after I've given my first to a friend who liked it so much that s/he kept it. This is a well-structured, clear, concise guide on how to hit the ground running in a leadership position. The authors' approach favors "this is what works--do it" over touchy-feely, less generally useful philosophizing. Whether you are a seasoned leader or a first-time supervisor, don't embark on a new position without this!

An enjoyable read with excellent sugestions, ideas, and examples. Especially valuable if you have never been a manager. There are so many great suggestions made without a lot of management theory to weed through. Made me feel confident in my abilities when my new position made me feel in over my head.

After integrating the inventions of man's several thousand years of creativity, life is now more complex and perhaps less satisfying rather than simpler and more fulfilling. Why? Because people now invest less time proactively authoring their lives and more time reactively accumulating "stuff." While "self-help" books with advice for "fixing ourselves" are abundant, there are few meaningful writings on how to author our own fulfilling life stories. "Life Launch: A Passionate Guide to the Rest of Your Life" is one of these precious few.

"Life Launch" is a powerful, well organized set of tools for helping us author our own purposeful lives. Dr. Hudson's ingenious use of conceptual "maps" breaks even the most complex phenomena, like life transitions, into comprehensible visual models. These maps powerfully facilitate: (a) characterizing the experiences we endure as we traverse the cycle of life transitions, (b) increasing our awareness of our individual resources and opportunities, (c) defining and clarifying our values and life purpose, (d) acknowledging our numerous life roles, and (e) authoring our own lives-lives that more completely and fulfillingly engage us.

Dr. Hudson's "Cycle of Renewal" is particularly powerful as we enter the 21st century where people are striving for more connection with themselves as well as with others. Like the Yin and Yang, Dr. Hudson characterizes life as a balance of "being" and "doing." Similarly, while most of us have heard of "midlife crises", few of understand the dynamics of natural life transitions. Building on the concepts of seminal researchers in Adult Development, Dr. Hudson translates psycho-babble into understandable layman's language and presents them as "The Grand Adventure: from 20 to 90."

"Life Launch" is a valuable read for every person striving to author the life they've previously only dreamed of. "If one's destiny is shaped from within, then one has to act more freely as the creator. One has to be at once the subject, author, and creator." Life Launch is this person's toolkit. A definite five star read!

I used two books for my recent Psychology class and life launch was up to date with todays society. I could relate this book to my own life. I gave this book to a dear friend for her birthday and she recommends it to others as well.

Never loan this book to anyone! I made that mistake several years ago and now I have to place an out of print order! The authors solicited a number of English and American critics as to what books they would take with them to a desert island. While the selections are strongly grounded in European and American authors the book does cover every major topic from Anthropology to Zoology. Descriptions are offered for each selection as well as rationale. Stars are added next to seminal writings. This is certainly a worth addition to any book lovers library. Just don't be an "lending" library or you might never see it again.

This an excellent, opinionated, acerbic review of Western Literature. The only other book in this catergory that comes close to this survey is Clifton McFadden's "A Lifetime Reading Plan". Both books make you want to go out and read the best literatue available. It is also daunting to think others have read this entire catalogue of books. For comments sent mail to my e-mail address.

Jelly's work is both readable and well researched. While it is written for a Catholic audience, it helped this Protestant understand the Marian dogmas for better than I did before.

Excellent book. Starting with the Old Testament, through the New Testament, through Patristic, medieval texts the author provides a faith-filled and reasonable account of how Mary has been viewed in the Catholic Tradition. A pleasure to read. I recommend it highly.

Frederic White has covered just about everything in here. While the book may take a long time to ship, it is worth whatever wait you have to endure. You probably have a year long lease anyway. The book provides an excellent overview to Ohio Landlord Tenant Law, and gets into specifics as well. If you have a question, this book very likely has your answer if you are serious about finding it. An excellent reference manual. I have it in my law office to this day.

This is an excellent book and is presented in a question and answer format which allows you to find a direct answer to your question easily. It also provides sample pleadings and forms for tenants and landlords. If you are going to be a renter for a year or more, I highly recommend this book to not only find answers to current landlord tenant problems but also prevent problems from happening in the first place. This is an excellent guide to Ohio Landlord Tenant Law.

I found this book at our local library here in Albuquerque, and just had to own a copy. For anyone with an interest in Chopin, this book is an incredible gold mine of facts and details you won't find anywhere else, but Chopin is really only a small part of the wide-ranging subjects covered. Everyone who was anyone in Paris in the 1830s and '40s figures in this book, and people and events are also connected to the wider world of Europe and even America. The major composers, writers, artists, social reformers, politicians, and even doctors are covered. Nearly everything you might want to know about daily life in the first half of the 19th century is also described (will definitely cure you of any longing for the "good old days"....).

William Atwood is a dermatologist, and his descriptions of the medical thinking and practice of the time were especially interesting to me. As a holistic practitioner, I appreciated his discussion of the popularity of homeopathy in the 19th century. Chopin, of course, used homeopathy instead of the brutal methods of the allopathic doctors of his time, and seems to have been far better off than he would have been otherwise.

This book was a great help to me in clarifying Chopin's place in his time and adopted country. I expect to refer to it often.

What pleasure it is to be able to sit down and write a review of a truly enjoyable book such as this one. As I sit here typing I am listening to some music from one of the greatest composers of the 19th Century, Frederic Chopin. Fitting no less, as this book provides the reader with a guide through the City of Paris as seen and experienced by Chopin during his time there.

The author, William Atwood, has written two previous books on Chopin and in this third book he shows that he has a deep understanding for Chopin and his time. Covering the period from 1831 to 1849 Atwood covers all manner of subjects in his discussion of Paris, that beautiful city that seemed to produce some of the greatest artists in Europe. The author provides you with an insight into the social and artistic scene as well as some of the more interesting people, places and activities of Paris.

The book covers not only music and musicians but poets, writers, painters, the opera and theatre, medicine, bohemians, people of the street and how they all lived and survived during this turbulent period. The story just flows along smoothly and some of the stories are just amazing.

For instance when Paris decided to solve the sewage problem that tended to blot the city streets they changed the roadways contours from concave to convex allowing the swill and sewage to run off the roads into the new drainage system. The only problem with this was that not all the drains were properly covered and children often fell through the drains into the underground sewer system!

Another interesting little story in the chapter on medicine informs the reader that during the craze for bleeding as a form of combating illness that swept Paris during the early 1830's it was estimated that by 1833 Paris was importing 41.5 million leeches a year!

One of my favourite stories was the tragic tale of Alphonsine Plessis, the lady of the camellias, which can be found in the chapter regarding bohemians and demimondes (I don't want to spoil the story for anyone so you will have to buy the book and read it for yourself). According the Atwood the people of Paris still leave offerings of flowers on her tomb at the cemetery at Montmarte.

For anyone who loves good history, the arts or just a well-written book I am sure they will enjoy this story. In the pages you will find some of the greatest names in the world of the arts, Frederic Chopin, Eugene Delacroix, George Sand, Honore de Balzac, Hector Berlioz, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Franz Liszt, and many many more. The book also provides numerous black and white illustrations showing Paris, its people and its buildings, during this time. This is a great story, an enjoyable read and an interesting piece of history.

Frederic Flach, M.D., graduated from Cornell University Medical College where he currently serves as Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry. He is an attending psychiatrist at the Payne Whitney Clinic of New York Hospital and of St. Vincent's Hospital and Medical Center. He has written numerous books on resilience and the survivor personality, with a particular emphasis on the management of stress throughout one's life.

This 234-page book is clearly written and well laid out, with a table of contents, index and bibliography. Dr. Flach starts the book with an introduction explaining the concept of resilience, which he defines as the "psychological and biological strengths required to successfully master change." In the modern, fragmented, urban world that 95% of us in the U.S. live in today, no topic could be more significant. Dr. Flach has spent years studying how people cope with major catastrophes and terrible hardships, as well as potentially dangerous major turning points in their lives. He has discovered that there are common personality traits of people who are resilient/survivors, including:
--creativity
--a high ability to tolerate pain, emotional and physical
--self-insight
--self-respect
--self-esteem and the ability to restore it when it is diminished or temporarily lost
--a capacity for learning
--the ability to make and keep friends
--the ability to cooperate and inter-depend on others without being dependent
--a vital, evolving perspective on interpreting the events in one's life and giving them meaning
--a willingness to utilize crisis and suffering as an opportunity to heal old wounds, discover new ways to approach life and make themselves over
--a body able to deal with the physical strains of the stress response
--a willingness to "appropriately collapse" in the face of a significant amount of stress and change (take time to experience the extent of the problem on all levels)
--an ability to contain within reasonable limits the amount of disruption in their lives due to the stress and change
--a desire to directly and practically attempt to reassemble the pieces of their lives after collapsing and containing the disruption
--a support network out in the world and a willingness to seek help when they need it, from friends, family or mental health or medical professionals

I find Dr. Flach's theoretical framework fascinating, informative and very useful, to wit: that it is a fact of life in nature that the physical world we are all part of is made up of endless cycles of disruption and reintegration. As human beings with physical bodies, living in the physical world, no matter how brilliantly and creatively we have managed to seemingly defy and work against the natural reality, it remains, always, within and around us. Thus we continually face crisis (the end of a cycle in our life, which demands that we change in response to a newly entering, different reality), and stress (the response of the body to any demand made upon it).

Dr. Flach provides an clear, easily understandable, compelling discussion of both these issues. I found his remarks on stress an excellent expansion on the huge body of literature on this topic written over the past 30-40 years. And I found extremely profound and useful the way he ties stress and disruption-reintegration together by explaining, very clearly, the concept of homeostasis. This, he states, is the innate drive within all living creatures, including humans, to maintain themselves in states of coherence, that is, to return to the status quo after being disturbed. This self-preserving, adaptive capacity is in all of us, and it is essential that we use it, rather than fighting against it, to maintain physical and mental health.

If you were to read only one book on the subject of resilience, this would be a very good choice. It is easy to read, and it makes a logical, concise, clear argument that is consistent throughout. Dr. Flach draws practical, meaningful conclusions, based on his professional experience with thousands of patients and his own professional research, and offers simple, understandable, practical suggestions for ways to survive and grow in the face of the inevitable stress and change we all face constantly.

The New England Journal of Medicine: "Part practical, part inspirational...Written with clarity...contains short, readable examples for all aspects of life...useful to lay persons in times of crises."...Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., Saybrook Institute: "Well written and vital. Flach presents ways of coping with stress, recovering from disruption and creating a process by which one can not only survive catastrophe but can escape with flexibility, faith, and the will to endure."

I have found this book to be a valuable personal resource as well as a resource with patients I see in the health care setting. I would recommend this book to those who are straving spiritually (which I cam imagine might be all of us) and those who are caregivers in the caring professions.

The Brussats have presented us with a real winner. Their book is not just another interesting, inspirational collection of advice and philosophy, but instead a very practical reference that I can use frequently in my every day life. And not just for myself but with my clients as well. Particularly easy to use because of it's coherent, straight forward format that runs throughout the book, it offers exercises and information that help me impart, to myself and others, ways for living a grateful, gracious, life, in which difficult circumstances, disappointments, pain,etc., may be transformed, even if only for a few moments, so we can catch a glimpse of the light and restore our faith. This is genuinely a major accomplishment. The book has not yet made it to my book shelf though I bought it when it first came out in early winter. It stays out on my desk at all times so that I can refer to it everyday. I want to say thank you and bravo. I look forward to Maryanne and Frederick Brussats next star turn in publishing.

rodboomboom of Dearborn, MI has already written a review that I could not surpass. I will just append these thoughts. The book should be read by anyone, layman, clergy or seminarian, who has lost their way in the morass of spirituality (that has nothing to do with God) and religiosity (pious sentimentality) that abounds these days and that can be found within any denomination. I would also recommend it to those free thinkers who find themselves toying with whatever a popular actor might be experimenting with today and makes them feel good. Although Baue's book is concise,and even easily understood, it has more meat on the bone than most popular books we find when entering the local book store / coffee shop. It is worth the brief time it takes to read it, and the benefits may last forever. In any event, it should encourage you to explore more. It might even get you wondering if the idea (being sold today by some with a dark agenda) that there are no absolute truths isn't true at all.

This is a vast undertaking, to look at history in its enormity and complexity, and find patterns, indicators that help provide direction and hope for our history, our society, our church.

Such Baue succeeds in doing. His breadth of reading in history, society, literature and church are remarkable. Further, he is able with a succinct, tight writing style capsualize the salient conclusions and insights he wants to present.

Taking his clues from discovery of sociologist Sorokin, he guides our tour through history using large systems of cultural change, breaking them down into Ideational phases (interest in things spiritual) and Sensate phases (interest in things material, of the senses).

The author sees our society and history as in Transition from a declining Sensate time to an increasing Ideational phase. The Church of Christ should rejoice? Not quite yet, as Baue so accurately portrays, this is not all good news that some put it forward to be. Yes, increased interest in things spiritual, but not in the most healthy, true spiritual sense.

The main thesis put forward is his clever coining of this new phase as the "Therian Age," using the greek word "there" for the beast of Revelation who portrays himself as love but turns out to punish the real love of God shown and believed in His church.

Baue has clearly shown that postmodernism is not the enemy now. Past that, the world is entering a spiritual age, but a dangerous one in which everything is tolerated enthusiastically, except for the true spiritual entity, Christ's holy and apostolic church.

Encouragement and hope are expressed, with tempered prognosis and well thought out responses suggessted.

Could well be a "break through" book! Fascinating reading to be continually reflected upon and considered by God's set apart people!