education-economics

This was supposed to be a book about BARGAINS! Not a book by some idiot yuppie whining about her life. Lady, if you don't want to change diapers, don't have a baby, OK!

What a moronic book! It's more therapy for the author than advice for the reader!

This book has some wonderful tips for shopping. Stephanie has great ideas and presents the facts well. It is very boring reading through all of her little stories to get to the information I am looking for in this book. I wish there was a way to get her information and not have to read her whinning and telling us how awful thing are in her life.

This book was exactly what I was looking for -- plenty of resources for discounts on travel, clothing, furniture, baby items. I gave it to my sister, and she won't return it!

This book is full of falacies that no one could live by. It's a purely fictional world in which a miserly lifestyle would have to be adopted. Wealth is not only monetary. Slaving over numerous minimum wage jobs does not define wealth. It might work for Mr. Steamer, but I think the majority of us would like to enjoy their jobs and the fruits of our labor.

Mr.Steamer's suggestions imply that in order to become a millionare, one must be essentially perfect and alone- that is, having no health problems, minimal bills, no family, and find the cheapest place to live. I think it can be assumed that if one were to live alone and have perfect health in the cheapest city in the world and not spend their money on frivelous things, they too could be a millionare. Personally, I would rather sacrifice the millions of dollars that James Steamer claims I can make, and rather have a family, accept my imperfect health (and treat it with the backing of health insurance), and spend money on fast food or an occassional movie once in awhile.

I was disappointed in the book. Perhaps I've already read too many financial books, but I honestly didn't get any new good ideas from this book. One of his ideas really concerns me - Mr. Steamer offers that if one is fairly young, in good health, and has no family history of health problems, he/she could consider going without health insurance (in effect, they become self insured paying their own costs out of pocket). He doesn't explictedly recommend this, but he does offer it as a potential cost saving. I believe this is a bad idea, since a major medical emergency (although perhaps remote), would lead to financial ruin. It's just too great a risk in my opinion. I should add I'm in no way affliated with the healthcare or insurance industry. I also believe that most financial planners would agree with me that this is a bad idea.

The other thing that bothers me about the book is that we're to believe Mr. Steamer somehow managed to sock away $250,000 over a ten year period with a cumulative gross salary of only $220,000 for a family of three. At one time, I tried to live by myself on an annual salary of less than 17K and it was difficult (and I consider myself a pretty frugal person). The book offers cost savings tips and financial advice, but I don't see how you could achieve what Mr. Steamer claims he has even if you used all of his ideas. I guess that was the biggest problem I had with the book. That fact kept bothering me as I read more of the book. Perhaps Mr. Steamer should have included some more factual information on how he himself achieved all that wealth. I wouldn't have been so bothered if he claimed to have gotten real lucky in the stock market, bought a house at auction for next to nothing and fixed it up himself, etc.

I originally wrote this review anonymously; 17 of 23 readers found the review helpful. Here is my update: The title is misleading: This is a look at full-time MBA and executive (MBA) programs at the arguably best business schools in the world. This is like claiming a study to be a study of the auto industry when all the authors studied is Mercedes Benz. The real "business" of business schools must cover the part-time and undergraduate programs. There are transparent inconsistencies: The authors bash b-schools for promoting a cult of gurus, only the authors quote and promote gurus repeatedly. They use the same gurus to criticize the very schools that hire and promote the supposed "guru". Crainer and Dearlove decry one-liners, then summarize their work with a cliched one-liner of their own: "Management is pocket science, not rocket science." They tell b-schools to be customer-friendly but not to cater to the catering needs or accommodation interests of their clients. They purport to do a global study when this is at best a modest revision of a study of the few, elite European business schools, which are generaly unlike the American business school system. They imply (p. 186) that the major business school accrediting body -- the AACSB -- only changed its name to International Association of Management Education outside the U.S., and this is not true. [NOTE: And AACSB in 2001 changed its name again -- worldwide.] They criticize business deans for lacking vision, while not realizing that the "independent subcontractor" mode of business faculty is inconsistent with "academic leadership" creating a vision for such independent experts. Business schools have been successful because they produce what businesses clearly prefer to hire: knowledge workers, managers and leaders for the global economy. Business students at all levels -- undergraduate, graduate and executive -- are learning the new culture and language of the new world economy. Even as the "new" economy declines and former dot commers return to collect their MBAs. Business is a liberal art, much like the study of a foreign language. At the undergraduate level, where most business education is done, accredited business schools demand a well-rounded, liberal arts curriculum. B-schools are generous cash cows for universities. Sure, their faculty earn a lot but they teach large course sections and generate demand for non-business courses. If as much were spent on training top business students as is spent on the college's star quarterback, we might have even more effective business schools. The fact that innovation and leadership is absent from the "top" schools is a phenomenon in all industries: the top schools become rich and self-satisfied and the real change bubbles up from those struggling, niche-building programs competing for the new customers' dollar. A well-trained manager need not be a rocket scientist, but if there are design flaws in his education, Challenger-like disasters are in the making. Business education is too big and too important to be left to a few, smug, incredibly expensive schools. And we should all be grateful that it is not...

Nothing interesting at all here. You could do just as well by doing a search of recent Businessweek articles.

I thought this book was bashing business schools. However, it actually a well researched and balanced look at the growth of business schools.

As a college professor, it upsets me when book authors and publishers change editions so frequently. There is a new editon of this book coming out (perhaps it already has). C'mon-how much about basic business has since 2001? It seems a ploy to not only charge students more money (and disallow them to buy a used edition) and force professors to change the lesson plans for the course-based on changes in a couple of chapters.

The book, however, is well written and provides good examples and case studies.

Good organization and readability does not excuse publishers from using their business knowlege to stick it to students. The "description" here doesn't do anything to change that impression. Perhaps this book should have been called "How to Make a Killing in Academic Book Sales" Obviously book buying is a new hazing rite for American students. "Yes, sir, may I have another!"

Positives:
Contains a huge amount of information - cites many, many studies.
Negatives:
Difficult to find the information because the subject index is so short and undetailed.

Also, I often had to reread whole paragraphs to get their meaning. This is partly due to the author's preference for complex sentence structure; partly due to the APA citation style which forces authors to cram huge citations into the middle of sentences.

This book is very expensive! I had to buy this book for a course and I hated it. Some of the sentences are 75 words long. I'm totally serious about that. The author speaks an intellectual language that is hard to understand. I hated reading it. The author could have said what he needed to say in about a quarter of the space. Please don't subject your students to this book. There has got to be better (and cheaper) textbooks about career counseling out there.

A lot of obscure, insignificant internships and very few that you'd really want.

I used this book and mailed out resumes for internship positions, but most of the time I was too late. I found there are better ways to get a good internship. There are also other good internship Web sites. END

I bought this book thinking that it would help me to learn on how to develop better CBT, but it is a very boring book with very little information about how to really develop CBT.

"The 300 pages of the book are crammed with information, unusual connections, mind-boggling facts and a lot os mind-stretching possibilities . . . This book manages that rare feat of being hugely informative, highly accessible to the non-specialist and very readable while dealing with a very specialist subject.

I am a business english trainer and ordered the Business English Teacher's Resource Book for additional material and ideas for my courses. From the description and the table of contents, my expectations were far greater than what the book really offered. It's set up by unit. Each unit is one exercise with a respective worksheet found in the back of the book. To be honest, it's got 137 pages (including the introduction and bibliography) The worksheepts are more or less empty boxes with a question at the top. My advice, unless you are desperate for ideas, or just started teaching, this book is waste of your money.

This book contains so much information about telecom systems that i dare not add anything to it. From the history of first telephone to computer telephony, from area code directory to list of system manufacturers' email address, it covers a wide range of topics and terminologies, some briefly and some in depth, that telecommunication managers should at least be familiar with.

However, it reads like an encyclopedia. from its title of "business telecom systems: a guide to choosing the best technologies and services", i expected to learn not only about telecom components but also how these components work together to make up a system and how that system maps to business processes. after all, most readers are not interested in the technology per se, but how the technology helps businesses.

The book is not meant to be read cover to cover. at the same time, it is not to be used as a reference. i also found a few HTML tags in the passages as if they were cut and pasted from a web site. all in all, the information is useful and bountiful. but i felt that those same information could have been better packaged and presented.

Considering the vast topic this is a fairly good book. I found some of the data to be dated at this point and some what sexist.