Archive for the ‘Products Highlight’ Category
We all have stories to tell about our lives and the lives of people we know. Rebecca Rule and Susan Wheeler help new and experienced writers commit those stories to paper.
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As usual, this year’s editor has put together an excellent collection of Science Writing. But the thing I tend to like about the series is that it contains a little bit on a lot of subjects. Not so this time. The stories generally fall into four categories: genetics, ethics/exposé, the brain, and the environment.
Genetics: The first, Facing Life with a Lethal Gene is, unforgettably, about a girl who chooses to learn her genetic fate. The second, An Error in the Code, concerns a genetic defect that causes persons to tear themselves apart, while the third explains the benefits and limitations of the work done by genetic testing companies. In the ethics/exposé category falls six stories: How NIH Misread Hormone Study in 2002; Psychiatrists, Children, and Drug Industry’s Role; What’s Normal ["the controversy in diagnosing bipolar disorder in the very young"]; After Sanctions, Doctors Get Drug Company Pay; Dr. Drug Rep; When Is a Pain Doctor a Drug Pusher?; and Supply, Demand, and Kidney Transplants. Those involving the brain include: The Abyss [a man whose brain can not lay down memories], Duped [lie detection], and The Older-and-Wiser Hypothesis [Does wisdom increase with age?]. In the final, environment, category are four essays: a five pager by Al Gore on (what else) Global Warming, two about China (1 – the country is running out of water, 2 – a whistle-blower tried to sound the alarm on chemical factories’ poisoning of a lake and suffered the consequences), and, finally, Sowing for Apocalypse, which I’d read elsewhere, about a Noah’s Arkian collection of seeds from all over the world, kept safe in case of a cataclysmic event on earth. You see, only one piece, about the loss of effectiveness of the human body’s evolution-related defenses against cancer, entitled Evolved for Cancer?, doesn’t fit my categories. In summary, I’d like to say to next year’s editor, more variety, please! Also good: A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar, The Best American Science and Nature Writing Series, and Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder.
Edited by Sylvia Nasar, bestselling author of A Beautiful Mind and former economics correspondent for the New York Times, The Best American Science Writing 2008 brings together the premiere science writing of the year. Distinguished by the foremost voices and publications—among them Pulitzer Prize-winner Amy Harmon, Nobel Prizewinner Al Gore, and award-winning and bestselling author Oliver Sacks—this anthology is a comprehensive overview of our most advanced and most relevant scientific inquiries.
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This is a very different book than the Lao Tzu. It’s written in a much less poetic style, but I find Zhuangzi more readable for that reason. The style is more conversational, and well rendered into contemporary English by Burton Watson.
These inner chapters contain only the core of a much longer work. Over the 2200 years since its writing, many accretions had crept into the work, including commentaries and addenda by other authors. Watson strips those away and leaves only the central and most vivid writings. Some of those may already be familiar to today’s reader. For example, this book originates the man dreaming to be a butterfly dreaming to be a man. Zhuangzi offers many more of these anecdotes, too long to be analogies but too short for fables. He also calls on the history and mythology of his time – not always distinct from each other – and creates mythology of his own, whether he meant to or not.
That mythology lived on in Chinese alchemy, when Zhuangzi’s magical sages were taken as literal beings. Zhuangzhi lived on, too, in Taoism’s eventual alignment with Buddhism. His cryptic, non sequitur style of answer seems to foreshadow the koans of the distinctly Chinese and Japanese schools of Buddhism.
This is a wonderful complement to the Lao Tzu. If that book is the art of enlightenment, then this is more like the practical craft. I recommend it highly to any student of eastern classics.
I must add that Zhuangzi is a more recent romanization of “Chuang Tzu” – different renderings of one name. It is easy to become confused and think that the two were different writers. It is especially confusing since Watson published this same material many years ago under the “Chuang Tzu” spelling, and now as “Zhuangzi.” While I have the highest respect Burton’s scholarship, I think that this difference-without-a-difference should be made more explicit.
Only by understanding Dao (the Way of Nature) and dwelling in its unity can humankind achieve true happiness and freedom, in both life and death. This is the central tenet of the philosophy espoused by Zhuangzi (369?-286? B.C.) in the book that bears his name. A leading philosopher of the Daoist strain, Zhuangzi used parable and anecdote, allegory and paradox, to set forth the early ideas of what was to become the Daoist school. Witty and imaginative, enriched by brilliant imagery, and making sportive use of both mythological and historical personages (including even Confucius), this is a timeless classic.
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This anthology contains 35 relatively short letters and sermons by the Church Father Augustine, dealing mostly with political and legal issues. They should really be read together with Augustine’s major work “The City of God”, but are quite informative even in isolation. The anthology also contains an introduction by the editor, plus extensive footnotes, and short biographies of the persons mentioned in Augustine’s letters. Since the translation is occasionally somewhat strange (“security” instead of “salvation” etc), readers shouldn’t skip the translator’s notes either. For people with the right sense of humour, the footnotes can actually be quite entertaining. One of them explains what the Book of Job is, presumably because the anthology is directed at students of political history, and the editor doesn’t expect them to be well versed in matters Biblical! Personally, I thought the Book of Job was common knowledge… 
Augustine’s letters are adressed to high-ranking Roman officials, both governors and military commanders. His letters are candid in tone, sometimes even provocative. They contain fewer formal greetings than the officials’ letters adressed to him. This says something about the power of the Catholic Church in the Late Roman Empire. As bishop of Hippo in North Africa, Augustine was in effect a powerful state official in his own right. This explains the tone of his letters, and why he could treat even the emperor’s men as equals. While ultimate decision-making power was in the hands of the imperial court, Church councils could lobby the court and perhaps get the emperor to do their bidding. Augustine was therefore very much part of the Old Men’s Club of the Late Empire.
On most issues, it’s difficult for a modern to sympathize with Augustine. His stern blend of other-wordly Platonism, belief in original sin, and predestination strikes us as typically “medieval” and “dark age”. The Doctor of Grace, as he was later called, was also against freedom of worship. He believed that everyone in the Roman Empire should be Catholic, and that the emperors had the right to force people to join the Church. After all, it’s all for their own good. Augustine also rejected the right to rebel against authority, any authority. Bad emperors are a chastisment from God, and should be suffered by the good. If they are really bad, it’s right to speak out against them, but solely for the purpose of becoming a martyr. In one of his sermons, included in this book, Augustine rebukes his congregation for attacking and killing a corrupt imperial tax-collector. From his Neo-Platonic perspective, Augustine declares that life is short, death inevitable and earthly possesions ultimately meaningless. Taking the law into your own hands is therefore pointless and, indeed, sinful. Few people today would take up such a position, and rightly so. Augustine comes across as a defender of the Late Roman status quo, at a time when the degenerate Empire was already breaking up at its seams.
In other ways, however, “Political Writings” shows a somewhat unexpected and more humane side of Augustine than we might have expected. For starters, Augustine was against capital punishment, and often tried to get such sentences mitigated, even when directed against anti-Catholic rioters and rebels. His opposition to the death penalty was based on the following reasoning: people who die unrepentant will spend eternity in Hell, therefore it’s better not to kill them, but to reform them instead. Augustine was also against torture, a commonplace practice even in the Christianized Roman Empire, although his opposition to this practice wasn’t entirely consistent, since he didn’t mind suspects being beaten up! At one point, the Roman governor of Africa, Macedonius, apparently sent Augustine a letter complaining about the bishop’s constant intercession in favour of obviously guilty criminals. In his response, Augustine points out that since everyone is a sinner, showing mercy to criminals is a religious duty, and he explains that he has sometimes even attempted to get victims of theft to drop their cases against the thieves, rather than demanding restitution.
At the same time, Augustine wasn’t always consistent in his attitude. In some letters, as already noted, he criticizes even victims of burglary or fraud for demanding compensation from the criminal. In other cases, he proposes fines himself as an alternative to the death penalty. The most interesting document in “Political Writings” is Letter 185, where Augustine admits that his attitude towards the Donatists have hardened. The Donatists were a group of Christians in North Africa regarded as heretical by the Catholic Church, and hence illegal, which didn’t stop them from commanding wide-spread support, and often violently attacking both Roman landlords and Catholic clergy. Originally, Augustine opposed using force against the Donatists, simply calling for Roman military protection against Donatist attacks, trying to convince the Donatists of the error of their ways by peaceful preaching. Only in areas with Donatist violence against Catholics would the Donatists be punished by fines, and only their bishops. Emperor Honorius, however, went much further, and decreed that all Donatists were liable to harsh punishments, simply for being Donatists. In Letter 185, Augustine seems to come around to this harder position, fed up with Donatist resistance.
The final section deals with Augustine’s view of war, always a tricky subject for Christians. After all, the Sermon on the Mount seems to preach non-resistance to evil. Augustine argues that Christians might nevertheless become soldiers and wage wars. After all, when Roman soldiers approached John the Baptist, he didn’t tell them to quit the army, but simply not to commit crimes against humanity. And what about the Roman centurion who asked Jesus to heal his son, or Cornelius, the righteous Gentile who became a Christian? They were both soldiers. A particularly interesting letter in this section is no. 220, sent to Boniface, a Roman commander in North Africa who had rebelled against the empress Galla Placidia. True to form, Augustine calls on Boniface to make peace with the Empire, and stop his troops from plundering the North African countryside, concentrating on fighting the “barbarians” instead. Boniface did eventually make his peace with the empress, but to late to save Roman Africa. When Augustine lied on his deathbed in AD 430, Hippo was besieged by the Vandals…
In sum, this volume is extremely interesting, especially for serious stundents of Church history, Late Roman history or theology. Recommended.
This collection brings together thirty-five letters and sermons of Augustine, Bishop of Hippo from 396-430 AD, that deal with political matters. The letters and sermons are both practical and principled and treat many essential themes in Augustine’s thought, including the responsibilities of citizenship, the relationship between the church and secular authority, religious coercion, and war and peace. These texts complement Augustine’s classic The City of God, and give students direct insight into the political and social world of late antiquity with which Augustine was immediately involved.
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“The Truth About the New Rules of Business Writing” is an excellent book for those wanting to learn about how to be more efficient in their writing, communicating with clients and even on social media sites.
Writers Natalie Canavor/Claire Meirowitz (Founders of C&M Business Writing Services) write about “52 Truths” when it comes to writing and the chapters are broken down into the following:
PART I: The Truth About What Makes Writing Work
Examples: “Me” Focused Messages Fail, Forget Yesterday, Write for Today, Tone Makes – or breaks – your message, etc.
PART II: The Truth About Self-Editing
Examples: The best writers don’t write; they rewrite, Less can be a whole lot more, passive thinking and jargon undermine clarity
PART III: The truth about successful e-mail
Examples: Know your e-mail do’s and don’ts, use e-mail to communicate in the fast lane-powerfully, etc.
And then you get into the more important chapters such as..
PART IV: The Truth About Letters
PART V: The Truth About Reports and Proposals
PART VI: The Truth About Web Sites
PART VII: The Truth About New Media
PART VIII: The Truth About Writing to Self-Market
PART IX: The Truth About Tricks of the Trade
And also the ability to access more materials by registering your book online.
JUDGMENT CALL:
Personally, “The Truth About the New Rules of Business Writing” could be a useful tool in college curriculum. In college, having taken writing classes that dealt with Associated Press writing, it was ingrained in our heads by our professors to write a certain way, to use words that most people don’t use in their vocabulary and to write intelligently.
But when I took a business class which emphasized “Chicago” writing style, it was what we learned to write memo’s, e-mails and business communication writing.
But as more and more people communicate via E-mail, chat, Twitter or utilizing social media, most people are in a hurry and don’t bother to rewrite. And how many times have you had people take a message you wrote out of context. Sometimes good writing requires repetition, good etiquette and for the most part, both Canavor and Meirowitz do a good job in showing people how to write effectively.
Overall, “The Truth About the New Rules of Business Writing” is an excellent resource for business writing and communication and for those who know they are having problems with communicating via memo, e-mail, tweets, etc.
“From everyday letters, e-mails, and reports to Web site content, proposals, and new media, you’ll discover what it takes to make every written word count.” –Jerry Allocca, President, CORE Interactive
Business writing that packs a punch: Make the most of your message to get what you want!
Simply the best thinking
THE TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH
This book reveals 52 proven, bite-size, easy-to-use business writing techniques that work.
Natalie Canavor launched four national magazines for business and professional audiences and directed communications for New York’s largest educational agency.
Claire Meirowitz, an award-winning author, has served as project manager and copy editor for leading business publications. Natalie and Claire own and run C&M Business Writing Services.
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Featuring the latest APA-style guidelines, this concise guide helps readers master the skills and conventions they need to write well in psychology.
This brief guide takes readers step-by-step through the writing process. In addition, it presents thorough discussions of researching psychological literature, focusing on online and database research, and presenting those findings in written and oral formats. Special attention is given to interpreting and reporting the results of statistical tests, as well as preparing data displays in tables and figures. Introducing readers to all elements of professional writing in APA style, this book is a perfect supplement for courses in the social science disciplines.
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Whether you love John F. Kennedy or hate him, “Let the Word Go Forth” is a rewarding read for anyone interested in the 35th President or the America from which we are not very far removed. This book consists of excerpts from over 100 speeches made by John F. Kennedy during his political life. These is not a collection of quotations but a public career as portrayed in largely and totally complete speeches and statements. In these pages we are reminded of the lofty ideals, the wit and, a bit of the parochial politician which was John F. Kennedy.
For me, much of the value in this book lies not in what it tells us of Kennedy, but what it tells us about the country in which he lived. The things which were said, and which did not need to be said, and the language used tell us of an America different from the one in which we live today. To illustrate this I will discuss four of the speeches.
We begin with the Inaugural Address, probably Kennedy’s most famous statement. The speech, which gave us several remembered lines, the most famous of which is “Ask not what your country can do for you,-ask what you can do for your country” is most notable for what it does not say. Read this speech from start to finish and you will find no mention of social security, health care, education, poverty, civil rights, highways or any of the domestic concerns which have held such center stage in recent public debate. It deals exclusively of foreign policy. What President since Kennedy would start his administration which such a challenge?
The second speech to which I would direct the reader’s attention is the address to the Houston Ministerial Alliance on September 12, 1960. The purpose of the speech was to refute allegations that a Catholic would have a divided loyalty or would be subject to orders from the church hierarchy. The way in which Kennedy responded to the problem is felt by many to have done a great disservice to Catholic politicians. It is believed that Kennedy established the standard that, in order to be considered for office, Catholic candidates must establish that their religious beliefs will not be a factor in their decision making process. At the end of the speech, Kennedy was specifically confronted with a request that he request approval from the Vatican for his statement supporting the separation of church and state. What politician since then has been confronted with such a question?
The third speech to be considered is entitled “The City Upon a Hill” and was given to the Massachusetts legislature on January 9, 1961. In this speech Kennedy draws on the history of Massachusetts in establishing the code of conduct for those serving the Commonwealth. He lists four questions by which public servants will be judged: “were we men of courage…were we men of judgement…were we truly men of integrity…were we men of dedication.” As one reads these stirring question with their elaborations, a realization dawns on the reader: There were no women in the Massachusetts legislature in 1961. I am sure that the wording would be different today.
The last speech which I would suggest for consideration is the acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, entitled “The Opening of the New Frontier.” I bring this speech up because of the oft stated lament that the public is losing its sense of history, its ability to relate current conditions to conditions of the past in order to help us separate the principle from the pragmatism and the important from the trivial. In that speech, the nominee tells his listeners: “just as historians tell us that Richard I was not fit to fill the shoes of bold Henry II-and that Richard Cromwell was not fit to wear the mantle of his uncle {sic}-they might add in future years that Richard Nixon did not measure to the footsteps of Dwight D. Eisenhower.” Overlooking the fact that Richard Cromwell succeeded his father and not his uncle, what contemporary candidate would trust his listeners to understand the reference to long gone English leaders? Is it the draining of the general fund of knowledge of our citizens which has lowered the level of our public discourse from the deep, rich speech of the Kennedy era to the shallow sound bites of today?
At the conclusion of “Let the Word Go Forth” one has a greater respect for the communication skills of our 35th President and an appreciation for the things which we, as a society have gained, and a longing for the things which we have lost.
Collected in one illuminating volume, the writings and speeches of John F. Kennedy reveal the man and president who inspired a generation. Here are the words that propelled a nation and moved the world, offering an important portrayal of the 35th president’s entire career. Photographs throughout.
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This book has drastically impacted my comedy writing capabilities. Not necessarily because you learn anything different than you would in another book but because of the way it makes you WORK to practice every technique. Lots of room for you to fall flat but fantastic for learning to work a few hours everyday and continue to write even when not feeling like it. Doing an exercise or two a day after the first section is a great means of learning how to write regularly.
The whole range of tricks for successful comedy writing is examined in this book. The author, one of Bob Hope’s top writers, analyzes what he does to produce one-liners, anecdotes, monologues, formular jokes, cartoon captions and teaches the reader how to master the skill.
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A visually appealing and gentle book, this is as enjoyable as a book on the art of writing can be. The author communicates in an engaging, personal manner that speaks to us no matter where we’re at in our skill as a writer. Even a reluctant writer will find this little manual easy to tolerate. The introduction alone, while giving a helpful, brief overview of the pillars of writing, is an encouraging invitation to come along for the journey. Think of each of the twenty principles of writing as little gems to be uncovered by those who wish to write better. Who among us is not guilty of using needless words? Or how about long sentences?
He also emphasizes things I wanted reiterated to my homeschooled child such as sentence variety and reworking his writing. Additionally I like how the author uses both positive and negative examples for his readers to examine and compare. The errors of bad writing become obvious to us when held up against good writing that follows sound principles. As to the exercises, while they are short, and not every chapter contains them, they are useful and help cement the rule given. As a home educator I used this book, along with the exercises, as a supplemental refresher for my sixteen year old, who is a strong writer but needed some help in “polishing” his work. Finally, the grammar section is concise and beneficial and will be considered a reference tool in our home. I highly recommend this book!
For Writers From All Walks of Life!
There’s no need to fear the big, bad world of writing with The Little Red Writing Book in hand. Brimming with clever advice, this book offers writers, students, and business professionals a concise guide to penning strong and effective work for all occasions.
The Little Red Writing Book is designed for visual appeal and ease of use. Elegant yet practical, it will be an intriguing, inviting reference you’ll turn to again and again. Author Brandon Royal offers clear explanations and non-intimidating instruction based on the four pillars of sound writing – structure, style, readability, and grammar. His discussion centers on 20 immutable writing principles as well as 30 commonly encountered rules of grammar. A wealth of examples, charts, and engaging exercises make The Little Red Writing Book an invaluable guide for anyone who wants to master those skills that will make a good writer even better.
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