I met Richard one night in Greensboro. He was a very nice person, and a terrific writer. I consider him a good friend. This is a touching story and is masterfully done. Great job again Richard! I would recommend this book to people of all ages.

It goes beyond talent. Stafford captures your heart as each shell he finds opens a new passage way for the reader to explore. Stories which cause us to question our beliefs, our thoughts of people, and our inner most feelings. I've read and reread this book and would highly recommend that you do as well.

This book offers a look into a man's life of whom we know nothing. It allows us to hear his life story through an interesting comparison of sea shells. This book is great for all ages, but especially good for moms and dads whose son(s) or daughter(s) is about to go to college. A definite "Must read" book for the whole family.

"The Bar Code Implementation Guide" by Stephen L. Pearce and Rick Bushnell truly is a guide that will benefit anyone who already uses or is interested in using bar coding for warehouse and distribution systems. Written by two well-respected members of the distribution industry, the guide provides practical, easy-to-understand steps to implementing bar coding technology. This is not the average "turn the page and continue reading" book. The guide is divided into several sections that address the many facets of bar coding implementation in a clear and concise fashion. Want to know how bar coding can help your business? Turn to the "Benefiting from Bar Codes" section. How about the money aspect? Turn to "Equipment & System Costs." The guide also includes question-and-answer sections and numerous worksheet-style appendices. These are helpful for defining specific problems your business might have and offering solutions to these problems. This is especially useful for saving money. For instance, a handy Q & A chart provides a way to quantify the dollar amount saved by implementing bar code technology. Above all, this guide is practical. From the description of how bar coding works to the breakdown of industry-wide standards, the authors have provided a wealth of easy-to-read information. The clarity of the information makes the guide useful across many business disciplines and provides a common language for trade partners. Follow the guide's plan and save your company money!

"Strategic MRO is the first practical summary about the challenges facing organisations trying to improve their bottom line. Strategic MRO delivers a concise review of these challenges and the engineered processes that permanently reduce the costs associated with plant operations and MRO. This book should be required reading for all purchasing, plant maintenance, and engineering personnel."

I really enjoyed this book. It's a great insight into the world of Lampworking. Packed full of beautiful color pictures of glass beads, the artists that make them and examples of what you can do with these treasures. Each artist shares their background and examples of their work.

This is a great addition to any "bead-a-holic's" library!

This is a terrific book for anyone who appreciates the art of lampworking, especially for those of us who collect these beautiful beads. There are short bios of the featured artists, along with examples of their work and tips for other lampwork artists. Being a collector of fine lampwork beads, I was delighted to see the faces and read the stories of so many talented artists I have come to "know" over the years. This book is a "must have" for bead lovers, jewelry designers, and lampwork connoisseurs, and would make a wonderful gift for anyone who appreciates glass artistry!
I HIGHLY recommend this book!

If you have ever admired art glass beads and wanted to learn to string them, The Art and Soul of Glass Beads will certainly get you started. Sixteen amazing lampwork artists talk about their own creativity, what got them started and share a few tips and advise on where to go to find proper equipment, glass and get help along the way. Many of these artists pour out their "souls" and share their beads as well as their experiences as they struggled to learn methods to this ancient craft as well as how to buy their beads for use in your own work. The book also has lots of projects for art bead jewelry makers. The book has easy to follow jewelry directions, illustrations, glossaries and how-tos. The photography is very high quality. I would say that anyone interested in art glass beads as a craft would find the book helpful. I enjoyed each artist's own narrative. It was a very personal look at glass bead jewelry: art and soul.

This is a new edition of a book published in 1984 that has long been out of print. So far as I can tell, the only change is a new preface of Joseph Pierce. The republication is due in part to the surge of interest in Middle Earth occasioned by the new movies, and in part due to the interest the publisher, Ignatius Press, has in the book's subject matter.

What Tolkien, Purtill, and Ignatius Press all have in common is their Roman Catholicism, and of particular relevance to this book, a common sense of morality stemming from it. Between the Purtill the critic and Tolkien the author are additional commonalities as well: Purtill, like Tolkien, is an academic who is also an author of fantasy.

Given the commonalities between Purtill and Tolkien, it is therefore not surprising that the critic is entirely sympathetic to the author. In explaining, Purtill also defends. There are a few passages where Purtill makes the defense explicit, citing negative comments by others and then arguing against them. For the most part, however, the defense is implicit, inherent in the explanations he gives. The explicit defenses are not fully satisfactory. In terms of tone they come off as, for lack of a better word, defensive. A deeper problem however is that the explicit defenses by their very nature tend to distort that which they defend - points minor in Tolkien can become major in a defense of Tolkien. These defects make Purtill's explicit defenses sufficiently unsatisfactory that the work would have been improved through their omission.

Where Purtill succeeds and succeeds quite well is when he defends Tolkien implicitly. The strength of his book lies in his explanations of Tolkien's moral views, as well as how myth is used as a means to convey them. When Purtill works directly with Tolkien's published writings and with comments he made about them in his letters, Purtill is at his most interesting and his book most worth the time spent with it.

The main works of Tolkien taken up by Purtill are "Leaf by Niggle", "On Fairy Stories", "The Hobbit", "Lord of the Rings", and "The Silmarillion". The attention paid by Purtill to the first of these, "Leaf by Niggle" will surprise some readers, but it is I think justified by the parallels between the character Niggle and Tolkien; to understand how Tolkien saw Niggle is to a considerable extent to understand how Tolkien saw himself. "On Fairy Stories" is similarly self-referential in that Tolkien is writing about a genre in which he himself works. If "Leaf by Niggle" is about the relationship between Tolkien and his writing, "On Fairy Stories" is about the relationship between Tolkien's writing and the world. Together, these works give the reader a sense of how Tolkien saw his writing and it is through these works that Purtill approaches the others.

Tolkien's chief works, "The Hobbit", "The Lord of the Rings", and "The Silmarillion" share a common world, and are treated by Purtill in an overlapping fashion. Purtill's main goal is to separate and discuss the works' moral themes. In his discussion of how morality is presented in the three works, Purtill applies the approach developed in his discussion of the previous two: the use of a particular world and a particular story to illuminate the universal and unchanging. What is the nature of good? What is the nature of evil? How do good and evil operate in man? It is simply by explaining what Tolkien has to say about these themes that Purtill's literary defense of Tolkien succeeds; it is when he is least concerned with defending him and most concerned with simply explaining him that Purtill defends Tolkien best.

Tolkien employs multiple methods to make his moral points. First, he often simply makes the moral physical - beauty and ugliness representing good and evil. Second, he facets personality; this character receives this facet while another character receives another. Third, he makes moral choices stark. While it is many other things as well, morally Tolkien's work is one of analysis - he breaks up complexity into simpler parts for study. Given this, an analytical reader is doomed to failure because his work has already been done for him - he can't break up Tolkien's characters into simpler parts because they are simple parts already. Morality in Tolkien becomes interesting not when he is read analytically, but when he is read synthetically - when the reader considers not the parts in themselves but in how the parts relate to each other.

Purtill's book benefits its reader in two ways. First, in his explanation of particular moral points that Tolkien makes that many readers may not have caught, but which enrich the experience once understood. Second, and more importantly, Purtill explains how to read Tolkien - Purtill has by no means exhausted the moral complexities of Tolkien's work; he opens the door but ultimately leaves each reader with the pleasure of crossing through and exploring it for himself.

Strategic planning as a process is nicely presented in this well written textbook. As an instructor of strategic planning at the master's level, I find the students like the book and cases and are able to create competent strategic plans using the process described. Very good resource book; one I have kept on my reference shelf.

This is one of those books where some of the photos are captioned, others are not. This is one of those books where the pictures are on a page generally have nothing to do with the text on the page. You may be reading about the Ohio River in Pennsylvania and see a photo of a power plant in Kentucky. In fact, this book on the "Ohio River" seems to spend most of its time picturing and writing about steel mills and power plants, and railroads. It's very much like the authors assembled a few photos, and 3x5 cards of text, threw them up in the air, and where they landed formed a book.

Having moved to Ohio just four years ago, I came across this book in a local library. The author and photographer actually rode the river from Pittsburg to Cairo where the Ohio meets the Mississippi.

The text and photos reflect their ambling journey -and the two are not necessarily related on each page.

"The Ohio River" shows the river and the people as they once were and as they are. Some photos are exhilarating while others are quit pensive and even sad.

If you are a river enthusiast or a lover of the Ohio, you will want this book for your coffee table.

Having moved to Ohio just four years ago, I came across this book in a local library. The author and photographer actually rode the river from Pittsburg to Cairo where the Ohio meets the Mississippi. The text and photos reflect their ambling journey -and the two are not necessarily related on each page.

"The Ohio River" shows the river and the people as they once were and as they are. Some photos are exhilarating while others are quit pensive and even sad.

If you are a river enthusiast or a lover of the Ohio, you will want this book for your coffee table.

This book is as jaded and contrived as Dr Peirce's class. There is only one chapter worth reading #7, the rest of the book serves absolutely no value. Furthermore, I agree with the previous reviewer that Dr. Peirce makes some very strong statements in his class. However, why didn't the put them in his book? I guess other professors in the field would have laughed at him. Do not buy this book..........and save yourself 15 weeks of torture by not taking his class at Nova............MBA99

This book is a good general overview of strategic management but lacks well thought out insight into what makes a strategy successful. For example in class Dr Pearce calls SWAT analysis worthless. If that is the case then why doesn't he say that in this book? Furthermore, chapter 7 is the only worthwhile chapter in the book. But even then it lacks sufficient depth to be useful to a student or practitioner of strategic management.