Books about Old school from Amazon.com

Tobias Wolff's Old School is at once a celebration of literature and delicate hymn to a lost innocence of American life and art. Set in a New England prep school in the early 1960s, the novel imagines a final, pastoral moment before the explosion of the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the suicide of Ernest Hemingway.

The unnamed narrator is one of several boys whose life revolves around the school's English teachers, those polymaths who seemed to know "exactly what was most worth knowing." For the boys, literature is the center of life, and their obsession culminates in a series of literary competitions during their final year. The prize in each is a private audience with a visiting writer who serves as judge for the entries.

At first, the narrator is entirely taken with the battle. As he fails in his effort to catch Robert Frost's attention and then is unable--due to illness--to even compete for his moment with Ayn Rand, he devotes his energies to a masterpiece for his hero, Hemingway. But, confronting the blank page, the narrator discovers his cowardice, his duplicity. He has withheld himself, he realizes, even from his roommate. He has used his fiction to create a patrician gentility, a mask for his middle class home and his Jewish ancestry. Through the competition for Hemingway, fittingly, all of his illusions about literature dissolve.

Old School is a small, neatly made book, spare and clear in its prose. Each chapter is self-contained and free of anything extraneous to the essentials of plot, mood, and character. Near the end of the novel, the narrator, now a respected writer, imagines that he might one day write about his school days. But he is daunted. "Memory," he says, "is a dream to begin with, and what I had was a dream of memory, not to be put to the test." Old School enters this interplay between dreams and the adult interrogation of memory. Risking sentimentality, Wolff confronts a golden age that never was. From the confrontation, he distills a powerful novel of failed expectations and, ultimately, redemptive self-awareness. --Patrick O'Kelley.
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The six-year-old is a complex child, entirely  different from the five-year-old. Though many of the  changes are for the good -- Six is growing more  mature, more independent, more daring and  adventurous -- this is not necessarily an easy time for the  little girl or boy. Relationships with mothers are  troubled -- most of the time Six adores mother,  but whenever things go wrong, it's her fault. It  used to be, at Five, that she was the center of the  child's universe; now, the child is the center of  his own universe.

Parents need the expert  advice of Drs. Ames and Ilg during this difficult  year, to explain parent-child relations,  friendships with peers, what six-year-olds excel at, how  they see the world, what it feels like to be  entering the first grade. Children need patience and  understanding to help make this transition easier..
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The eight-year-old child is an exuberant,  outgoing bundle of energy; he meets every challenge  head-on, willing to try almost anything Sometimes  parents are amazed at the enthusiasm and excitement  with which their child greets the  world.



However, eight is also a time when the child  begins to do a great deal of analyzing and  evaluating, finding fault in himself and  others--especially Mohter. How do parents help an eight-year-old  through this up-and-down age? What should parents  expect in their relationships with the child and  how can life in the family be made easier? What  will the child's relationship with friends and  siblings be like? In the successful tradition of the  Gesell institute series, Your  Eight-Year-Old is a well-researched, highly  accessible guide..
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Introduces a new way of measuring and thinking about the contributions of individuals to business success.
Makes the case that the role of Human Resources is increasingly important, as company assets become more intangible and reliant on intellectual capital.
Provides a framework that focuses on identifying where Human Resources issues are performance drivers--or impediments--to strategy implementation.
Develops a measurement system that provides valid, reliable indicators of Human Resources' contribution to the success of strategy implementation, and ultimately to firmperformance.
Includes recommendations supported by clear and persuasive examples, as well as the authors' unique survey of 2,800 firms..
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What happened to that sunny outgoing child of eight?  As parents of nine-year-olds often discover, nine is a tricky age.  Children are more distant from Mother and Father; they're more independant and rely on friends for companionship, or they have a tendency to spend time alone.  Some nines are boisterous and wild, others thoughtful and withdrawn.  Helping parents learn how to cope with the unpredictable nine-year-old is the aim of this practical guide from the Gesell Institute.



Nine-year-olds are hovering on the brink of adolescence, and this in part contributes to their up-and-down nature.  Dr. Louis Bates Ames and Carol Chase Haber paint a vivid picture of the child at this age and offer useful advice to make life easier for parents and children alike..
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When Warren Buffett was asked why the Gillette board of directors chose Jim Kilts to be CEO, he said, “Jim made as much sense in terms of talking about business as anybody I’ve ever talked to. If you listen to Jim analyze a business situation you get absolutely no baloney. And, frankly, finding someone like that is a rarity.”

There is only one CEO in recent times who has faced—and succeeded at—the extraordinary challenges of leading three major companies—Gillette, Nabisco, and Kraft—into prosperous futures by doing what matters on the fundamentals.

That CEO is Jim Kilts. In this vivid first-person account he reveals his system for success that is both cutting-edge and back-to-basics. Doing What Matters—the action plan for identifying and tackling what’s important and ignoring the rest—is the key to winning in a warp-speed world where the need for revolutionary speed and decisiveness increases by the day.

Kilts illustrates his ideas with colorful stories, such as “that little red razor.” A new product idea he proposed early on at Gillette, it was initially shelved because “everyone knew you couldn’t sell a red razor,” but went on to become one of Gillette’s biggest marketing successes ever.

Jim Kilts’s focus on both business fundamentals and personal attributes provides the “complete package,” showing how to get results that make a difference through:

• Intellectual integrity: The ability to face the unvarnished truth about yourself and your business and using what you see as the basis for action.

• Generating emotional engagement and enthusiasm: Using the force of your personality and ideas to infuse people and an entire organization with a sense of purpose and mission.

• Action: Gillette, with just five product lines, had over 20,000 SKUs. After studying the issue for over two years, there were still 20,000. How Kilts got Gillette off the dime to pare down the number to 7,000 almost overnight is an astonishing example of getting the rubber to meet the road—with enormous benefits to the business.

• Understanding the right things through an overarching concept to frame and filter issues: For Jim Kilts it was Total Brand Value, the framework he used in the consumer products industry for achieving better, faster, and more complete results than the competition.

Whether you’re CEO of a multibillion-dollar global company, the brand manager for a product, an entrepreneur starting a small business, or just beginning a career, Doing What Matters provides the practical ideas that get results—ranging from a day one action plan for starting a new job to a chorus of cheers and support to a program of total innovation that involves everyone in changes from small to “big bang.”.
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Leading Minds and Landmark Ideas In An Easily Accessible Format

From the preeminent thinkers whose work has defined an entire field to the rising stars who will redefine the way we think about business, The Harvard Business Review Paperback Series delivers the fundamental information today's professionals need to stay competitive in a fast-moving world.

From the seminal article, "Leading Change," by John Kotter to Paul Strebel on why employees so often resist change, Harvard Business Review on Change is the most comprehensive resource available for embracing corporate change--and using it to your company's greatest advantage. A Harvard Business Review Paperback..
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