This book goes far beyond helping therapists transition into life coaching. It gives the reader a very clear and exciting introduction to this new and upcoming field. It was my first real introduction to coaching, yet after training in the field and went back and read it again and got even more out of it.
The book explains the difference between coaching and therapy, and also helps the reader decide which is best for her/him. Exercises are provided to help the reader's decision making. The way the book is put together the authors quite effectively coach the reader toward the possibilities and the joys of coaching. They also spend a good number of pages on how to start a coaching business. I loved it. As an aspiring life-coach I say "thank you."

This is an excellent book for those of us who have been practicing therapists and have a desire to do what we actually intended when we chose this profession in the first place. The book is well written. It provides a comprehensive discussion of the differences between coaching and psychotherapy or counseling. After defining what this new and exciting field is all about, the authors have given us newcomers to the field a wonderful manual to assist us in establishing a coaching practice. You couldn't really ask for more... unless you want even more of a headstart; you might enroll in Pat's Life Coach Training course, a 30 hour course which supplements the book. A complimentary introductory session is available by going to the Institute web site,...Life coaching is a natural evolution from traditional therapy practices. Moving into this field has transformed my life. Thank you Pat and Deborah!

Pat Williams and Deborah Davis have crafted an excellent "How To" guide for therapists and others who want to enliven their lives and their practices. What I like best about this book is that it does not assume that the reader has no backgrond or skill but rather acknowledges the readers skills and helps them to see how they fit into the world of Life Coaching. The book is very well written, well thought out and well structured. Reading it is a great way for a prospective coach to find out about the field and to gain insight as to whether or not it is a fit for them. It is also a wonderful review and refresher for those of us already coaching because it covers the basics in such an interseting and informative manner.I highly recomend it.

I read this a few years back, and it was brutal to get through, black clouds of depression lurking on every page. This is actually by way of saying that Maggin did his job well, although it couldn't have been much fun. There is account after account of a phenonenomally gifted yet self-absorbed monster who lived in a world of rationalization and evidently felt his talent justified doing unspeakable things to people (which, of course only means doing the same to oneself). You find yourself, as reader, torn: On one hand, one feels sympathy for one of the great musicians of our time who literally grew up on the road with no parental discipline (he started out, for example, at 15 with Jack Teagarden, a great player and undoubtedly a father figure to Getz, but also a notorious lush)who had to grow up fast and couldn't quite handle it. On the other, there's the aforementioned devil that the substances either created or, more likely, merely brought out. By the time Getz sincerely tried to mend his ways (a terminal illness will do it every time)the train had long left the station leaving much emotional wreckage in its wake.

But as with Charlie Parker, also widely reported to be a less-than-admirable person, we care about the art, and want to remember that. Sadly, this is where Maggin fails. He really means well, but his musical insights and prose style on the subject are, frankly, clumsy and less than helpful. He gropes for, but does not find Getz the musician or why he is so beloved. It's really simple: Getz was a fountain of melodic beauty, even as he swung his tail off. Improvising melodically sounds easy, but is one of the hardest things to do. Plus, his sound was a miracle--a force of nature. This is what puts Getz in the rarified category of accessible musical genius that includes very few others, Parker, Armstrong, Baker, Farmer and Davis among them. Maggin also even gets musicians' names wrong, a definite no-no.

Fortunately, Getz's music speaks for itself loud and clear. Perhaps someone will write the critical work Getz's enormous corpus of work deserves. Hopefully it will be a musician (we have a bad rap for being inarticulate and illiterate for some weird reason) However, Maggin deserves credit for his unflinching portrait of a complicated, at times loathsome man who nonetheless was chosen to be a conduit for some of the most rapturous and beautiful music this world has known.

Being a recognized translator and a Stan Getz fan, I would like to translate the book to Swedish. At the same time I am aware of the fact that certain aspects concerns an important family in Sweden, i.e. Silfverskiold. Anyway, Maggins book is of too great importance to be ignored and Stan Getz is a legend...

As far back as I can recall, Stan Getz had always been my personal favorite jazz musician of all time. Blessed with an incredible musical memory - you just have to listen to the amount of quotes he would use during the course of a solo - he was able to render some of the most obscure lines from popular music to jazz lines to Jewish anthems. His personal sound was readily identifiable, pure,wholesome and wondrously beautiful and never filtered with sentimentality. When you heard a Getz solo there was never any mistake who was playing. Lester Young flowed through him and initially set the mold to this master jazz musician. Stan Getz carried the banner from Lester and ran with it.This book covers much of Stan Getz and his musical as well as personal life. Behind his playing was a torturous life hampered by drugs, alcohol, severe depression and anger. You would never have known this about the man after spending years of following and listening to the progressions of his performing art. Unlike the Chet Baker book this book chronologically follows his music as well as the events in his personal life. I found it inspiring to read about various recording sessions and all that was happening in his life at the time. All this while following it, by listening to the particular recording mentioned. He was a perfectionist and achieved it most of the time. If he felt his playing not to be at par this depressed him and would sadly result in dissonance for him and his family. He thought he needed to be stoned to play better. The irony is that he was throughout much of his life. Maggin mentions the many times when Stan would be inspired, either by another musician or a piece of music, that his playing would suddenly ignite and reach incredible levels of Art. I, for one, have on many occasions,witnessed such performances by him.This again brings up the question that has bothered me as a very devoted jazz follower: In order for the music to become a pure art, must it have flowed through the artist through suffering and artificially altering his senses with drugs and alcohol? Further, are the jazz musicians of today too antiseptic to ever achieve pure estheticism? These are troubling thoughts and often lends me to think that it may be impossible to truly create in a totally sober environment. True, the music can be technically brilliant, intricate and interesting, but would it be Getz,Parker, Monk, Baker, Davis or Coltrane?The book is very well written by Maggin and covers the career of Stan Getz thoroughly. Maggin has struck a delicate balance between the music, life and times of Getz. The nurturing, friendships and relationships of the musicians who began playing, developing and expanding with his various musical groups are clarified throughout the book. This book is an indispensable guide for anyone that has followed any of the aspects of Stan Getz the musician and the man.

Athena is an excellent book for undergraduates and for anyone looking for a thoughtful overview of diachronic changes in religious beliefs from the Bronze to the Heroic Age. The view is through the eyes of Athena with a focus on the Trojan war, 'Athena's war.' Through the goddess' relationship with Odysseus, the author reveals changes in Athena's personality (function) as portrayed in the Iliad and Odyssey. The author links Athena's transition from war goddess to goddess of justice, wisdom and civility to societal changes including a shift of emphasis from personal bravado to civic honor and from individual to community spirit and responsibility.

Through lively word choices and a deep sense of needs and concerns of humans of all eras, the author makes relevant to us the religion of the ancients. They, like we, struggle to control forces surrounding us. Through 'Athena' we better appreciate the ancient Greek need and concern for religion and, accordingly, we realize a! ll the more that we share today their same fears and life questions.

This book was a fascinating look at the history of the greek goddess Athena from her beginning as an African deity. Athena is my favorite of all the greek pantheon.

Lee hall has provided an excellent auxillary reading for students in the humanities and social sciences. ATHENA is a book that opens up an exciting multidisciplinary dialogue that combines a splendid story--supernatural beings, mythical heores, and heroic events--with a solid focus on parallel social struggles in modern times. First and foremost, ATHENA is an exciting story--well written and fun to read. Familiar and obscure myths combine to make this "biography" of the great warrior goddess a more useful reading for students, especially students in Classical Studies, than the usual mythology sources (Graves & Hamilton). Using a modern "voice," Lee Hall shows how Athena changes identities over the centuries, reflecting the development of ancient civilization as well as telling us much about our own contemporary identity stuggles. ATHENA was a pleasure to read, integrating a vast amount of mythological stories into a creative statement about the processes of civilization itself.

and falls short. Jane's Chem-Bio Handbook is much improved over the freebie notepad version they gave out a few years back, but it suffers from a lack of focus. The small size, spiral binding, and tabs suggest it is intended as a first responder or incident commander handbook, but occasional topical discourses suggest that it is meant as a textbook. As a result, it is hard to find the information that would be needed on the scene (an index helps, but only slightly), while the coverage of the various topics is too uneven for it to be a good text. In some places, it seems to be simply a compilation of information from various (US) field manuals.

There are some good ideas, but they seem to be sabotaged by the execution. The checklist version of the "Agent Indicator Matrix" (based on the Defense Protective Service model) is a good idea, but it is spread over three pages (instead of being arranged to fit on two facing pages in a landscape presentation or provided as a foldout) so that it can neither be copied easily or used easily in the book. A section on the threat of stolen military munitions, after noting that stockpiles in other countries are not as well secured as those in the US, then proceeds to a description of US weapons without describing distinguishing characteristics of chemical munitions relative to conventional munitions or how the munitions described might relate to foreign munitions.

There are also some surprising errors in the hodgepodge of facts. The volume I purchased indicates that it is from the sixth printing, so I have to presume that most typos have been corrected. One particularly egregious error is in the characterization of liquid phosgene as "...not hazardous except as a source of vapor." This statement is highlighted in a little box with a finger pointing at it on page 106, and repeated on page 108. While certainly it is the vapor that kills, liquid phosgene splashed into the eyes is known to produce opacification. Subsequently, it is stated that "Phosgene [vapor] does not damage the eyes or skin..." Yet it is well known that concentrated phosgene vapor will irritate both the skin and eyes, and, while this would not be fatal, and is usually not permanent the downplaying of these risks is certainly inappropriate, to put it mildly.

To try to close on a positive note, this book does have some good information salted in various odd spots. If you are responsible for a training program, it would be a good book for you to look at, provided it is not the only reference you use. The table of emergency decontamination materials found at a K-Mart, for instance, suggests an obvious bit of homework for your trainees.

In summary, this handbook should not be your first or only purchase, but it probably has a place in a comprehensive library. Given the reputation of Jane's, a bit more proofreading would have been in order.

Among those involved with the planning and implementation of specialized, multi-casualty incident response, this book is quite useful. Field personnel, command staff, and planners - all will find it helpful. I found it to be concise, packable, and physically handy. About the only thing I'd change would be to laminate the pages for weather resistance.

R.D. Lopez, Emergency Medical Services and Disaster Specialist, Dept. of Public Health

This is a wonderful book for any first responder to have.
It is very easy to use because not only does it come with on and off scene procedures, but it also has quick reference tables and charts. On a scale of 1 to 5 I give it a 10!

It is useful to compare the fate of Heidegger, the philosopher of Being, with that of the shadowy Gurdjieff, with his mysticism of Being, during the era of Nazism and the Holocaust. As much as one might detest the reactionary nature of his thinking, and the abuse of the mystic tradition for occult purposes, every man is innocent until proven guilty, notwithstanding the incontestable rumours, indeed outright Gurdjieff fascists one meets. As this work shows (though hardly in any conclusive fashion) these years are probably accounted for.
In fact his critics have perhaps missed the point in their undeground whispers, which is that a man like Gurdjieff was much too smart to make the mistakes of Heidegger or get caught at anything. The point can be seen in a Spengler, whose own reactionary works such as Prussianism and Socialism certainly influenced the catastrophe, although their author was himself taken by surprise. And this different criticism is and remains the point, for the impulse is of such extreme cultural anti-modernism and the implaccable emnity to liberal societies dressed up in spirituality.
Mr. Patterson's account is useful, interesting, but too doggedly devoted to a teaching he seems incapable of grasping in its full set of omens, which include the powers of occultists in these dark times, and low and behold a quite innocent case who gave sweets to children, an occultist in sufi trappings. Cleared of all charges. Case dismissed. Great spiritual sage. Tremendously inspiring force for the great spiritual restoration.
In any case Patterson's work is quite incomplete, but a useful addition to the documentation of this dangerous man. You wish the author would wake up a bit.

By this point in his life Gurdjieff was evidently incapable of communicating in anything but arcane gibberish, intended for the ears of his slack-jawed proto-new-age disciples only. Every generation produces its true believers in some method to free themselves from the prison of their delusions, but they never seem to realize that by joining some occult organization that they are only exchanging one prison cell for another. Patterson showed great promise as a writer earlier in his career; now he is reduced to regurgitating goobledeygook like this, from a man who believed the caves at Lascaux were created by Atlantean magicians. No wonder Patterson thinks that the old manipulator Gurdjieff is greater than the anti-guru Krishnamurti (it takes the latter about one paragraph to completely disassemble the former in his Commentaries, Volume One, which was written around this same period. If you would like to be free of Gurdjieff's prison, you might pick it up instead of this).

I had just begun Voices in the Dark when the September 11th attacks occurred, and this book began to speak to me in a way that few other books could have. Living with fear daily is so new to me as an American, and here were people, ordinary people as well as resistance fighters, living for years with fear. Although I'd read some history of World War II and what it was like for the French living under the Nazi occupation, this book made these people and the times really come alive. The people that went to the meetings that Gurdjieff held during those dangerous times were heroic in a very deep way. They risked death just to be out on the streets after curfew, and once in the meetings what they talked about were their personal struggles with spiritual transformation. I was very moved by Gurdjieff staying in Paris with his students when he could have easily gone to a safe country while the war lasted.

Voices in the Dark is an inspiring book. I found its depth and insights very invigorating, and saw how a true teaching goes beyond individual self-growth. I've learned a lot about what fear and the uncertainty of life are about, and they've receded in importance for me. I found in this book new ways to think and perceive life, and it points to much more.

Interesting that you basically ignore native XML DBs. They are the definitive choice in most XML Document Centric environments. While RDBs remain quite strong in XML Data Centric models, they must resort to BLOBs or risk an order of magnitude of sluggishness compared to native XML DBs, such as our GoXML DB. Even with BLOBs, you cannot create a new document from multiple existing documents because of the columnar structure. The lack of a full table of contents when your title is 'Professional XML Databases' is disappointing...

Concerned XML Enthusiast

this is very well written book. the material presented in this book are exhaustive and gets you good insight on how xml would be used with dbms. the chapters 2,3 and 4 are very informatiove as they list ou tthe steps required for converting db table to xml and vice versa.

I read through this book at more of an advanced developer level, so I'm going to treat it from that level.

The chapter on XQuery was great; it answered many of my questions concisely. There is very little information on the web about XQuery outside the W3.org site, so I was surprised to find such high quality information in a book.

XPath is also a newer API that is covered well in this book, giving you enough information to get your project going.

If you're planning to do any kind of development with XML coming in or going out of a relational database, this is an excellent book to buy. I also recommend Professional XML from Wrox and O'Reilly's XML in a nutshell.

I am currently doing an assignment on business process re-engineering. Many of the texts I have read so far have been thick on the theories and the benefits of re-engineering. As such, it comes across as cheap propagnada.

This book was different. In the first chapter, unlike other texts, it did not simply insists that TQM and other continuous process improvements are of the past and are not good enough for today's business environment. It explains how TQM has its place, if you are already a market leader. However, if you are way below, then TQM will not allow you to reach the apex before you are out of business. Re-engineering is the way.

This immediately pave the way for the rest of the book. The authors are balanced in their views and do not simply advertise the merits of re-engineering. They also cautioned throughout the text on the difficulties and pitfalls of re-engineering. I found their arguments more convincing than most authors.

The examples throughout the book were taken from different industries and prove a source for ideas for any re-engineering effort. The authors came across as extremely experienced in their work.

I would have given it five stars except the last chapter on the human aspect of re-engineering was rather dissapointing. I had expected to learn more from the authors about the very difficult human resource issues in re-engineering. Like most texts, the book mentioned difficulties and dished out textbook solutions without real solutions.

Still, it was one of the best re-engineering texts I have read and I believe it will help me greatly in my assignment.

I also believe that it is extremely useful for any managers or CEOs who want to re-engineer their business. Hammer's classic on re-engineering is not enough. You need to read this book for the practical advice and guiding framework if you are to have any chance for success in re-engineering.

In this book the author C. W. Metcalf's has a voice assistance from his wife Roma Felible. He first describes to you the tools of humor that could be later on used in life.He tells you that without humor "there is no ultimate triumph over tragedy, no joy in the journey, no sense in the nonsense of it all" (72-73). This gave me the sense that the only thing to make people have humor is to have joy in a journey and so on. I was in his position learning what to do while reading this book. When I started reading this book it wasn't too interesting until I finished it and started thinking that this book is the best way to describe to you what humor is and how it is used. Overall this book is interesting torwards the end. If you are curious about how he tells you about humor, start reading the book.

Sins are definitely out of fashion. The last time I came across the Seven Deadly Sins of Envy, Pride, Covetousness, Gluttony, Sloth, Lust and Anger, it was in a glossy Singaporean magazine for the trendy crowd. Under each of the headings it featured big cars, expensive condos, the current "IN"-nightspots, the newest restaurants, fashionable jewelry, designer clothes and so on. The word "sin" may have made monks and Victorians tremble; but we just shiver in anticipation of the latest thrill. Alain de Botton captures this change in attitude perfectly in his 5-page afterword: "[Today] our concerns are of a different order. We worry about whether we are cheerful or depressed, fulfilled or low in self-esteem. We worry about happiness, not sin and virtue."

"The Seven Deadly Sins" have originally been published in 1962 by The Sunday Times, and authors from England have written all seven contributions. The book does not rank the sins in any order (rankings are a very American obsession, and it seems the English have not been infected yet in the early sixties). However, it is very fitting for our democratic society to begin with ENVY, Angus Wilson's contribution, and to end the book with ANGER, W. H. Auden's contribution. Envy is the quintessential democratic "sin." Alain de Botton reflects that "envy comes from comparison and [...] the habit for everyone to compare themselves to everyone else is a particularly modern, democratic one." People envy only those who they feel themselves to be like: "There are few successes more unendurable than those of our closest friends [and] it follows that the more people we take to be our equals, the more we will be at risk of dissatisfaction." Which explains why a society of equals does not automatically lead to more happiness for its individual members. Anger is also a very democratic "sin" because anger tends to arise from a sense of entitlement: "We aren't overwhelmed by anger whenever we are denied an object we desire, only when we believe ourselves entitled to obtain it" (Alain de Botton). A sense of entitlement comes with democracy: we are not just in pursuit of happiness, we assume we are entitled to it.

Wedged between the highlights of Wilson's and Auden's articles are contributions by Edith Sitwell on PRIDE (a tongue-in-cheek confession to the "virtue" of pride), Cyril Connolly on COVETOUSNESS (a very funny short story about obsessive greed), Patrick Leigh-Fermor on GLUTTONY (an indigestible, rambling piece of writing - skip this part of the menu!), Evelyn Waugh on SLOTH ("Sloth is the condition in which a man is fully aware of the proper means of his salvation and refuses to take them," the state of rejecting the "spiritual good" which - in modern parlance - leads to depression, the contemporary cousin of sloth), and finally Christopher Sykes on LUST (a fine example of British common sense).

If we worry about happiness, not sin and virtue, why should we read about "The Seven Deadly Sins" at all? Why worry about the "good" when we can go out and have "fun" instead? The answer is: the "good" is about the value we attribute to our lives looking forward and looking back, the "fun" is just living it. In general, we are bad at "just living" or "living in the moment." but experts in reflecting on the past and planning for the future. It is a smart decision to build on our expertise and put some meaning into our lives to make looking back and forward more enjoyable. After all, the good life and the happy life are complementary, not mutually exclusive. Alain de Botton points it out just so well: "If we listen to pre-Christian philosophers, there is never a conflict between happiness and goodness. For Socrates, the sinful man is at the same time the miserable man, the good one the happy one. It's only with the arrival of Christianity that a conflict starts to appear and that, unwittingly, it starts to seem as though being good is dull and not likely to lead one to happiness, while sinfulness is bad, but actually rather fun."

Harbors and High Seas gets more use from me than the lexicon reference to the Aubrey Maturin series, A Sea of Words. I skimmed through Harbors and High Seas after each O'Brian book the last time through; leaving alone the clearer geographical detail, this really adds depth to O'Brian's already convincing world.

I would recommend this highly to fans of the series who feel bereft at its close and long to return, to poke around a little themselves. Harbors and High Seas is full of taking off points, tangents to the stories that the curious reader can follow up on. A print of the decrepit Temple, reproduced here, might spark you to pursue some detail or other about Napoleon's Paris. The discussion of the many Desolation Islands has lots of little sides to it that could reward some curiosity. Like the stories, this is a sort of open-ended invitation into the historical setting, you might say.

Harbors and High Seas is a "companion" to the series, a complement to it, not just a reference to be consulted when you're muddled. Don't just refer to it -- read it for fun.

If you enjoy the Aubrey-Maturin books as I did (and I read almost nothing else for several months), you will find this book an excellent reference aid. At times I found the geography in the books difficult to follow. The maps in Dean King's companion set forth with excellent clarity where Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin have been and when they were there. Although I found Dean King's lexicon (his other book) more helpful, I would nonetheless recommend this one.

I'm now on book 7 of the Aubrey-Maturin series, and have only had my Companion for the last 2...how much it adds to the joy and the education. The best part of the companion is the maps, with clearly marked routes taken by Lucky Jack's vessels. O'Brian's description of Aubrey passing by Elsinore while Jack describes his role in Hamlet as a young midshipman comes alive with both the map and the picture of Elsinore. As well, eliminating the frustration of trying to determine what is fiction (Grimsholm) from what is not (Admiral Suamarez) greatly adds to the historical learnings.

The only downside to having this companion is the irresistable temptation to read ahead...the plot lines of the first 17 books are all given in general outline. As O'Brian readers know, however, much of the joy is as much in the characterization and writing as in the plot line. So, even if you do look ahead, it in all likelihood only will increase your desire to move on to the next book....I personally can hardly wait to get to Treason's Harbour and the mood that O'Brian will create around historic Malta.

If you love maps, though, and have always used them to add a visual learning dimension and reference to the words, you can't possibly read the books without it.

In closing, I guess I should add the warning that as addictive as these books are, they become even more addictive with the companion.

Beware!