While other books try to teach the selling process, this piece of art helps you understand all the issues underlying in a sales force area, it's administation, the relationship with pre and post sales areas and the way to succeed in a managing position. One of the best books I've read on this subject.

I teach in one of the finest schools of Mexico, MBA Marketing and Field Force management topics, and was really tired of looking for comprehensive, complete and reasonable readings that covers the most important areas of managing a Sales Force. Churchil is a must-have text for both, college and high level (superior / undergraduate) students, since it really takes you through every important aspect of the topic.

THE CNE-4 STUDY GUIDE, PUBLISHED BY SYBEX, IS ANOTHER GREAT EXAMPLE OF THE QUALITY WORK THAT IS DELIVERED FROM SYBEX. THE AUTHORS OF THIS BOOK HAVE DONE A GREAT JOB IN ARRANGING THE CONTENT IN A MATTER THAT IS EASY TO UNDERSTAND AND FOLLOW. THIS STUDY GUIDE HAS EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW TO PASS YOUR CNE 4 EXAM. THE CNE-4 STUDY GUIDE IS VERY COMPREHENSIVE, ALLOWING FOR THIS BOOK TO NOT ONLY BE USED AS A STUDY GUIDE, BUT AS A REFFERENCE MANUAL FOR HOW-TO INFORMATION WHEN ADMINISTRATING OR SUPPORTING A NOVELL 4.1 NETWORK. ANOTHER GREAT FROM SYBEX

San Francisco p.i. John Marshall Taner is back on the case and this time he takes a case that seems simple enough but propels him into a conclusion that will forever change his life.

He is hired to find a seragate mother for a couple and 2 months after he does so the young woman vanishes after the embryo had been implanted.

John quickly assumes that the woman found out the identity of the parents and for soom reason fled but the anxious couple feels she is hiding for ransom of their child.

John begins to investigate the couples family and history only to find the unexpected.

A superb ending plot twist...well maybe not as dramtatic as Greenleaf's Past Tense but this book is a winner.

Here was an old time outlaw that didn't cotton to spending time in jail, fumbling robberies, or getting perforated by Banana Republic Keystone Cops. He was in the mold of O. Henry's bad guys in Cabbages and Kings. Further, he died a happy, affluent rascal, just as he lived - and get this - in 1947. Plenty living still remember this outlaw and to John Tanner who wrote the book with his wife, Karen (Doc Holliday, A Family Portrait: she is Doc's closest living blood relative) George Musgrave was more of an in-law than an outlaw. John is related to him so many ways it's hard to keep them straight, but John can, and does.

Karen tells a great story about her husband when they were at a Texas shindig, among Musgrave's relatives, (i.e. like John that's almost everyone is south Texas) where some disgruntled local accosted her and said: "All of these people think they're related to each other." Karen said without hesitation and with not the foggiest idea who this fellow was: "I'll bet you a bunch my husband is related to you and can prove it." She brought John over and they did prove it. The fellow simply scratched his head.

John is not only related to all the participants on the Taylor side of the bloody Sutton/Taylor feud (but I'd bet he's related to some on the other side). Moreover he's related to half the people down here in my neck of the woods, and most of them were related to George Musgrave. Take Howard Lindsay who ran the Boot Hill Museum in Tombstone for years. He's a second something or other to both George and John. So, if you think John doesn't know what he's writing about here, blame it on the relatives who were there and told him - and showed him the pictures, by gum, and a lot of them are in this book, and talk about damned interesting faces.

George was no joke, however. He rode up to an ex-Texas Ranger who was a foreman on the famed Diamond A Ranch out here in my neck of the woods, recognized him as the SOB who had killed one of his relatives, and burned him down without hesitation. George must have been all of nineteen at the time. His horse must have been a lot younger than that because when he split the breeze no one caught him.

Ever hear of the High Five Gang? George was a stalwart. This was an outfit that didn't shoot itself in the foot blowing up a RR car and leaving the pieces all over the landscape. They got the loot. And they evaded such legendary lawmen as George Scarborough, Jeff Milton, John Slaughter, Billy Breakenride (who finally became a lawman after leaving Tombstone and his Sweetie, Curly Bill and hero John Ringo, "the gunfighter who never was") and others.

Emil Franzi, fabled Tucson radio personality (when the mood strikes him to air his show) phoned here the other day and had just finished the book and was raving: "Forget those other phonies, like Butch and Sundance! This SOB is the real McCoy!" Besides that he could read, brushed his teeth, washed his feet regularly and knew how to order in French from a menu. Honest Injun.

My advice it the read this mother and find out for yourself. If Hollywood doesn't discover that it's been barking up the wrong trees for years and zero in on this badman, I miss my guess. Probably years too late and after being dragged to the party, but I predict this one will burn down the barn when they finally film it.

And it's just plain fun reading. It's full of peripheral characters like John's uncle who periodically phones him - usually on a dead Sunday - and says John, "Let's go shoot us a Sutton." This is, as I recall, the same uncle who wires buzzard wings on dead armadillos and puts them in the road for some dumb tourist to stop and gawk at, whereupon he comes out with a shotgun and cusses them out for "killin' the last danged winged armadillo in Texas."

Come to think about it the authors here, and the characters they know that are still around kicking, are as interesting as their protagonist.

This excellent Greenleaf novel opens with Tanner recovering from a gunshot wound in a hospital. He meets a young woman there who has many more problems than himself. She gets him back into "life". But later she is found murdered. Tanner has made promises to her and intends to carry them out. Villains had better beware. Great stuff!

Strawberry Sunday, by Stephen Greenleaf, was nominated for an Edgar Award, 2000 -- and reading it, it's not difficult to see why. This is a mystery novel with a social conscience and a wry sense of wit. It begins with the hero, P.I. John Marshall Tanner in a hospital recovering from a gut shot and mourning the death of his close (cop) friend Charley Sleet, but most of the action takes place in the California Salinas agricultural community. Tanner has resolved to find out who murdered Rita Lombardi, a fellow hospital patient who wants to better the life of farm workers.

There are lots of red herrings, wonderful characters, and witty and often hilarious dialogues with them (and with himself). Tanner often reaches wrong conclusions and gets plenty of egg on his face, but in the end he prevails; he's a tough guy with loads of grace. Strawberry Sunday is a punchy, funny, touching novel. Read it.

As a long time fan of Greenleaf and Marsh Tanner, I thoroughly enjoyed Strawberry Sunday. I love books that inform and challenge me as well as entertain, and can always count on this author to accomplish that.

A rumor has been circulating that Greenleaf planned to retire the Tanner series, and with the last book seemed to have done so, in a most excruciating way. With this book, Marsh has been returned to me and I can imagine him, one of the rare really good people, continuing to do what he does best.

This is an unsentimental account of a hunting-gathering life. Even with guns and metal knives, the Falcon faced starvation so frequently that it seemed practically routine. One of the saddest sentences is a simple, somewhat relieved declarative about a fever sweeping the area: "Only one of my children died."

The writing is intense, and builds slowly. Tanner is anything but dramatic, but the events of his life command respect. This is a book that no author could have created artficially: its power is natural.

Nonetheless, I would have liked to learn something about where, when, and by whom the book was written. I suspect my Penguin paperback may be missing something. Page 228 refers me to a note at the end of the volume, but it is not there.

Generally, I do not care for Introductions. However, the Introduction by Louise Erdrich is worth reading carefully, before and after reading the narrative.

This appears to be a reprint of the original text published by Ross & Haines in 1956. There were only two thousand copies originally printed.

"The Falcon" is the autobiography of Shaw-Shaw-Wa Be-Na-Se or John Tanner, a White Indian captured by the Shawnee along the Ohio River in 1789 and later sold to an Ojibwa family in northern Michigan. He went on to live a long and fascinating life among the Indians of the Old Northwest working as a trapper for the Hudson Bay Company and serving as the interpreter at the trading post at Sault St. Marie. He spent some time searching out his white family in Kentucky before returning to Michigan to be with his Indian children, forever spurning the white way of life. He went on to write this narrative in 1830 shortly before becoming a murder suspect and disappearing into the north woods forever.

Tanner's narrative is truly amazing for it's matter-of-fact style and the wealth of information it contains on every facet of Indian life in the late 18th and early 19th century including hunting, family life, Indian-white relations, foodways, views on war and murder, even attitudes toward sexual orientation. Tanner tells a story from the point of view of a man who has lived a hard life but is determined to live it as well as he is able. He makes no romantic notions about the Indians nor does he have sentimental longings for his white family. Unlike other famous captivity narratives like those of Mary Rowlandson, James Smith, or Oliver Spencer, this story is of the unredeemed captive who willingly chooses to embrace the neo-lithic lifestyle and the hardships that such a life entails, but makes no regrets of his life choices.

The historical and ethnographical information contained here alone makes it worthwhile reading, but the pure human content the author puts into this work makes it truly great.

Victory is in many ways more fluid and readable than Conrad's more dense works (for comparison sake I'd previously read Heart of Darkness and Conrad's collection of short stories Tales of Unrest.) In Victory we have Conrad's standard fare of tragedy and man's isolation, but in this case wrapped in a tale of adventure and swept along by an uncharacteristically eventful plot.

Conrad's works have, of course, been reviewed to exhaustion; the only thing that I could hope to add would be my emotional response to the novel as a reader.

Personally through the majority of the novel I found Heyst to be the only truly well defined character. Much of what we learn of him is revealed indirectly through the observations of others, but somehow Conrad manages to use this method to flesh out a complex and intriguing figure in Heyst. The remanding characters, while interesting, serve mostly as scenery. The villains Jones and Ricardo, while interesting, struck me not so much as human characters but as forces of impending doom; they could have as easily been an approaching storm or a plague or any other brand of natural disaster. The girl Lena in the end is the one exception; perhaps the one thing that I found most gratifying is the way in which her character developed as the novel neared its climax.

The Penguin Classics version is well footnoted for those of you (like me) that would have missed some of the more obscure Biblical references and allusions to Paradise Lost. The notes also comment on the narrator's shifting viewpoint, and on revisions Conrad made to subsequent editions. For those readers interested in an insight into Conrad's thinking I'd recommend this version.

Victory is the story of a man named Heyst who leads an isolated life in the South Pacific. However, he is drawn out of his isolation when he brings a woman to his island home. A chance encounter between a dishonest German who dislikes Heyst and two criminals sets up the dramatic ending. Conrad's style is as fluid as in his better known books, such as Lord Jim, and it is amazing that someone could write English so well who did not learn it until later in life and who always spoke it with a heavy Polish accent. Victory is similar to Conrad's other works in that the plot flirts with melodrama, but always is rooted in realism. Those who read the book will find the title apt.

Victory is the best of the handful of Conrad novels I have read (for reference sake, the others are Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, Heart of Darkness, and Nostromo). For one thing, the other novels were much heavier in their narrative and descriptive content. As a result, I often suffered from mental imagery overload when plodding through a page-long paragraph. Victory has more dialogue, making it an easier read. Conrad's characters are always great, and the ones in this book are no exception. I also really liked the correlation between these characters and their environment. Heyst living in a serene yet isolated island matched his aloofness perfectly. As the book reaches its climax and tensions reach a boiling point, Conrad adds to this tension in godlike fashion, as the storm evinces the internal and external struggles occurring in Heyst. Of course, Conrad don't write no happy tales (sic), but in the end, I think that the title Victory was still very appropriate. This was an excellent read and one of the best novels I have read in a long time.

"Past Tense" was the first book that I have read in Stephen Greenleaf's John Marshall Tanner P.I. series. I read a lot of P.I. novels, and my usual rule is; the darker, the better. And that is why I found "Past Tense" to be a very engaging novel. Greenleaf is not a master of metaphor like Raymond Chandler with Phillip Marlowe or Loren Estleman with Amos Walker. And his Marsh Tanner is not a man battling personal demons like Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder or Andrew Vachss' Burke. But the story here is worthy of any of those other anti-heros. One of Tanner's best friends, an honest cop, has suddenly gone on a revenge killing rampage. In the process, he has cut himself off from everyone who cares about him. Tanner investigates at first to find an answer to his baffling behavior, and then to try and save his life. The plot line is a bit convoluted and Greenleaf ends up relying on the old police corruption cliche, but it all leads to one of the more shocking endings I've seen in a P.I. novel.

Greenleaf may not be a writer whose style is equal to the masters of the genre. But with "Past Tense," he has delivered one quite memorable novel.

I just discovered this P.I. series last month and love it! The writing is all-pro, the action is fast and fun, and the hero is truly likeable. There's no recovering alcoholic (thank God), no coincidences, no sterotypes. I was worried that this might be the last in the series as this, the last one so far, was written in 1997, but I see a new installment is due in July, 2000. Pick this book up! You'll be happy you did, and I bet you'll finish it in one day!

Another book from one of my favorite authors, and one of my favorite private detectives, John Marshall Tanner - from my area, San Francisco. Effortless, fast-paced, interesting sidebar on recovered memories.

I used to love Stephen Greenleaf's John Marshall Tanner mysteries, but ELLIPSIS was tired, mechanical, and unconvincing. It reminded me of the reasons why Robert B. Parker's Spenser novels ran out of steam. For one thing, there is too much midlife crisis angst on the part of Tanner, too much relationship trouble between him and his girlfriend. For another, there are two different women of mature years who are raunchy and amusing and make Tanner blush -- one is plausible, two are excessive. For a third, the plot is warmed-over. I was reminded of Parker's LOOKING FOR RACHEL WALLACE. Again the p.i. bodyguards a major female celebrity writer. Of course, in the Parker book the writer was lesbian; here she's straight and a romance novelist. A promising plot development -- allegations of plagiarism -- goes nowhere. Another plot line, a carryover from a previous book in the series, becomes increasingly significant, but if you haven't read the previous book you'll be frustrated and put off by the too-neat tying together of disparate plot lines. Finally, the ending of the Tanner character study in this book depends on a "deus-ex-machina" ending that had me throwing the book across the room.

This was my first John Marshall Tanner mystery, not an ideal place to begin reading this series. So much is said about important events in Tanner's life that the outcome of one or more previous mysteries is given away. On its own merits, this novel has a lot going for it. I like Tanner, a regular guy, no superhero, and feel I got to know him fairly well. Through most of the book, Tanner shows good sense in the actions he takes, given that he's aware he doesn't fully know what he's getting into. Greenleaf's style is crisp, with few wasted words. The only problem is that this story is 100 pages too short for my taste. The beginning of the book is terrific, strong on plot development, characters, dialogue, everything. Then, just when things are getting interesting, Tanner suddenly solves the case. For me, the solution happened too quickly. This book has a great beginning, pretty good ending, but not much of a middle. If the series continues, I will probably read on, although at the end Tanner appears ready to retire. That would be disappointing.

John Marshall Tanner, private investigator, tells his story of this case. His client is Chandelier, a super successful writer of romance novels. Her secretary is Lark. Tanner's girl friend is Coppelia. And the author surely has fun inventing names. Aside from that, he writes in clear, concise language, presents a tight plot that is well thought out. It is a book that is a pleasure to read because it is written intelligently and without the usual gimmicks. What more can one ask for? I highly recommend it.

A usual book review outlines something of the plot, not enough to give everything away, but at least something to catch a potential reader's fancy. I cannot assure you that this book has much of plot---some men come together to run a new bi-weekly magazine in New York in the 1880s, their financial backer has hickish, conservative tendencies and he opposes a certain impoverished writer who supports socialism (then a wild-eyed fantasy. This rich man's son, who abhors any form of business, is made into the managing editor. A crisis develops, takes a sudden unexpected turn, and the men buy out the backer, who leaves for Europe. Most novels have a main character whose moods and motivations are central to the work. Not A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES. Several people figure almost equally in this respect, none of them women, but women are developed more than in most male-authored novels of the time, even including a sympathetic view of a very independent female character. Basil March might be taken for the main character, but that would be mostly because he is introduced first. He is abandoned for long stretches while we follow the lives and personalities of others.

Yet, I must say, I admired Howells' novel very much. It is not for those who require action, sex, or dramatic events. Rather, it is a slice of life of the period, of the place, of family life and social repartee that may be unequalled. Though Howells claimed to be a "realist" and he is often spoken of, it seems, as one of such a school in American literature, the novel oscillates between extremely vivid descriptions of all varieties of life in New York, humanist philosophizing, and mild melodrama, thus, I would not class it as a truly realist novel in the same sense as say, "McTeague" by Frank Norris. Howells had the American optimism, the reluctance to dwell on the darker sides of human nature. This novel may draw accusations, then, of naivete. I think that would be short-sighted. Henry James and Faulkner might be deeper psychologically and Hemingway more sculpted, but Howells sometimes puts his finger right on the very essence of American ways of thinking and on American character. Some sections, like for instance the long passage on looking for an apartment in New York-over thirty pages---simply radiate genius. The natural gas millionaire and his shrewish daughter; the gung-ho, go-getter manager of the magazine; the dreamy, but selfish artists, the Southern belle---all these may be almost stock characters in 20th century American letters, but can never have been better summarized than here. Two statements made by Basil March, a literary editor married into an old Boston family, sum up the feel of A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES, a novel that takes great cognizance of the potential for change in people (always an optimist's point of view). First, he says, "There's the making of several characters in each of us; we are each several characters and sometimes this character has the lead in us, and sometimes that." And lastly, he says "I don't know what it all means, but I believe it means good." Howells was no doubt a sterling man and this, perhaps his best novel, reflects that more than anything else.

This title should be on the syllabus of every American lit class. Read it and you'll realize that the canon is as full of holes as a chuck of swiss cheese.

William Dean Howells in his lifetime was ranked with his friend,Henry James as a writer of a new realistic kind of fiction,and however mild and idealistic it seems today,was considered by its admirers as refreshingly revolutionary and by others as cynical meanspiritedness seeking to sacrifice all that was "noble" in art.While actually having little in common with James, (he seems to be closer in spirit to Trollope)Howells' name was always side by side with James' and it was probably supposed that their future reputations would share a similiar fate. Unfortunately,that was not the case-while Henry James is considered a giant of American belles lettres,Howells has been relegated to minor status and except by a happy few,little read."A Hazard of New Fortunes",possibly Howell's best work,is one of the better known-but most people aren't aware that it is one of the greatest works of fiction in American literature.It is an impressive panorama of American life towards the end of the last century.People from Boston,the west,the south and Europe all converge in New York to enact a comedy of manners or tragedy,depending on their fortunes,that compares in its scope and masterly dissection of society, with"The Way We Live Now".Howell's light irony touches upon the eternal divisions between the haves and the have-nots,male and female,the socially secure and the unclassed,and with the Marches,the book's ostensible heroes,uses a typical normal middleclass family-with all of its intelligence,understanding,decency on one side and with all of its pretensions,timidity,selfishness on the other-to reflect the social unease and lack of justice in a supposedly sane and fair world.The book is subtle in its power and underneath its light tone probes the problems of its day with compassion and insight.Indeed,many of the problems it depicts are still relevant today.William Dean Howells wrote so many novels of worth that he deserves to have more than just a cult following; "A Hazard of New Fortunes" amply illustrates this.