Have you ever read a book that felt like you were having a conversation with a good friend? Jeff Kane's new book, The Healing Companion makes me feel comforted, entertained, encouraged and enlightened; just as if I'd spent time talking with a good friend.

The book could be considered as a guide toward offering sick loved ones our healing presence. This guidance is valid for anyone relating to someone who is sick and is just as helpful to doctors, nurses and counselors as it is to family members and anyone who has a loved one who is sick.

A quote from page three says "This book will guide you toward offering sick loved ones your healing presence. By learning to ask them exactly how they're suffering and help them express their feelings thoroughly, you'll encourage an atmosphere of honesty. You'll move toward a perspective in which whatever happens physically, the emotional turmoil surrounding it will settle. All involved will benefit from increasing serenity."

I found especially helpful Jeff's discussion of how sick people suffer. He talks about really listening to their suffering and hearing their fears, anxieties, confusion, depression and rages. He says "I learned that people get emotional when they're sick and that fear and anger and despair aren't abnormal; they're a natural feature of sickness. In fact, I'd worry about the mental health of sick people who weren't affected by their consequent feelings. Hearing many hundreds of stories, I gradually learned that people don't generally suffer from their disease as much as from their emotions, the reactions their disease ignites in them." (page seven)

The rest of the chapters in the book are just as juicy and relevant as the above examples. In "Speaking With TLC", Jeff encourages speaking (only after much listening) with truth, leanness and compassion. He gives examples and practical questions to ask ourselves to pass the "TLC" test.

My two favorite chapters are "Welcoming Mystery" and "Healing Yourself". The first deals with the existential questions that illness can stir and the second with "continual" self care. What profound encouragement both offer for living in this world.

I truly enjoyed reading this book (and have read several sections more than once). The wonderful stories of courage and healing inspired me to be a better listener, a better friend and even a better person. Thank you Jeff.

Anyone confronted with the serious sickness of a family member of friend will find this sensitive but unsentimental book invaluable. Jeff Kane not only shows how the emotional support and participation of one's friends and family help the sick person in his or her illness (that is, the social and spiritual disclocation and emotional and psychological suffering caused by the disease), but also gives very concrete, practical suggestions on listening, responding, respecting, and feeling and showing compassion. Dr. Kane's insights about the experience of suffering, the devastation it causes and the opportunities it offers both the sick person and the care-giver for self-knowledge and personal transfromation make this a book to be read and reread time and again.

For anyone who has stood beside a hospital bed wondering, "What can I do to help?" Dr. Jeff Kane's THE HEALING COMPANION is an invaluable new resource. Beginning with beautifully told stories of people redefining their lives after a diagnosis of cancer, Dr. Kane shares the essence of his decades of work exploring the nature and sources of human suffering. He then goes on to offer practical techniques, which anyone with a willing heart and open mind can learn, to alleviate suffering and aid healing. A remarkable book whose applications go far beyond the boundaries of medical uses, and can have a profound transformative impact on how we perceive the meaning of our lives.

The 4th book in this series was really really well done. I hardly ever rate books with 5 stars, but this book deserved every one of them! It is a must read if you love this series. I can't wait for book 5. ...

The fourth book in this series is just as good as the others. The author(s) do a wonderful job at drawing the relationship out between Zee girl and Tristan. I want them together so bad!!! Also, they really get into their psyche. The reader feels like he or she knows the two main characters on a personal level. More is found out about Summer and Erin, who is continuing her visit at Effing-huh! as well as Tristan's friends Stevie and Billie. The cliffhanger is a cliffhanger to end all other cliffhangers, per usual with this series, and the medical information and suspense escalates. I can't wait for the fifth book, PROGNOSIS HEARTBREAK, which is supposed to come out fall 2001 and center around Tristan in a totally unexpected way. Ahh!

Cherie's done it again! This book was REALLY good. It was mostly aboutZoey and Tristan.... How about Chad and his crush? It answered a lot of questions that have arised, but it also made new ones. And at the end of the book your left with a new cliffhanger. I can't wait for Book #5!

For those of you that read Zapp! this book continues on the same idea. It's in parable form, which makes it easy to read and the points made are on target.

Helped me tremendously when I became a manager. How to tell people what needs to be done and let them figure out how to do it. Learn while following a story. You don't even realize you're learning all the techniques because the story is so fun to read.

Facing the constant threat of Dragons attacking the village, and encountering a mysterious gloomy fog each and every workday, was the reality for the people of Lamron. In order to preserve the village, and bring some meaning to the everyday work experience, change had to happen.

Heroz is a tale of a fictional village, of fictional characters facing problems common to the daily grind of work. Throughout the book, the people working in the arrow factory strive to determine and achieve the goal of the business, to make money and provide the knights charged with slaying the dragons, the quality arrows they need. Throughout the book, the factory workers and management personnel learn to work together, to enhance teamwork and motivation, and experience the enhanced ZAPP! gained by working together.

Heroz is a breeze to read, easy to identify with, especially if you experience the fog that rolls in the workplace at the beginning of the day, and lifts completely only after the last person has gone home. It's entertaining and humorous. You'll learn spells to use in all different situations, and upon completion of the book, will have them all compiled in the "Zapp! Wizard's Spell Book", conveniently tucked in at the conclusion of the novel.

A brilliant investigation into and meditation on the intersection of epidemiology, journalism, politics, and human suffering known as the Gulf War Syndrome. The book is sui generis, and as with many works of surpassing originality it may be overlooked today, but I predict people will be reading this humanist classic in a hundred years.

This book is a remarkable portrait of a difficult and highly politicized medical phenomenon -- Gulf War Syndrome -- and its subsets, chronic fatigue syndrome, chemical sensitivities and fibromyalgia. Because of this overlap, many, many Americans will be tremendously interested by this book. It is deep and broad, and rich. Journalists and historians will also be fascinated by the writer's unusual and intelligent method, and the implications of the story. Wheelwright not only keeps you reading way past your bedtime, but reveals the complexities for victims, doctors, and the public's attitudes. Not glib, this book manages to paint a vivid picture of people and medical ideas without taking any shortcuts. A tremendous and really entertaining achievement which may sadly be overlooked in the trend towards simple blockbusters. You will be recommending it to others.

This book is a stunning achievement: it makes obscure and confusing science understandable, and discusses with accuracy and compassion the many different aspects of Gulf War Syndrome. I found that Wheelwright's voice, always confident and clear, was greatly reassuring. Very powerful. A must read for those interested in science, medicine and politics, and how they overlap.

What I like about this book is that he takes his time to build a point slowly and methodically, with lots of examples. You understand the logic behind the "rules", so you can figure them out for yourself. After reading it, I went back and picked up "Bridge for Dummies", and B4D paled by comparison.

I've read many introductory books to bridge, and this is in a league of its own! A very simple, straightforward, logical approach to playing. The book begins with the playing of the hands (in no-trump then trump), and moves to bidding as a logical extension of the ability to win tricks. This approach is unique, and takes allows the player to LEARN the proper bidding, rather than to memorize (too) many sets of numbers for bidding hands. Also, I felt that the other books I have read did not offer a strong foundation in the playing-out of the hands. I'll be purchasing copies for non-bridge-playing friends! HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

I am a returning bridge player and find this book very helpful in refreshing my mind about the game. I have a question for the author and don't know how to ask him except here. Mr Bayone, where did you find the scoring system which I love but have never seen before? I want to change my bridge table over to your system but need some validation. Thank you

Poet leaves a legacy of love, death and physics

By Michael J. Vaughn, Staff Writer

Northern California lost a great and provocative voice this summer when Santa Cruz poet Greg Keith succumbed to cancer. And I use "voice" both figuratively and literally; Keith was one of those poets whose words lived behind the microphone as well as on the page (ask anyone who's heard his famed railroad poem, backed by a mesmerizing, rail-clacking vocal inflection).

Keith's farewell gift is "Life Near 310 Kelvin," a collection of poems and essays from Berkeley's SLG Books that comes either alone or with a CD of readings by the poet.

The overwhelming attraction of Keith's work was his great love of science, and his ability to nudge its often-ponderous weight through the revolving door of poetry. Though he spent his last 18 years as a computer programmer, his preoccupation was clearly physics, and he had an incomparable knack for turning the faceless beings of subatomic theory into a vivid cartoon show of characters.

A fine example is "The Age of Light," in which the poet mourns the loss of one of his favorite notions, the nearly unfathomable distances traveled by stellar light before they reach earthling eyes, "...long trains of photons / coming on through the night, the future on its way / like fast freight across an interstellar prairie."

It seems the old theory has been replaced by a new one, "resonant scattering," in which the photons of that original starlight steadily give way to new photons which they meet up with in deep space. "...in the space of two light years these lonesome photons / meet someone, some lone electron in all probability / somewhere specific around a proton. The electron, excited / by a packet in the mail, leaps to embrace / the possibility of light, only to extinguish it / in its own unstable enthusiasm." The embrace produces a new photon, which continues on the old photon's path.

The poet finds this new view depressing, but two friends quickly change his mind, convincing him that the process is actually "the birth of new information." "I like that," says a guy in a bar. "Me too," says the poet. "The eye that big. Light that fresh. News that current."

Keith was certainly not limited to science. He showed the same observational acuity and humor in matters of the heart. "310 Kelvin" contains several tributes to his last love, Susan, whom he married a few months before his departure. Typical among poets, however, I derive more morose pleasure from Keith's more lonesome ventures. A fine example is "SWM," a personal ad ten miles deeper than any you'll read in the paper, a wish-list of amusing second-person generalities regarding the hoped-for companion. "You will have currents of your own," he writes, "nothing to do with me. / You will have spent some non-zero number of Christmases / alone." He concludes with an arresting, hopeful plea: "Meet me in the world. Wear that smile and those eyes."

Then there are poems in which the romantic and cerebral meet, like "Last Words," a trio of seemingly dry multisyllabic words he leaves on his ladylove's cubicle. "Callipygia" describes "...the condition you exhibit when you walk, / the sketch made in space by high tonus and articulate bones." "Gynephanic" is "...conducive to epiphanies of womanshine, / the stark, resonant reflection in the terminal glass / of you going by my door. This is not your fault. These / are my own bells swinging in the little wind of your passage." "Pneumoparoxysmic" means simply "...breathtaking / in its most sudden, poignant sense."

...; a novel from Soho Press (New York 1995>.

Greg Keith, who died this year, tragically, of cancer, is still alive in his poems. When you read them, you think he knew he would be. Life Near 310 Kelvin is a startling book--in its intelligence, its clear, strong sense of life, its sureness of voice. Keith uses the language of science in the service of revelation. He does it with the precision of a thinker and the passion of a lover. It's interesting to see which words a poet comes back to, as small clues to his obsessions. Keith likes words life "specific" and "exact." He likes to invoke the names science has invented for what we know of the world and the forces that energize it. But he also likes "moon" and "woman" and "kiss." He's interested in the way things work, but he's not afraid of his heart.

The power in these poems comes from an understanding both simple and complex: Keith knew that poems ought to be interesting; that they ought to tell us something we don't know or something we didn't know we knew, or both. They surprise and often delight us. We sense that they surprised and delighted him, too.

There's such willingness, an eagerness, to look things in the face. In "radiology," Keith, strapped into poisition for the X-ray machine, waits to find out the verdict. "No other place to go, no other thing to be," he tells himself with heartbreaking bravery.

There are other treasures in this collection--"Radical Equality" (the ending is truly wonderful), "Another Note to the Young," the lyrical "Journalism: Biological Constraints on the Spirit," the quietly humorous "SWM." Actually, I like nearly all of them. I was interested in the stories at the end of the book, but I confess that I left my heart in the poems. I wish there could have been more. --Charlotte Muse, excerpted from THE MONTSERRAT REVIEW, Fall 1998

I had the good fortune to have known Greg for a few years before his death. These poems are truly elegant. He writes in a style that is very accessible to everyone, but with many layers, so that each reading will bring new gifts. He faced his disease and, ultimately, his death, with an almost child-like curiosity. I learned about grace from Greg, I've never known someone to be so gracious and wonderful in the face of such pain. The book deals with the progression of his cancer, but it's also rich with love poems, including ones to his family, that are so lovely, you'll want to go out and fall in love yourself, hug your siblings, kiss your children! You can get the book with a CD-ROM and an audio CD. I love to listen to the "Train Passing" poem, it's so special, Greg made this train sound, soft at first, and woven between the lines of the poem, then louder as a train approaches, then soft again as the train moved to the distance. These poems are for everyone.

The author expended a tremendous effort in researching the Jeff Davis Legion. He has created an interesting history of this unusual cavalry unit. Any one who is interested in the Confederate Cavalry will enjoy the detail information the author has dug out of the archives.

Amazon says book has 40 pages. It has 325

The author obviously performed a great deal of research in order to extract such detailed and little known facts about the "Little Jeff". Truly a gem for all interested in the Civil War. Highly recommended.

Jeff Lowe's earlier book, the Ice Experience, was a companion text to Yvon Choinard's Climbing Ice, and those two formed the vast majority of the printed information on technical ice climbing for several decades. Now his new book eclipses everything else on the market for its scope, practicality, and good looks (the photos are one of the highlights of the book).
Buy this one if you have any serious or casual interest in the subject; the others pale in comparison.

Jeff Lowe did a wonderfull job explaining the climbing techniques and reasons behind the technique. The knowledge in the book range from basic crampon technique to desparate overhanging dry tooling. All that is completed by excellent story of the frozen world

Jeff Lowe's Ice World is a must have for any ice climber. His in depth descriptions of classic techniques as well as insight into skills that helped him put up incredible mixed routes are all detailed in easy to read language.

The vivid photography really brings Lowe's instruction to life. This book is one of the best climbing reads out there.

Last Autumn is an AK-47 attack of words on lost love and forsaken dreams; an ageless story of two people who search for a compromise in love. Under the stark and majestic certainty of coastal life, the author gives you a "Looking Glass" view of a cigarette-filled, bottom of the beer can reality.

The poetry and beauty of Jeff Conine's words sing lyrically in the background, haunting and tragic...but none the less genuine.

Last Autumn is the kind of book that begs a good stiff bourbon on a rainy night, cutting and burning its way to inner warmth...don't expect "Love Story."

Jeff Conine's second book is a tragic story of love complicated by two other characters, one that overwhelms - the rugged and dangerous area where the ocean meets land - the second who lirks close at hand - the demon of alcohol. True literature. Take a breath, submerge, then read on. I await the surprise of his third book.

Jeff Conine has written a dark review of just how bad an alcoholic's relationships can be.Keeps you on the edge of your seat waiting to see just how bad this guy can screw up the the attachments between himself and his Significant Other. Sure to become a 'self help group' classic!

I had the good fortune of being in one of Jeff Patnaude's leadership seminars where I got to experience the Maze first hand. Not only does the Journey into inner management work, Patnaude is one who "walks his talk" and lives from the "inside out".

I really enjoyed this book as I have walked the labyrinth in France but never concieved of the three part journey as a path for the corporate leader. The author is an original thinker whose writing style is most engaging and very entertaining.

This book has great articulation, and great methods of how to incorporate a more personal aspect to the corporate world. I feel that in many companies in todays society, they are lacking a great deal of personality, and is to invloved with the every day buisness of buisness. This book, Leading From the Maze, offers many great solutions as well as humour. I would like to recomend it to anyone to feels stuck in the work place, or feels they need to figure out how to put creativity back into their daily lives.