Sun Tzu: The Art of War for Managers; 50 Strategic Rules
by Sun-tzu
from Adams Media
Sun Tzu's Ihe Art of WarR, written in 500 B.C., has achieved international recognition as the foundation of Eastern military strategy.
Selling To VITO (The Very Important Top Officer)
by Anthony Parinello
from Adams Media
This book contains all the tactics you need to get appointments with impossible-to-reach top decision-makers. They in fact are the Very Important Top Officers (VITOs), the people with the ultimate veto power who hold the key to bigger commission checks, every sales award you could possibly win, and VITO to VITO referrals that you can take to the bank!
You'll quickly learn how to:
Get into new accounts at the top
Keep out of time-consuming log-jams-and into VITO's office
Promote loyalty at the top with existing customers and capture add-on business
Increase the size of every sale
Selling To VITO offers innovative new ideas and street-smart tactics for reaching the very top person in any organization. It's based on the seminars that have helped thousands of sales professionals from top corporations like Canon, 3M, Hewlett-Packard, and MCI bust quotas and increase commissions. It can help you, too, by getting you to the right person so you can do what you do best: SELL!
Anthony Parinello is without question the country's foremost expert on getting appointments with, and selling to, top decision makers. This book is the product of his twenty-three years of award-winning sales performance.
Europe by Eurail 2008: Touring Europe by Train (Europe By Eurail)
by LaVerne Ferguson-Kosinski
from GPP Travel
5 Steps To Professional Presence: How to Project Confidence, Competence, and Credibility at Work
by Susan Bixler
from Adams Media
Exceptional Customer Service: Going Beyond Your Good Service to Exceed the Customer's Expectation
by Lisa Ford
from Adams Media
The Classic Fairy Tales (Norton Critical Editions)
from W. W. Norton
The cultural resilience of fairy tales is incontestable. Surviving over the centuries and thriving in a variety of media, fairy tales continue to enrich our imaginations and shape our lives. This Norton Critical Edition of The Classic Fairy Tales examines the genre, its cultural implications--and its critical history. The editor has gathered fairy tales from around the world to reveal the range and play of these stories over time. The Classic Fairy Tales focuses on six different tale types: "Little Red Riding Hood,' "Beauty and the Beast," "Snow White," "Cinderella," "Bluebeard," and "Hansel and Gretel." It includes multicultural variants of these tales, along with sophisticated literary rescriptings. Each tale type is preceded by an introduction, and annotations are provided throughout. Also included in this collection of over forty stories are tales by Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde. "Criticism" collects twelve essays that interrogate different aspects of fairy tales by exploring their social origins, historical evolution, psychological dynamics, and engagement with issues of gender and national identity. Bruno Bettelheim, Robert Darnton, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Karen E. Rowe, Marina Warner, Zohar Shavit, Jack Zipes, Donald Haase, Maria Tatar, Antti Aarne, and Vladimir Propp provide critical overviews. A Selected Bibliography is included.
About the Series--Each Norton Critical Edition includes an authoritative text, contextual and source materials, and a wide range of interpretation--from contemporary perspectives to the most current critical theory--as well as a bibliography and a chronology of the author's life and work.
Trans-Siberian Handbook: Seventh Edition of the Guide to the World's Longest Railway Journey (Trailblazer Guides)
by Bryn Thomas
from Trailblazer Publications
>Kilometer-by-kilometer route guide -- covering the entire routes of the Trans-Siberian, Trans-Manchurian, and Trans-Mongolian railways with thirty-eight strip maps in English, Russian, and Chinese: readers can see where they are as they travel
>Siberia and the railway -- the detailed history of Siberia, the construction of the railway and the running of the Trans-Siberian today are of great interest not only to visitors but also to armchair travelers
>City guides with maps -- the best sights, places to stay, and restaurants for all budgets: Moscow, St Petersburg, Ulan Bator, Beijing, and twenty-three towns in Siberia
>Nutshell information on Minsk, Berlin, Baltic Republics, Helsinki, Hong Kong, and Tokyo
>Rail fares and timetables
>Seventh edition includes seventy maps
>Plus Russian and Chinese phrases
Nothing Like It In the World : The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869
by Stephen E. Ambrose
from Simon & Schuster
Abraham Lincoln, who had worked as a riverboat pilot before turning to politics, knew a thing or two about the problems of transporting goods and people from place to place. He was also convinced that the United States would flourish only if its far-flung regions were linked, replacing sectional loyalties with an overarching sense of national destiny.
Building a transcontinental railroad, writes the prolific historian Stephen Ambrose, was second only to the abolition of slavery on Lincoln's presidential agenda. Through an ambitious program of land grants and low-interest government loans, he encouraged entrepreneurs such as California's "Big Four"--Charles Crocker, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Leland Stanford--to take on the task of stringing steel rails from ocean to ocean. The real work of doing so, of course, was on the shoulders of immigrant men and women, mostly Chinese and Irish. These often-overlooked actors and what a contemporary called their "dreadful vitality" figure prominently in Ambrose's narrative, alongside the great financiers and surveyors who populate the standard textbooks.
In the end, Ambrose writes, Lincoln's dream transformed the nation, marking "the first great triumph over time and space" and inaugurating what has come to be known as the American Century. David Haward Bain's Empire Express, which covers the same ground, is more substantial, but Ambrose provides an eminently readable study of a complex episode in American history. --Gregory McNamee
Nothing Like It in the World gives the account of an unprecedented feat of engineering, vision, and courage. It is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad -- the investors who risked their businesses and money; the enlightened politicians who understood its importance; the engineers and surveyors who risked, and sometimes lost, their lives; and the Irish and Chinese immigrants, the defeated Confederate soldiers, and the other laborers who did the backbreaking and dangerous work on the tracks.
The U.S. government pitted two companies -- the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads -- against each other in a race for funding, encouraging speed over caution. Locomotives, rails, and spikes were shipped from the East through Panama or around South America to the West or lugged across the country to the Plains. In Ambrose's hands, this enterprise, with its huge expenditure of brainpower, muscle, and sweat, comes vibrantly to life.
The Union had won the Civil War; slavery was abolished. Lincoln, an early champion of railroads, would not live to see the next great achievement. It took brains, muscle, and sweat in quantities and scope never before ventured and required engineers and surveyors willing to lose their lives in the wilderness; men who had commanded and obeyed in war; workers from China, Ireland, and the defeated South; and capitalists betting their money for possible great profit. The government pitted the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific against each other in a race for funding, encouraging speed over caution.
Locomotives, falls, and spikes were shipped from the east through Panama, around South America, or lugged across the country. The railroad was the last great building project to be done by hand: excavating dirt, cutting through ridges, filling gorges, blasting tunnels. Nothing like this great railroad had been seen in the world when the last spike, a golden one, was driven in at Promontory Peak, Utah, in 1869, as the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific joined tracks. Ambrose writes with power and eloquence about the brave men who accomplished the spectacular feat that made the nation one.
China's Great Train: Beijing's Drive West and the Campaign to Remake Tibet
by Abrahm Lustgarten
from Times Books
A vivid account of China’s unstoppable quest to build a railway into Tibet, and its obsession to transform its land and its people
In the summer of 2006, the Chinese government fulfilled a fifty-year plan to build a railway into Tibet. Since Mao Zedong first envisioned it, the line had grown into an imperative, a critical component of China’s breakneck expansion and the final maneuver in strengthening China’s grip over this remote and often mystical frontier, which promised rich resources and geographic supremacy over South Asia.
Through the lives of the Chinese and Tibetans swept up in the project, Fortune magazine writer Abrahm Lustgarten explores the “Wild West” atmosphere of the Chinese economy today. He follows innovative Chinese engineer Zhang Luxin as he makes the train’s route over the treacherous mountains and permafrost possible (for now), and the tenacious Tibetan shopkeeper Rinzen, who struggles to hold on to his business in a boomtown that increasingly favors the Han Chinese. As the railway—the highest and steepest in the world—extends to Lhasa, and China’s “Go West” campaign delivers waves of rural poor eager to make their fortunes, their lives and communities fundamentally change, sometimes for good, sometimes not.
Lustgarten’s book is a timely, provocative, and absorbing first-hand account of the Chinese boom and the promise and costs of rapid development on the country’s people.
Japan by Rail, 2nd: includes rail route guide and 29 city guides (Japan by Rail)
by Ramsey Zarifeh
from Trailblazer Publications
* Practical information – planning your trip; what to take; getting to Japan from Europe, North America and Australasia
* City guides and maps – where to stay (all budgets), where to eat, what to see in 29 towns and cities; historical and cultural background
* Kilometerkilometer route guides – covering train journeys from the coast into the mountains, from temple retreat to sprawling metropolis and from sulfurous volcano to windswept desert; 34 route maps
* Railway timetables – Bullet trains and all routes in this guidebook
* Plus – Customs, etiquette, Japanese phrases and 28 color photos
+++
