What is branding? A common misconception is that branding in the business world is like branding on the cattle ranch. Company A hires company B to brand them. Company B rustles up some research and then proceeds to place a brand on Company A. Nothing could be less effective, or farther from the truth. Parker and LePla do a great service in clearly and simply explaining this in their excellent book, Integrated Branding.

Integrated Branding shows that every company has a brand waiting to be revealed. What a company doesn't need is a "brand" presented to them by an ad agency. What that company needs, and what this book will teach it, is learning how to recognize and develop their existing brand and then live that brand all the time.

Integrated Branding maps out a process that merges research of what an organization's customers/audiences want/need/expect, with the strengths and assets that a company has to offer. With that process the author's show you step-by-step how to develop (and use) all of the brand tools at the core of the integrated brand - principle, mission, values, personality, story, and association

Integrated Branding also explains how to introduce the brand from top to bottom into every level of the company, and to every employee --from CEO to receptionist-so that they learn to live that brand.

Following the Integrated Branding process will help your organization to reveal what brand assets it already has, and some that it may choose to aspire to. It helps provide each employee with tools to guide them throughout every decision and communication -- from announcing company news, to hiring, to product development. If a company truly lives its brand, customers will respond with increased loyalty, a willingness to pay a price premium and shortened purchase processes; and employees will pitch in for the long haul. How many books can provide you with a method to do all that?

Integrated Branding should be the bible for anyone who is embarking on a brand program with any type of organization, big or small, corporate or non-profit. Your company - and your customers - will thank you for reading this book.

--Rob Crowther

The Interdisciplinary Straegies for English and Social Studies Classrooms: Toward Collaborative Middle and Secondary Teaching is an excellent piece of educational material. After being taught by Dr. Nowicki for several years I was able to experience much of the information from this book, and I have to say that it has helped me a great deal. This book really helps teachers to teach and students to learn. This book is all around excellence.

A complete and technically detailed enumeration of rockets from all around the world (yes, outside the USA). Very well done, and very instructive. Diagrams, charts and statistics... it has it all.

The second edition of this important title on locating information, people and software on the net provides a host of tools for accessing and locating online communities, from building web tools for using the Internet for research to locating virtual libraries of information. An excellent handbook reflects the latest in Internet strategies.

Scholars have conducted the study of culture in two general ways: as an observer science, where behavior and world-views are measurable and subject to impartial observation; and as an interpretive art, where a scholar actually participates in the understanding of a given culture. In view of increasingly manifest problems with both stances, this book proposes an alternative, one that capitalizes on the strengths of both schools of cultural analysis and in fact underpins the work of major social theorists of the modern era, including Adorno, Foucault, and Bourdieu. The study develops a practical model of culture and method of interpretation that are built around the concept of "constructing constellations." According to this concept--drawn from the work of Simmel, Kracauer, Benjamin and Adorno--cultures are made up of social fields, embedded social practices that are continually created and patterned in various relations, akin to constellations. The central task of interpretive social research, the book contends, is to thematize such fields and practices in context-transforming ways. The book concludes with an examination of embedded actions and beliefs in urban settings, focusing especially on ghetto life in New York and the world of boxing in Chicago.

"Into the Dark House" is a significant contribution to the literature dealing with the intellectual history of hte Cold War. Meticulously researched and cannily argued, "Into the Dark House" tabs into all the available archives relevant to the origins of the Cold War.

You'll love this book. Recipes for the restaurant's classics. Great photos, family stories. Almost like being there!

Landin's book is a great introduction to abstract algebra. It is written at about a 3rd year undergraduate level, so it should be easily accessible to interested readers. Mathematicians will probably find this book a bit easy, but for those of use who are not mathematicians by training, the ease of this book is welcome. The topics covered are set theory, the number systems, groups, group homomorphisms, rings, and polynomial rings. Landin provides plenty of definitions, theorems and proofs, but he is kind enough to also build intuition about the theory with incisive prose and illustrative examples. It is also great for self study, but does not include solutions to the problems. However Landin gives the reader the equipment necessary to solve the problems with little difficulty. Overall I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in learning the basics of abstract algebra.