Complete Idiot S Guide To Critical Reading

The essential guide to looking at literature with your own two eyes. What students know about Shakespeare, Orwell, Dickens, and Twain is primarily what their instructors tell them. Here’s a book that teaches the students how to move on to the next level—evaluate and read critically on their own, trust their own opinions, develop original ideas, analyze characters, and find a deeper appreciation for fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and more. • Ideal companion for college students and accessible for the casual reader as well. • Covers fiction, poetry, narrative nonfiction, biographies and memoirs, essays and editorials, and newspapers, magazines, and journals. • Features examples from published writing. • Includes a reading list and a glossary of literary terms.

Great reads for busy people. This is a guide to help busy people find great reads in fiction and nonfiction. Filled with recommendations of popular, entertaining reading, this book covers mystery and suspense, romance, women’s fiction and chick lit, Westerns, science fiction, such nonfiction topics as animals, art, biography, memoirs, business, true crime, and more. Plus, each entry includes a summary of the book, its significance, and a critique/observation/comment.

Team building remains a key component to a successful work environment. With The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Team Building, learn: • Quick and easy guidance on making America’s newest way of working for your team • Idiot-proof steps for creating a team and getting the most out of it • Down-to-earth advice on training, delegating, communicating, setting goals, and more “Dr. Pell has written a delightfully entertaining ‘how-to’ manual that is not only a prime training tool for new team leaders, but a reference guide for all managers, regardless of their level of proficiency and experience. . . this book is a must-read.”—Franklin C. Ashby, Ph.D., president of Manchester Training

Don't feel left out in the roar of the crowd Football is the most popular sport in America today. It's also the most complicated, especially to those who watch their loved ones hibernate in football heaven from September to February. Here's the book that levels the playing field for novices, giving them a simple, clear, and comprehensive guide worthy of a Lombardi Trophy. Finally, get in the game with: • Basic rules and objectives • Player position, strategies, formations, and plays • The business of football • Differences between high school, college, and pro football • Fantasy football

You’re no idiot, of course. You’ve had the pleasure of staying at a few bed and breakfasts, and you’d love to open a charming inn of your own. But when you think about what it takes to get a business up and running, you want to hang the Do Not Disturb sign. This is your wake-up call! The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Running a Bed and Breakfast will show you it can be easy and fun—and a great way to meet new people and make money. In this Complete Idiot’s Guide®, you get: • Useful insights into the booming B&B industry. • A simple test to help you decide if you have what it takes to succeed in the B & B business. • Idiot-proof guidelines for converting a house into a B&B. • Expert advice on accounting and business issues. • An insider's look at the new trends in guest services.

From Plato to Freud to ecocriticism, the book illustrates dozens of stimulating-and sometimes notoriously complex-perspectives for approaching literature and film. The book offers authoritative, clear, and easy-to-follow explanations of theories that range from established classics to the controversies of current theory. Each chapter offers a conversational, step-by-step explanation of a single theory, critic, or issue, accompanied by concrete examples for applying the concepts and engaging suggestions for related literary readings. Following a section on the foundations of literary theory, the book is organized thematically, with an eye to the best way to develop a real, working understanding of the various theories. Cross-references are particularly important, since it's through the interaction of examples that readers most effectively advance from basic topics and arguments to some of the more specialized and complicated issues. Each chapter is designed to tell a complete story, yet also to reach out to other chapters for development and debate. Literary theorists are hardly unified in their views, and this book reflects the various traditions, agreements, influences, and squabbles that are a part of the field. Special features include hundreds of references to and quotations from novels, stories, plays, poems, movies, and other media. Online resources could also include video and music clips, as well as high-quality examples of visual art mentioned in the book. The book also includes periodic "running" references to selected key titles (such as Frankenstein) in order to illustrate the effect of different theories on a single work.

"Artful Making" offers the first proven, research-based framework for engineering ingenuity and innovation. This book is the result of a multi-year collaboration between Harvard Business School professor Robert Austin and leading theatre director and playwright Lee Devin. Together, they demonstrate striking structural similarities between theatre artistry and production and today's business projects--and show how collaborative artists have mastered the art of delivering innovation "on cue," on immovable deadlines and budgets. These methods are neither mysterious nor flaky: they are rigorous, precise, and--with this book's help--absolutely learnable and reproducible. They rely on cheap and rapid iteration rather than on intensive up-front planning, and with the help of today's enabling technologies, they can be applied in virtually any environment with knowledge-based outputs. Moreover, they provide an overarching framework for leveraging the full benefits of today's leading techniques for promoting flexibility and innovation, from agile development to real options.