Friday, October 28, 2011

Featured Book - Sisa's Vengeance: Jose Rizal & the "Woman Question" by E. San Juan, Jr.


Excerpt from the beginning of the book:

“More than his persona as the astute and circumspect dissident, Jose Rizal as lover, romantic protagonist, and simpatico confidant of women of various nationalities, has preoccupied many scholars to the point of suspecting that there was something anomalous somewhere. Was Rizal manic-depressive, or simply neurotic? Few would accuse him of being an unscrupulous and promiscuous Don Juan. In fact, Rizal was courtly, thoughtful, even fearful and wary towards the opposite sex — except for his mother. . . The inamorata Leonor Rivera exposed the Rizal phallus as a “semblance” (to use the Lacanian rubric) while Josephine Bracken restored it to its decorous size. Only one other woman challenged him: Nelly Boustead, while the Japanese Seiko Usui/O-Sei-San confirmed his virility, sacrificing herself (in his judgment) without demanding any reciprocity nor due recognition of her gift/service.

Entangled in this seductive chronicle of amorous affairs, we take a moment to interpose mindful distance and ask: what is Rizal’s ultimate assessment of women’s actual virtue and potential? None of his biographers has contributed anything substantial on this, perhaps intimidated that if they venture to engage with “the woman question” they would provoke a Pandora’s Box of adversarial criticism that might expose vulnerable biases and unconscionable presumptions.”

Monday, October 24, 2011

The Mozart Effect: Tappling the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind, and Unlock the Creative Spirit

The Mozart Effect: Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind and Unlock the Creative Spirit: Don CampbellCOMING  SOON !!!



Anyone who has ever seen a two-year-old start bouncing to a beat knows that music speaks to us on a very deep level. But it took celebrated teacher and music visionary Don Campbell to show us just how deep, with his landmark book The Mozart Effect.

Stimulating, authoritative, and often lyrical, The Mozart Effect has a simple but life-changing message: music is medicine for the body, the mind, and the soul. Campbell shows how modern science has begun to confirm this ancient wisdom, finding evidence that listening to certain types of music can improve the quality of life in almost every respect. Here are dramatic accounts of how music is used to deal with everything from anxiety to cancer, high blood pressure, chronic pain, dyslexia, and even mental illness.

Re-Imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age


COMING  SOON !!!

Tom Peters is back with a call to arms and a passionate wake-up call for the business world, educators, and society as a whole. In Re-imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age, America’s most influential business thinker profiles seven distinct and very different companies that exemplify Peters’ new business ground rules where screwing up, destroying, and “thinking weird” rule the day. Each of the companies profiled faced revolutionary business challenges and responded by inventing entirely new opportunities. Each had to re-imagine the nature of work itself—and did so by soliciting the energy and engagement of each and every one of their people.



Re-imagine is part of the Tom Peters Combo Package( $1499).  The combo includes:

In Search of Excellence

Passion for Excellence Short Cut

Passion for Customers

Re-Imagine Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age

The complete package is not available at this time.

The Forest for the Trees: An Editors' Advice to Writers

forest

COMING   SOON !!!

To writers, particularly unpublished ones, editors can seem imposing figures determined to thwart their success. They won't take calls, they don't offer feedback--sometimes they don't respond to queries at all. Guess what: Editors don't lug home hundreds of pounds of manuscripts to read each year because they aren't looking for good writing. "An editor gets off," says Lerner, "on the thrill of discovering a new writer." Editors crave "succinct, well-written cover letters," inspiration that comes from within (as opposed to from the bestseller list), and "catchy, clearly targeted title[s]." They detest unsolicited phone calls, "query letters that sound as if they were penned by Crazy Eddie," and writers who offer to "write it however I want it" (it's "like saying I'll be straight or gay; you tell me, I have no preference"). Lerner is aware of how excruciating it is for a writer to wait for feedback on his or her work. But she also lets writers in on a little secret of her own. "I'm always anxious about the author's response," she confides. "Will he or she take to my editing?

Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende

Portrait in Sepia
COMING  SOON !!!
 
Internationally celebrated novelist Isabel Allende has written a magnificent historical novel set at the end of the nineteenth century in Chile, a marvelous family saga that takes up and continues the story begun in her highly acclaimed Daughter of Fortune.

Recounted in the voice of a young woman in search of her roots, Portrait in Sepia is a novel about memory and family secrets. Aurora del Valle suffers a brutal trauma that shapes her character and erases from her mind all recollection of the first five years of her life. Raised by her ambitious grandmother, the regal and commanding Paulina del Valle, she grows up in a privileged environment, free of the limitations that circumscribe the lives of women at that time, but tormented by horrible nightmares. When she is forced to recognize her betrayal at the hands of the man she loves, and to cope with the resulting solitude, she decides to explore the mystery of her past.

Portrait in Sepia is an extraordinary achievement: richly detailed, epic in scope, intimate in its probing of human character, and thrilling in the way it illuminates the complexity of family ties.



Revolutionary Wealth

Revolutionary Wealth

COMING  SOON !!!

Starting with the publication of their seminal best-seller, Future Shock, Alvin and Heidi Toffler have given millions of readers new ways to think about personal life in today's high-speed world with its constantly changing, seemingly random impacts on our businesses, governments, families and daily lives. Now, writing with the same rare grasp and clarity that made their earlier books classics, the Tofflers turn their attention to the revolution in wealth now sweeping the planet. And once again, they provide a startling, penetrating, coherent way to make sense of the seemingly senseless.

Revolutionary Wealth is about how tomorrow's wealth will be created, who will get it and how. But 21st Century wealth, according to the Tofflers, is not just about money, and cannot be understood in terms of industrial-age economics. Thus they write here about everything from education and childrearing to Hollywood and China, from everyday truth and lies to what they call our "Third Job" --- the unnoticed work we do without pay for some of the biggest corporations in our country.

Blazing with fresh ideas, Revolutionary Wealth provides readers with powerful new tools for thinking about -- and preparing for -- their future.

Modern Criticism & Theory

Modern Criticism and Theory: A ReaderCOMING   SOON !!!


This work contains a selection of important and representative work from all the major theoretical schools or tendencies in contemporary criticism and looks at them from an historical and thematic point of view. It also takes into account the impact of structuralist and post-structuralist theory and the disciplines from which it has drawn many of its terms and concepts of  linguistics, psychoanalysis, philosophy and Marxism.

Modern Criticism and Theory has long been regarded as a necessary collection. Now revised for the twenty first century it goes further and provides students and the general reader with a wide-ranging survey of the complex landscape of modern theory and a critical assessment of the way we think – and live – in the world today.

David Lodge is Emeritus Professor of English Literatureat the University of Birmingham, where he taught from 1960 until 1987. He is well-known as one of the most significant British novelists and critics of recent times. His work, fiction and non-fiction, has been translated into some twenty-five languages.

Nigel Wood is Professor of Literature at Loughborough University. Widely published as an editor and critic, Nigel is currently working on the Longman Annotated Edition of the poems of Alexander Pope.