welfare of some groups was more important. He goes on to point out that the consequences have been anything but beneficial, even to those groups. Feelings of antagonism have increased. An increasing infantilization or dependency of the favored groups has occurred. etc.

The author cites a number of other interesting recent books, including McWhorter, Losing the Race; Wood, Diversity; Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies; Farber and Sherry, Beyond All Reason; and Kors and Silvergate, The Shadow University. Kors and Silvergate have continued to be active in the area and have established an organization called Foundation for Individual Freedom in Education (FIRE) with a website, www.thefire.org, where complaints can be registered. The site makes interesting if harrowing reading. There is also a database in which you can look up any college and get FIRE's rating of the degree of freedom on that campus.

One strength of the book is its narrow focus. That means, however, that other books need also to be consulted. The book is especially weak on the causes or development of the present situtation. The author states that he became a faculty member in the mid-1980s as a result of having written an anti-Nazi book (PhDs looking for faculty positions, take note!). By that time, the situation had already developed. For an eyewitness account in narrative form of the groups and motives that led to the present situation, see The Rape of Alma Mater. For a detailed study of the situation at the present time, one which includes other parts of society that are affected by what is happening in academia, read While America Sleeps: How ... and Indoctrination Are Destroying America From Within -- While America Sleeps: How Islam, Immigration and Indoctrination Are Destroying America From Within.

The present book is unique in sounding a hopeful note and in providing others with the two cases of (limited) success. It is to be hoped that other academics and students will read this book and learn how to take back their own universities.

Born in St. Vincent, employed in Trinidad and the U.S., and now living in Barbados, Carolle Bourne won that nation's Kamau Brathwaite Award in 2002. Saraband (The Incomplete Works of Caroline Ravenspeare) (Independent Press, $15), published in Montreal last year, celebrates Caribbean identity, and, particularly, Carib heritage, for the author is a descendent of Chatoyer, an 18th-century chief and St. Vincent's first national hero.

But these poems also narrate a difficult love affair. See Perfume: "Once a lover of / things light and floral - / I find myself drifting / from jasmine to /pungent pithy fragrances / like burying myself / in the deepest sense of you." Fascinatingly, Bourne often shifts between Victorian phrases and street- talk: an ex-colonial tic.

[She's an exmplar] of ... exemplary transatlantic poetry.

** George Elliott Clarke, a Nova Scotia-born author and poet, teaches literature at the University of Toronto. In 2001, he won the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry. **

This is a magnificent perspective of the mythos of The Caribbean...

"Wild Child" sounds like a fairy-tale comic-book of the West Indies! It was obviously partially inspired by the beginning of Disney's Snow White but done in a totally regional flavor.

There are definitely overseas influences such as a description of shoes that's not for the prudish, a glance at a tree in the heart of winter...

Many of my family and friends no matter their station in life hear one or two of these all too brief poems and rush to get a copy, perhaps we can hope for some more in the near future?

This book has awesome information for anyone wanting to grow all their own food and become self sufficient.

Also lots of tips for extending the season even if you only grow a few favorites.

Includes growing information on different vegetables, organized into short and long season heat-loving or cold-hardy. Also building instructions for their solar appliances and even the difficulties and learning from their decades of experience growing all their own food.

One of the best gardening books I have ever read! Excellent information on solar gardening & instructions on how to construct the garden cones, frames & pods. They provide practical information in an easy to understand format. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in gardening.

I had the opportunity to attend a Tabula Rasa workshop with Kathy Curry in February. The technique is amazing and easy to use. I had been working for some time on getting to the bottom of various emotional issues, and had tried a multitude of techniques, both through traditional medicine and more holistic approaches. After the workshop, I had a breakthrough when I recovered memories that previously I only had bits and pieces of to puzzle over. I used the technique on myself by first grounding myself, and then visualizing my "inner child" and grounding her...by using the communication balance, I was able to finally get her to tell me what was going on. The effect on my emotional state, AS WELL AS my physical health, was astounding. I have since used the technique both on myself and on others with positive results. I am now a certified Tabula Rasa practioner and look forward to sharing this technique with others!

This book is life changing. If you believe in the saying, "when the student is ready, the teacher will appear" this is the book for you. After reading the book and applying some of the processes, it has been a life changing experience. Not only for myself, by my children as well. There is a lot to be said about looking within, verses looking outside for a solution. Especially as it relates to your health and emotions. This book will start you on the right track and take you on a journey that will be forever life changing. Thank you Kathy Curry.

I picked this book up in Kansas City where the art exhibit "Unnaturally" was on display. While the book and essay are fantastic, it pales in comparison to the exhibition which was sublime!!!

I don't know where the show is going to travel (I heard it was going west) but do yourself a favor and check it out. One of the best art shows I have seen. If not, check out the book with wonderful reproductions and thoughtful insights on the work.

This is a beautiful book - the pictures are delightful, but it does not have an essay in it by Barbara Kingsolver. I bought it for a friend because we both love her writing and I'm disappointed to see that there's no work of hers included. Fortunately my friend loves art and I think this will still be a nice gift for her, but it's not what I expected.