would be interesting only to people, who study scripts seriously, who love Minghella's art, and who love the film itself. This particular script was not meant to stand on its own, unlike some scripts from other great films. It was only meant to be Minghella's subjective and brief overview of what he is going to create for the screen. I bought it because I was curious to compare written word with what I have seen on the film. This book has lyrics of "Lullaby for Cain" and full cast list, though, which is a nice touch...

The book was better than the movie. I think the movie was too soapy. The ending was not conclusive

After seeing this film I was quick to jump to the conclusion that the screenplay would be just as good. I am pleased to report that I was correct!

As a read, Ripley is captivating and diabolical. The words finely link together the voices and faces that I loved in the film. Anthony Minghella has such a remarkable gift! First English Patient, now Ripley!

All I really have to say about this screenplay is that it is honey--rich, sweet, and easy to swallow. You'll love it!

Elephant tails can be 5 feet long, African elephants can be 13 feet high and Asian elephants can weigh 12,000 pounds. These are just a few of the many fascinating facts children will learn by reading this book. Children may know that elephants do have good memories, but they might not have known that elephants walk on tiptoes, flap their big ears to keep cool, and that their trunks can reach higher than a giraffe. Wonderful photographs accompany the interesting text.

Did NOT help us run Kaizen events. An overview and story.
Author has never implemented Kaizen, only told about others' successes.
Not a "how to do it" book.

Three contributers, three more "experts" trying to tell us how to do something that they have never done themselves.
A lot of references and notable people and companies are mentioned, but where is the real hands-on "How to do it?"
This book is a story book and should be classified as FICTION.
This trio are writers, not "Lean Manufacturing" implementers.

As you probably know already, the word "kaizen" is a Japanese term meaning "to make better" with the implication that such effort should be continuous, indeed intensive and unrelenting. Since 1994, the Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME) has developed a series of educational initiatives known as the "Kaizen Blitz." In the Introduction to this volume, Jon Brodeur observes: "We think non-consultant-driven events -- training and on-the-floor work by the experts, the hands-on employees who have experienced the power of the Kaizen Blitz -- will continue to be a welcome addition to any organization's arsenal of improvement approaches. Small- and medium-sized companies can do it as well as larger ones and they may have an advantage if operations are small enough in scope to get their arms around." However, positive and significant results can only be achieved with an appropriate combination of leadership at its highest level, acceptance (indeed enthusiasm) throughout all other levels, and tenacious involvement about attaining 20 percent to 50 percent improvement (or greater) in performance in a short time and in narrowly targeted areas. The effective Kaizen process must be top-down, initiated and sustained by teamwork, and focused entirely on doing "whatever needs to be done" ASAP. The authors of this book explain both how and why.

The material is organized within 11 chapters whose titles correctly suggest the nature and extent of coverage: The Power of AME's Kaizen Blitz: Learning by Doing; The Roots of Kaizen; Improvement Strategy: Implementing the Big Picture; Getting Ready for Kaizen; Time Prints and Takt Times; How to Tell If There Is Improvement: Adding Value, Subtracting Waste: Uncovering the Flows: Establishing and Clarifying Process Flows; Forms, Charts, and Measurements; Sustaining the Gain: Lean Leadership; and finally, Never Look Back. Throughout the book, the authors reiterate the imperative that Kaizen Blitz initiatives must be sharply focused, task oriented, results driven, measurable and -- meanwhile -- FAST. Hence the relevance of the concept of "blitz," which gained worldwide prominence prior to and then during World War II when Fascist and then Allied forces attacked enemy positions with unprecedented velocity. As the AME Kaizen Blitz has demonstrated so convincingly, the same strategy (with obvious modifications) can effectively be implemented within any organization, regardless of size or nature.

Obviously I think highly of this book because it offers a sensitive, flexible, thoughtful and rigorous program to achieve what the subtitle correctly describes as "accelerating breakthroughs in productivity and performance." If these brief comments suggest that this is a program your organization needs, I strongly recommend that all of its decision-makers read it. Then, schedule an offsite meeting during which the book becomes the agenda for collaborative efforts to formulate and implement a Kaizen Blitz appropriate to your organization's specific needs and interests. If there is a need for additional resources, I strongly suggest Breyfogle's two books as well as one written by Pande and his co-authors.

For a long time, Tom Clancy's "Red Storm Rising" was considered by and large to be the best mass-market speculative fiction about World War III. Then in 1994, Eric Harry wrote his magnificent "Arc Light," which I went on CNN.com to call the best Cold War novel ever, about accidental war between the U. S. and Russia. What these two authors had in common, though, was not necessarily Russo-phobia. Rather, they were limited to envisioning World War III between the U. S. and another nuclear power capable of destroying the world.

It did not occur to them that the U. S. and Europe might fight World War III against a bunch of little countries united by religion, language, and simple, implacable revulsion towards the modern world. It occured instead to Patricia Anthony. And to think that when I first read this book (before the first paperback edition had been printed), I telephoned Ms. Anthony to chide her for making U. S. tanks too easy to kill in her book.

Even if the factor unifying the Arabs in her book is food insecurity (as a result of global warming making their already arid homelands more or less uninhabitable), she did come up with what wound up being the most accurate prediction of World War III. And by saying that, of course, I do stick my neck out a ways. All right, I admit that AS OF THIS WRITING, we aren't fighting all the Arab countries. The key words in that statement are capitalized.

And I also admit that aliens may never have visited here, or even if they have, may think our predicament so hopeless or our problem-solving abilities so pathetic that they would consider us not worth the effort of saving. Having the good ol' world restored by Mr. Blue for the price of two permanently abducted service members is just a bit intellectually dishonest, and the scene where SACEUR is taken in by a human "psychic" is ludicrous. For her part, Anthony attempts to restore the Victorian consensus that God (wearing the guise of a mysterious alien probe/organism) is clearly interested in human progress. Her thinking about how technology would transform war, however, is visionary even if not capable of being fully realized in a scant eight years. Never fear - the war will last longer than that, though perhaps not quite long enough for everybody's croplands to dry up on their own.

What I like most about Anthony's futuristic (ie. take place at some time in the future) novels is how natural they play. Cold Allies, Cradle Of Splendour and Conscience of the Beagle have a view of the future that is very convincing and this makes the backdrop of each of the stories more interesting and palatable. This in contrast to say.... Dan Simmon's Hyperion where people owned houses that had each room in a different galaxy all joined together by some cosmic work hole. Yeah... interesting.... but the operative word in SF would be Fiction.

In Cold Allies, climatic change has lead to North Africa and the Middle East to completely dry up and all the Islamic countries have banded together and invaded Europe so as to avoid starving to death. The United States is a willing if slightly ineffecvtive ally to the Europeans, having had its economy and population devastated by the same climatic changes which have also put much of the USA under water.

The story revolves around the involvement (or lack of) in this war of a mysterious alien presence. The presence manifests itself as a blue globe and it invariably shows up at the sites of major battles in the European theatre.

The blue globe seems to have a strange attraction to a remotely controlled battle robot (think Mech-Warrior) whose satellite connected controller is so psychically connected to the robot that his persona appears to be felt by the globe through the inanimate workings of the machine.

The story line is part future history, part war drama and part alien mystery. The future history is interesting, the war drama is compelling with rich, complex characters, and the alien mystery is ultimately, well.... mysterious. Chris Carter, producer of the XFiles once said that what made episodes of that show frightening was that they never showed too much detail of the "monster". It was always shrouded in darkness. Anthony treats her aliens in a similar way, never anthropomorphizing them. This is achieved perfectly in her book God's Fires and it possibly a little overdone in Cold Allies, but I enjoyed it a lot none the less.

This is the second Patricia Anthony novel I've read, the first being "Brother Termite". Both novels delve into the UFO arena, with "Cold Allies" touching a upon abductions and mutilations.

"Cold Allies" takes place in the not too distant future and shows us a world at war over the Earth's dwindling recources, but fighting it with conventional weaponry (sometimes using technologically advanced weapons, sometimes using World War I mentality). Throughout this conflict, the enigmatic aliens often appear over the battle fields, their purpose unknown.

Like the unfathonable cattle mutilations and human abductions that are replete in UFOlogy, along with the "Foo-fighter" lore of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, Anthony uses these phenomena to draw in the reader, and true to the UFO mystery itself, she gives no answers as to why, nor to what purpose the aliens may have in abducting and/or mutilating the human victims. The reader is left wondering (as was intended), are the aliens allies or are they dispassionate creatures putting us under their microscope?

"Cold Allies" is a fast read (I found it hard to put down), and like "Brother Termite", is a well thought out character-driven novel. If you think UFO's are all hogwash or have not looked into this phenomenon, then I doubt that this novel is for you. However, if you have more than just a passing interest in UFOlogy, you should really enjoy this novel. Between 1 and 10, "Cold Allies" gets a solid 8.

One day I have to figure out how to give a book no stars 'cause I feel horrible about giving "Cradle of Splendor" a star since it deserves none. This may be the worst book I have ever read (and I've read a lot of books). Let's just get it out in the open: this is a bad book. Bad writing, moronic storyline, and annoying characters. Bad enough I had to put up with cliched writing and a asinine plot but I couldn't understand half of it! I'm still not exactly sure of what happened. Some kind of alien/sex-thing..not that it matters. And let me just say that this book is very offensive to Brazilians. Throughout the book she describes Brazilians as lazy, dirty, incompetent, violent and stupid. She describes Brazilian society in the worst way possible and at the end thanks a Brazilian family for hosting her. I wonder what they would think of the beautiful way she depicted their country...don't buy this book. Please.

Patricia Anthony's oblique style of storytelling is usually an ill fit with her broad-stroke plots, which is why her novels Brother Termite and Happy Policeman missed the mark and are worth reading only for Anthony's stylism. In Cradle of Splendor, however (as with Cold Allies before it), Anthony finds a plot sufficiently multifaceted and enigmatic to match her style. It is hard to explain the plot, not only because so much of it is a surprise but also because so much of it is left to speculation. Given how little of the story is spelled out, it is surprising how well Anthony's writing holds the reader's attention. I cannot call Cradle of Splendor a failure because it leaves us with so many questions, possibilities, and levels upon which it can be taken. I am sure that was Anthony's intent, and I found it a welcome and interesting challenge. Her ambiguity would make Cradle of Splendor an excellent novel for book-club discussion -- and her writing makes it a good read.

Patricia Anthony has written this novel with obviously extensive understanding of politics, gender relations, the UFO subculture and the craft of writing. It is a tragic, sad tale, filled with absurd moments and startling beauty. Her characters are vivid and surprisingly believable in their eccentricities and obsessions. Her canvas is wide and it contains a full spectrum of people whose lives (and deaths) are woven into an intricate and subtle mosaic of mystery and tragedy.

The novel is provocative science fiction, compact and quite as readable as her previous books. It is a bit eccentric, as perhaps expected, and eminently comparable to a Phil Dick novel. But you wouldn't mistake hers for his. As he was, she is. An original.