Maverick marketing whiz Mike Veeck presents his simple, no-fail formula for business success: make work fun and you'll create a culture where the best... people will want to work and customers will want to spend their money.Mike Veeck runs six minor-league baseball teams, and for each of them he's drafted a business plan that begins with three simple words: "Fun is good." The fun-is-good philosophy not only has worked to make an evening at one of his ballparks--full of laughs, zany promotions, and free giveaways--enjoyable for everyone; it has transformed a half-dozen money-losing or start-up teams into a thriving $25 million business.In this book Veeck, son of legendary baseball owner Bill Veeck, shows why an injection of fun, creativity, and passion is so essential to business success. We learn: o Why customer service, the lifeblood of any business, suffers when employees aren't having fun at work o How just a few people with the fun-is-good attitude can transform an entire workplace o What companies should look for when hiring people and how employees can forge a fun-is-good career path.Throughout, the book is peppered with vignettes, where we hear firsthand from people who have benefited professionally and personally from the fun-is-good philosophy and how they have applied it specifically to their own industries and careers.

Make work fun and you'll create a culture of creativity where the best people will want to work and customers will want to spend their money. That is... maverick marketing whiz Mike Veeck's Fun Is Good philosophy in a nutshell. And in this book, he demonstrates how it has worked, not only to make an evening at one of his minor league ballparks--full of laughs, zany promotions, and free giveaways--enjoyable for everyone, but also how it can turn any organization into a thriving one.

(Berklee Guide). Learn deep funk/R&B guitar! These hands-on exercises, licks, and technical discussions will help you play in the style of Kool and... the Gang, Prince, James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix, Curtis Mayfield, Soulive, and other great artists, spanning from old school to contemporary funk/R&B grooves. The CD features demonstration and practice tracks, played by the Boston-based R&B/funk group the Thaddeus Hogarth Band. Guitar tablature, fretboard diagrams, and traditional notation are included. You'll learn how to: play lead lines and build solos; understand and use scales over funk/R&B harmonies; create rhythm-guitar parts that support funk/R&B grooves; bend strings to expand your palette of scales, harmonies, and ornamentation; and much more!

Funk: It's the only musical genre ever to have transformed the nation into a throbbing army of bell-bottomed, hoop-earringed, rainbow-Afro'd warriors on... the dance floor. Its rhythms and lyrics turned bleak urban realties inside out with distinctive, danceable, downright irresistable music. Funk hasn't received the critical attention that rock, jazz, and the blues have-until now. Colorful, intelligent, and in-you-face, Rickey Vincent's Funk celebrates the songs, the musicians, the philosophy, and the meaning of funk. The book spans from the early work of James Brown (the Godfather of Funk) through today, covering funky soul (Stevie Wonder, the Temptations), so-called "black rock" (Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone, the Isely Brothers), jazz-funk (Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock), monster funk (Parliament, Funkadelic, Bootsy's Rubber Band), naked funk (Rick James, Gap Band), disco-funk (Chic, K.C. and the Sunshine Band), funky pop (Kook & the Gang, Chaka Khan), P-Funk Hip Hop (Digital Underground, De La Soul), funk-sampling rap (Ice Cube, Dr. Dre), funk rock (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Primus), and more.Funk tells a vital, vibrant history-the history of a uniquely American music born out of tradition and community, filled with energy, attitude, anger, hope, and an irrepressible spirit.

From the acclaimed author of Arresting God in Kathmandu, The Guru of Love is the engrossing story of a fevered love triangle set in contemporary Nepal.... Ramchandra, a quiet math teacher, reluctantly enters into an adulterous relationship, and soon his double lives disastrously converge. When Goma, his wife by arranged marriage, learns of his affair, she demands that his mistress move into their small quarters. Unable to dissuade her, Ramchandra finds his desires and fears living side by side. Goma proves to be far shrewder than she seems, entering into a surprising alliance with his mistress. And Ramchandra finds himself trapped -- both in his house and in his city, Kathmandu, a crowded place where secrets are impossible to keep and family matters dictate. Ultimately, his only escape is to let go of someone he loves. Absorbing, sexy, and psychologically acute, The Guru of Love radiates compassion and rare insight.

“A marvelous first novel, about growing up gay in Sri Lanka...from a brilliant new writer whose next book cannot arrive here quickly enough” (Kirkus... Reviews).

DramaCharacters: 3 male, 5 female Drop & wing Set A Black woman awakens in a phantasmagoric rooming house where she is visited by the Duchess of... Hapsburg, Queen Victoria, Patrice Lumumba and Jesus Christ. Only she and Lumumba are not dressed in white; she has a white fixation and wants to become whiter and whiter. She harangues against her father who gave her a jungle strain and then sold out to white harlotry, dreams of returning to Africa to save the continent, and hangs herself amid swirling conflicts and desires, a victim of a nightmare world.

This new Readers Circle edition includes a reading group guide and a conversation between Firoozeh Dumas and Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite... Runner.” In 1972, when she was seven, Firoozeh Dumas and her family moved from Iran to Southern California, arriving with no firsthand knowledge of this country beyond her father’s glowing memories of his graduate school years here. More family soon followed, and the clan has been here ever since. Funny in Farsi chronicles the American journey of Dumas’s wonderfully engaging family: her engineer father, a sweetly quixotic dreamer who first sought riches on Bowling for Dollars and in Las Vegas, and later lost his job during the Iranian revolution; her elegant mother, who never fully mastered English (nor cared to); her uncle, who combated the effects of American fast food with an army of miraculous American weight-loss gadgets; and Firoozeh herself, who as a girl changed her name to Julie, and who encountered a second wave of culture shock when she met and married a Frenchman, becoming part of a one-couple melting pot. In a series of deftly drawn scenes, we watch the family grapple with American English (hot dogs and hush puppies?—a complete mystery), American traditions (Thanksgiving turkey?—an even greater mystery, since it tastes like nothing), and American culture (Firoozeh’s parents laugh uproariously at Bob Hope on television, although they don’t get the jokes even when she translates them into Farsi).Above all, this is an unforgettable story of identity, discovery, and the power of family love. It is a book that will leave us all laughing—without an accent.

From esteemed New Yorker writer Mark Singer comes this cautionary tale of the Penn Square Bank, the oil and gas broker in an Oklahoma City shopping mall... whose collapse in 1982 staggered America’s banking industry. Recounting the whole spectacular story and its colorful characters, Singer makes brilliantly (and hilariously) clear what actually happened and why it had to happen in boom-time Oklahoma. Nowhere else did money flow in quite the same spontaneous fashion. “[A] tale of wonderful verve” (New York Times), Funny Money comes to life through Singer's vivid prose and continues to resonate in today's culture of corporate corruption.

Christmas favorites arranged for the Level 3A - 3B student, including both traditional and popular songs which students find especially appealing.... Contents include: Angels We Heard on High; Carol of the Bells; Deck the Hall; God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen

Finally, a great book to use with the Boomwhackers(R) musical, colorful tubes! Boomwhackers(R) are colorful tubes perfectly tuned to different musical... notes that are clearly marked on their labels. They are fun, educational, economical, and kids love them! Most of the songs in this book can be performed with the C Major (Diatonic) sets of tubes. Fun with Boomwhackers(R) brings you: * 20 fun songs and activities to use with the colorful tubes * Kids' seal of approval -- all activities have been kid-tested! * Lessons that reinforce standards set by Music Educators National Conference for K-8 * Lessons that appear in order of difficulty for K-8 classes. For more information on Boomwhackers(R), a product of Whacky Music, Inc., visit www.boomwhackers.com.

In Fun with Problems, Robert Stone demonstrates once again that he is “one of our greatest living writers” (Los Angeles Times). The stories in this... new collection share the signature blend of longing, violence, and black humor with which Stone illuminates the dark corners of the human soul. Entire lives are laid bare with remarkable precision, in captivating prose: a screenwriter carries on a decades-long affair with a beautiful actress, whose descent into addiction he can neither turn from nor share; a bored husband picks up a mysterious woman only to find that his ego has led him woefully astray; a world-beating Silicon Valley executive receives an unwelcome guest at his mansion in the hills; a scuba dive takes uneasy newlyweds to a point of no return. Fun with Problems showcases Stone’s great gift: to pinpoint and make real the impulses—by turns violently coercive and quietly seductive—that cause us to conceal, reveal, and betray our truest selves.

Yerkes offers tips, examples, and motivation to help readers, their coworkers, and their customers unleash the power of fun in the workplace. Through... real-life case studies and interviews with dozens of leading authors and everyday people, the author illustrates 11 principles of what she calls "The Work/Fun Fusion".