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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Wedding Blessings by June Cotner

Wedding Blessings: Prayers and Poems... A beautiful collection of poems, prayers, and toasts for all marriage celebrations. Finding the right words about love for a wedding or anniversary can be difficult. In Wedding Blessings, June Cotner has collected perfect selections for the bride, groom, members of the wedding party, and other family and friends to share. From verses and vows to prayers and toasts, the sentiments of Wedding Blessings will help make any marriage celebration more memorable. With selections devoted to "anniversaries" and "Reflections", Wedding Blessings also serves as a tribute to and affirmation of marriage.Filled with inspiration and timeless words by renowned authors such as Robert Browning, Rainer Maria Rilke, the Persian poet Rumi, as well as many contemporary writers, this spiritual, multi-faith anthology offers true gems suitable for all aspects of weddings, anniversaries, and vow-renewal ceremonies. Wedding Blessings is a wonderful gift for the bride-to-be and others celebrating the union of marriage.

June Cotner is the author of more than a dozen anthologies, including the bestselling Graces; see more June Cotner Anthologies. She lives in Poulsbo, Washington.

Principle-Centered Leadership by Stephen R. Covey

How do we as individuals and organizations survive and thrive amid tremendous change? Why are efforts to improve falling so short in real results despite the millions of dollars in time, capital, and human effort being spent on them? How do we unleash the creativity, talent, and energy within ourselves and others in the midst of pressure? Is it realistic to believe that balance among personal, family, and professional life is possible? Stephen R. Covey demonstrates that the answer to these and other dilemmas is Principle-Centered Leadership, a long-term, inside-out approach to developing people and organizations. The key to dealing with the challenges that face us today is the recognition of a principle-centered core within both ourselves and our organizations. Dr. Covey offers insights and guidelines that can help you apply these principles both at work and at home - leading not just to a new understanding of how to increase quality and productivity, but also to a new appreciation of the importance of building personal and professional relationships in order to enjoy a more balanced, more rewarding, more effective life.

The Case for Make-Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World

In the critically acclaimed Consuming Kids (The New Press, 2004), Susan Linn, the nation's leading advocate for protecting children from corporate marketers, provided an unsparing look at modern childhood molded by commercialism. In her new book, THE CASE FOR MAKE BELIEVE, Dr. Linn argues that while play is crucial to human development and children are born with an innate capacity for make believe, the convergence of ubiquitous technology and unfettered commercialism actually prevents them from playing. In modern day America, nurturing creative play is not only countercultural—it threatens corporate profits.
At the heart of the book are gripping stories of children at home, at school, and in a therapist’s office using make believe to grapple with real-life issues from entering kindergarten to the death of a sibling. In an age when toys come from TV shows, dress-up means wearing Disney costumes, and parents believe Baby Einstein is educational, Dr. Linn lays out the inextricable links between play, creativity, and health, showing us why we need to protect our children from corporations that aim to limit their imaginations.

Living in the Shade of Islam

Islam, which literally means peace, submission, and obedience, is the religion of the whole universe. The universe is orderly, a cosmos whose parts are linked together and work together for the same purpose
and goal. This book seeks to present Islam's true face and make it known in a summarized form with most of its aspects: Islam's essentials of faith, principles and ways of worshipping God, morality, and rules ordering human life and relations between people.

On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins

From the inventor of the PalmPilot comes a new and compelling theory of intelligence, brain function, and the future of intelligent machines.
Jeff Hawkins, the man who created the PalmPilot, Treo smart phone, and other handheld devices, has reshaped our relationship to computers. Now he stands ready to revolutionize both neuroscience and computing in one stroke, with a new understanding of intelligence itself.

Hawkins develops a powerful theory of how the human brain works, explaining why computers are not intelligent and how, based on this new theory, we can finally build intelligent machines.

The brain is not a computer, but a memory system that stores experiences in a way that reflects the true structure of the world, remembering sequences of events and their nested relationships and making predictions based on those memories. It is this memory-prediction system that forms the basis of intelligence, perception, creativity, and even consciousness.

In an engaging style that will captivate audiences from the merely curious to the professional scientist, Hawkins shows how a clear understanding of how the brain works will make it possible for us to build intelligent machines, in silicon, that will exceed our human ability in surprising ways.

Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change

William H. Calvin
Published April 2008

Every decade since 1950 has seen more floods and more wildfires on every continent. Deserts are expanding, coral reefs are dying, fisheries are declining, hurricanes are strengthening. The debate about climate change is over: there’s no question that global warming has made the Earth sick, and the outlook for the future calls for ever-warmer temperatures and deadlier results. Something must be done—but how quickly?

With Global Fever, William H. Calvin delivers both a clear-eyed diagnosis and a strongly worded prescription. In striking, straightforward language, he first clearly sets out the current state of the Earth’s warming climate and the disastrous possibilities ahead should we continue on our current path. Increasing temperatures will kill off vegetation and dry up water resources, and their loss will lead, in an increasingly destructive feedback loop, to even more warming. Resource depletion, drought, and disease will follow, leading to socioeconomic upheaval—and accompanying violence—on a scale barely conceivable.

It is still possible, Calvin argues, to avoid such a dire fate. But we must act now, aggressively funneling resources into jump-starting what would amount to a third industrial revolution, this one of clean technologies—while simultaneously expanding our use of existing low-emission technologies, from nuclear power to plug-in hybrid vehicles, until we achieve the necessary scientific breakthroughs.

Passionately written, yet thoroughly grounded in the latest climate science, Global Fever delivers both a stark warning and an ambitious blueprint for saving the future of our planet.

At the Hand of Man: Peril & Hope for Africa's Wildlife

At the hand of man: peril and hope for Africa's wildlife

Knopf, 1993 - Business & Economics - 322 pages

In a book often shocking, always passionate and inevitably controversial, Raymond Bonner brings desperately needed illumination to one of the most important and emotional issues of our time: the threat to Africa's wildlife, and especially to the elephant. In cutting through prevailing misinformation to documented truth, he makes abundantly clear that unless we address the needs of Africans in their poverty and despair - instead of attempting to impose culturally biased Western solutions - the people will out of necessity destroy the wildlife, no matter how much Westerners protest. For Westerners, elephants are the stuff of exotic safaris and television nature shows. But it is the Africans whose land has been taken to create the parks, whose children are killed and whose subsistence farms are destroyed by elephants run amok, whose ecosystems are ruined by oversized elephant herds in countries like Kenya that can't support them (something we've heard little about). Bonner reveals and documents for the first time the ways in which some wildlife organizations suppress facts and ignore opinions of forward-thinking conservationists - opinions that might get in the way of good public relations. Examining these organizations as no one has done before, he has obtained internal documents that contain cautionary revelations: in one wildlife group, for example, a scientific consensus to oppose an ivory ban fell victim to expediency - the ban was supported with a campaign that played to the emotions for fear that otherwise fund-raising would suffer. Bonner finds hope in Africans who are practicing "sustainable utilization", whereby they profit from the animals and therefore want to protect them. InZimbabwe, for instance, impala herds have been culled and the meat given to farmers and their families. However, imposed solutions from Westerners, whose record of preserving their own wildlife has been atrocious and whose knowledge of Africa is mostly inaccurate or nonexistent, threaten to scuttle whatever modest success has been achieved. Not saving the wildlife is too horrible to contemplate, but saving it will require us to accept harsh realities and abandon romantic notions. That is the hope for Africans, both man and beast, and that is the courageous purpose of this book.More »

Beyond Light Bulbs: Lighting the Way to Smarter Energy Management

Deborah Brodie is a book editor who has made a sideline occupation of collecting quotes about writing and creativity. The 627 "best" appear in this pretty little volume, Writing Changes Everything, accompanied by charming illustrations. At turns witty and pensive and contradictory, these literary nuggets come from unlikely sources such as Rudolf Nureyev, Morrissey, Albert Einstein, and Satchel Paige. The quotes that sing the clearest come from expected authorities; among them are Mark Twain ("The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and lightning-bug."), Samuel Johnson ("Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."), Iris Murdoch ("Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck."), and Erica Jong ("We make up the ocean--then fall in. But we also write the life raft.").

This inspiring and lively book brings together novelists, short-story writers, biographers, playwrights, and poets, along with literary agents, editors and publishers, all sounding off on writing and the creative life. Witty, cranky, wise, jubilant, and eminently repeatable, these quotations will surprise and delight anyone who loves books and writing.

Finalist of 2010 Indie Book Awards

Honorable Mention of 2010 Green Book Festival

Recommended Reading in the Spring 2011 issue of University of Texas McCombs School of Business Magazine

New Book Entries This Week

Our Rights, Our Victories: Landmark Cases in the Supreme Court by Marites Dañguilan Vitug and Criselda Yab

 

The Enemy Within by Glenda M. Gloria, Aries Rufo & Gemma Bagayaua-Mendoza (NEWSBREAK)

 

MINDANAO Into the 21st Century: A Photographic Journey by MindaNews 

 

Three Centuries of Binondo Architecture: 1594-1898: A Socio-Historical Perspective by Lorelei D.C. De Viana

 

Troubled Odyssey by Patricio P. Diaz 

 

[Click Title to See Book Entry]

ANG PROPETA, Katha ni KAHLIL GIBRAN. Isinalin sa Filipino ni JOVEN R. SAN PEDRO

Mula sa Paunang Salita.  Una kong nabasa ang “The Prophet” maraming taon na ang nakalilipas. Natatandaan kong kaagad akong humanga sa kagandahan ng mga mensahe ni Kahlil Gibran at sa lalim ng kanyang pagkaunawa sa buhay. Sa hindi ko maipaliwanag na dahilan, gumitaw sa aking isip ang larawan ng isang batang nasa kandungan ng kanyang lolo na masayang nagkukuwento ng kanyang mga karanasan at natutunan tungkol sa buhay. Hindi ko na nakagisnan ang aking mga lolo at lola. Hindi ko naranasan ang makalong at makapakinig sa kanilang mga kuwento at pangaral. Marahil dito nagmula ang aking hangad na pangahasang isa-Pilipino ang obra maestra ni Kahlil Gibran.