This engaging and colorful account of the history of U.S. food regulation provides excellent perspective for better understanding the recent spate of high-profile, food regulation trade disputes between the U.S.and Europe, and within Europe, such as the "Banana Wars", "British Beef", and "Genetically modified corn" incidents. A must-read for anyone who who has interest in the unique nature and psychology of government actions in dealing with issues around "our daily bread". This book appears to have been subjected to a very rigorous "peer review" and I expect it will become a classic reference work.

a brillant, insightful exposition of a fascinating subject -- a must read for historians and all persons interested in government regulation.

weather you are a begginner or an expert, i think that every diaboloist should own this book

Jack Trout, head of the marketing firm Trout & Partners, digs for details about the major reasons big brands run into trouble and just how enormous companies mess up by handling their signature standard-bearers badly. He runs down the litany: mistaken extensions of the brand name, failures to differentiate the brand's qualities and loss of clarity about just what a brand represents. His failure sagas are mini-novels based inside Xerox, General Motors, AT&T, Digital Equipment, General Mills and Coca-Cola. Remember New Coke? Now that was a branding debacle. Trout highlights corporate shortcomings and lays the blame for branding woes right at the feet of people who should have known better: of out-of-touch CEOs, ineffective consultants and dysfunctional boards. Alert consumers who like insider business war stories will enjoy this clear, lively book, but if you own a company or market a brand, we from getAbstract suspect you should read it twice.

"Big Brands" is kind of an update of "Positioning" with more modern examples, and they are fascinating. Examples like Newton vs. Palm, McDonalds vs. Burger King, & Levis vs. everybody. Of course some of those great examples from "Positioning" remain, like Xerox and Miller Brewing. If you haven't read "Positioning", I would definitely recommend doing that before diving into "Big Brands." Jack Trout makes marketing easy to understand by talking about products and situations we are all familiar with.

Prosper (Prosper is last word of title of review)
Time Pressured, Overloaded with Information and media outlets, and now Osamaed, Americans need to work and live more efficiently and exhuberantly than ever. How can you improve your business or learn to keep your company competitive in a short period of time? Take one to 1 1/2 hours to read: Big Brands, Big Trouble. It gets right to the point in offering the best advice for companies that want to grow and prosper, or at the very least, maintain their market share. There is no flowery language, textbook talk, academic lingo-only solid strategies based on years of experience working admidst the most well-known brands. Trout is not afraid to point out the mistakes of companies who spend millions of dollars on marketing programs and research yet move no further along in market share or stock value. See what happened to companies that were once on the Fortune 500 list but are now part of some amorphous holding company or conglomerate. What lessons can be learned from their mistakes? Easy to read, with a touch of humor, Big Brands Big Trouble provides concrete business strategies and actionable plans for the most busy among us. Jack Trout's intelligence and marketing savvy cuts through all jargon and provides the best business advice anyone working with any brand will need.

This book covers almost all aspects of unicycling, from learning how to ride, learning additional skills, history, mechanics, clubs, and more. It is an excellent reference work, but readable as a regular book too. The only problem with it is that some of the book is a little dated, but since there aren't many other books out on the topic, this one does fine.

Highly great book!!! I'm a serious juggler/unicyclist, and there can't be a better unicycle-info-packed book then this. The only down falls of this book are the black and white pictures and the bounding of how it is made. And the 80 something copyright. But, the info packed in here can't be better as far as unicycling books!!! It covers everything, learning how to ride, tricks, group riding, group tricks, games, riding in parades, training, organizations, juggling on a unicycle, gives you info on the wide variety of giraffe/novelty kinds of unicycles out there and much, much more!!!

Very detailed and picturesque, including materials, processes, and safety. Illustrations make building a unicycle extremely easy. An interesting piece for the bookshelf.

Even if you have no prior knowledge of how a bike is assembled, this book contains all you need to get started in assembling that unicycle. If you're experienced in the arts of metal working, and welding, then you're in great shape to begin building or fixing that unicycle or bike. If not, the book still contains enough information to get you on your way.

This book is nothing more than a template or a compilation of numerous other books that deal with marketing, prospecting, and selling. In fact the title is disingenuous. The book should be renamed to "Building, Marketing and Selling Your Business." The fact that the word Accounting appears in the title is misleading as this book could and does discuss the things necessary to starting and building any business.

The book also includes a glossary of accounting terms which is insulting. If you are an accountant purchasing this book you should already know them hands down or seek a refund from the institution of higher learning that gave you your education in accounting or ask your state accountancy board to revoke your CPA certificate.

This book is full of checklists and numerous discussions of what to do but rarely gets to "How" as the outside of the back cover states. While the information is useful it is again generic to any business and not specific to accounting.

The author bets to death the value of using Microsoft products (to the exclusion of others) and goes though a litany of the things that Microsoft uses/provides. I am certified by Microsoft in almost all the things that the author mentions in the beginning of his book and I found the authors marketing plug for Microsoft quite humorous but also very wrong. The author almost gave the impression that he is "in bed" with Microsoft and may even be a Microsoft Certified Solution Provider himself but never really states his relationship to Microsoft. This diatribe should have been in an appendix and not part of the main body of the book.

Another grating plug is the constant mention of the Accounting Guild that the author is involved with. It would have been far more professional to discuss this at length in an appendix rather than constantly marketing it to his readers by repetitive mention of it in the text. One more grate was his constant mention of the Goldmine software for tracking clients without explaining why he thinks it is the best and what is his involvement with it and more importantly why he mentions no other PIM software when he goes though a many page discussion of the various software packages available. It makes me very suspicious.

Also unless you are a firm with at least two or more accountants, two or more marketing people, two or more sales people and the accompanying support staff you are reading the wrong book. You will also have no life.

The author implicating states that unless you are dealing with businesses that are $500,000 to $10,000,000 you are not dealing with a small to medium sized business nor are you one yourself. What a grave insult to small business in general.

I am not attempting to slam the author at a personal level in my review but having read the third edition I am left with the begging question as to what was so wrong with the first two that there is in fact a third edition. After all I was the one that paid for it and I feel that I was stung and strongly so.

This book is basically a written seminar on how to build, market and sell your (any) business accompanied with numerous plugs for the authors products (at least it smells like it). The author did not follow his own advice....be honest with your clients.

I also found his web site for the Accounting Guild inactive and email is not there.

If you are looking for a book to help you build your accounting business this is not it unless you have $$$$$$ capital and staff to do so. The book is definitely not intended for the true small business person.

Save your money.

This book is an excellent source for starting an accounting practice. It is very heavy on the aspects of technology and working that into your business to grow clients and business partners.

The caveat here is this. Mr. Fox discusses Arthur Anderson a great deal in this book when referring to ways consulting is performed and how to sell clients. In addition, he refers to his own "Accounting Guild." Unfortunately, the web site for this guild no longer exists, his Yahoo message board is inactive and he does not answer email requesting information on solvency of his own business. Although I am reading this book 3 years after it was published I find it disturbing that the book is still in print yet very out of date and no longer factually correct. i.e Offering services in the Accounting Guild.

It would be nice to at least get an explanation or have the book removed as a valid and complete source, which it no longer is.

Having been recently laid off, I am now looking into starting my own accounting practice. I am a CPA, but have no public accounting experience. I bought this book as part of a CPE course and was truly amazed at the wealth of information it contains, especially on marketing. It gave me some great ideas on areas to pursue and I know I will refer back to it many times over the next few months and even beyond.

This book beats the theories of Max Adverse Excursion (how much a trade moves against you), Min and Max Favor Excursion (how much it moves in your direction) and then applies it to varying trending, non trending and reversal type of situations. The idea is that a winning trade is not likely to move very far against you. A losing trade is likely not to move very far in your favor. Therefore, one can uses these ideas to construct proper risk management and tweak their methods. I did find the book to be a bit wordy, often taking several chapters to explain a few points that could be summarized in two lines. There is also an interesting chapter about using options to hedge your position, rather than relying on stops. I give this book a strong 3 or a weak 4. There are certainly some good ideas, but isn't anything to write home about.

Even though John Sweeney is Tech Editor for Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities, I had rather low expectations, expectations which most books in this field fulfill nicely. Mssrs. Sweeney have presented an idea book which focuses on what to look for, what to look out for, and, in passing, saves the cost of a piece of software. What this book is not is a set of formulae showing how to make a million trading. Thank Heavens!

The thrust of the book is to look at the phases a market can go through and to develop an approach for trading the phase now in evidence. Sweeneys also present concepts for turning a loss generated by a phase change into a profitable reversal. This concept builds on the authors' other work, Maximum Adverse Excursion. The concepts are fully explained and a methodology is used to illustrate each. The authors are careful to note that the method used may not be what they use and may not be optimum, but rather is presented for illustrative purposes.

At the outset I thought this work appropriate for only intermediate and experienced traders. Now I'm not so sure. Beginning traders, if they go back to this work from time to time, may be able to save themselves some time and grief.

I certainly recommend the book; I am uncertain whether I should post five stars or only four.

ron davis,CMT

As a culinary student in a reputable institute, I was presented this book to use as a textbook for my business management course. The structure was sufficient, focusing almost exclusively on the hospitality industry, but the content was not. The majority of the book deals with self-evident truths and situations that can best be solved by common sense, but instead Miller voices his opinion that when experience fails you, revert back to the management theories, most of which he denigrates, others that he blatantly misinterprets.

Miller also pens that "management at any level in an art", a statement that many would disagree with and should give some insights as to what the 10th grade, babble-filled prose is all about. For a management book, especially one for $..., I was expecting a more technical approach to managing - theories and illustrations also combined with charts and math, two aspects that are completely vacant in the textbook.

There is a general sense of the grim reality of the hospitality industry that I was relieved to see (two stars). There's mention of the low pay, hard work, and long hours that will inevitably come with the job, and the book maintains that thought throughout. Overall however, it's too much money, and too much time, for reading what I already know.

This textbook package contained "Supervision in the Hospitality Industry" 3rd Edition hard cover (ISBN# 0-471-19420-0) and National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation-NRAEF ProMGMT Student Workbook (ISBN# 0471-41305-4). Chapter 9 on performance evaluation was the greatest insight. A great learning tool to help focus my job development within the huge vacation/hospitality employer I work for here in Orlando, Florida.

You can be the most organized person in the world and you will still run into difficulties when trying to communicate in an effective manner, recruit, train, evaluate performance, discipline, and delegate all at the same time. For anyone, it's a lot to have on your plate. This book makes it seem simple. It offers way to alleviate some of the frustration that comes with the job.

The first part of the book covers very basic material that may be found anywhere on the Internet or in a beginner's finance text book. This portion will be valuable only to introductory students of the subject.

The second two parts, which deal with actual valuation techniques, are very verbose, but lacking in organization and depth. This half assumes that you are already familiar with concepts such as WACC, Free Cash Flows, and other accounting and valuation terms. Although several valuation techniques are indeed discussed, by no means is the list comprehensive. Furthermore, no systematic approach to deriving or explaining the formulas is available, and often, terms not introduced earlier are used.

On the positive side, however, the book makes easy reading and focuses on a more practical, rather than academic or theoretical, discussion of valuation.

This book may not provide much value to a serious student of valuation. Furthermore, I do not believe it will make an ideal reference for the experienced professional either. At best, it will make a good second reference for a graduate level course in valuation.

I hoped that McKinsey would have something new to say on this subject. There are two corporate finance texts and various finance books that cover the ground better or at least as well, so it is hard to see why this book was written.

In light of recent corporate shenanigans with off-balance sheet products, it is unforgiveable that this book doesn't address how lack of value can be disguised using off-balance sheet products. Total return swaps, an off-balance sheet financing tool, isn't discussed, and credit derivatives, another off-balance sheet tool aren't even discussed. For coverage of these topics and offshore vehicles, read "Credit Derivatives" by Tavakoli.

This book provides excellent information about the DCF Valuation process. The reader will learn how to develop the model and where to input the various data, as well as understand how to justify some of the assumptions such as cost of equity. The disk that accompanies the hardcover addition will be very useful to some practitioners, although analysts with strong modeling skills will likely want to create their own spreadsheet. The book, however, is not a comprehensive guide to valuation, as it does not discuss other methods such as the peer group comparison. Nonetheless, it is an excellent reference book on the topic of DCF Valuation, and it belongs on every financial analyst's desk.