This book really gets to the core of successful selling. It emphawsizes identifying and understanding the decsion makers wants which are personal, emotional, and under the surface. Too many sales people focus on the surface stuff especially customers needs. What we really should do is tie in want based selling into our successful needs based approache we are curretnly using.

This book is a very easy read. Key points are emphasized and repeated several times to make sure they sink in. The charts and exercises used really help you grasp the concepts.

The only downside is the first helf of the book tends to be very repetitive and you wonder are they having going to get to some other points. However the second half of the book is fantastic! It really gives you excellent ideas and techniques for identifying decsion makers wants and applying the concepts to your customrs.

Enjoy and Good Selling!

If you think that there is such a thing as the "science" of sales, this is the book you need. Easy to understand and apply to whatever product or service you sell. It helped me change the way I approach new clients and service existing clients. Worth the money and more...

Brook Thomas is an English professor, not a legal scholar, and, although much of his work deals with intersections between law and literature, he tends to be more discerning as to literature and social issues than regarding the law. While his Plessy v. Ferguson gives a competent overview of the case and its context, this book is not his strongest work by a long shot. I have had success teaching this book in conjunction with Twain's Pudd'n'head Wilson, and its brief documentary history works well to get students up to speed. But it has a distinctly text-bookish quality that would make it something of a drag in any but the classroom setting.

Thomas has done yeoman service in his editing of this volume on the Plessy v Ferguson case. Sure, we all know "separate but euqal," but there was so much more, and Thomas covers it succinctly and completely. As part of the Bedford Series in History and Culture this volume looks at Plessy through a collection of original period documents with thoughtful, but to-the-point analytical introductions. Within a small number of pages is included not only the entire opinion of the Court, but also legal and social backgrounds for the case and race relations in America. Also covered in the volume are reactions to the case from general newspapers, the legal community, and African American intellectuals, and the impact of the case as seen from the first decade of the 20th century. It even has a wonderful timeline of pertinent events to help orient the progress of the case. It will probably not be fascinating to the casual reader of history-if your tastes tend more to the straight narrative, you may find this volume frustrating. But if you want to really understand Plessy's "separate but equal" argument and where it came from, this is the volume for you.

The book is very detailed about the progress of the campaign. But there is a very serious mistake in the last page. Brooks writes that the town of Torbole was destroyed in a house to house battle. This is absolutely wrong, I lived practically next door and can assure you that Torbole survived unscathed. This throws into doubt all the rest of the book. Also there is no record among the population that any American soldiers were killed in tunnel # 5. But while dinamiting the road a contingent of German troops (actually they were from Bolzano)was decimated by a premature explosion and were laid to rest in a side chamber in one of the tunnels; the entrance was then bricked up.

I read this book while I was living in Italy, so I found it even more interesting. The fall of Rome happened the same time the Invasion of Normandy did, and with the Battles in Western Europe raging on, this arena of combat has allways been overlooked. While few can name any key battles after the fall of Rome, the combat was as heroic and bloody as in any theater. Brooks does an amazing job of recanting this remarkable campaign. The level of detail is superb, and the book was very easy to read. The vast types of units that are described (US Mountain troops, Ethnic units, and varoius allies) makes the book even more enjoyable. This might be a tough book to find, however keep trying, it is well worth it.

So I was getting ready to reread Don Quijote (1605)(Miguel de Cervantes 1547-1616) in the excellent Burton Raffel translation and as I was looking for information about the book and author, saw repeated references to Fielding's Joseph Andrews. I'd read his Tom Jones a couple of years ago and found it kind of tough sledding, but when I stumbled upon this one at a library book sale for a quarter, it seemed a stroke of destiny.

The parallels with Don Quijote are readily apparent. First of all, the book consists of a series of humorous travel adventures; second, the travellers involved seem too innocent to survive in the harsh world that confronts them. When Joseph Andrews, the naive footman of Lady Booby, deflects the amorous advances of both her Ladyship and Slipslop, the Lady's servant, he is sent packing. Upon his dismissal, Joseph, along with his friend and mentor Parson Adams, an idealistic and good-hearted rural clergyman, who essentially takes the physical role of Sancho Panza but the moral role of Quijote, sets out to find his beloved but chaste enamorata, Fanny Goodwill, who had earlier been dismissed from Lady Booby's service as a result of Slipslop's jealousy. In their travels they are set upon repeatedly by robbers, continually run out of funds and Adams gets in numerous arguments, theological and otherwise. Meanwhile, Fanny, whom they meet up with along the way, is nearly raped any number of times and is eventually discovered to be Joseph's sister, or maybe not.. The whole thing concludes with a farcical night of musical beds, mistaken identities and astonishing revelations.

I've seen this referred to as the first modern novel; I'm not sure why, in light of it's obvious debt to Cervantes. But it does combine those quixotic elements with a seemingly accurate portrayal of 18th Century English manners and the central concern with identity and status do place it squarely in the modern tradition.

At any rate, it is very funny and, for whatever reason, seemed a much easier read than Tom Jones. I recommend it unreservedly.

GRADE: B+

This is a handy if somewhat eclectic little collection, with works by some poets who are hard to find elsewhere, such as Henry Howard. If you don't have a copy of the long-out-of-print Hebel and Hudson anthology of English Renaissance Poetry, pick up this.

If you ever saw the Mel Brooks' movie _Spaceballs_, you MUST remember how Yogur told the good guys what did he do: MERCHANDISING. From that point on, every scene in the movie has an Spaceballs product: the Spaceballs towel, the Spaceballs toilet paper, the Spaceballs lunch box, etcetera.

And here we have the Spaceballs novelization. As a novel, it's not noteworthy at all - if you simply watch the movie, you'll enjoy it better and use less time.

However, it does work as a joke, by taking the merchandising mania within the movie into real life. Leave it in your library, among your SF books, and wait for someone to ask you of they can have a look at your library...

I absolutely LOVED the movie and the book was really good too! Good effort by R.L. Stine (who was quite a new author at the time).

I actually found this book just as good the movie, very humorous. Sure, it's not as profanity-laced as the movie because of the ages of people reading the book, but it still comes across as really good. Yogurt rules!

If one is interested in the latest nonsense from the academy, this time dressed up in New Historicist colors, buy this book. If one is interested in either American literary realism or contract law, however, one is better off actually reading those texts and trying to understand them.

This book was originally published in 1987 and updated in 1996, and authored by two attorneys. It is probably targeted at the vast college market for lower division courses, where the instructor doesn't critically evaluate texts. The book is built around legal cases, usually Supreme Court cases but occasionally state court cases, that the authors use to illustrate a particular theme. However, the choice of case frequently fails to clearly illuminate the point, and the authors have a tendency to offer their opinions as conclusions without clearly identifying them as such. The book is strongest where the authors focus on their expertise - law; and weakest where they wander off into policy and philosophical issues. In particular, the authors seem ill equiped to address the broad policy and philosophical issues which they want to make the focus of this book. I can't really recommend this book to any audience. There are much better texts for discussions of environmental law, whether for students, laypersons or serious students of policy. Also, there are much better policy and philosophy texts for all levels.