About this product: Want to discover the most profitable, lowest-risk idea for your home business? It's selling used books online, which is growing 33 percent annually, according to a new study by U.S. publishers. Learn how to start your business part-time, then expand at your own pace. This step-by-step guide, written by one of the most successful and highly rated sellers on Amazon and eBay, includes everything you need to know:
About this product: The tale of Amazon.com is well known to anyone who follows the stock market, the book business, the Internet explosion--heck, it's hard to imagine not knowing at least a piece of this extraordinary story. But few, it would seem, know the entire story, and it's these gaps that Robert Spector's Amazon.com: Get Big Fast attempts to fill (or at least the information available in early 2000, when the book was published). For example, those who know about Amazon.com's paradigm-shifting influence on the book business may not know it wasn't even the first online book retailer, or the second or the third. (It was preceded by clbooks.com, books.com, and wordsworth.com, the last of which beat Amazon.com to the Internet by almost two years.) Those who've heard quirky stories about Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos--for example, that he built his own desk out of a door, and that his mother bought the desk at an online charity auction in 1999 for $30,100--may not know that he was a studious overachiever from an early age. As a 12-year-old in Houston, he was even profiled in a book on gifted education in Texas. And those who marvel at the company's multibillion-dollar stock valuation may not know that it was broke and nearly out of business in the summer of '95.
Put it all together and you have a book that should be interesting to many different readers. As a pure business read, it certainly provides a blow-by-blow account of an important company's critical decisions. And anyone looking for a brief history of e-commerce will see how one idea--Bezos's realization in 1994 that Web usage was growing 2,300 percent a year--set the entire online retailing phenomenon in motion. If nothing else, that last fact should propel parents to pay very careful attention to their kids' math scores. Had Bezos, a summa cum laude Princeton grad in computer science, not realized the implications of exponential growth ... well, let's just say you wouldn't be reading this review right now. --Lou Schuler
About this product: Wonder Woman has been a member of DC's Big Three heroes ever since she, Superman and Batman were the three icons to continue publication in the long night between the end of the Golden Age proper circa 1949 and the beginning of the Silver Age of superhero comics in the late 1950s. However, while Diana has always had iconic value, she has never been anywhere near as popular as her alleged co-equals, and much of her popularity rests on a campy 1970s TV show that is about as good as representation of the character as Adam West is of Batman. Even in comics, she has always struggled in the sales department. In 2006, however, her title was safe in the hands of Greg Rucka, arguably the best Wonder Woman writer ever. So, of course, DC bounced him, bringing in Allan Heinberg for a revamp that horribly regressed the character to her terrible Silver Age status quo, and, aided by the normally more-than-competent Geoff Johns on "Infinite Crisis", horribly misrepresented the character's post-Crisis history. And then DC unleashed "Amazons Attack", which I believe to be the worst crossover in comics history, even worse than Marvel's "The Crossing", which eventually had to be written off as a deliberate attempt by a villain to confuse the heroes.
One could spend hours cataloguing all of the problems with this crossover, but I will endeavour to be brief:
1) The structure; major events take place in "Wonder Woman", not included in this collection (which also results in Jodi Picoult's collected edition ending on a cliffhanger, necessitating that readers buy another book; my advice: save your money), and there's no clear reading order for the issues (normally, publication order would give a good indication, but that doesn't work here, and, anyway, these are collected editions, not monthly comics).
2) The wholesale rape of the Amazons; as if Hercules wasn't bad enough, Diana's people, once held up as paragons of wisdom who had found a better way to live, are now shown to be a clutch of barbarian murderers who blindly do what their resurrected former Queen tells them to do, even when a known enemy was responsible for her resurrection. Diana's mom Hippolyta gets at least a partial out in this story, but she is written as a raving lunatic (and everyone seems to have forgotten that she wasn't queen anymore when she died).
3) The portrayal of Diana and all the other heroes as a bunch of pathetic morons who refuse to fight the Amazons, basically because if they actually engaged them they would wipe the floor with them; we're told that their first priority is "rescue", rather than confronting the invaders, when logic would dictate that getting rid of them would eliminate the need for rescue. The heroes fail at every turn in this story, and, what's more, act superior about it (Black Canary, at one point, proclaims that the cavalry has arrived, having arrived too late to stop a USAF pilot from being executed by Amazons; generally, Dinah, the cavalry saves people).
4) The ending, which I won't get into here, because it hurts to think about; sufficed to say that it has already attained reputation as legendarily nonsensical among comics fans.
2007 was hands-down the worst year in Wonder Woman's 66-year-history, and this story was a huge part of it. Avoid this at all costs.
About this product: With a landmass larger than the continental U.S. west of the Mississippi and the richest diversity of plant and animal species on earth, the Amazon has always struck its explorers and would-be exploiters as infinite and largely impenetrable. For decades, anthropologists assumed that permanent human habitation was impossible–but they were wrong. Recently, proof of centuries-old Amazonian civilizations has been unearthed, shifting perceptions of the inhospitability of the rain forest–and providing a precedent for human occupation. Today, as developers and environmentalists clash over the region’s future, the seemingly endless forest is fast disappearing in fires, rampant mineral extraction, rogue logging operations, and encroaching urban sprawl.
Through a series of startling human encounters–interviews with government ministers and environmental crusaders, millionaire ranchers and disenfranchised slum dwellers–Mark London and Brian Kelly, longtime explorers and trailblazing chroniclers of the Amazon basin, trace the region’s transformation. Logging thousands of miles, London and Kelly take readers from the mushrooming shopping malls of Manaus to the pristine rain forest that still seems beyond the reach of civilization, from the ghostly ruins of abandoned factories and failed plantations to the thriving agribusinesses that one day may feed the entire world and change this landscape forever. Again and again, they collide with the same fundamental question: Is it too late to strike a balance in the Amazon between economic sustenance for the twenty-one million Brazilians who live there and protection for the world’s last great forest?
London and Brian Kelly have fashioned a complex, vibrant portrait of a region on the edge of crisis. At once a seductive journey and a searing account of political, environmental, and social tumult, The Last Forest is a masterpiece of contemporary reporting.
About this product: Who wanted her dead? Having rescued Cassidy McKnight from kidnappers in South America, Gabe Sinclair thought his job was done. Not that the former Navy SEAL could ever forget the brave, beautiful single mother. But when the danger followed her home, Gabe promised to protect her. Why anyone would want to kill Cassidy was a mystery. Was the motive related to the orphaned toddler Cassidy was raising, a sweet little girl who brought out the father figure in maverick Gabe? Or did a newly revealed family secret have killer consequences?
This new edition has been completely revised with updated information on hotels, lodges, and tour operators. It covers all nine countries of the Amazon Basin and Orinoco and includes a detailed illustrated natural history section on native species and habitats. The Amazon is an ideal place to suit the needs of eco-travelers, naturalists, sports enthusiasts, and explorers. Travelers are given sound advice on eco-travel, combating perils, and planning their own expedition.
Features include:
*Revised travel safety and health information
*Amendments and updates to health and natural history information
About this product: Now, let the record show that Amazon.com is not, in fact, for dummies. It's good to see that Amazon.com for Dummies has finally arrived on our virtual shelves. This book will introduce even experienced Amazon.com customers to some of the less obvious features of the online emporium, such as corporate accounts, travel services, and the super-fun Friends & Favorites area. Read and learn from Mara Friedman how Amazon.com can provide you with information and (through zShops and the Associates program) make you money.
Friedman briefly covers Amazon's collection of Web Services, which are utilities available to programmers who want to embed Amazon.com functionality (like book searches and popularity monitoring) in their own applications. What's here is clear and stylish (and sometimes funny), and will certainly make you aware of features you don't know about yet. Amazon.com is unusual as a business in that it rewards exploration and study. This book acts as your guide through the electronic aisles. --David Wall
Topics covered: How to locate and buy the things you want. How to advertise and sell the things you have. How to meet people and have fun on Amazon.com.
About this product: It was crazy. It was unthinkable. It was the adventure of a lifetime.
When Don and Dana Starkell left Winnipeg in a tiny three-seater canoe, they had no idea of the dangers that lay ahead. Two years and 12,180 miles later, father and son had each paddled nearly twenty million strokes, slept on beaches, in jungles and fields, dined on tapir, shark, and heaps of roasted ants.
They encountered piranhas, wild pigs, and hungry alligators. They were arrested, shot at, taken for spies and drug smugglers, and set upon by pirates. They had lived through terrifying hurricanes, food poisoning, and near starvation. And at the same time they had set a record for a thrilling, unforgettable voyage of discovery and old-fashioned adventure.
"Courageous . . . Exciting and always immediate." -- The New York Times Book Review
About this product: A history of the Amazon, its peoples, and those who have explored the river by an author with unsurpassed knowledge and experience in the region.
By far the world's largest river, the Amazon flows through the greatest expanse of tropical rain forest on earth. Human beings settled in Amazonia ten thousand years ago and learned to live well on its bounty. Europeans first saw the Amazon around 1500 and started settling there in the seventeenth century. Always in fear or awe of the jungle, they tried in vain to introduce crops and livestock.
John Hemming's account of the river and its history is full of the larger-than-life personalities this unique environment attracted: explorers, missionaries, and naturalists among them. By the nineteenth century, Amazonian natives had almost been destroyed by alien diseases and slavery, as well as violent class rebellion. Although the rubber industry created huge fortunes, it too was at a fearful cost in human misery.
In the last hundred years, the Amazon has seen intrepid explorers, entrepreneurial millionaires, and political extremists taking refuge in jungle retreats. Alongside them, natural scientists, anthropologists, and archaeologists have sought to discover the secrets of this mighty habitat.
Today, the world's appetite for timber, beef, and soya is destroying this great tropical forest. Hemming explains why the Amazon is environmentally crucial to survival and brilliantly describes the passionate struggles to exploit and to protect it. 70 illustrations, 20 in color.
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