The text is aimed at practising international marketers, although also of benefit to students of more advanced or specialised international marketing programmes. The material is developed from years of line management and international marketing consultancy, including with many blue chip multinational corporations, across many global markets. Much of the material has been used, honed and customised, on many in-company team development programmes run by the author.

The author clearly is a hands on international marketer, sharing his experience across many markets and aspects of international marketing. Whilst is is of good use for students of international marketing, particularly those of CIM and Institute of Export professional exams, I think it is particularly relevant for practisng marketers.

Dear Sir !
Congratulations !Great books !But !
I.m missing the
explanation for the content of Foquet abbé:
"...so difficult to discover that nothing now on
this earth can prove of better fortune nor be their
equel.."
Nevertheless it is questionig to me,why Posussin
informed Foquet so easily-if this is so secret ?
Furthermore I doubt about the fact,how could Poussin
undertood all these really difficult mathematics in
this century-if it makes difficulties to me as well in
2001 ?

...and what is meaning:"nothing better fortune" ???
Just the mathematic rules and ????
I.m absolutely sure there should be more than this
and I think there should be any link,how rapidly
Sauniere became rich ?!
These are currently my doubts and questions to you.
With best regards:
Zoltan Szilagyi
Budapest/Hungary

This book is a really good read for anyone interested in Rennes-le-Chateau. For those who have read "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" by Baigent et. al., this is a totally new and different perspective on the mystery. The basic premise of "H.B., H.G." is that Jesus didn't die on the cross, but has a direct line of decendants to the present day, and relates this to the secret organization Prieur de Sion and Freemasonry. Wood and Campbell take the same information Baigent et. al. used to derive this hypothesis and, using a more mathematical approach, relate the secret of Rennes-le-Chateau not to Jesus Christ, but to a returning comet that will destroy the earth at a certain date. Worth reading!

I used this book for additional reading and reference for a course in Sociology at Penn State. It is very well written, easy to read (usually means short length of subject) and gives varying views of social observations of differing subjects and cultures. I recommend it for reading as my text book has too much stuff to remember.

Ballard Campbell edits The Gilded Age And Progressive Era, examining public figures at the turn of the 20th century. Biography blends with historical review and analysis in this important coverage.

Ian Fleming: a catalogue of a collection is an Excellent Book, the one and only Bibliography produced to date. Its 71 pages are filled with information not readilly avaliable anywhere else, such as details of periodicals and reference material. Iain Campbell's collection yeilds many one-and-only items, such as letters to people who had dealings with Ian Fleming and his reaserch, special proof and advance readers copies (that are not believed to exist any more), and details of the Fleming First editions. The book is in wrappers (not a hardback-there was no hardback) with a clear plastic dust-jacket. It was privately printed by Commersgate in Oxford in 1978, (in an edition of about 1000, I will presume). It is difficult to say how many items are listed, but there can be up to and above 20 per page. The sections on the novels are divided into: First Edition, Proof Copies, Source Material, Antologies, Book Reviews, Book Club editions,Paperbacks(U.K), Foriegn editions, Film Brochures and related, and finnaly film Reviews. Other sections relate to the books and periodicals related to James Bond and Ian Fleming, (biographies, reference, critisicm, review). As you will suspect, much more thoughrer than you would expect of a 'Preliminary to a bibliography'. ...
Overall, the Campbell reference work on Fleming is an invaluable reference to any Fleming Collector. I have refered to it hundreds of times since i purchased it, as, I'm sure, you will!

_Laurence Sterne: A Life_ (Oxford University Press), by Ian Campbell Ross, is a dandy new biography which I will tell you about. But the only real reason to be reading about Sterne is to increase appreciation of his wonderful book, _The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman_, which has been making people laugh for almost two and a half centuries. So let me make the recommendation first of that book to you, if you have never read it. Go read it, and when you finish, I'll be right here.

There! What did I tell you? Intelligent, chaotic, witty amusement, with some bawdiness thrown in. I don't need to tell you of the thousand odd attractions of the book. It is one of the most fun of the classics. Now to the fine book at hand. Sterne was, Ross shows, just as peculiar as his book, and had as chaotic a life. Sterne lived only eight years after bursting onto the scene with _Tristram Shandy_, and to Ross's credit, he has made Sterne's pre-Shandy years interesting. Sterne had led a modest, impecunious life of a vicar in Yorkshire. He did a bit of political writing, but nothing that would have prepared anyone for his comic masterpiece. He had an unhappy marriage, and a remarkable interest in adultery.

Then in 1759, the first two of the nine volumes of _Tristram Shandy_ were published, and caused a sensation. The reviews were very good, and if readers were puzzled by the extraordinary digressions and puzzles in the book, they laughed at them, and they bought them up. Then Sterne appeared in London, and was delighted to wear his black ministerial garments everywhere. This brought his book notoriety as well as fame; reviewers changed tone from praising the book's hilarity to criticizing the vicar for writing "downright gross and obscene expressions." Sterne became a hot ticket at dinners and salons. The zany mixture of adventures and accidents, farcical and sad, reflected the life of the author.

This was an odd man, to be sure, who produced an odd book. Ross's elegant and thorough biography brings Sterne to life for our age. The gregarious James Boswell wrote that Sterne was "the best companion I ever knew," and those who find him to be a good companion in the form of his famous book will find him an even better one after reading this illuminating biography.

Lewis Grassic Gibbon (or James Leslie Mitchell) has written a novel of Spartacus that is as refreshing as it is clearly one of the forerunners of historical fiction. Opening through the eyes of the eunuch Kleon and his mission to find the heroic leader of the Slaves the novel centers more around Spartacus 'inner circle' and his relationship with Elpinice. Book I is told through Kleon and deals with the period up to the defeat after the Battle of the Lake. Books II and III with Spatracus' victories until we move towards the well-known and inexorable end on the Appian way at the hands of Marcus Licinius Crassus at the end of Book VI. The novel ends as it begins, with Kleon, and his crucifixion
The novel is well written, well-paced and pauses sufficiently to voice greater philospohical views than historical novels of the current generation. It is easy to see why this has been heralded as one of the great novels of its genre.

Hogg's book was one of many 'Gothic' doppelganger novels produced at the time, as editor Cuddon makes clear in his introduction. What sets 'Sinner' apart is the fierce, unforgiving, saturnine, phlegmatic, terse, Biblical, paganistic, ugly beauty of the vocabulary and phraseology (Hogg was a shepherd and a poet), suited to a narrative lashed with hate, murder, bigotry and terror, whose sheer violence connects it with another shocking Gothic one-off, Lautreamont's 'Maldoror'; the way the 'double' theme of the novel is embedded not just in the plot, but in the rich formal patterning, from character groupings to the religiously and politically divided Scotland of its setting; and the wide literary adventurousness as a whole which, in its proliferation of stories, framing devices, and self-reflexivity create a labyrinthine, elusive, very modern text.

James Hogg's "Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner" is a claustrophobic, terrifying spectacle of a novel. First published anonymously in 1824, the novel centers around the manuscript of an obscure Scottish Laird who lived in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Robert Wringhim is a well-educated, but illegitimate child of the Laird of Dalcastle. He leaves the estate to live with his mother, also estranged from the estate. Raised by his adopted father, a zealous Calvinist preacher, Robert grows to despise his biological family. When, on his 18th birthday, God reveals through the preacher, that Robert is one of the elect, the true action of the novel begins.

The novel has an unusual and provocative structure: an editorial recounting of the story envelops the text of Robert Wringhim's actual 'memoirs and confessions'. The novel's temporal structure hinges on the 1707 Act of Union which annexed Scotland to England, forming Great Britain. With the editorial apparatus (and its debt to an oral tradition), and Robert's first person manuscript, Hogg seems to question the methods by which history is written and passed down. Several versions of Robert's story, from himself, his contemporaries, and the 'editor' who lives over 100 years after the events gives a startling, disturbingly incoherent vision of history.

This novel is great for its wranglings with the problems of reconciling money with morality, and religion with the law. Hogg's primary concern is with the religious issue of antinomianism - the notion that God's elect are free from the dictates of human law. Robert's election and subsequent relationship with the wildly mysterious, fantastically rendered Gil-Martin put antinomianism to the harshest test.

"The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner" is a rather short novel which I recommend highly. It is an entertaining historical, religious, psychological rollercoaster. Its blend of sublimely dark humor and social comment is a high achievement in any century.

Hogg's novel is about 150 years ahead of its time. Published in 1824, the work has everything readers of post-modern novels could ask for, including clustered narratives, self-reflexive point-of-view, unreliable narrators, unsympathetic-protagonist, etc. Hogg is engaging in a highly playful exercise, yet at the same time the novel can be read as an entirely chilling depiction of what may happen to the human psyche when it is given absolutely free-reign. The story takes place in Scotland in the early 18th century, a time of political and religious foment. It chiefly concerns the religious "progress" of Robert Wingham. Robert's mother is a religious enthusiast who has left the household of her husband, George Colwan, laird of Dalcastle, because he does not meet her stringent standards of pious behavior. Before she leaves, she delivers a son, whom Colwan names after him and names him his sole heir. A year after she has left she delivers another son, Robert, whom the editor-narrator who first tells the story is too polite to say is illegitimate, but it's evident by all appearances and intimations that Robert is the son of Lady Colwan and the Reverend Wringhim, a dour, intolerant, "self-conceited pedagogue," who is the polar opposite of the easy-going laird. Reverend Wingham undertakes the instruction of young Robert and eventually adopts him. Robert, like his father, is a cold fish, who abhors the presence of women and anything else that he thinks will lead him to sin. Young George, on the other hand is naturally open and fun-loving, engaging in the "normal" activities young men of the time preferred. This attitude piques the ire of Robert, who sees any activity that is not directly related to religion as frivolous. He starts showing up uninvited whenever and wherever George and his friends get together. When they try to play tennis, Robert stands in George's way and interferes with the game. The same thing happens when they play a rugby-like game on a field outside Edinburgh. Even after George loses patience and punches Robert , the younger brother keeps on insinuating himself, uninvited, every time George and his friends meet. When the Reverend Wingham learns that his precious boy has been roughed up, he incites his conservative faction to retaliate against the liberals with which George and his friends are in league. A full scale riot ensues, reminiscent of the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet. Neither the editor nor Wingham ever give full assent to the fantastic elements in the story. Events are depicted in as realistic a light as possible, which lends weight to the storyline and keeps things from drifting off into never-never land.

Everything about this novel "works." The editor's framing narrative subverts Wingham's "confession" narrative at just the right points, so the subversion actually adds to the solidity and texture of the work as a whole and adds to its plausibility. The comic characters are wonderfully depicted (including Hogg himself, who puts in an appearance as an unhelpful clod who's too busy observing sheep at a local fair to assist the editor and his party when they want to dig up Wingham's grave). Wingham's descent into fanaticism and his subsequent psychological disintegration is handled as well as it possibly could be. It is also a perfectly drawn cautionary tale about the pitfalls of antinomian religious beliefs. Hogg describes for the reader a splendid representation of just where the path of predestination can lead a susceptible mind. That's where the comparison's to Crime and Punishment evolve. Wringhim, like Roskolnikov, considers himself above the common rung of humanity. Unlike Rodyan, however, Robert never does discover the full import of his megalomaniacal doctrine until it is entirely too late. Readers might be interested to note that Hogg's novel had a direct influence on Stephenson' s Jekyll and Hyde and on Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray. Hogg was considered by his contemporaries to be something of a rustic genius, and the poetic successor to Robert Burns. He was known as the Ettrick Shepherd, because he did earn his livelihood from raising sheep and was entirely self taught. He was a friend of Sir Walter Scott. He's still highly revered in his home country. If more readers become familiar with this one-of-a-kind book, he will be revered more universally. It really is that brilliant a novel.

For those who like Vampire's darkness or Werewolf's potential blood, Changeling is probably not the best game. However, if you're looking for something completely different from and possibly lighter than the other White Wolf games, this is it. Changeling, even more so than the other games, has no limits. I've been role-playing and Storytelling this game for over a year, and I find it refreshing. I can run a game where the characters have to go find chess pieces turned into humans or other similarly crazy ideas. And if it doesn't quite make sense, well, it's Changeling, and if it all has to make sense, then you're in the wrong game. Changeling's strength is in its enchantment, rather than in its logic.

There are some drawbacks to this 2nd edition, though. I was particularly annoyed by the change in the cantrips, esp. Primal. These changes make healing even harder for Changelings, which already are the weakest of the White Wolf pack.

Some call it 'fluff', some scoff at the idea of playing a faerie; however, a look deeper into the heart of the book will reveal the Changelings have as much to fear about the Endless Winter as the other supernaturals of Gehenna, the Apocalypse, the Oblivion and the Ascension War. There is a constant battle between fantasy and reality, not only are Changelings caught in the middle they are expected to fight on either side. Second edition is truly a 'glamorous' work of art, with its artwork, cultural setting, clearer rules and WW system. It can be much more challenging to run a crossover chronicle with the other WoD games but it can be very rewarding. Changeling offers an outlet of pure creativity, however this does not always equate to silliness, for the themes of Changeling can be as subtle and dark as any of those in Vampire. I may be incredibly biased, but Changeling is by far my favorite game in the WW series, for its creative outlet and strong ties to history and mythology as well as continued White Wolf quality.

I love this game! In order the list of the best to worst of the White Wolf WOD games in my opinion looks like this #1 Changeling, #2 Wraith, #3 Mage, #4 Vampire, #5 Werewolf, #6 Hunter.... Changeling is the best in my opinion because you are not playing totally angst filled Characters (Well except maybe Sluagh.) But they still fit comfortably into the World of Darkness. Its sad that most people overlook this game in the grand scheme of the World of Darkness because it is more "light" than the other games... Changeling is more fun because of that fact. No you are not on the run from the Wrym, fighting an Ascension War, participating in the Jyhad, or even having a constant battle with your Shadow. Instead you are trying to bring Imagination back to the world.. What a concept... :-)