Mom's & Dad's to be: Excellent Book.... Lot's of information that you'll never think to ask until you browse. Doc Poliakin delivered our Son, Edward in Thousand Oaks, CA. There's so many things in this book that are pratical, simple, common sense guidelines with general information to help influence confidence in parent(s) to be. Believe me, he's a down to earth doctor that speaks the truth and reflects it in his book.

David Norman

This is the best book! Everything you need to know but forgot to ask is in this book!

It's like little pebbles that make up the beach. The short storries conbine to give you a feel of his life. Great collection of storries. Some that reflect on me so much that they often remind me of things in my childhood.

These are raw stories of the human heart in conflict. They will change your life forever.

It is a shame that this book has been let go out of print. Someone ought to get to Penguin or Dover and ask them to bring it back to availability. The text is fascinating, and, rather like good science fiction, makes you stop and rethink your assumptions about "the way things are." Our assumptions that the food on today's tables and menus has always been much the same are fascinatingly wrong. The authors treats several places in both the "new" and "old" worlds as to the effect of ingredients imported after 1492, and then looks in more detail at several of the seminal products, such as corn and potatoes. Particularly if you like "ethnic" cuisine, you will never look at a recipe or menu in the same way again.

This is a very readable and entertaining history of the revolution in cuisine with the introduction
of foods from the New World. It includes some marginal political history necessary to
understand the subject, but is filled with interesting anecdotes. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the evolution of cuisine or just a good read.

In the tradition of "little instruction books", this volume is full of short tips on writing well and getting published. These secrets will motivate, instruct and make you laugh.

The tips are categorized by chapter: inspiration, characterization, dialogue, plot, style, technique, writer's block, editing, marketing, the business of writing, reading & writing and the writing life. There is an index to help you find valuable passages again.

THIS IS A GREAT GIFT for yourself or for the writeaholic who is making your (co-dependent) life miserable.

As the author of 113 books (including revisions and foreign-language editions) and over 500 magazine articles, I recommend this book to writers. DanPoynter@ParaPublishing.com.

This is a great book to help keep you focused on what it takes to not only write a great book but to get it published! A friend loaned it to me for daily inspiration and I wore it out while waiting for traffic, waiting for the dentist, etc. Great to keep with you to keep you motivated and on the right track!

For someone who doesn't understand French, it is hard to really know the meaning of the Cajun folk songs. Mr. Francois does an excellent job of translating. In addition, he gives a small history of the songs as well as actual written music.

This is the "bible" of Acadian "Cajun" music! Raymond E. François

Great book that cuts through the all the garbage that's promoted as "expert opinion" and uses good common sense to raising kids.

This is the best parenting book I've read, and I've read a bunch. It's completely free of psychobabble, and his approach is straightforward, practical, and sensible. Guarendi doesn't get into the usual controversies about whether or not to spank, attachment parenting, or the like. Instead, he gives parents practical ways to apply whatever their particular philosophies are. I can't recommend this book highly enough!

Like his hero Lewis Carroll, Raymond Queneau was a polyglot, and a mathematician with a love of patterns, forms and games. He wrote a study of dog language in Carroll's 'Sylvie and Bruno', and 'Zazie' is his update of Alice to the Parisian Wonderland of the late 1950s, although it is not clear whether Zazie is an anti-Alice, bringing chaos to a normal society, or whether she is a precocious, sensible, curious (if foul-mouthed) child faced with a blinkingly unstable universe: Zazie is notably passive in the book's final third, when the linguistic, philosophical, temporal, narrative, spatial and sexual dissolutions collapse into a frenzy of barmy physical violence.

the book as a whole sees Rabelais and Diderot rewriting the Arabian Nights. Each chapter plays like a Ionesco drama, a sustained, rhythmic dialogue where the disparity between bizarre event and the disintegrating attempts of language to express it, creates a gap where logic contracts, explodes and comes back together in an hilarious anti-logic. Not only are the borders of dream and reality, plausibility and fantasy, role play and identity broken down, but Queneau's narrative procedures - at once Joycean in its plenitude, and startling in its gaping ellipses - further confuse the reader.

'Zazie' is Queneau's most 'plausible' novel, in that much of its fun lies in its Parisian locales, and its comedy at the expense of romantic cliches about the city; but it is also a true Surrealist novel, both in breaking down the normality of the real, and in asserting that the only way you can get what you want is to dream.

Raymond Queneau has written a strange but tantalizing little novel about an adolescent named Zazie... she has a New York accent, and the mouth of a Henry Miller. Her misadventures in Paris, prove challenging to those around her,and amusing to the reader. It's am amusing collage of seemimgly misplaced dialogue and eccentric characters, yet is easy to read and laugh with.

(Note: Queneau is, I think, an underappreciated genius. You can find out more about him by looking up the book "The OULIPO COMPENDIUM" here at Amazon, which contains his extraordinary "One-hundred-trillion sonnets." "Oulipans: rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape" -- Raymond Queneau).

Zazie is less of a labyrinth and more of a amusement park, a good introduction to this imaginative writer. Probably not for those easily offended (nor is "Zazie" herself), but a little treasure worth looking for.

When the authors read The Discipline of Market Leaders, they must have immediately realized the potential of bringing the ideas of being an innovator, effective producer, and relationship manager together. This book fulfills that synthesis in a zero-time concept, of immediately providing value for stakeholders. In a December 1999 poll in Fast Company Magazine, 38 percent of respondents indicated that some aspect of their company already operated in a zero execution time mode.

The book is built around five basic concepts for a targeted group of high profit margin customers:

(1) Instant Value Alignment with customers (FedEx's commitment to on-time delivery and instant access to tracking information)

(2) Instant Learning by employees and customers (Dell Computer's computer-based education at work cell assembly sites)

(3) Instant Adaptation of the organization (G.E.'s focus on building a direction for the company around vision and trust)

(4) Instant Execution of value for the customer (Progressive Insurance's accelerated claims processing methods)

(5) Instant Involvement of all stakeholders (Cisco Systems' involvement with its suppliers and outsourcers from development through implementation for customers)

A company can progress towards having all five elements in a three step process. First, you become a market leader by emphasizing either product/service innovation (employing instant learning and adaptation), operating excellence (using instant execution and involvement), or customer closeness (relationship building based on instant alignment and involvement). Second, you turn that into locking customers in by adding one more key element from the five part model. Third, you complete the transition into providing all five elements.

A t-strategy is described for making this transition. You find an opportunity that is unfilled (such as the desire to be alone in the middle of other people that is partly served by the Sony Walkman), develop a key core competency for that conceptual space, and expand into some zero-time operations. You first apply that vision, core comptence, and distinctiveness for one market, then expand it into different, but similar (and usually related) markets. These market extensions form the vertical part of the 't' shape. For example, Dell Computer wants to employ direct selling with a competency of build-to-order to dominate the market for PCs by operational effectiveness. It expands from desk-top PCs to portable ones, then to servers, and now into storage.

Now that you understand the model a bit, let me share a few quibbles. First, I disagree with the idea of focusing on a subset of customers who can provide the highest profit margin. I think a better concept is to identify the customers where they will give you the greatest combination of competitive insulation, profitability, and improvement in your economics of providing goods and services in order to be able to take on more customers profitably.

Second, several stakeholders are missing from the discussion here such as shareholders, bondholders, the communities in which you operate, and those who regulate what you do. More thinking needs to be done about how to apply the model there stakeholders.

Third, the authors argue that providing all three dimensions gives you a guaranteed customer for life. I disagree. You could still be upended by someone with a proprietary technology with the same zero-time elements that gives an edge in bringing more benefits to the customer. Another way of thinking about this is that technology can still be disruptive to this strategy (see The Innovator's Dilemma).

Fourth, the authors do not address how to make the cost-benefit trade-off decisions. Getting closer to zero time gets more and more expensive. How much is it worth? How fast should you transition to this level of performance? The book will tend to encourage a too-fast transition, in my judgment.

Fifth, when is a non-zero time response better? If someone asks me my opinion on an important subject, they may not want a response in 1 second. They may prefer that I pull together all of the resources of my organization for the next 3 days instead and provide a better answer. The book doesn't address that class of circumstances.

Sixth, how do you correct for errors? I frequently stay in hotel chains that pride themselves on writing down my preferences. Then they smile broadly as they anticipate my needs and provide those preferences. The only problem is, that those aren't really my preferences. For example, staying at a luxury hotel with a sore throat, I ordered mid-afternoon tea with lemon. I don't usually drink it that way, but that's the way it always comes when I am at that hotel. In another luxury hotel, someone asked me casually if I liked the room I was staying in. I was feeling friendly and happy, and said, 'Oh, yes!' Well, for the next six years, I had the same room -- even though I actually preferred a different room. I respect what these hotels are trying to do so much that I don't have the heart to tell them they are unintentionally giving me the wrong service.

Basically, like all models, it is a lot easier to understand than to do it well.

After you have completed this fine book, put yourself in your stakeholders' shoes. What would you really want from your company? How would you like to go about making that happen? How would you like to adjust your needs and the responses you receive? Then use those insights to talk directly with your stakeholders about how well you are doing. If you are like most of the companies I study, you aren't ever delivering the right value. You'll need to get that straightened out before you start working on getting great value provided in zero time.

Be effective!

The authors really take today's norm of 'operating companies' and challenges them to entirely re-think the fundamentals of their current operations for today and tomorrow. Zero Time is well thought out and raises the bar helping direct companies shift their paradigms in both thought and action to truly develop into tomorrow's champions - for the long term. It really is a must read for the new generation of e-business leaders and tomorrow's visionaries.

Olderman has insight into the world of Business Communication, and it shows in his writing! This is a must-have book for people in business.

This isn't one of Smullyan's books of logic puzzles (those are great too!), but rather contains highly entertaining (and mind-stretching) flights of philosophical fantasy and paradox. If you like Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, you'll like this.