Jim Dugger has done a great job writing a book for us pragmatic business people who want to write the most appropriate letter in style and structure) for any given situation but don't want to spend hours learning how. I'm an Entrepreneur, work fast paced hours and sometimes take on multiple tasks in my company. This leads me to have to write sales letters, customer relations letters, internal memos, etc. To do this I need to be flexible in my communication with various people and this book helps me do just that. I keep this book handy on my shelf, and so far I haven't been disapointed. It will provide you with two primary things: quick advice for writing letters in professional situations and over two hundred business letter formats for easy reference. The book is organized in such a way that you can easily flip through it, find the type of letter you want to write, and find the best format to follow with a breakdown of each part of the letter and what it's function should be, as well as some general information about that specific type of letter and a visual representation of the letter itself. The over two hundred letters cover almost any type of letter you will have to write as a business person. I would have given the book 4.5 stars if it was possible, but I chose not to give it five stars because I would expect a book on business letters in today's day and age to now include at least some information on e-mail letters, or letters written in the context of e-commerce. I think that if the author came out with an equivalent book for writing e-mails or business letters for people in e-commerce situations, or perhaps made an addition to this book, it would provide important additional resources to the average user given the popularity of new internet technologies. Otherwise the book is excellent, and I highly recommend it for anyone who wants a quick reference and guide to writing business letters!

From sales and goodwill letters to collections letters and those covering employment, this revised and updated fourth edition of Business Letters For Busy People which provides templates and samples which can be quickly adapted to suit virtually any kind of business venture. The accompanying CD-ROM contains the templates for all of the samples in the text, further reducing the time needed to quickly locate and utilize a professional-sounding letter.

Very nice book! The edition I own is the 1983 printing, so I am unfamiliar with recent changes. Book has good drawings of leaves (often several), fruits, twigs, buds and leaf scars. Excellent info on summer and winter identification included in text and step-by-step outlines. The step-by-step outline starts at the front of the book and helps you identify the family in which the tree in question belongs. Then turn to the section on that tree family for help isolating which species you have on your hands. There are good text descriptions throughout to aid identification as well as information on history, growth, and commercial uses of the trees. Not a field guide for the size and weight conscious though. Keep it in your living room or SUV.

I bought my 1983 edition when I was active as a park district volunteer. What sold me on this book was that it went beyond the tree's identification, and told you more about the tree itself. For example, looking up the Sycamore it says "The Sycamore is also known as the Buttonwood, Buttonball-tree, and the American Plane Tree. It is one of the most massive of all our native trees, perhaps exceeding all others in the diameter of its trunk... The wood is heavy, hard, tough and coarse-grained; being difficult to work or split. It is used for furniture - both solid and veneer, interior finish, siding, musical instruments, boxes and crates. Practically all butcher's blocks are made from the Sycamore..." and so on.

This volume is similar to the authors earlier work, "The Illustrated Book of Trees," which was (and is) a valuable resource for many people (including me). The books even look the same, in terms of binding, fonts, and form of illustrations. A large number of flowering plants and shrubs are presented with a short description of each one together with a black and white drawing of the critical features needed for identification (there are no color illustrations in this book). This is not a professional field guide, and there is no provision for "keying out" a specimen for positive identification. As far as I could tell, there is no attempt to provide a systematic approach to identify a specimen. As with the popular field guides for birds, species are listed in groups that share superficial properties that make them seem similar to a person encountering them in the field. Furthermore, the brief descriptions and illustrations are very good, and interesting. Additional positve features include a glossary and several other ancillary tables of information. The index is not exhaustive, but has almost everything I looked for. I only had access to this book for about one hour, but I can see spending lots of time with it and I am about to make the purchase. If you spend much time in the out of doors, and wonder about the identity of plants you encounter, this book belongs on your shelf (its a little heavy for the backpack).

I highly recommend this book, no get two because if you are like me-dragging one into the field-you are going to need a second copy for your reference shelf. With 1300 references to flowering plant life of Eastern North Amercia this author leaves almost nothing to doubt. This book has made all the difference to me in identifying native plants. That's because the author gives clear identifing features and details in his short descriptions, including bloom time, habitat, range and distinguishing plant characteristics. I found the book very easy to navigate because of the illustrations. It is well organized by GENERA and thumbing through the book will help you navigate to the correct species and type of plant. I can't recommend this book highly enough, especially for the advanced plantsman!!! You do need to have familarity with the difference between a daisy and a trillium, botanically speaking, to put this reference to work for you.
This is an outstanding guide to plant identification, not a gardening book. However you can use the habitat information and the bloom time for use in planning.
I am a member of the Georgia Native Plant society. I go out to rescue native plants from development sites and reestablish them in my home garden. I am very pleased with being to rapidly identify anything I come across thanks to this excellent reference.

As a native Liberian, a history major in college and a complete bookworm, I was delighted to find this book on Amazon.com. It covers what our ancestors experienced prior to and after their arrival in the "Dark Continent". The authors have cleverly woven into their story how and why current Liberian customs and cuisine have evolved. This is also an interesting read for non-Liberians to find out about this lost chapter in the history of slavery in the United States.

I only gave it 4 stars because it was slow in places, but it was worth it in the end.

The story of African Americans leaving the United States in the 1800s to find a better life else where seems quite unreal, but this historical novel uses that base to make a wonderful story. The use of character description and the creation of a new frontier give this novel a great base for developing into an interesting novel that will make you suggest this to your neighbors and friends. The cross-over of people and locations gives the chronological story a great way of how time passes by and people still move towards the ultimate goal, freedom in their own country of Africa. This story has the opportunity to become a great school-oriented novel if given the right direction. All-in-all, this novel would be great for anyone interested in history, African culture and/or Southern and Northern attitudes in America before the Civel War.

Freedom Ships is an exciting and informative historical novel about African Americans who managed to go back to Africa in 1820 to find the freedom denied them in America decades before the Emancipation. Based on a neglected chapter in America's history, elements of the Freedom Ships narrative are reconstructed from emigrant letters, diaries, official reports in the Library of Congress, and U.S. Navy and Congressional archives. A highly recommended and engaging novel, Robert Carey and John Furbay have successfully collaborated to write an epic story of freed slaves who dare to risk all dangers in a vast and unknown continent so that their children could escape the inhuman bondage and overwhelming racial prejudice of slave era America.

I would say this is "David Copperfield"'s B-side. It is a typical Dickensian book: the life of the Nickleby family from the death of the father until they are rich and happy. One of the most important parts of the book is the study of the horrible boarding schools of Yorkshire, where Nicholas is sent. We can read the dirty intrigues of Uncle Ralph, the adventures of Nicholas and Smikes as travelling actors (a world Dickens came to know very well), the kindness of the brethren Cheeryble.

Definitely, this is not one of Dickens's best novels, but nevertheless it is fun to read. The characters are good to sanctity or bad to abjection. The managing of the plot is masterful and the dramatic effects wonderful. It includes, as usual with Dickens, an acute criticism of social vices of his time (and ours): greed, corruption, the bad state of education. In spite of everything, this is a novel very much worth reading, since it leaves the reader a good aftertaste: to humanism, to goodness.

Nicholas Nickleby is a marvelous novel. It is the young Dickens at his best. I almost feel guilty for giving it four stars, but giving it five would be unfair, I think, because his later works, such as Great Expectations, are bettter. The novel is written enthusiastically and contains some of Dickens' best humor. I especially found funny the character Mr.Lillyvick, the revered and dignified water clerk. And I will never forget Ralph Nickleby. Mr.Squeers and Arthur Gride were detestable and colorful villains, but they pale before Ralph Nickleby. He is such a cold and heartless character that he steals nearly every scene he is in. He has a certain magnetism that most of Dickens' good characters lack. And his suicide at the novel's end is so perfectly written that I read over it several times before I finished the novel. My only problem with the book was Nicholas's lack of psychology, but let us remember that this was written by a young man, not the mature artist of Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend. The novel's strengths easily make up for its weaknesses. Nicholas Nickleby will be enjoyed by fans of Dickens and all other readers for centuries to come.

I read criticisms of this book that it is not one of Dickens' best. For me, it is up there with Great Expectations and David Copperfield as one of his most enjoyable novels (A Christmas Carol is a short story).

The social axe that Dickens had to grind in this story is man's injustice to children. Modern readers my feel that his depiction of Dotheboys Academy is too melodramatic. Alas, unfortunately, it was all too real. Charles Dickens helped create a world where we can't believe that such things happen. Dickens even tell us in an introduction that several Yorkshire schoolmasters were sure that Wackford Squeers was based on them and threatened legal action.

The plot of Nicholas Nickleby is a miracle of invention. It is nothing more than a series of adventures, in which Nicholas tries to make his way in the world, separate himself from his evil uncle, and try to provide for his mother and sister.

There are no unintersting characters in Dickens. Each one is almost a charicature. This book contains some of his funniest characters.

To say this is a melodrama is not an insult. This is melodrama at its best. Its a long book, but a fast read.

An invaluable guide to this very difficult problem. Ogden, perhaps the world's leading expert in this field, makes a compelling case for deliberate long term planning, tailored to an enterprise's specific needs. His laserlike focus and penetrating analysis seem like a hidden national treasure.

Corporate titans and politicians who would like to be statesmen ought to read this book and heed the lessons offered.

Shareholders naturally assume that boards have succession for the CEO and other top executives all figured out. WRONG! A well kept secret is that many CEOs try to stall in this area, as a way to make themselves more secure.

Even the companies that work in this area can be unprepared. A young CEO may suddenly jump to another company (as Ray Gilmartin did from Becton Dickinson to Merck), die unexpectedly of a heart attack (as Jerry Junkins did at Texas Instruments), or fail to perform to the board's expectations (as has happened to many companies). Couple that with the fact that irresistible forces may mean that the style that worked well in the past won't wash any more, and apparent succession preparation can equal being totally clueless.

The authors are headhunters with Spencer Stuart and share what they learned in interviews during 1996 and 1997 at Met Life, Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard, Mobil, Continental Grain, SmithKline Beecham, Delta, Mellon Bank, Bestfoods, Foster Wheeler, Hercules, and GTE. They also interspace other examples. One of the difficulties with a book like this is that things don't always turn out as they seem. A lot of praise in the book goes into Coca-Cola's preparation for the unexpected death of Roberto Goizueta. Douglas Ivester is quickly invested, which is where the book ends. But we know that he also was almost as quickly divested as he turned out to be a poor replacement. This replacing CEOs is a tough business. As irresistible forces become stronger and more volatile, replacements will probably occur even more frequently.

The book concludes that 10 key practices are required: Have a strong, involved board; continually expose the top management team to the board; encourage the next generation of CEO prospects to get early experience with outside boards, the media, and the financial community; create an active executive or operating committee so more executives get exposure to an overview of the company, its strategy and issues; do succession planning on an on-going, real-time basis; take as much human drama out of the process as possible (it's especially hard on number twos); tie some of the CEO's compensation to succession planning and progress; have the directors be paid in stock and make additional investments in the company's shares; calibrate the internal candidates with external ones; and develop a culture that encourages succession (a la Built to Last).

So much for the summary. Here are the problems. Although this book purports to be a best practice book, it does not investigate enough companies to succeed. This is actually a limited survey of practices, with picking out some that seem to work better. To be accurate, such a survey would have had to consider in equivalent detail at least 400 companies. A handful won't cut it.

Second, they have to measure of success in succession. They obviously like some better than others. Without some success measure, you cannot pick out best practices.

Third, the book plugs a service that appears to be from Spencer Stuart in callibrating internal and external candidates. To me, that made the book read like a virtual ad rather than a book about management practices.

Fourth, the audience spoken to was mostly boards and CEOs. There are a lot of other stakeholders out there, like customers, employees, suppliers, distributors, and the communities the companies serve. Shouldn't their reaction be considered in deciding which successions work well and which do not?

I could go on, but you get the idea. The authors needed someone to help them design a methodology before they started. Without one, they have produced a book, and some of what it says seems to make sense. With an appropriate methodology, I am sure they could have produced a much better book.

If you want more information on the subject, your best source in my opinion is to read the case studies in Directors & Boards, a magazine devoted to corporate governance. The material I have read in that magazine is consistently superior to what is in this book.

Good luck in overcoming your disbelief stall that people who recruit CEOs should know how to determine best practices in the area of CEO succession.

Authors Dennis C. Carey and Dayton Ogden present a thorough, insightful guide to choosing a new Chief Executive Officer in this nicely written, concise book. Offering plenty of inside information and real-life corporate examples, the authors explore their ideas without resorting to fluff or to the dry, dull prose that often fills such books. Given their experience helping corporations choose CEOs and other executives, the authors know what they're talking about and understand the tricky issues involved in putting any advice into practice. Their book delivers what it promises, and given that it can be repetitive, it delivers on some of those promises two or three times (but we're quibbling, some of those lessons do bear repeating). We [...] recommend this book to anyone involved in executive succession and recruitment, especially board members (read it now, before you ditch your CEO, not after).

I read this book for a book report and I originally thought it sounded very interesting. I saw the book (it is MASSIVE, 886 pages) and I decided that I still wanted to read it. I began to read and it starts off very confusing and rocky.

The book is not funny, and not witty, it just has a smart theme. By the end you are pretty well caught up on characters, plot, etc. but it is grossly sad in a realistic kind of way and a big fat waste of time. If you are a scholar or interested in long books or origin/closer look of the behavioral sciences then this might be something you are interested but if you are on the fence about this book, my advice is get out of it while you still can!!!

When reading victorian fiction, with its prim and child-like heroines, I sometimes long for a story about someone who is neither long suffering or innocent. Vanity Fair is the perfect remedy. Becky Sharp probably is the wickedest woman in 19th century fiction and one of the most delightful. Whether facing uncertainties at the battle of Waterloo, or seeking a rich protector, or FINALLY marrying for money (this husband disappears before the money does), Becky is determined to have the kind of life with which she would like to become accustomed. This book is pure pleasure since the reader is always wondering "what is she going to do next." This book cannot be praised to highly.

Hilarious, scathing, wistful, beautiful.

Incredibly modern; the language is as fresh as if Thackeray had penned it yesterday.

A pure delight from beginning to end.

If you're one of those booklovers who reads as much as anthing else in order to get to know the author, in order to sit down and share a beer with him (or her) as it were, then this is your book.

You will come to adore Thackeray, to wish he were your best friend.

In short, if you love Henry Fielding's brand of humor and conversation with the reader in Tom Jones, then you will love Vanity Fair.

This Penguin edition features a brilliant introduction by John Carey, in which he draws comparisons between Vanity Fair and another sumpreme work of art: War and Peace.

In fact he argues that without Vanity Fair, there may never have been a War and Peace.

Ahh, Dobbin. A character that will live in my heart forever.

This is a truly enjoyable book. Carey discusses (or should that be: enthuses about) his personal favourites with a passion that makes one want to go out and read, or re-read, all of them. And he does so in a wonderfully concise and clear manner, never academic in tone.

This is a book for anybody who love reading, to read, but also to refer back to from time to time. I cannot but recommend it.

I have used this book in my classes on Celtic literature and mythology, and have found nothing else comes close for classical and medieval sources on the Celts. It is a collection of translated original material to be used by those interested in real, as opposed to fanciful, Celtic studies.

This book is a brilliant kick off point for anyone interested in the real ancient celts. It consists in the main of translations of historical texts. Most people are reasonably au fait with the insular texts thanks to the romantic movement, but fully half the book is dedicated to the comments that the ancient Greeks and Romans made about them. These "first hand" accounts are otherwise difficult for the beginner to find which is sad as I feel that they show what these great people were really like. A great read.

Although I don't have any formal academic background in Celtic Studies, I found this book to be very approachable. It gives easy-to-follow translations of the original text alongside fascinating insights on ancient Britain and Ireland. For the hobbyist it can be hard to find books on Celtic lore which both are readable and have substance -- this does both nicely.

Strange to think that a well-chaired professor at Oxford, that ancient bastion of academic elitism (still, despite the sun setting on its hallowed but crumbling halls), would have so much criticism to level against the dawn of modern intellegentsia. But upon reading the first part of this concise and well-documented book, it became clear to me just how rotten at heart our intellectual heroes truly were. Carey finds a wealth of unnerving evidence that the great figures (self-appointed "greats," as this book shows us) of the modern literary canon festered with hatred of the common man, so much that they advocated (oftentimes straightforwardly) wiping out all of humanity. Moreso, the various case studies in the book's second part uncover further details about just how much these great writers loathed the "masses," and the strange, selfish reasons behind their disdain.

This is an excellent read for anyone struggling through "Ulysses," "To the Lighthouse," or even "The Wasteland." Carey's thorough research and well-argued points shed much-needed light on the dark side of our past century's most celebrated authors: why they wrote in such an unreachable voice, why they crafted their themes to be so alien to most people, why they lived where they did, and (most importantly) how much worthier they took themselves as human beings. I did groan a bit during the final chapter, which was about Wyndham Lewis and Hitler. Dropping the "H-bomb" can make anything seem evil and was therefore too easy a potshot for Carey to take at the intellectuals. Also, the two back-to-back case studies on H. G. Wells were somewhat redundant; Carey would have done better to write two case studies on two separate writers. Still, this book gives the reader an exciting, enlightening, and shocking view at the world of the intellectuals between 1880 and 1939 (and, in the Postscript, a look at similar currents in today's postmodern world), and I highly recommend it to any fan of modern literature who is not afraid to explore the ugly side of the great writers.

John Carey's "The Intellectuals and the Masses" is an eye-opening account of the fear and loathing many English writers had for ordinary people during the early days of Modernism. The intellectuals of the time hated and feared the growing power of the newly expanding middle class. Many famous and prominent writers came to dislike democracy and capitalism, because they thought they were losing influence. Carey theorizes that Modernism was invented in order to shut out the common reader of the day; to prove the elite's superiority and to put the upstarts in their places. Wyndham Lewis, a man with an amoral personal life, worshipped Hitler. D.H. Lawrence noted the efficiency of poison gas and imagined a large execution chamber where all the stupid people could be killed. Virginia Woolf sneered at the banality of the conversations she overheard from the women in the lavatory. The Bloomsbury set was especially guilty of the worst class-consciousness.

Some writers did battle with their impulses and the intellectual fashions of those years. George Orwell wrote with a minimum on condescension about "the proles" in his early novels and "1984." H.G. Wells seemed to advocate mass extermination of his inferiors in his non-fiction, but in his fiction his imaginative sympathies were usually with the failures and "losers" of the world. James Joyce's masterpiece was "Ulysses", a tribute of sorts to the common man (although written in a Modernist style that made it impossible for the common man to read it.) But on the whole the snobbery of most of the intellectuals of the day was unforgivable.

This book is an excellent companion to Modris Eksteins' "Rites of Spring" his cultural history of World War I. Both books argue that Modernism was in part responsible for the horrors of the 20th century, with its ruthless elitism and emotional coldness. Shaw, Pound and Forster dreamed of ridding the world of "superfluous" people; did this make it possible for Hitler and Stalin to actually attempt it? The necessary ideas were in the air. And they still are. Carey notes that, as the masses began to catch up in sophistication, post-modernism and literary theory was invented to create a new elite artistic language for its aristocrtatic initiates to revel in. The Modernist loathing for the mass media of newspapers was replaced by hatred of television and America, the middle-class nation par excellance. (And I would add, they really hate the Internet.) If you want to know why so many celebrities seem so sour and cynical about everything but themselves, read this book.

The Intellectuals & The Masses: Pride & Prejudice Among The Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 by John Carey is an informed and informative analysis of the elitist views of respected and influential literary icons during the late 1800's and early 1900's, including H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, G. B. Shaw, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Elliot, and others. A scathing and iconoclastic account attacking the negative side of intellectual views (such as a running thread of contempt for common humanity that allegedly intertwines with the philosophy of Nietzsche and an environment that brought about Adolph Hitler and World War II), The Intellectuals & The Masses does not shirk from its stringent stand or its unflinching scrutiny of smart people's biggest flaws. Highly recommended for academic Philosophy and Literary Criticism reference collections and supplemental reading lists.