Anyone who wants to know how to overcome the trappings of this shallow materialistic world and become a free and uplifted person, look no further. Divine Right is the most honest, soulful, lovable character that I have ever encountered in literature, and his struggles with family and identity should hit home with anyone who has ever had to rethink their view of self. I read this book once and had to read it again and again and again...I am a better person for it. Norman's descriptions of Kentucky are so perfect, and anyone who's never met the Greek in one form or another should definitely get ahold of this book ASAP!

I originally read this novel as "serialized" in the Whole Earth Catalog. They put each short chapter, sometimes only a few paragraphs, in a narrow column on every-other page of the catalog. I'll bet I've read this book four times.

Divine Right's Trip is so intensely, so honestly human that it hurts. Stick out your thumb and hitch a ride with hippie Divine Right and his girlfriend, Estelle as they bump along in Urge, D.R.'s psychedelically-painted VW bus.

To read this book is to trip. For those of you who haven't tripped, the sensation was summed up well by the very friend who bought me that Whole Earth Catalog 'way back then. He admits to "dropping acid" back in the late 60's. He told me once that tripping is like sneaking into the circus by crawling under the tent: Sometimes you get the clowns, sometimes you get the lions.

And that reminds me of something Divine Right read, written on a bathroom wall somewhere along his trip: (paraphrasing) "There are nights when the wolves are silent and the moon is howling."

Just read the book.

--LW

This is a classic piece of American history. For those of us who were fortunate to live in the 60's, it will make you cry and it will make you laugh out loud. For younger readers, take a trip with Gurney back to a time when everything of the fertile mind was possible and "far-out". My favorite character: "The Lone Outdoorsman". Enjoy the ride and arrive alive!

This is an excellent guide book. I highly recommend this book to anyone in the field of massage therapy, or who may be thinking of getting into reflexology. Great illustrations, very easy to read and understand. Wonderful ideas and example stories to refer to and use in daily activities.

FEET FIRST is the ultimate book on reflexology, since Laura Norman is the ultimate reflexologist and she shares her techniques in this book. Reflexology is a philosophy which links every part of the body with a corresponding area on the foot, and soothes those body parts by a specialized method of foot massage. Everything one needs to know in order to master this ancient form of therapy is included in FEET FIRST. If one cannot get to Laura, using her method is the next best thing, because a Laura Norman reflexology session is like no one else's treatment. Afterwards, your toes will feel like singing!

It is an old edition but I find the visualization very unique.

Please ask the author if there would be updated revision?

An excellent natural healing reference book. Tons of cross references. So easy to follow. Beautiful clear layout. Covers just about everything. Tells how to do it yourself in many cases. Includes Ayurveda, chinese medicine, flower remedies, herbs, home remedies, aromatherapy, vitamin therapy and homeopathy.

Written by experts in each field, this full-color illustrated book provides a chapter on each of the eight major alternative therapies: ayurveda, aromatherapy, flower essences, Chinese herbal medicine, herbal medicine, vitamins and minerals, homeopathy, and folk remedies. Each chapter includes practical, cultural and historical background, and up to 60 remedies per therapy, explaining the ailments and the therpeutic effects of treatment. A glossary of terms, lists of contacts, and further reading help make this an essential guide to alternative medicine.

This book is so easy to use and understand. It presents each item individually and also has a section that covers most problems that people face from upset stomachs to headaches to Cancer. Obviosly some remedies seem far fetched but the vitamin section makes good sense and gives you much more information then the vitamin bottles at the store!

This is a very practical and powerful guide for improvement.

1. The first revelation this book brings is: improvement is a change. From this viewpoint, the fundamental questions faced by the improver (e.g. Green Belts and Black Belts) are:

(1) What are we trying to accomplish? (Define phase)
(2) How will we know if a change will result in an improvement? (What are the key Y's?)
(3) What changes can we make that will result in improvement?
(What are the key X's and their settings to affect Y's)
Appropriate tools from '6-sigma' tool sets can be used to seek answers to (2) and (3).

2. The Guide emphasizes testing a change in small scale before full implementation so we can learn and improve the proposed change using the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle. This significantly improves our typical 'trial-and-error' approach.

3. The Guide classifies improvement into 3 categories:
(1) Eliminate Quality Problems (the aim of many '6-sigma' projects)
(2) Reduce Costs while maintaining or improving quality (the goal of many internally focused improvement efforts)
(3) Expanding Customer Expectations
Specific advises and examples are presented for each of these categories.

4. Best of all is a list of 70 Change Concepts categorized under 9 sessions, e.g. standardization under Manage Variation, Synchronize under Improve Work Flow.
Using these change concepts can significantly reduce the time to develop the specific changes.

This book is very easy to follow and contains a lot of examples. It is a must read for all improvement practitioners including Green Belts and Black Belts.

Whether involved with improving products/processes within a business or coaching little league baseball, The Improvement Guide provides a practical and fundamental approach for improving performance. The book serves as an excellent reference for those involved with change, specifically, change that will result in improvement.

A few of the items from the book which ring in my mind continuously include:

Improvement can be viewed as a science (in fact, some of us do!).

Three questions provide the framework for improvement: 1.What are we trying to accomplish? 2.How will we know if we if a change will result in an improvement? 3. What changes can we make that will result in improvement?

While there are many opportunities to change, there are only 70 change concepts (included in the Appendix) available to us today.

Any system for improvement will include five activities: 1.Establishing and communicating the purpose of the organization/team. 2.Viewing the organization/team as a system. 3. Designing and managing the a system for gathering information for improvement 4.Planning for improvement and integrating it with business planning. 5. Managing individual and team improvement activities.

Leaders are required to implement change that will result in improvement and they draw their power from three sources (the informal leader gets his/her power from sources 2 and 3 below). 1.Authority or position 2.Knowledge 3.Personality and persuasiveness (caring about people)

These items and many more, are introduced in the book via an easy-to-understand model that uses proven methodology for developing, testing, and implementing change that produces specific, identifiable improvements.

Dr. W. Edwards Deming, whose management ideas and Profound Knowledge provide the theoretical underpinnings of this book, continually asked the question to anxious audiences: "By what method? How do you go about it?" As a professional in the quality sciences field, I believe this book has the answer to those questions as it relates to improvement. The Improvement Guide defines improvement and describes in complete detail workable, easy to use techniques that are effective and time-tested. The book is based around the Improvement Model, an expanded and improved version of the Deming-Shewhart cycle, whose historical roots trace are grounded in applications of the scientific method and applied scientists since Roger Bacon. The principle of testing on a small scale, learning using the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle, and building knowledge sequentially using the Improvement Model are some of the most practical and useful aspects of the book. Part I is written on an introductory level and provides lots of simple examples that guide the beginner through theory and practice. The heart of the book, and some of its most useful content, describes ways to develop, test, and implement a change. The insights provided, based on decades of experience and knowledge of the authors, are invaluable. They are followed up by thoroughly documented and easy to understand case studies that ring true using real life examples related to manufacturing, services, health care, and a variety of standard business and educational processes. Finally, the third section describes an integrated approach to various standard improvement goals and useful strategies for achieving them. This section also includes extremely insightful guidance for leaders trying to promote and enable improvement, and an innovative and thought-provoking section suggesting techniques for expanding customer expectations to increase demand for products and/or services. This section, too, is replete with examples and case studies to support and illustrate methods and concepts.

This book should be studied by anyone, beginner or experienced professional, interested in a systematic method for improving processes, products, or services. I strongly recommend it.

I've been an avid Mule deer hunter for about seven years and I thought that I new how to go about going after the "Gray Ghost". I was wrong, you learn some great techniques on how to look for, find, and stalk the trophy of a lifetime. I would recommend this book to anyone that loves to hunt Mule deer no matter how long they have been hunting.

Let me start by stating that I am fairly new to big game hunting (deer etc.). I've tried scouting without much succes--until reading this book. THe best part of the book (the main focus) is in helping hunters practice to know how to locate game in the field before spooking them. I've looked at a good amount of books on hunting deer and I this is the best I have seen, hands down. Get it and you won't regret it. P.S. I don't see why this book wouldn't help you in locating other game using similar techniques.

I liked this book. It delt with "hunting" something that is lost, with todays "buying" a deer. the guide does the "hunting" and the "hunter" does the shouting. The authors did a good job of explaining, through pictures,what it is to "hunt" deer. This is a book that you will review every year!

In all my experience with fine woodworking I haven't had the pleasure to read a book that so well written that it is as exquisite as the pieces within. This book is a must for every serious furniture maker or perhaps collector who wants to learn and appreciate this magnificent craft. How did I miss this one?

Recognizing that Queen Anne furniture is one of the timeless and most beautiful designs, I realized, on starting my first project, that I hadn't the foggiest idea of the history, the elements, or the construction techniques of Queen Anne furniture. This book has it all. The sections on history and the making of the cabriole legs in themselves make this book a "must have," both for the collector and for the cabinetmaker. To top it off, there are scaled plans for several projects, and some time-saving techiques for construction. If you get only one book on Queen Anne furniture, this is the one.

Norman is obviously as incredibly talented an author as he is a cabinetmaker. I couldn't say enough about how great a job he did with the content of this book and drawings. I only wish he would write another one for each of the 18th century styles( Federal, Chipendale, etc) This is definately the bible for 18th century reproduction cabinetmakers. Please write another one Norman!

As recently as 10 years ago, Moe's Norman's very existence was considered apocryphal. A few American golf pros, Paul Azinger and Lee Trevino come to mind, told stories about an eccentric Canadian with a strange swing so accurate he could stand on a driving range and hit the 250 yard sign repeatedly with his driver. Or they told of the time he hit three balls off the tee that were later found huddled together like mushrooms in the middle of the fairway. Then there's the time that, upon hearing someone in the gallery say he was a poor putter, he proceeded to hit a hole-in-one, boasting "I guess I won't be putting today." They said he was so good that if a hole called for a 3-wood and an 8- iron, he'd play it 8-iron/3-wood just to keep it interesting. The stories always held the not-so- subtle claim that if Norman had played the US tour, no one would have ever heard of Jack Nicklaus.

But nobody had seen him recently. He was a ghost. Finally, in 1995, Golf Digest ran a cover story that brought Moe and his strange swing back to life. By that time he had become the poster boy for a new golf movement called Natural Golf, and the leaders of that company were splashing Moe's image around as much as they could. This biography soon followed.

Fortunately, readers of "The Feeling of Greatness" will discover not an advertising piece, but a balanced look at a complicated man. Because of a childhood head injury, or perhaps just because genetics occasionally breeds the strange and unusual, Moe Norman represents obsessive-compulsion applied to golf. He is described as golf's "Rain Man", a savant-like creature of habit who found solace in striking golf balls -- hundreds a day for thousands of days -- but who was so shy, he wouldn't appear at awards ceremonies. He muttered a continuous stream-of-consciousness monologue and played so quickly that he often struck his shot before his partner had pulled his tee out of the ground. He never paused over putts, but rather hit them in full stride. He was not your typical golf pro.

However, while he was very successful on the Canadian tours of the 50s and 60s, he was a flop on the US PGA tour and, in fact, was reprimanded by fellow pros for boorish behavior. The book is honest enough to make it clear that any notion of his tearing up the US tour if only given a fair chance is just false. While he is generally regarded as one of the finest ball strikers of all time, he never came to terms with the real scoring clubs in his bag - his wedge and putter. In the end, Moe Norman was most at home on the driving range, where he gives impressive demonstrations to this day.

Having lived in the North Florida town where Moe and Craig Shankland give golf clinics every Wednesday of the winter, I have watched Moe in action many times, continually to my amazement. One day, during my 1000 balls a day stint, Moe gave me a lesson I will never forget. He's wonderful. I only wish the jerks on the tour could have accepted his idiosyncracies and made him feel comfortable out there. But who wants to make someone who can beat the pants off you feel comfortable?

This is a great story of a relatively unknown personality who could not be a part of the "system". His whole life is unconventional; however, his golf is exceptional. An upolished man, Moe Norman never achieved PGA greatness in the US, but is a legend in the amateur ranks in Canada, owning 33 course records and several rounds shot in the 50's. I was fascinated by the many examples of his ball striking capabilities, like hitting over 1500 drives in one afternoon. Each one traveled over 220 yards and each was in a 30 yard wide fairway. The average golfer loves this story. A guy like you and me CAN hit the ball well! That is what we all want.

Marsha Norman, 'night, Mother (Hill and Wang, 1983)

What a refreshing piece of work-- a sparse, clear-headed play that examines the ramifications of suicide and (for once) comes up with the right answer. The action takes place in two rooms, with two people, and runs about an hour and a half. The two characters, a late-thirties daughter and her mother, start with the idea that the daughter is planning on committing suicide later that night, and the resulting tension between them allows both an examination of the more stable, understandable reasons behind the desie to end one's life and the soul-baring necessary in any familial relationship (and present in only a few).****

What if your daughter or son came into the living room, and she or he told you that he or she was going to end her or his life? How would you respond? What would you do? And the question is what can you do?

Mama thinks that her and her daughter are having a normal night at the house until she finds out that her daughter has planned to end her life. At first, Thelma "Mama" thinks that Jessie is kidding when she says that she wants to shoot herself. When Thelma realizes that Jessie is serious, the conflict begins between the struggle of life and death which is out of Thelma's hands.

Thelma stalls and tries to find out why Jessie wants to end her life. In the small amount of time between life and death, Thelma finds out more about her daughter than she ever did in her entire time with while she releases secrets and concerns that she never revealed to her daughter.

'Night Mother is a play that unwinds spellbound confessions and displays intense emotions that run through the course of people lives. Jessie and Thelma are powerful characters that makes me feel like I am there with them in the room. Jessie, in the first time in her life, feels like she has a sense of control, and death is freeing her as she sees life imprisoning her. The whole play is intriguing and complex. The ending will make you feel like you have realized that life is complex and question why you exist as a human being.

Night, Mother is a play that covers every aspect of human life: love, family bonds, importance and usefulness in society, to a slew of others too numerous to count. The dialogue between Mother and Jessie is gripping, terse and tense. The ending will inbue in the reader so many unexplainable thoughts, which will come back at you in life like flashes in the night, to make you all the more wiser and compassionate. Outstanding!

a brutally honest account of the palestinian intifada experience as written by a jewish american. exposes fallacies in the representation of the case as well as in foreign policy. very necessary in understanding the israel-palestine conflict

As a Jewish woman living in the U.S. it was difficult for me to hear but one side of the story in the Israeli-Arab conflict. That side was the Zionist perspective. It wasn't until I spent time in Israel (ironic as this is) that I began to understand the fallacies in the arguments I grew up hearing. I read this book after picking it up at a friend's house, and now I'm feeling brave enough to buy a copy of my own. That courage comes from Finkelstein. I feel like I'm in good company. There ARE other Jews who can see and dare to shed some light on the OTHER SIDE--the Palestinian viewpoint. Finkelstein presents us with the Palestinian perspective in the context of the Israel-Arab conflict with such integrity and simplicity. As descendents of a terribly oppressed group of people, I whole-heartedly support all efforts to stop dehumanizing the "enemy." Finkelstien shows us the humanness of Palestinians.

Finkelstein's book is that rare gem of a monumental work housed within a slim volume. What makes his ideas so astonishing, in addition to their being meticulously researched and footnoted, is that his parents were survivors of the Nazi holocaust. Based on encounters with Elie Wiesel and the like, one would not expect a Jew of this background to have such a profound understanding of the Palestinian people and of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This book is a must-read in that it convincingly defies, with powerfully sculpted arguments and towering research, the tired and frequently hypocritical views of the New York Times and other news authorities.

Finkelstein will convince you.

Isn't it amazing what money continues to do to some people and more so, to business? This excellent historical and recent account of how classical music has wound up monetarily suffocating itself is the best read that I've encountered. I could never figure out, until I read this book, why some popular artists' CDs would still be $16 EIGHT YEARS after their release. That's because the CD label still hasn't recovered from paying that artist's ridiculous fee and consequently, redirects the recording industry's funds away from our country's orchestras and lesser known talent. One can see today what turmoil this has caused classical music and its starving artists. Read this book, for if you love classical music, it can be a guide to help people better manage classical music towards a more fiscally sound future and most important of all, stop the greed.

If you've watched the two-decade evolution in pop music industry exposé books-going from general veiled accusations and using pseudonyms, to the hard- hitting journalistic romps that are being written today, naming names, dates, companies, and places-then you'll appreciate the HIT MEN of the classical world, Norman Lebrecht's WHO KILLED CLASSICAL MUSIC, which, while it may not name vulnerable artist names in all the damning anecdotal situations in which Lebrecht places them, does explore the life and business of classical music in an alert, candid, and yet affectionate way, naming companies, managers, artists, salaries, and even top-echelon concert fees. Readers who may follow classical record-business entrepreneurship will be glad to find that the great independent- label success stories of our era, such as Naxos and Hyperion, are very much a part of Lebrecht's consciousness and research. There are no clear-cut classes of heroes and villains here, just a general sense of regret and fatigue about the current state of business in the classical world. Ron Simpson, School of Music, Brigham Young University. Author of MASTERING THE MUSIC BUSINESS

This book takes a unique look at the classical music world of today. Norman Lebrecht has combined historical evidence as well as researched evidence to declare the truth about the condition of classical music today. It is, as a modern historical account, quite stunning. And for one overly romantic about classical music today, this book dispels much of that kind of though. You learn about Pavarotti's greed, the sexualization of female stars, and down-right dirty underhanded agents. It's a must-read for all classical music lovers.