Online Read Books

Archive for June, 2011

The author Nadine Laman does it again!! “High Tide,” the second book in the Kathryn McKenzie story, certainly lives up to the quality of the first book, “Kathryn’s Beach,” I am looking forward to reading the 3rd book in this trilogy called “Atonement.” You can read “High Tide” without reading the first book, but I would highly recommend reading the first book for enjoyment and to catch up on Kathryn’s story.

In “Kathryn’s Beach” Kathryn came home to California and resumed her old life on her special beach. She became reacquainted with old friends, found love and faced tragedy. “High Tide” picks up where “Kathryn’s Beach” leaves off. In “High Tide” she has to face several losses and find new strength to deal with the turmoil in her life. As she moves through these difficult situations, Kathryn finds that strength on her beach and it becomes her lifeline. Once again, Nadine Laman captures the complete realm of human emotions while the story unfolds.

As the story continues, Kathryn is trying to figure out her true feelings for her boyfriend, Ioseph. He returned to his country Ireland for a vacation and decided to move back there. He asks Kathryn to go with him and she must now decide if he is what she really wants in life.

Kathryn is still working as a social worker on the homeless shelter project which she loves. Many of her clients are beginning to find their independence again through work, and Kathryn has a tremendous amount of respect for them. She is also seeing a new depth in the nuns that she works for as the project unfolds.

Mr. Goldstein, Kathryn’s senior friend who lives upstairs, seeks Kathryn’s help in finding his long lost family from World War 2. She helps him, but with mixed feelings because she is afraid if he finds his family she will lose him.

Much to Kathryn’s surprise she is contacted by her paternal grandfather. He had disowned her father for marrying a Catholic and has never had contact with the family. She has spent a lifetime of saying “Not that McKenzie” when people ask her if she is related to the high profile McKenzie’s of California. It comes as a shock to find out “She is that McKenzie”.

Kathryn’s late friend Maggie’s wonderful advice lives on in this book through her journals. “It isn’t how long one lives it is how wide that really matters.” What great insight to begin the New Year with.

If you could attract one thing in your life right now, at this moment in time — what would it be? Author, Hope Bradford’s new book, Beneficial Law of Attraction: The Manifestation Teachings will give you hope and the tools you need to attract whatever you desire into your life.

Bradford provides clear and concise steps and techniques in Beneficial Law of Attraction that teaches and inspires you to “effectively utilize ego’s focusing abilities to optimize those forces within you that are crucial to success.” You’ll learn that your thoughts and dreams are all you need to harness the power of the universe to bring what you need and desire.

You’ll also learn how to develop one of the most potent mind forces available – focused intent – and how to manage and maximize what Bradford calls, “your Seven Innate Forces.” Bradford skillfully provides powerful insight about how to utilize the “Six Beneficial Law of Attraction Steps to Success” to bring you personal prosperity and ultimate happiness and success in all your endeavors.

Bradford takes the information and help from the innovative and highly successful best-seller, “The Secret” and takes it to the pinnacle of understanding how forceful and effective our minds can be when we learn to focus complete attention to attract what’s always been there. In Beneficial Law of attraction, Bradford also introduces a new concept that you’ll learn has an amazing effect on your life – sound and vibration.

Besides providing the steps and techniques you’ll need to attract prosperity and happiness from the universe, Bradford also presents a wealth of information about three beliefs that can prevent you from achieving the success you deserve. She combines teachings of spirituality and self-help with the rules and practice involved in the universal law of attraction in a way that will make you experience a “light bulb moment” about how it all works together and how you can use it in your own life.

You’ll learn about Kuan Yin’s “love and forgiveness” principles, realizing that without them, your mind’s power is impossible, and Bradford adeptly helps you to see how love and forgiveness impacts your beliefs and perceptions – of yourself and the world. After reading Beneficial Law of Attraction, you’ll be able to plainly see and understand how the ego can be exhausting to your body and mind and can prevent you from the love and forgiveness stage of your life that will set you free.

Beneficial Law of Attraction: The Manifestation Teachings, by Hope Bradford, is a powerful extension of “The Living Word of Kuan Yin,” a book that Bradford wrote with Lena Lees in 2006. After you’ve read Bradford’s book, you’ll realize that love and abundance are always there and are yours for the asking if you simply, “Let Magic Happen!”.

If your job is on the line, Bulletproof Your Job, is the first book you want to reach for. This book offers over fifty practical tactics, organized into four simple strategies that you can employ to help increase your chances of being the last to go and decrease your chances of being next to go. Even if your job isn’t on the line the author offers sound advice for anyone looking to make themselves a candidate for most valuable player in their company. In short, employing these tactics will help foster a positive work environment no matter what the economy or labor market look like.
 
The four “simple” strategies: Be Visible, Be Easy, Be Useful, and Be Ready, each outline a number of tactics organized into easy to read and in some cases entertaining sections. I truly enjoyed reading the “True Story” and “Just So You Know”, call outs.
 
Highlights:

• The Be Visible section offers practical heard before advice presented with an honesty and frankness that makes it less easy to take the information for granted. One of my favorite tactics comes from the Be Ready chapter: Help the People in Your Network. This bit of advice immediately connected with the value I place on investing in other people – the old sowing and reaping principal.
• And finally, Mr. Viscusi gets points for advocating social networking. His own True Story on page 142 is a perfect example of how savvy professionals are successfully leveraging networking 2.0 strategies.

 
Low-lights: If you’ve been questioning whether you want to stay in corporate America – this book is a nudge out the door. The bigger message of this book is that it’s not enough to focus on being a doing a good job, there are all these other tactics you need to consider just to keep your spot in what for many is an increasingly draining rat race. A few of the tips he mentions remind me of this:

• Be the mini me of your boss: Definitely a turn off for those of us who enjoy being ourselves. I can’t imagine anything more insufferable than spending forty plus hours a week purposely putting on a façade just so I won’t be fired. Support your boss, yes. Be his or her creepy clone – no.

   

• I am also not a fan of his idea about stress at work. I agree about not complaining about it, but I am not a fan of just telling people to suck it up. It’s true that every job has seasons or waves of stress, but if the stress is consistent and you have no means of managing it then it may just be time to find a new gig. In my opinion, good companies understand that creating high stress environments is a sure way to increase two things: employee turnover and poor performance which impact customer satisfaction and eventually the bottom line.

 
Final Call:

Despite his apparent disregard for career coaches and those who use them, Mr. Viscusi offers down to earth, easily implementable tactics for his audience. I’ll forgive him this oversight, highly recommending this book. 

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be the head matchmaker of a high-class Beverly Hills dating service? In this her candid and witty memoir, Marla Martenson takes you on a humorous ride through the ups and downs of her life working for such a place, as she struggles with the often unreasonable demands of her wealthy clientele.

“I honestly had no idea how shallow, picky, selfish, and entitled some clients could be. After six years of feedback, demands, and expectations, I’m still thrown for a loop now and then,” says Martenson. But what can you do when her clients pay $40,000 and up to find the right woman?

The author starts off by showing us what a regular day for her is like, answering annoying emails and trying to understand her clients’ often incredible and unreasonable requests, as they continually find faults with their gorgeous, perfect Barbie-doll dates.

After this initial glimpse into her ‘regular day,’ Martenson goes back in time to recount how she got started, working at restaurant jobs and waiting on rude celebrities such as Joan Collins, who once barked at her for forgetting a fork. “For all my work, she left me a $2 tip on a $120 tab. The woman was clearly typecast as Alexis, right?” says the author.

She also talks about her dreams of becoming an actress, her marriage, divorce and remarriage to the perfect guy, her father’s death and, finally, taking charge of her life. Eventually all fell into place and she started earning good money making commercials and getting small parts in films and print modeling work. She even got a couple of lines in the Mel Gibson film, What Women Want. Then, finally, how she got started as a recruiter for the dating service, on the lookout for what she calls “a fresh supply of goddesses” and her life as an author-a calling she never suspected she had.

The book is full of interesting anecdotes about Martenson’s work in Hollywood with the stars. The writing is simple, straight forward, witty and honest. This is the perfect fun, beach read. I like the author’s satiric slant on beauty and the mystery of dating and relationships, as well as the shallowness of Hollywood and the pressure put on women to look good. The book, though a light read, makes you think about society and the role of women and men in it, and explores interesting issues of gender.

Diary of a Beverly Hills Matchmaker
By Marla Martenson
Bettie Youngs Books (April 15, 2010)
ISBN-10: 0984308105
ISBN-13: 978-0984308101
Paperback, 272 pages
Memoir

Mellert sets out five assumptions, four of which we agree with, as presented. Robert Jastrow would call assumption 1-that “as members of the human species, future generations will be essentially the same as we are” – chauvinist. Yet the advanced silicon intelligence that Jastrow sees superseding our human race appears many thousands of years away; we are inclined, in the short run at least, to agree with Mellert. And we agree with assumptions 3,4 and 5; that we are born into a given generation as an accident; that our survival as a species is more important than our survival as individuals; and that we share indirectly in the lives of our descendants.

Assumption 2-that “future generations will seek their own pleasure, just as we do”-does cast into doubt, however, Mellert’s advocacy of sacrifice today for the sake of future generations. As he says, the pleasure principle is a powerful motivator; we are not sure that a majority of people in our generation or in the future generation-even those agree with him-would be ready to act on a broad suggestion that the sacrifice is an important ethical responsibility. Picture the resistance that mom and dad would encounter if they told the kids that the trip to Disney World was off because relatives two hundred years from now will need the petroleum reserves for their own enjoyment. this is not to say Mellert is mistaken, but merely to point out, again, that acting on principles is difficult – especially this principle, at this particular moment in history.

It seems to us that our relationship to the future differs in a crucial respect from the relationship of our forebears to us: at some point in the recent past, during the industrial revolution, we gained the capability of radically altering our environment in ways that had never before been possible. Mellert contends that we stand in relation to future generations in the same way that earlier generations stood towards us. We disagree.