If self-sacrifice is the mark of true heroism, then Brother Andrew is in a class with the most valient. This book tells his story from birth and youth in WWII poverty, to the agnosticysm of a young man to the realization that God is REAL and part of his life. It will challenge your faith to rely on God as if he were a king leading his troops into battle. He is. Brother Andrew's story is one of the most involving STORIES I have read. But it isn't just a story, it is the life of a real man who has given everything for the mission to spread light to a dark land. Just because the Iron Curtin has fallen, dosen't mean that this book is any less relevant today. It will change your faith. Gaurenteed.

In 1968 I received this book as a bonus from the Farm Family Book Club. I started to read it in the evening and read until I was finished at 4:00 a.m. The next day I said, "If Brother Andrew can trust God for 365 days a year, I can trust Him for one day, no matter how foolish it makes me look." I did, and I did look foolish. But I found out that He is faithful. My life has never been the same.

This book has truly inspired me. To read about the sacrifices Brother Andrew made has made me know I can do so much more for God. This is a must read for anyone who is working for God. This is a thrilling, edge of your seat, page turner. You will not be able to put it down.

This is one of the most profound and sensational books I've ever read. It brings to light the "dark side" or the "left hand", so to speak, and illumines us as to how the "dark side" is as valid a part of God and Creation as the "bright side" is. It describes the journeys of the Tantric adept Aghori Vimalananda through realms of existence far removed from the mundane world, and hidden from most of us. Reading this book (and the other two in this series) can cause a radical change in the concepts we've formed about the universe, God, life, death and everything.

Vimalananda is the pen-name of a great Aghori master (his real name is not revealed for very good reasons), who had the privilege (or rather the grace obtained because of his past karma) to meet some of the greatest masters of all times and achieve phenomenal spiritual growth through the grace of Smashan Tara, the Great Goddess of the burning grounds. The chapters on "Ma" and "Shakti" describe the motherhood of God so wonderfully that one cannot help but fall in love with the Divine Mother in spite of her frightening disposition. The chapter on Mentors describes the eternal Guru-disciple relationship and also brings to light some of the very devious ways adopted by Gurus to test their disciples, among many other things. The chapter on Aghora brings illumines us as to how even the "forbidden" substances such as meat, alcohol, tobacco, drugs and such can be used to accelerate spiritual progress if used in a proper way along with the guidance of a Guru. The chapter on Avishkar is all about possessions, whether it's by a low-level spirit or by a high-level deity, and after reading this chapter, you would (hopefully) no longer be misled by people claiming to be incarnations of deities, since the mechanics of possession would become clearer to you.

The chapter on spirits is absolutely sensational. The astral world consists of many realms, and different types of spirits live in different realms based on their karmic qualification and level of evolution. Many people seem to think that they can extract work from the spirits and achieve whatever they want, without realizing that it can drag them into a dangerous trap, if they do not have an adept Guru to protect them. Considerable information is given on different types of spirits along with their descriptions, in the bright as well as the dark realms. It's a very objective account that brings to light various types of spirit contact, along with their pros and cons, and also tries to show how we can cultivate friendship with even the lowest forms of spirits and take advantage of it for attaining spiritual progress.

The chapter on sex is the longest and perhaps the most illuminating, and I have no words to talk about it....you must read it for yourself....it brings to light some of the deepest mysteries of sex, relationships, marriage and such never heard of before!

A word of caution though: If you are a purist with black-and-white standards, then you may find the information presented here to be very disturbing, so it might behoove you to stay clear from this book. But if you're a truth seeker who desires to discover the reality behind this mysterious cosmos, then this book is certainly for you.

This book packs real power and can cause a permanent change in your life and your very approach towards it.

May the Cosmic Mother bless you!

"Aghora At the left hand of God" is a book I would surly recommend for anyone on the spiritual journey. I feel it is necessary to be open minded and trust divine intuition. The portrait of Aghori Vimalananda's life is very straight to the point, and may make one's lacking in faith a bit frightened. Or on the flip side, it may just be the divine spark needed to ignite the spirit of faith within you. If you trust, "that still small voice within", and your guru you will be able to gain great inspiration and perspective from this wonderful book. Anyone, who knows anything about eastern philosophy can relate and grow from Aghora. It will take you through realities not many were meant to know about, at least not until the moment of death maybe.

Jai Jai Sri Sri Mata Amritandamayi!

This book is truly outstanding. It is like Autobiography of a Yogi but goes far beyond what the beginning seeker needs to hear. It covers all facets of life and discusses spirits and many other celestial beings and their activities. Robert Svoboda has established his credibility with his intelligent and well written books on Ayurveda and Jyotish. I highly recommend this book to anyone fascinated by the spiritual realms.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It kept me interested from page one right up to the exciting end. I couldn't turn the pages fast enough! If your're a fan of action/suspense thrillers...you need to add Dead Reckoning to your must read list.

It's an excellent summer read.

This book has been nominated for the Bloody Dagger award and itearns it by the rip-roaring actionpacked in almost every page. Ijust read it again and it's evenbetter the second time around.The author is featured in this month's issue of The Third Degreemagazine, formerly known as Judas,It is on-line issue of Bumpin Guns. DR deserves all acclaim forfast action, thriller-suspensefans. The book is not fluffed upby tiresome descriptions of theimmediate surroundings. It takesplace in the beautiful area aroundBuffalo, The Peace Bridge and downthe Niagara River to the Falls, but your mind is on the action asJimmy Taggart, sheriff, chases down the notorious Baker and hisgang are killed. But is Bakerreally dead? A coming sequel toDR will tell the tale so you wantto read this book now and be readyfor more this fall. You are in forsome of the best reading out thereso hold on for the ride of a lifetime

Suspense/crime readers read DEAD RECKONING as soon as you can get it in your hands, HOWEVER, understand that once you start reading you will return to the next page in spite of all else that needs to be done in your life. Chapter 1, which is more a prologue, establishes the character of Jimmy Taggert when his best friend Bobby Ryan is killed in the jungles of Viet Nam.

Jimmy extracts his revenge on the Vietnamese troops who killed his friend and returns to Darien his hometown near Niagra Falls to marry his highschool sweetheart and become Sheriff of his town.

A bank robbery in Darien introduces the reader to Michael Baker, a more deadly serial killer than fact or ficton has produced thus far. The suspense escalates through each attempt to stop Baker. An FBI agent, Mitchell Cory, and Jimmy Taggert work together without the usual rancor of the FBI v. local law enforcement to become friends and eventually to stop Baker. There is a susprise ending that adds to the finale. The last sentence in the book, "This should make for quite an interesting morning," is the only understatement in the book.

Buy it; read it ! I'm going to look for Fulani's first book and read it as I hope that a third is on the way.

If you read this book as long ago as I did, you probably
first heard about it from Douglas Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas" column in _Scientific American_, or the book in which his columns were collected. (If you're just now being introduced to this book, check out Hofstadter's too; his discussion of it is very helpful and insightful.)

What Robert Axelrod describes in this book is a novel round-robin tournament (actually two such tournaments) in which various game-theoretic strategies were pitted against one another in the game known as the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Each strategy was scored, not according to how many times it "beat" its "opponent," but according to how many points it accumulated for itself. The surprising result: a strategy dubbed TIT FOR TAT, submitted by Anatol Rapaport, cleaned everybody's clocks in both tournaments.

Why was this surprising? First, because TIT FOR TAT was such a simple strategy. It didn't try to figure out what its "opponent" was going to do, or even keep much track of what its "opponent" had _already_ done. All it did was cooperate on the first move, and thereafter do whatever its "opponent" had done on the previous move. And second, because this strategy can _never_ do better than its "opponent" in any single game; the best result it could achieve, in terms of comparison with the other player, is a tie.

So it was odd that such a simple strategy, one that went up against all sorts of sophisticated strategies that spent a lot of time trying to dope out what their "opponents" were up to, should do so much better than all the "clever" strategies. And it was also odd that a strategy that could never, ever "beat" its "opponent" should nevertheless do so much better _overall_ than any other strategy.

As Axelrod is careful to point out, this isn't always true; how well TIT FOR TAT does depends on the population with which it's surrounded, and in fact it wouldn't have won even _these_ tournaments if certain other strategies had participated. But TIT FOR TAT is surprisingly robust, and its success does offer some tentative political lessons.

Axelrod spells them out, in the form of principles like "Be nice and forgiving" -- which means: never be the first to defect; be quick to forget what your "opponent" has done in the past. And in a follow-up computer simulation, he shows that it's possible -- under some conditions -- for a little cadre of "cooperators" to increase their numbers and "take over" a population that practices other strategies.

Axelrod's research was and is important for several reasons, one of which has to do with evolutionary theory: it shows that, under the right conditions, natural selection can tend to generate cooperation rather than competition, even among actors who act solely out of self-interest. Another has to do with the spontaneous growth of cooperative behavior in predominantly competitive or hostile environments (Axelrod's examples include holiday cease-fires in the trenches during the First World War). Yet another has to do with the need (or otherwise) for external authorities to _enforce_ cooperative behavior -- a point not lost on Axelrod's libertarian and/or Hayekian readers, including myself.

Nevertheless, as groundbreaking as this work is, the results are modest and Axelrod states them very cautiously. TIT FOR TAT doesn't _always_ "win," and in any case not all of our social interactions can be modelled as Iterated Prisoner's Dilemmas. It's a _very_ hopeful book, but readers will want to be careful not to claim more for Axelrod's results than he claims for them himself.

In short, this volume is a solid piece of political-sociological-mathematical research that has stood the test of time and stimulated all sorts of follow-up work. I expect it will be read for a long time to come -- this conclusion being a simple extrapolation from the fact that I've been reading it for almost two decades now myself. It's fascinating.

If you're an intellectual and want to read a book that will change your perception of many facets of the world forever, this is the book for you. It's not a long read, but you will spend a lot of time thinking about all its implications as you read it. I found it applicable to everything from inviting people to parties, to business and personal relationships, to species competition, to wondering whether a theoretical race of super-powerful extraterrestrials would enslave us, to... Well, you just have to check it out!
I'm reading the sequel ("The Complexity of Cooperation") right now, which is also amazing. In it he quotes a letter written to him about EoC by a woman who claims that the principle developed in it helped her with her divorce proceedings! How can you miss a book with such broad applications.

Though I've never seen the two linked elsewhere, this book explains how Linux and Open Source developers can succeed in a world populated by back-stabbing defectors. A wonderful book and an easy read. Recomended for anyone who cooperates.

For business readers, consider Co-opetition by Nalebuff etal and the Death of Competition by Moore.

Have no illusions about this book -- Bill Barnett delivers on his promise! We tend to make life more complicated than necessary! Bill strips away all the fluff and gets to the point on what works in the real estate investing business. This book is
truly a manual to get you on the road to wealth.

for this wonderful book. It is written in a light and entertaining way, I didn't want to put it down until I was through. Each chapter contains valuable warnings about pitfalls from the school of hard knocks which are also repeated at the end of each chapter for easy review. There are many great concepts about real estate investing out of which I particularly like the ABC offer strategy and the lockbox idea. To launch your career in this exciting business, the book concludes in a 120 getting started plan with lots of hands-on assignments.

Bill Barnett offers non-stop suggestions throughout the entire book on how to improve your ability to buy, rehab-if-necessary, and market real estate. I've been a real estate investor for over 40 years and I learned an amazing number of new techniques and ideas by simply reading this book. I've also had the pleasure of meeting Bill personally, and he's a great resource to have on your team.

This book is very comprehensive and current, covering all aspects of the finance/investing world. As a CFO of a fortune 500 company, I refer to this book frequently; I highly recommend this glossary.

This investment dictionary lists over 5000 terms, with clear and easy to understand definitions. This book is current with the latest industry buzz words, and is a terrific resource for anyone interested in investing or finance.

An excellent guide to all of those buzz words you hear on CNBC.My broker uses this book and recomended it to me. It is very easy to read and understand.

It's hard to believe that this biography of Emerson can be topped. It's dense - but truly gives the ins and outs of Emerson's life, his passions, relationships and what influenced his thought...even his reading lists...it was a pleasure to read such fine scholarship....

I must confess that I don't understand the reader review below who found this biography of Emerson to be a difficult read. Although not quite a page-turner, I managed to read this in very little time at all. I must also confess that I do find Emerson himself incredibly difficult to read. But what I find to be the case in Emerson himself, I did not find to be true in Richardson's biography. While I find that Emerson constructed one stunning sentence and aphorism after another, I generally find his essays to be slow going. Nonetheless, while I am not his biggest fan, he is unquestionably one of the four or five greatest figures in American intellectual history, and Richardson's biography does him great justice.

The great merit of this biography is that at the end of it, you feel that you have gained considerable insight both into Emerson and New England intellectual life in the 19th century. I was especially intrigued with Richardson detailing of Emerson's reading. Emerson was, without any question, a great reader. Great readers rarely read books from cover to cover. Samuel Johnson, who was himself one of the most accomplished readers in the history of civilization, once said that we have more of a need to reread than to read. But he also once quipped, "What, you read books all the way to the end?" Emerson did not read books all the way to the end. But like Johnson and other great readers, he had a genius for picking out the most important points. What Boswell wrote of Johnson is true also of Emerson: "He had a peculiar facility in seizing at once what was valuable in any book, without submitting to the labour of perusing it from beginning to end."

One comes away from the book also enormously impressed with Emerson's character. He seems by any standard to have been a remarkably good human being. He was both a man of high principle, and a man of powerful attachments to other human beings. I found the accounting of his various friendships, many to equally famous individuals, to be of the utmost interest. Also, he seems to have met virtually every important thinker and writer in the English-speaking world, from Coleridge to Carlyle to Melville.

I heartily recommend this book to anyone who wants to gain a deeper knowledge of Emerson's life and work. By any standard, Emerson is one of the giants in American life. His influence on American thought is incalculable. Consider: not only was he the major influence on such American literary figures the magnitude of Thoreau and Whitman; he was a profound influence on artists such as Thomas Cole, Moran, and Bierstadt. America's deep-rooted environmentalism is steeped in Emersonian Transcendentalism. John Muir was a devoted reader of Emerson. One could make a case for Emerson having had perhaps more influence in the shaping of American thought than any other individual. This biography is an outstanding introduction to that person.

Robert Richardson's biography of Emerson is superb. Though, as Richardson reminds us, Emerson did not like superlative language when precise and adequate language would do, it is the case that at times the superlative, the precise and the adequate converge (as, in fact, they often did in Emerson's writings). Richardson's biography is indeed superb in its unfolding of Emerson's life -- the loves, the friendships, the losses, the intellectual and spiritual hunger, the religious quest, the writers in America, in Europe, in Persia and elsewhere to whom Emerson owed and acknowledged debts, the grasping at and for a world, the determination of a single, brilliant human being to find his way and to see his life, and all individual lives, as imbued with the divine and thus worth living.

The book is also superbly written. Each short chapter offers enough substantive insight to urge the reader into the next. It is a long book, but not long-winded. Richardson provides the reader with some morsel of insight in a few pages of narrative, and then offers a rest to digest what has been said. His placement of quotations from Emerson's journals, essays and other works is brilliant, offering the reader a useful sketch of Emerson's metaphysics and ethics. In my own case, this has allowed time to reach for other literature more fully descriptive of the events or scenes offered in a particular chapter, or to reread chunks of Emerson's writings while moving through the biography. The book is a useful tool not merely for a study of Emerson's life but for a study of Transcendentalism and of the interplay of ideas across the Atlantic that shaped American thought in so many ways. One sees more clearly where and how such writers as Nietzsche and Thoreau obtained the seeds of their own truths from Emerson's works and thoughts.

Richardson has set the standard for the writing of future biographies. Again, simply superb.

Is this a good read? Yes it is, but not necessarily for the accounts of combat missions flown by Robert Morgan, pilot of the famed Memphis Belle, the first B-17 of the 8th Air Force to successfully complete 25 missions, and memoralized by William Wyler's photography and, in 1990, by a movie. More to the point, the story is one of what happened to the heroes of WWII, to those who flew, who were in the foxholes, who strode the deck of a warship. Did everyone come back to marry, buy a house, have children and live happpily ever after? Read this book and perhaps you'll understand in a small way what war meant and what it meant to those who fought in it.

Raised in upper class surroundings in Ashville, North Carolina, Robert Morgan seemed to have a care-free life of good times, fast cars, and plenty of women. But World War II intevenes and Morgan, at loose ends, joins an expanding Air Corps in late 1940. He fell in love with flying, but his career was often jeporadized by his propensities for buzzing buildings and beaches, and his disregard for proper military attire and the finer points of military discipline. There is no doubt of Morgan's abilities and courage, however, because in 1943, after a lengthy tour with his Memphis Belle and crew on a bond drive, he volunteers for the brand new B-29 program. As a squadron commander, Lt. Colonel Morgan is part of the 73rd Bomb Wing, based on Saipan, and flies the first B-29 mission to Tokyo, November 1944, in "Dauntless Dotty." After twenty-six often perilous missions, he is grounded and returned to the States in the summer of 1945. Later discharged, Morgan returns to civilian life with wife and now children and enters the business world begun by his father and headed by his brother, David.

But Robert Morgan's flying career is only part of his story. The other is his personal journey, a trek tinged with sadness and search Despite the privileges and luxury, his father was distant and his beloved mother, a friend of the Vanderbilts, was often away. The suicide of his mother when Morgan was 18 was a serious psychic blow, perhaps accounting in part for his numerous love affairs and marriages. As was true with many others who had seen too many friends killed or lost, Morgan continues for years after the war to wonder "why was I spared, my buddies killed." A drinking problem becomes more serious and it is not until Morgan seeks help from his "Command Pilot," God, and counsel from Billy Graham, does to come to grips with the demons that plagued his life.

Another story is also told; the story of Morgan's greatest love, "The Memphis Belle" and his efforts and those of others to have this fabled plane properly enshrined in Memphis. May Morgan and his "Memphis Belle" have tranquil times in their remaining year.

WWII bomber pilot, Robert Morgan is a real-life hero, who pens an informative and entertaining read. This historical narrative of The Memphis Belle, its crew and their missions was the best thing I could have possibly read over Memorial Day.

Reading the bio of Col Bob Morgan has made history come alive for me. I have never been much of a military history buff, but this book was worth reading. Anyone who had family serve in the Air Corps in WWII should read this book. It is well written by a man who states that the Memphis Belle may be the most famous B 17 ever but she was not the only one and her story is the story of all the Air Corps not just one crew. Bless them all!

A great book for the large, multimillion-dollar corporate, government, B2B complex sales executive looking to enhance, hone and build their sales strategies. The New Strategic Selling system focuses on the big fish. Many tactics and ideas may apply to smaller business sales opportunities but the main focus is toward major corporate accounts where the sale must funnel through multiple channels before closing versus smaller business accounts.

I have many years of industrial sales experience, and I started my own manufacturing business with venture capital financing (Big time selling). This book has the best approach to strategic selling that I have encountered. I read it to get recharged and check my practices. I recommend it to all new sales people.

Many times a sales person can get confused identifying the players, the probability of change, the timing, the competition, the politics of a sales opportunity. Following the Strategic Selling process lays out an effective plan that leverages the key benefits of the sellers/buyers solution, and minimizes price as the principle buying criteria. Strategic Selling provides a process for what successful sale people do consistently-Plan. This book lays out a process that is also a two day class used by many global corporation's sales forces. The book is not a replacement for the class, but if you are selling B2B the process is well documented, and will put you on the right track. I have been teaching and using this process for 13 years and I have not found a better sales opportunity planning process. I think you can learn more from this book than from 100 sales calls.

When in 1976 Jerome Kohlberg, Henry Kravis, and George Roberts left Bear Stears to form KKR, Wall Street realized these three dealermakers might become a major force in the restructuring of American big business then beginning. What could not be predicted was the heights KKR would achieve. It has risen from the ranks of upstarts to become a major player in "The New Establishment." While KKR has been the subject of other books and articles, none could be considered "definitive," as is "The New Financial Capitalists." It is more than a history of a bank, however. Baker and Smith have addressed the problem posed by the separation of ownership and management delineated in 1934 by Adolph Berle and Gardner Means in "The Modern Corporation and Private Property," indicating how the leveraged buyout programs of the 1980s helped resolve it.

Baker and Smith have accomplished two objectives in their short book. On the surface, they have expertly captured the key elements in the development of KKR as the frontrunner of the LBO firm. However, on a deeper level, they have also captured many of the elements that managers and entrepreneurs should consider when running or starting a firm. In this regard, the Preface and Chapter Five are worth the price of admission. For anyone interested in the evolution and history of modern American finance, read this book.

Baker (Harvard Business School) and Smith (New York Univ.) provide a well-documented history of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) and its development of the leveraged buyout (LBO). During the period 1976-93, KKR acquired more than 50 firms with an equity investment of only $10.9 billion. As of 1998, these equity investments were worth $40 billion (an annual return exceeding 28 percent). The authors examine KKR's strategy of identifying undervalued, poorly managed firms with potential to increase cash flow. Each LBO was financed with 80 to 90 percent debt, and equity was provided by a partnership organized by KKR. The LBO managers were required to have a large proportion of their net worth in the equity. After the acquisition, KKR's strategy was to cut costs and increase productivity, quickly pay down the debt, and sell the firm to unlock the equity investment. The large debt service inflicted discipline while management's investment created incentives. By linking managerial and ownership interests, Baker and Smith argue that KKR improved corporate governance and contributed to increases in corporate profits and productivity. This volume is an excellent addition to the literature on mergers, business history, and corporate strategy. Upper-division undergraduate through professional collections as well as large public libraries.