Reviews written by Rich Brueckner

The Invisible Entrepreneur is targeted at a very specific audience: established business people who have been immersed in their ventures for a long time. While I don't fit that category at the moment, I do hope to join the ranks someday.

The book is based on a simple premise that made a lot of sense to me; take three months off from your business and you and your business will benefit. You will learn a lot as you prepare your employees for your absence, you will get a new lease on life while you're away, and you'll be amazed at how well the crew got on without you.

The authors based this book on their own experiences and they reveal some fascinating insights along the way. For example, in one analogy the business owner realized that by trying to do everything himself, he was not spending his time where he could make the biggest impact. If you were a born salesman, would you hire yourself to do accounting? Of course you wouldn't. For budding entrepreneurs like me, just this one jewel of wisdom is well worth the price of the book.

This is a nice little treasure to have on any bookshelf. Told in a straightforward style that describes one concept per page, this book could be described as baby steps towards the cessation of suffering.

As such, this is probably not the best place to start if one wants to first learn about Buddhism. Rather, I think this book is more for the practitioner who wants to revisit concepts that in themselves could be the basis for multiple lectures.

In view of the tumultuous times we live in, you would think that a Manual for Living would be just the ticket. Finally, life gets its missing manual. I mean, what could be better?

I bought into the concept right away. And if anyone ever needed a manual for life, that would be me right now. So I picked up the book and immediately sat down to read Chapter One: DEATH.

Oops.

That's right; the Manual for Living: A User's Guide to the Meaning of Life starts out with a chapter about death. This is your first clue that something is amiss.

But if you're like me, you are very stubborn when you want to like a book. So you keep reading in the hopes that it will get better.

It doesn't.

The problem here is not that David Chernoff doesn't have worthwhile things to say; he does. It's just that every bit of wisdom he espouses is written in declarative sentences without any analogies. None.

Imagine the Bible without any stories. Think about how flat that would be. If Jesus and the Buddha taught like this, no one would have ever heard of them.

The great teachers knew that you cant just tell people things like "We must have clarity within our mind to focus on the positive" without telling them just exactly how to go about making it happen. Isn't that what manuals are for?

Do you remember Agent Mulder in the "X Files" television show?. There was a poster of above his desk that showed a photo of a flying saucer and the words "I Want to Believe."

As an alien abductee, author Jim Morony believes. So rather than try to convince us that UFOs are real, The Extraterrestrial Answer Book attempts to answer the questions that fellow believers want to know: why aliens are here, what they want, and most importantly, what should we do now?

For someone who contends he has spent time communicating with aliens, Morony seems to have come away with only tentative theories about their intentions. Now that he has a book, perhaps he should hand it to them on their next visit and asked if he guessed right.

Margot Fraser and Lisa Lorimer have written a fascinating insider's view of what it's like to run a growing, socially responsible company. As the title suggests, they focus on their trials, tribulations, and failures while in charge and what they learned from those experiences.

Reading this book, it is clear to me that running a company is a daunting task that takes it toll. The pressures of meeting payroll and managing cash flow result in lost sleep, broken marriages and trampled values. Fortunately for today's business leaders, the authors provide some very helpful tips to deal with such adversities.

In this challenged economy, Dealing with the Tough Stuff is a very timely book for entrepreneurs looking to create a values-driven business. We all want to feel good about the place we work, but given a chance to read about how these values can collide with the pressures of real-world capitalism may give us pause.

When was the last time you picked up a self-help book and found yourself taking notes within the first few minutes? I had this experience recently while reading Neale Donald Walsch's latest book, one that seemed to jump up and grab my attention at a time of great upheaval in my life.

Change can be a frightening thing, especially when it involves the loss of a job as in my case. In his refreshing conversational style, Walsch reaches out to the reader with some startling revelations about change itself: that change is going to keep happening whether we like it or not (thanks, Heraclitus), that change and life are actually the same thing, and that the only thing we can change is the way we deal with change itself.

For a book that deals with something we all tend to avoid, When Everything Changes does a remarkable job of explaining complex ideas in a methodical, non-threatening way. Like a brick layer, Walsch puts down a solid foundation of helpful concepts and then adds layers of empowering steps for the reader to turn change into a ever-present ally.

While I highly recommend this book, I don't think it is for everyone. Walsch himself may have foresaw this because he divided the book into two sections: "The Mechanics of the Mind," which really appealed to my left-brain, logical sensibilities, and then a second part called "The System Of The Soul," which got into all kinds of metaphysics that might turn off some folks with a more secular perspective. It's not that I blame him. After all, he is the guy who brought us "Conversations With God."

In any event, I think just about anyone could benefit from the practical wisdom in this book. Change doesn't have to be scary, and somehow just knowing that is a comfort I wish I had enjoyed much earlier in my life.