Art of possibilty:
113 of 122 people found the following review helpful: Great Performances for Everyone!, September 24, 2000
Reviewer:
Donald Mitchell "Your Entrepreneurial Coach: Build a Billion Dollar Business by Reading http://billiondollarbusiness.blogspot.com/" (a citizen of the world based on Boston) - See all my reviews '. . . The objective of this book is to provide . . . the means to lift off from . . . struggle and sail into a vast universe of possibility.'
Benjamin Zander is the conductor of The Boston Philharmonic and is well known for his orchestra's passionate performances. Rosamund Stone Zander is an executive coach, family therapist, and private practitioner who brings enormous psychological perspective to enhancing human behavior. They have written a fascinating book in which they alternate as voices in sharing principles and examples in the form of compelling stories.
They have striven to make what they share ' . . . simple, not easy.' The idea is to help you create in yourself and in others 'transformational' improvements.
They share a series of perspectives designed to improve your understanding of what and where the potential is.
First, humans tend to focus on very few things, missing most of what is going on around them. By shifting focus, you will see many opportunities for the first time. Much of this book is designed to do that for you. You will visit our old friend the nine dot square and be reminded that connecting all of the dots in four lines without lifting your writing instrument from the paper requires you to go outside the box that we mentally draw at the circumference of the dots. Be careful about your assumptions! They can fence you in!
Second, measurements can cause us to focus too narrowly on where we are today and encourage scarcity thinking -- the glass is half empty. The Zanders encourage thinking about the glass as half full, citing the well-known perspective of optimism as being empowering. This can help you 'step into a university of possibility.' I like to call this pursuing the ideal practice.
Third, if you assume that people will do well and help them see how they can, they will. Mr. Zander gives every student an A in his class, and simply requests that the student write a paper to tell what they will do to deserve the A. This gets the students focused on excellence, and takes away the tension that harms accomplishment.
Fourth, as a mindset, think of your role as 'being a contributor.' 'You are a gift to others.' How could that change what you do? As someone who thinks that way now, I find it a very useful perspective, and was glad to see it in the book.
Fifth, lead from any chair. This is a reference to involving everyone. Mr. Zander asks his players to write down how he could improve practices and peformances, and pays attention to the suggestions.
Sixth, follow rule number six. That rule is to 'lighten up.'
Seventh, be present to the ways things are. Many of us are disconnected from reality. By re-touching it, we can see more possiblities.
Eighth, give way to passion. Going with your strong feelings allows you to be more authentic, and to go to new heights of accomplishment.
Ninth, light a spark. See you role as creating a spark of possibility to be lit that others can see.
Tenth, be the board of the game you are playing. This makes it easier to see how you can make a difference.
Eleventh, create a vision that generates 'frameworks of possibility' for others. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous 'I Have a Dream' speech is cited.
Twelfth, tell the WE story. Focus on being inclusive and considering what is best for all. Move from I to We, as the Coda to the book encourages.
Each section has exercises you can use to deepen your understanding of the principles and to help you practice, in order to create greater skill.
The principles are similar to those in many other books about improving performance and creativity. What is different about the book are the unique ways that the principles are expressed, the exciting examples in beautiful stories from music and business that will be new to you (as they were to me), and the passion with which the Zanders write. I would love to hear them do this book on an audio cassette! Both do public speaking, so you may get a chance to hear them.
Can we ever get too many great inspirational stories and reminders to live up to our potential rather than our pasts? I don't think so. This book will reignite your passion for making a larger and more positive difference. It will make you more human as you do so.
After you have finished the book, consider where your passion, gifts, and influence can combine to all you to most effectively live these principles. Consider that as a calling for at least some of your leisure time. If you are lucky, you can find some way to make that a primary calling for your working hours, as well. But find that place, and spend as much time as you can there

A MILLION LITTLE PIECES
Piercing story , brutally honest...................compelling, December 27, 2005
Reviewer:
jeanne-scott(Tampa , Florida) - James Frey has written a story that tells of his life as a drug addict who truly has one last chance in rehab to gain his life back. Failure will ultimately mean his death. Frey writes with a piercing quality of crystalline clarity that delivers a sharp, raw picture of his heart and soul as a drug addict attempting to make it from one moment to the next. Reading this is uncomfortable and yet overwhelmingly compelling. It is brutally honest, leaving nothing to the imagination about the rationalization or delusions that an addict clings to as reality. It is concise and all encompassing. Reading the story of his life, what he has done, why he feels he choose the path he did and his ability to realize that no matter what led him to life as an addict, that in the end, he must make the choice to be the one responsible to change, a choice that must be made each moment of each day at every opportunity.........compelling to read!!

On supplements, vitamins, herbs:
A great book is, “Prescription for Nutritional Healing” by Phyllis Balch and James Balch.
Every home should have one, August 20, 2003
Reviewer:
Shaz "oi-you!"(Naples, FL USA) - See all my reviews I've been referencing the PFNH book for so long, I can't remember when I purchased my original one (2nd Edition). This book is so informative, and I guarantee there's more to it than you think. Touted as a "self-help approach to good health", the PFNH guide offers natural remedies for fever, headaches, common pregnancy woes and more, from "abcess" to "yeast infection". PFNH also discusses serious diseases, such as AIDS, cancer, diabetes, heart and kidney disease, and gives advice on remedies and diets that can help aid a person who may be suffering from one of these. But wait- there's more! Includes a table of herbs, their origin, and the maladies they can help relieve, an entire section on color therapy (a fave of mine), chelation therapy, fasting, sitz baths and pain control. The back of the book holds an impressive glossary (to help define ailments that you heard about and never truly understood) and a list of manufacturers and distributors, health and medical hotlines and organizations, and even a list of suggested reading to continue your natural medicine education. No home should be without this book. I buy each new edition that comes out, because we get more than our money's worth.

One Minute For Yourself:
Thought-Provoking and Straightforward, January 30, 2003
Reviewer:
David R. Bess (Charleston, WV) This book is the second I have read in the One Minute series. Once the reader grows accustomed to the parable presentation, the principles are much easier to grasp. The author in this volume interestingly defines selfishness as neglect of self.
There are three basic concepts promoted: take care of me, take care of others, and take care of the relationship I have with others. Johnson asserts that a person is most loving when his own needs have been adequately addressed. He feels that self-denial is destructive to ourselves and others, rather than helpful.
Jesus encourages us to "love others as we love ourselves." Based upon this admonition, there is a biblical basis for what the author is stating. Until we love ourselves and give attention to our own needs and desires, we are not truly free to love. Once we have taken "one minute" to look inward and assess our own needs, then we are much better equipped to relate to the persons around us.
This book is an easy read -- I finished it in one sitting. If you have been raised to think that self-denial is always good and self-indulgence is always bad, I encourage you to read this volume. For the price, the insights gained are well worth the money spent

The Tipping Point:
I have done this. Worth doing!
An amazing book, what a gifted reporter...
A very quick read, Gladwell makes the material so compelling and relevant to everyday life as well as being pertinent to more global societal issues. Even though of many of the concepts and studies were familiar, he brilliantly brought it all together in a wholly an ingenious way, and with such memorable real-life, commonplace examples.
The idea that small, focused changes can have a huge impact in our society, is so hopeful, so inspiring. The suggestion by many of these studies, that our chracters are volatile, and more often determined by our immediate environs, not necessarily our genetics or family, is actually very optimistic realization too, I think. Because it means people, do and can affect change, as his examples of the remarkable decrease in crime in NYC, and increase of breast cancer awareness in african american women—by making small siginificant changes. Without it costing much – in money or time or effort. Cleaning up graffitti, changing a potential criminal’s immediate surroundings changed how he would act, crime went down by cleaning up subways. Amazing.
And his chapter on teenage/children smoking was so enlightening. The possibility to curtail kids smoking and hence adult smoking is there, that all it may take is lower the amount of nicotine in individual cigarrettes, so that kids on’t cross that threshold, that “tipping point” when they eventually become addicted.
My mind is so blown away!
Nov 29, 11:42PM PST
By Gonzo

The tin drum by Gunter Grass
Reviewer:
Donald Mitchell"

I have been meaning to read this book since it came out in 1959, but only did so now. My reason for delaying was that the reviews I had read of the book made it sound unappealing to me. Why did I want to read the unrealistic ramblings of an insane dwarf?
Having been impressed with Mr. Grass's recent work, Crabwalk, I finally decided to give The Tin Drum a try. I'm glad I did. Let me explain why.
In my studies of the Nazi era, I was always struck by comments that observers from that time made about how banal the evil of it all was. Yet much of the propaganda from that period (such as The Triumph of the Will) that we can see today makes the Nazis seem like mythic figures. What were the observers trying to say? I finally felt like I understood the point through reading The Tin Drum. Reading about distant battles while living in Germany before the bombing became great seems a lot like reading about attacks on coalition troops in Iraq now. Going to party meetings seems a lot like how people here go to lodge meetings now.
In the first 100 pages, I kept wondering why Mr. Grass had chosen to write the novel in the form of an autobiography of an insane dwarf pretending to have a mental age of 3 who had been convicted of a murder he did not commit. Eventually, it hit me. He needed a narrator who could not be considered complicit in what the Nazis did, or we could not trust his voice. In addition, how can you portray banal evils as insane unless you see them through the eyes of an "insane" person who makes all too much sense? Once I accepted the brilliance (perhaps even the inevitability of his choice), I settled back and really began to enjoy the story. Then I began to realize that it is our childish instincts to want to control everything in our lives that leads to our separation from the richness that we can provide one another. So Mr. Grass was also sharing an important psychological point in choosing Oskar as his narrator.
What made the book special for me was Mr. Grass's ability to continually show how our connections to one another are the potential for goodness, while our instincts to take advantage of one another are the evil we must overcome. Oskar Matzareth, the narrator, is a thinker . . . yet ultimately his point is that we must carefully examine what we think about. Otherwise, false ideas will lead to fatal consequences.
I was very impressed by the way that the plot was constructed so that each time society acted in divided ways Oskar himself or someone close to him was harmed.
What will stay with me the longest are the amazing descriptions of fictional people and events: His grandmother's skirts, the horse's head with the eels emerging from it, his "father's" death during the Soviet invasion, Jan Bronski's obsessive search for skat cards during the attack on the Polish post office and Oskar's reaction to the statue of Jesus coming to life will always be with me.
I found myself wishing that I could read German like a native. The satirical humor is usually savage and quick to kill its object. I fully absorbed the lesson before the blood could even begin to emerge from the butt of the satire. As I read the book, I wondered how many times I missed compelling humor because it didn't translate well into English.
At the end of the book, I found myself searching for a novel to compare The Tin Drum to . . . in order to help other readers decide if this book is for them. In the end I could find no one book. Instead, The Tin Drum can best be described as a combination of reverse sort of Gulliver's Travels, Candide and Don Quixote set in the context of German/Polish Danzig through the end of World War II and in West Germany thereafter. So there's a fundamental darkness to the book that is missing from the other three.
I came away wondering how I can stay connected with others now while retaining the ability to see and act on the events around me as a detached, objective observer. Mr. Grass has raised quite a challenge for us all.

Reviewer:
Guillermo Maynez Western literature is full of what Germans call "bildungsroman", that is, the story of a young man's (or woman's)intellectual and emotional growth, often told from the main character's own voice. This kind of novel has adopted innumerable shapes and styles through history, and certainly this one is, so far for me, the strangest and one of the best.
It is hard to summarize the plot, as it is mainly the diverse and extreme experiences of Oskar Matzerath's life. Born in 1924 in Danzig, itself a unique and troubled city, Oskar decides at age three not to grow up anymore. Or does he simply has an illness of the tyroid gland, as he hints at some point? It doesn't matter, precisely because that moment starts the style of the whole book: all the time, terrible things are happening to Oskar, to his family, to his city, to his nation and to his century, but we see everything only through the distorted glass of this unique character's view.
First he tells us about his ancestors and the life they led in pre-war German Poland. Then we know the story of his parents, the infidelity of his mother and other disturbing and often sordid events. His community starts to fall apart as the Nazis rise to power. Then the Nazis come and destroy the city, phisically and spiritually. Oskar spends the whole war in Danzig as well as wandering through France and Belgium as part of a grotesque midget-troupée. After the war, they flee Poland for Düsseldorf, where he is employed in very different jobs: as a tomb engraver, painters' model, jazz drum player. The chapter which describes the journey by train is simply horrible and scaring, as the chapter on his emotional disappointing is sad. The end is strange, confusing but full of hope.
There is abundant abnormal sex, vomit, dirt, misery, but also struggle, success, and much love. Oskar is not always nice, but he remains loyal to those he loves, and that is a great strength of a character you sometimes hate, but in the end you come to love. The book is full of metaphors, obscure symbolisms, grotesque and sordid events, and, above all, the human misery of our century, especially in Europe. It is a bittersweet book, often repulsive, just because that is how life is. It has moments of joy, of glorious triumph, of utter defeat. It is very very sad, because it is the story of a distorted but extremely sane person in an equally destorted but horribly insane world, but it is also a book about the joy of life, about how we have to keep going on even in the midst of tragedy and misery. If it has a message, it should be: fight on.
It is said that great works of literature depend on character development, not so much on the plot and the story itself. Well, this is a case in point. The whole book is sustained by the central character of Oskar, a wicked, depressed, desperate man seeing how his world crumbles apart and he has to build a life for himslef. As another reviewer aptly put it, he is the lonely voice crying in the wilderness. Oskar is a very solitary man with a great disadvantage, one that by sheer willpower he turns every time into an advantage, a means for surviving in a careless, cold world. Oskar never gives up, never surrenders, he finds a way to survive after every setback, and terrifying setbacks he experiences.
I think this book had to be written in the form of magical realism, because the pure realism would have been insufferable: the tragedies that occur are beyond telling them.
Not an easy read, it is most rewarding, for it paints a wide picture of the human experience, precisely what great literature is about.

The small things seem to be where making a difference can be the most important. Accomplish the small things, and greater things may come. Remember to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, be courageous(even when you’re afraid), and make a conscious effort to be kind to others. These actions can make a bigger difference than you may ever realize.