As a family therapist, I readily and heartily recommend this book to my clients.

It is an excellent resource for parents and ANYONE who wishes to improve communication skills. Its enjoyable, lighthearted style makes it easy to read; even teens may want to read this book (as long as their parents aren't looking).

This is a quick, powerful read, that can make big differences in how you communicate. In Dr. Schenk's book he discusses little language changes that can facilitate big conversational changes. This book can help you with managing subordinates, parenting children, and building great relationships. I already knew about most of the concepts in the book, AND it was still a great review. (You will have to read the book to see why I capitalized the word AND).

I wish that I had had "Great Ways To Sabotage a Good Conversation" when my kids were young! Dr. Schenk's advice would have made life easier for all. Also, I have found this book helpful in talking with the preschoolers whom I teach.
In addition, it is never to late to change your interactions with your children and your spouse. Then, you can hope that your children will learn Dr. Schenk's lessons and use them with their future spouses and children.
All new parents need to read this book. When you buy that "new baby" card, give a great gift: "Great Ways to Sabotage a Good Conversation." This is the only book that a new mother will have time to read! By the time the baby is speaking, the new parents may have been reprogrammed! An easier time will be had by all!!

the book is easy to read,understan, and to follow. the book contains every thing the salesman need in his career this book is the start point in sales. read it and folow it.

I am a 25-year sales veteran, and have spent this entire time reading any and all Sales motivational books and "tips" I can get my hands on. Without exception, I found Paul Green's book one I will reference often, and anxiously refer to others. He has his pulse on the Sales game and on the sales professional. It is obvious he has passion for the profession and for those who pound the streets daily in search of their next success...he understands the process.

Mr. Green's humor is ever-apparent throughout the book, which makes it an even more enjoyable read. I recently took Good Selling! with me to read on the plane, beginning my only vacation in the last five years (I was trying to slow down). I found myself laughing and muttering affirmations out loud, as I finished the book before we reached Orlando. I made action notes in the margins, promising to implement all the great ideas (and reminders) I found in almost every chapter.

This book is insightful, empathetic, funny, and a true sales tool. Thank you, Paul Green, I can't wait for your next effort.

If you are a Sales Professional providing Point of Sale solutions to the retail market, this may be the breakthrough you've been looking for. "Good Selling" does an outstanding job of interspersing fundamentals of Human Interaction (a la Dale Carnegie) with specific techniques for increasing Sales. Neophytes to Bankcard/Point of Sale Services will appreciate Paul Green's coverage of the fundamentals, while veterans enjoy a refresher course and gain the benefit of Paul's research into the latest trends within the Financial Services community, and how recent technology is impacting today's market. Anyone interested in self-improvement, increased motivation, or just more sales will enjoy the read!

Joy Harjo tells this story in a simply beautiful way. Wrapped in this cover are emotions and experiences that my daughter and I can joyfully follow together. I'm always glad when my child selects this as one of her bedtime stories.

This story is a touching tale of pet ownership. The unnamed narrator shares her love for Woogie (the cat) with the reader, and expresses (in both words and pictures) a very real relationship between a child and a pet.

This story is sweet without being saccharine; emotional without being overly sentimental. Harjo's gift for poetry shows in the simple but expressive text ("My dad watched Woogie's seventh life fly by him as she ran after it"), and the warm paintings show the cat's expressions in a very real way.

According to Aunt Shelly, Woogie is a good luck cat, and he certainly proves it by surviving one scrape after another. But when he doesn't come home, we wonder if this good luck cat's luck has run out. This is a light, charming celebration of a young girl's friendship with a cat. And it's -- at last! -- a children's picture book featuring Native American characters where culture isn't the main theme. Of course, it's great to have accurate books that touch on Indian themes; however, they should be balanced with delightful stories like this one that depict daily life. Harjo's writing -- as always -- is wonderful and Paul Lee's lovely illustrations really capture feline personality.

I always wondered if I was the only person in the world who was blown away by products like "Armour Pork Brains in Milk Gravy". Paul Lukas has proven that a) I'm not alone and b) if I was more talented I could have made money writing a book about bizarre products. My only complaint about this book was that it ended. I was ready for hundreds of more examples, particularly the weird foods.

As Sigue Sigue Sputnik so weirdly proved back in the '80s, _anything_ can be a product (even a rock band). This well-written, researched and hilarious book takes us from Thirst and Musk LifeSavers (a favorite in the former penal colony known as Australia) to microwave pork rinds and the smoker's robot (read to believe). The perfect read-to-your-friend-in-the-car-while-roadtripping book

Paul has a talent for looking twice at products we usually take for granted. It's the "how did we ever miss this?" attitude he takes that makes his book and writing so fun -- he's got a great wit and eye for the absurd in everyday life. After reading his book (and his zine, Beer Frame), I've never been able to go to the supermarket in the same way again

This is a great book. Not only does it help you to sort out what you really want to do in life, it provides an easy to follow series of actions you can take to help you get there.

I found that the hardest thing about finding a new job or career is knowing where to start and how to get moving in a new direction. This book is set up in such a way that you can read a page or two at a time, get some food for thought and put it down. Then, Later you can do a "fill in the blank" quiz or checklist and get a new piece of information to fit in to your plan. Bit by bit, idea by idea, suggestion by suggestion it gets you moving and that's half of the battle to finding and keeping a job you can love at least it was for me. I highly recommend this book.
Scott Rassoulian, Brookine, MA.

I got my first copy of "Love Your Job" after I saw Dr. Powers on CNN and enjoyed his upbeat message for those in a down job market. Since then I have recommended it to many clients in my organizational consulting practice. The exercises and mini-tests (self assessments really)alone are worth the price of the book and are both motivational and practical. I have found this book to be as helpful to an executive or manager as it is to someone new in the job market. I'm on my third copy now because they keep getting "borrowed." Timeless wisdom!
Dr. Edward Deevy, North Andover, Massachusetts.

"Good News for Bad Days" is masterfully composed, flawless in its writing and wise in its message. For what it is -- a guide to the use of the spirit in coping with the adversities of life -- it's perfection. If that's your interest, you'll enjoy it and perhaps even be a better person for having read it.

Good News for Bad Days - a great title for a book which gives such a deep look into the life of the author. Father Paul shows me in this book that it is possible to be fully human and fully in touch with God. In fact, to be fully human is to live a soulful - a soulfilled - life. It is rare these days to have someone share so much of their own struggles and joys of life. In all of the struggles, there is a lesson to be learned. That lesson is grounded in a deep faith in God. I only wished that Father Paul had written this book years ago!

Sometimes, books like these can become too heavily optimistic and, therefore, alienate the reader that really needs comfort in a time of suffering. When I purchased this book, my older sister had just died at the age of 27 and I was desperate for some kind of comfort. My friends and family, though they tried, only seemed to make me feel worse. This book, however, was just what I needed.

Good News for Bad Days takes a sober and uplifting look at life without making your problems seem mundane or unworthy of notice. It is a book that is full of empathy and not pride or guilt. Father Keenan does not push Christianity down your throat or even try to convert the reader, rather he uses modern day situations to show the different ways one can look at life and times of need.

If you are looking for a friend to be compassionate and there is no one in sight, this book is just what you need.

As the other reviews say, this is a great read for those interested in straw baling. I especially liked how the authors are balanced with their approach to straw bale: they tell you the good and the bad, and are conservative about what straw can do given its limited history. I feel much more confident knowing that they're not just trying to sell the idea, but are really attempting to spread their knowledge and experience on the subject.

I was a bit disappointed with lack of information on climates other than the cold and wet Northeast. (I'm hoping to eventually build in the hot dry San Joaquin Valley of California.) The subtitle seems to be written by an editor in an attempt to sell more copies. Unlike other construction books I've seen which weigh different weather needs across the country or the continent with descriptions and maps, this focuses on New England and Eastern Canada. This focus is fine, of course, but only if the book is initially presented as such.

This book now rockets into the forefront as the most complete straw bale book. It seems pretty much to be all here: Interested in mud floors - got it; Interested in earth plaster - It's here too. All the main building subjects are covered, often exhaustively. Once one strays from the 2x4 and block foundation, into alternative building, there are by definition a lot of options. There isn't a standard set of details yet for bales, which partially accounts for the length of the book.

The authors come from the enviro alternatives camp, but they aren't romantic about it. Expect some well deserved skepticism about the virtues of Nebraska style load-bearing walls in cold climates. On the other hand they leave the decision up to you. After spending 12 pages telling you why you might not want to build load bearing walls, they spend 22 more pages telling you how to do it (not to mention the countless other pages devoted to related topics).

This book covers the subject of framed straw bale walls more completely than any other thus far. This is an important addition to the literature. While the authors are driven in this direction by the realities of snow loads that are not experienced by all, those who live in wet climates, or wish to build multi-story houses will find much of use here also.

I have been designing and building straw houses for a decade now, as well as teaching others how to do it. Across that time there have been a small handful of books on straw construction, each a great contribution in its time. But now we have what I feel is the book we have been waiting for: solid information in a well written format.

The authors are experienced builders with a common sense, grounded approach. Where most of the earlier books were coming out of the desert South West, this book specifically looks at the detailing needed in the colder and wetter parts of the world.

A wonderful contribution to the growing field of natural building. I recommend this book highly.

Political Pilgrims is the amazing story of how Western intellectuals embraced Marxist tyrants at the very moment their colleagues were rotting in prison cells, and the common people everyone claimed to be concerned for, were starving. The book relates how cultural and religious leaders from the West, including familiar names, visited the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other communist countries, and told the most appalling lies to flatter their hosts and express their contempt for Western society. It is quite an education, as another reviewer put it. Marx's revolutionary myth dominated history for the better part of the 20th Century, and if we are serious about not repeating the errors of that period, this book should be a part of our education. The short story Buddha's Smile in Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece, The First Circle, brilliantly tells the same story, from the point of view of Soviet prisoners. Lewis Feuer's Marx and the Intellectuals compares Marx and Engels themselves with the kind of people Hollander is describing. I also recommend the writings of the Rumanian philosopher, pastor, and former prisoner, Richard Wurmbrand.

Hollander retells George Keenan's story of a Norwegian radical who, when asked what country he most admired, said, "Albania." Keenan noted that the student obviously knew nothing of Albania, but chose that country "simply because it seems to be a club with a particularly sharp nail at the end of it with which to beat one's own society."

The same reactionary psychology has, it seems to me, been transferred in our day to an uncritical and naive attraction towards what is (simplistically) called "eastern religion." One could write an even longer book about how Westerners project their fantasies on monist ideologies: people like Joseph Campbell and Karen Armstrong "explaining" human sacrifice, the Theosophical Society standing up for caste, Arthur C. Clarke (Did he know much more of Asian history than the Albanian radical knew of Albania?) describing Buddhism as "the only faith that never became stained with blood." Even Hollander allowed that, "While the suspension of disbelief has its place in human life, it belongs more to the religious (or asthetic) than the political realm." But his book should be read, in my opinion, as a warning against all forms of ideological naivite. A love of truth, and a determination to tell it no matter how out of fashion it may seem, is essential to integrity in all walks of life. Political Pilgrims vividly illustrates, in the political realm, the evil that can be done when honesty plays second fiddle to fashion.....

Hollander puts the selective moral outrage and selective acceptance of evidence of the Left on parade as he follows these blinkered one's through the various Potemkin Villages of the Totalitarians, from the October revolution forward into most of the 20th century. Smug arrogance knows no political party or religious faith, no gender, race or sexual preference, it seems to be evenly spread among us. In this instance the highly developed capacity for self-deception of the Left is on trial and an amusing trial at that. Their tortured explanations of the intellectually unexplainable are a fictive of mankind's marvelous ability "to transform things to the liking of his desires".

Like all those who are "blowin' in the wind", these intellectual hard heads do not seek truth, but instead to validate their worldview. This book is a study of intellectuals, estrangement and its consequences.

Hollander has written a remarkable work of cultural history, documenting western misperceptions of revolutionary societies. As the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski has observed, it is one of the characteristics of a liberal democracy that it is politically unexciting compared with the messianic political creeds. Hollander substantiates this truth with a depressingly predictable, horrifying, but still grimly funny catalogue of intellectual gullibility concerning the supposed virtues of a succession of Communist despotisms, from the early Bolshevik state to Nicaragua under the Sandinistas. It is perplexing that this type of support for totalitarianism of the Left has not always - or even often - destroyed the reputation of the 'intellectual' professing it. One has only to think of the deserved obloquy heaped upon supporters of the equivalent monstrous tyrannies of the Right - Ezra Pound's sympathy with Fascist Italy, Heidegger's support for Nazism - to note an unwarranted inconsistency here. The preposterous encomium "Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation" (thus titled in its second edition, without a question mark), defending Stalin and the Moscow trials, has done little to dent the reputation of Sidney and Beatrice Webb as reforming advocates of Fabian socialism, while Noam Chomsky's repulsive polemics denying the extent of Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia are apparently not to be mentioned in polite company. Hollander dredges all this up, with useful annotation on just why these illusions persist. My one main criticism of this seminal book is its loose definition of the term 'intellectual'. Figures such as H.G.Wells or Bernard Shaw are indeed exemplars of the higher stupidity whereby intelligent men may take leave of all critical faculties when it comes to Left-wing tyranny. It is stretching that definition somewhat when Hollander refers also to intellectual lightweights like Jane Fonda.

Anna was left resposible to care for Winston, Mrs. Wiggins' pony while she was on a trip.Winston is a very special pony,not only because Mrs.Wiggins loves him,but because he pulls the cart every year in the spring parade.Then,everything goes wrong and Winston gets sick and dies...how will everyone do? What about the parade? The Pony Pals have it all figured out......

Have you ever lost your best friend? Well my best friend is my pony and I hope he never dies!

When the Pony Pals friend Ms Wiggens is away in Boston the Pony Pals agree to visit her horse Picasso and old pony Winston. Then Winston gets sick. Pam and Lulu know that his time has come but Anna can't take it. Acorn and the Pony Pals have to help Anna cope but one problem remains. Now who will pull the cart to lead the big parade? Can Acorn do it? Read this book and find out!

I thought this book was extremally sad I even cried during the bit with Ms Wiggens coming home. I have a pony and I would be devastated if he died(his name is Acorn!)

Ms Wiggens is training Anna and Acorn for the Wiggens Winter Festival. When she has to go to a painting show in Boston she asks Anna and her Pony Pals Pam and Lulu to visit her pony Winston and horse Picasso. The Pony Pals discover that Winston is sick so along with Acorn they help take care of him. Anna is convinced that Winston is okay but Pam and Lulu know the time has come. Can they help Anna say good-bye? Also with Winston on his death bed Anna isn't sure if there will be a pony leading the parade. Can Acorn do it? A very sad but nice book.