I just love this guide. I use it every day to start my day at work. It really gets me to meditate on God's wonderful word. It is so great, that I am buying it for a friend.

This book revolutionized my own Bible study time. The Quiet Time Companion uses several different approaches to freshen up personal study times. Weekly sessions may study a single passage, a character, or a word. Other sessions will look at the same passage from several different perspective or will spend two or more weeks on an indepth study of a section of scripture.

This multi-themed approach keeps your Bible study from becoming routine. You will not find a three month study of Leviticus. It cuts down on the theological/philosophic mumbo-jumbo giving straight but not dumbed down look at the Word of God.

Another innovative approach the authors used in creating this devotional aid is that the weekly sessions are composed of 5 lessons, giving you 2 days of individual study (the authors do make some suggestions) but this is an excellent opportunity to work in preparing your Sunday School lesson during the weekend personalized study.

The authors are to be commended! Bravo!

For those who are uncomfortable with stuttering therapy, this book is for you. The first half of the book requires reading. It offers a great review of stuttering and then goes into a hierarchial progression of therapy. This book focuses on stuttering therapy with young children, ages 2 1/2 to 7 years. It deals with direct therapy techniques.

The hierarchy takes you from single words, two words, three words, carrier phrases, extended carrier phrases, prepositional phrases, all the way to high-level demand tasks such as explaining or describing, and storytelling.

The authors then give you a continuum of direct therapy strategies to teach the child: easy speech and streatchy talk, make direct requests for easy speech, model short and easy repetitions, model self-corrections, play speech cops games, teach tigger talk (easy bouncing), introduce hard speech, talk about pushing, contrast easy speech with hard speech, and embrace the speech villans.

The last half of the book is packed with therapy activities that you can copy and use with your students.

I really like the therapy sequence they have set up, and have found this book to be very useful. I've got my own personal copy. If you like a cookbook for a crutch to boost your confidence or are short on therapy ideas, you'll like this book.

Ross Watton's book is a must for the 'rivet counter', scratch model builder, or Queen Mary buff that wants to know the full ins-and-outs of the ship's construction. Made up mostly of B&W photos taken during the fitting-out of the ship, and highly detailed deck and hull plans and drawings, the book is the perfect companion piece to the Queen Mary book by James Steele, which, through text and period photos, tells the story of the ship's successful historical career. None of that here. This is the (literally) nuts and bolts of the Queen. From the lifeboat davit schematics to the cabin number listings deck-by-deck, this book is a ship lovers' technical dream.

Unlike the rest of the series, this is the only book to cover a cruise liner. A great addition in that it looks at the enormous complexity of an ocean liner in words, diagrams, photos and in hand drawn rendtions of how the interior looked. Part of the true collectors editions in ship design.

The old adage applies to this book. There is no management method inside. Walton's work is long in the tooth. Her superficial, journalistic treatment of quality and productivity is poorly understood. She attempts to cover too much ground with too little understanding. It is a stretch to claim Deming's lecture circuit talking points contains a management message.

Deming's genius was as a statistician. He was also a humanitarian. He integrated himself into the Japanese culture to better understand and develop lasting relationships with his hosts. His was generous in donating publication royalties to the fledgling Japanese Union of Engineers and Scientist (JUSE). JUSE's prize bearing Deming's name is a measure of his generosity and humanity, not his management competence. His Japanese lectures on statistical methods, along with the standardization movement were influential in setting Japanese quality efforts in motion. JUSE soon realized that quality, productivity, customer service management, and zero defects required more than Deming could provide.

American publishers elevated Deming to guru status. Written during the mid eighties, this book's target was the US manager starved for some direction with which to combat the Japanese methodical implementation of quality and productivity. The publisher simply cashed in on an American name that had a Japanese quality prize attached to it. Deming's message may have been innovative for the forties, but today statistics-based productivity programs like Six Sigma incorporate a true management method. If you need to learn management statistics, consult "Introduction to Quality Control" by Kaoru Ishikawa.

The Deming "cycle" and statistical analysis is taken from Dr. Shewhart's 1932 work. Deming's 14 "points" and 7 "deadly diseases" are simply exhortations, talking points for the lecture circuit. Two diseases are explained as "beyond the scope of his present discussion" with one sentence of explanation given to each. It is evident that neither Deming nor Walton have the simplest grasp of US labor law.

The case studies include a company that is on the corporate bone pile for failing its environmental management responsibilities, and another in bankruptcy for managing its bottom line with emotion rather than reason.

To be fair, Walton's reportage of the bead demonstration taken from a Deming statistical lecture is worth reading. If purchased used, the value of the bead vignette will recoup the $[money]spent.

Serious students of management philosophy, productivity, and quality should look beyond this meager work toward Ishikawa, Crosby, or Juran.

Mary Waton does the impossible. She tells you about the life of the great Business Guru the late W.Edward Deming. The first part of the book is a short biography of the great man. Then she goes into his 14 points in detail. Another chapter is on Deming's ways to get improvement in any business.

And the following chapter shows the many companies that the Deming method and philosopy help in TQM.

I would recommed these method for any business, small or large.

You can tell the companies that use these methods ....there services and products shine with quality and more

What I really liked about Mary Walton's book is that it is ACCESSIBLE. While I certainly sympathize with Dr. Deming's eschewing simplistic slogans and posters to institute the notion of quality, I felt like Ms. Walton broke Deming's theories down into manageable chunks. Having survived reading Deming's "Out of the Crisis", I would have to say that Mary Walton's slim little volume is a much better way to glean the priceless gems of Dr. Deming's wisdom. This ranks right up there with "Liberation Management" as one of the best business books ever written.

Car starts out promisingly enough, with all the drama needed to tell a good story: the redesign of Ford's best-selling car, the Taurus.

Unfortunately, it soon becomes clear that Ms. Walton is more interested in bashing Ford than telling the story about the Taurus. Normal work conflicts that happen at every company are blown out of proportion and presented as enormous crises.

The proof that Ms. Walton did not set out to tell the story of the Taurus is the way she half-heartedly discusses important design issues and then suddenly drops them to follow personality conflicts at Ford. Where is the discussion of the forward-looking integrated control panel? She tells a long story about how the headlight design causes grave conflicts among employees, and yet never even bothers to tell how the conflict was resolved. This book was a real disappointement for me

I find that Mary Walton has done an outstanding job in this work. Were it simply a journal of names and events, it wouldn't entertain so well. I read and enjoy the car magazines. I've also worked for GM at a design and manufacturing facility, it could have been the Ford Ms. Walton describes. And although it appears to my fellow reviewers to be an unforgivable faux pas, I actually own a Taurus of this era and I'm quite pleased with it on it's own merits. A limited production styling and engineering exercise is exciting in it's own way, but this story is what happens with the cars actually purchased in the American market, the ones we hold on to for 14.5 years. The Japanese do things a little differently, not necessarily better. Look at the debt loads of the Japanese manufacturers today. Drive a Camray then drive a Taurus on a fast, winding mountain road. The Taurus need make no apology under this criteria. Choose your own, no car will fit them all. I don't want a Corvette, sorry. I can't afford one, it's not worth the insurance to me, I can't carry anyone in it. I'm not interested in reading about it's development. I think Mary Walton did a fine job of going to the heart of the automobile industry in America, uncovering the good and the bad. I was amazed at both the quality of her research and the pace of the book, and it was presented in a fashion that appeals to the avid automobile journal reader. I don't think this makes Ford look bad at all. It's a drama of the American workplace, repeated in other workplaces with different accents in auto manufacturers worldwide. Read the book. If you don't care for the Taurus, especially after reading this book, then think twice about the sausage you ate for breakfast, where it came from. This book is good entertainment.

Reading like a novel with protagonists, antagonists, and two plot climaxes, CAR is the well-written story of the design and manufacture of the 1996 Ford Taurus. The average reader will get a fascinating insight into the drama and conflict that goes into designing and manufacturing a new automobile. Business people, especially those interested in workplace teams, will find it an opportunity to benchmark (for better or worse) their own organization's behavior against those of a large and well known corporation embarking on a new way of designing and building a product. The book stereotypes engineers socially, but otherwise portrays them in a favorable light