Windfall: Managing Unexpected Money So It Doesn't Manage You

Customer Reviews:

Get this book...just in case!.......2004-03-29

I've been a CPA for nearly 20 years and I couldn't disagree more with the reviewer from Newton. I found the book to be accurate and insightful and precisely the kind of advice I would offer to my clients. Ms. Brill has injected real-world, practical information that I believe is useful and would help anyone put in the enviable position of having "found money".

As for the one negative review, I can't help but think that he/she has an axe to grind, or perhaps a competing book. ;-)

Awful Book.......2003-10-18

This book was poorly written, confused and in some places just plain wrong. As a CPA I know tax code and I know investing. This book sends all the wrong messages about what money is and what money can do.

Interesting and VERY approachable.......2002-04-30

I was a bit leery about buying a book on handling money, as I admit I don't handle money very well and I'm not very open to learning the details of money management. But I was really surprised - pleasantly - to find this book. Ms. Brill writes in a way that doesn't patronize the reader with trying to get too simple, but she does get her points across in a very approachable way.

I found Windfall to be extremely interesting and useful and have recommended it to friends and relatives. I've looked at a lot of other books on managing money (windfalls or otherwise) and this is by far the best written of the bunch. It ought to be required reading for any lottery winner or someone who receives an inheritance, and it's worthwhile for the rest of us too.

Interesting book - worth keeping as a reference.......2001-10-19

I wish I could say that I had a windfall sitting in my bank account, waiting for me to invest it, but I don't. I bought this book with the idea that it might help me if I ever came into a large sum of money, and also just to get a better idea as to how to handle money generally. I wasn't disappointed - Brill clearly knows her stuff, and she writes in a very "consumer-friendly" style. I found her advice to be straightforward and helpful and something that was reachable by someone like myself who does not have an MBA, or even a good understanding of investment options.

I'll definitely keep Windfall in my library and look back to it as a handy reference. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Good nuts-and-bolts guide.......2001-10-15

A few months ago I received an inheritance of several hundred thousand dollars. It was a confusing time, made all the more trying by the conflicting (and sometimes self-serving) advice I received from friends, relatives,and advisors about how to handle the money. Ms. Brill's book helped me by addressing not only the financial aspects of the inheritance, but the emotional conflicts that come into play as well. I highly recommend it.

Windfall!: Managing Unexpected Money So It Doesn't Manage You

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Windfall!: Managing Unexpected Money So It Doesn't Manage You
Marla Brill
Manufacturer: Alpha
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000O93YF0

Book Description

Serials collections can be extremely challenging to manage and develop--and can consume as much as 75% of the annual acquisitions budget. Buying Serials unravels the complexities of identifying, ordering, receiving, and routing serials, as well as the relationships among libraries, vendors, and publishers. Topics covered include serial selection, subscription agency analysis, and evaluation of vendor performance. An appendix summarizes the range of automated services and products available.

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U S Agricultural Research Strategic Challenges and Options
Robert Weaver
Manufacturer: Agricultural Research Institute
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0944919049

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U.S. AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH: STRATEGIC CHALLENGES AND OPTIONS
Robert D. Weaver
Manufacturer: Agricultural Research Inst.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000JF2W7K

Book Description

By Brandon J. Cruickshank (Northern Arizona University) and Raymond Chang is a success guide written for use with General Chemistry. It aims to help students hone their analytical and problem-solving skills by presenting detailed approaches to solving chemical problems. Solutions for all of the text’s even-numbered problems are included.

Workbook with Solutions to accompany General Chemistry

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Workbook with Solutions to accompany General Chemistry
CHANG
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill Science/Engineering/Math
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OGK4HE

Book Description

Scott Schell is the 24-year old son of super rich and highly respected Dr. Haywood Schell of Boston. Scott's consistently dissolute behavior induces Dr. Shell to remove Scott from his Will. The severance is irreversible unless Scott visits and reports on the Schell mineral holdings in Coonskin County, West Virginia.

Scott begins his journey to Coonskin County with his only remaining possessions: the tuxedo he is wearing and a little over one-hundred dollars in cash.

During his excursion into the backwoods of West Virginia, he encounters various eccentrics, coundrels and heroes. He learns valuable lessons of life from each of these.

Finally, Scott meets and falls in love with Doris Gruver, a great beauty from Philadelphia, who, like himself, has become entrapped in a deadly web of fate. Together, they will trust the mysterious widow Ola, an ex-spy, to engineer their escape from fanatic holdovers from the War Between the States.

Book Description

Gil Merom argues that modern democracies fail in insurgency wars because they are unable to find a winning balance between expedient and moral tolerance for the costs of war. Small wars are lost at home when a critical minority shifts the balancing element from the battlefield to the marketplace of ideas. This minority, representing the educated middle class, abhors the brutality involved in effective counterinsurgency, but also refuses to sustain the level of casualties resulting from fighting in other ways.

Customer Reviews:

They're not "Small Wars" if you live there. . ........2005-06-04

Merom's book, and Lusavardi's review essay which endorses it, share a subscription to an unhappy intellectual current: "the stab in the back" -- the idea that a worthwhile military effort is undermined by "intellectuals" back home, and that if we'd only been able to "take the gloves off" and be just a bit more brutal -as demanded by circumstances, of course-- then everything would have turned out OK.

But this analysis is both wrong, and a pretext for the suppression of dissent. One of the characteristics of all three of the wars that Merom covers is that they were long, far longer than the American Civil War, and than American involvelment in WWII. The length of these involvements alone belies the argument that if only "a little more time, or more men" had been expended then the outcome would have been different.

What they also share in common --and share with Iraq-- is that they were at best marginally legitimate. None of these "wars" included a declaration of war, nor the political unity that such a declarations require-- Begin's invasion of Lebanon was regarded as illegal by the international community, and unwise by many Israelis. The "casus foederis" for America's Vietnam excursion, the "Gulf of Tonkin Incident" was as authentic as Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction. And France wished to maintain as French an Arab Muslim territory which didn't desire it at a time when the international community --prominently including the US-- regarded old Empires as politically illegitimate.

An alternate explanation for why democracies lose such wars is that military political elites, having papered together a thin pretext for intervention, are unable to maintain such rationales against the steady wave of casualties, the hatred for the intervener for their efforts, and the lack of any defined endpoint, but you won't hear that in Merom's book.

Finally, we might add that the brutality argument doesn't wash. Rather brutal nations have failed at counter-insurgency warfare --hard to argue that the Soviets in Afghanistan "kept the gloves on", nor that their successors in Chechnya have either. Conversely, the British did put down an insurgency in Malaya-- one of the classic success stories in counter-insurgency warfare.

Blaming whingeing home-front intellectuals for the strategic errors of those who commit a nation's soldiers to wars without end is tempting, but wrong.

Small Wars Lost At Home Not on Battlefield.......2004-05-15

How Democracy Loses Small Wars is perhaps one of the most-timely, but unrecognized books dealing with the so-called "quagmire" and war prisoner abuse situations the U.S. has encountered in Iraq in 2004. Gil Merom addresses how modern democracies lose small wars against weaker forces. Merom writes that small wars are lost mostly at home not on the battlefield when a highly media-visible minority of the educated upper middle class selectively views with moral revulsion the brutality and casualties necessary to win war. In response, government war leaders resort to repress the ugly realities of war by deceit, censure, and crackdowns, attracting even more media attention.

Merom offers three case studies of the outcomes of small wars: the French Algerian War, the Israeli Lebanon War, and the U.S. Vietnam War. It is not the Vietnam War but the French war against Algerian independence from 1954-60 that may offer the best history lesson for the U.S.-Iraq war. France sought to hold onto its empire and oil and gas resources in a mostly Muslim country. The French had overwhelming military power. There were low casualties. The public supported the war despite concerns about the economy. The conflict entailed mostly urban guerilla warfare where one third of the casualties were due to ambushes. And the war was portrayed as a struggle between "forces of light and those of darkness." Sound familiar? France won the battles but lost the war and had to eventually pull out. Its citizens would no longer tolerate the suppression of wartime abuses by criminalizing the press, the seizing of antiwar literature, and invoking the military draft.

So look for the Iraq war to be lost not in Fallujah or Kandahar, but in Berkeley, Paris, or more lately, in Madrid or Abu Ghraib prison. Look for the war to be lost if U.S. forces resort to war crimes, cover-ups, abuses of the Patriot Act, and succumbing to provocations of anti-war activists. Thus far, the Bush administration has court-martialed those who have committed abuses, has reluctantly admitted to no WMD's rather than attempting a cover up, and have avoided anything like the opinion galvanizing incident of the 1970 Kent State University National Guard killing of student Vietnam anti-war protesters in response to the provocation of burning down the campus ROTC building.

Merom offers good analysis of the interaction between the military and civilian battlefields. His book could have been enhanced by an analysis of how, what sociologists Alvin Gouldner and Peter Berger call the "new class" are able to socially construct the military as comprising the moral low ground. As to the quest for capturing the moral high ground in the Iraq War, perhaps the often self-indulgent anti-war activists could be reminded of the tragic moral consequences of the aftermath of abandoning Vietnam - the Killing Fields, the Boat People émigrés, and the atrocities of Pol Pot in Cambodia.

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Merom, Gil. How Democracies Lose Small Wars: State, Society, and the Failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam.(Book ... An article from: Naval War College Review
Richard Norton
Manufacturer: U.S. Naval War College
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

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ASIN: B000ALRH82
Release Date: 2006-07-14

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Naval War College Review, published by U.S. Naval War College on March 22, 2005. The length of the article is 1090 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Merom, Gil. How Democracies Lose Small Wars: State, Society, and the Failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam.(Book Review)
Author: Richard Norton
Publication: Naval War College Review (Refereed)
Date: March 22, 2005
Publisher: U.S. Naval War College
Volume: 58 Issue: 2 Page: 152(3)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

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Te Maiharoa and the promised land
Buddy Mikaere
Manufacturer: Heinemann
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

New Zealand | Australia & Oceania | History | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0868635855

Book Description

FROM THE PREFACEThe processes used to remove water from biosolids and change their form from a liquid to a damp solid are critical to the operation of other downstream processes in wastewater treatment. An ideal dewatering operation would capture all of the biosolids solids at minimum cost and the resultant dry biosolids solids or cake would be capable of being handled without causing unnecessary problems. Process reliability, ease of operation, and compatibility with the treatment plant environment are also optimum. This text is designed to provide a detailed look at several dewatering options. It must be pointed out, however, that this text takes a strong, biased view toward centrifugation as the dewatering process that is most reliable, maintenance free, cost effective, and capable of producing the highest quality end-product when compared to the other options in a holistic manner. Therefore, the underlying theme of this text is wrapped around the premise that it is better to centrifuge it! Having said this, it must also be pointed out that all major biosolids dewatering processes are discussed in this text, in detail. Several examples of actual operating systems are presented, and preventive maintenance and cost considerations are presented and discussed. In recent years there has been a tendency in some technical texts like this one to focus on the theoretical and laboratory analyses of dewatering operations. While such research and documented findings can lead to improved understanding of the scientific and engineering concepts associated with dewatering biosolids, this text is presented in such a fashion so as to be user-friendly. It is an operator's text that can also afford the decision-maker the opportunity to make informed choices about selecting a dewatering system for his/her plant use. Dewatering Biosolids will be of interest to people in all aspects of wastewater plant operation. Useful as a handbook for operators, this plain language text is also of importance to anyone considering altering or adapting their wastewater operating system.

Innovation in Dewatering Sludges: Biosolids and Residuals (Werf Report)

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Innovation in Dewatering Sludges: Biosolids and Residuals (Werf Report)
Miller
Manufacturer: IWA Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Environmental Science | Earth Sciences | Science | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 1843397447

Book Description

This volume presents selected contributions given to the 38th European Marine Biology Symposium, held in Aveiro, Portugal, in September 2003.

Understanding the functioning of marine ecosystems is the first step towards measuring and predicting the influence of Man, and to find solutions for the enormous array of problems we face today. This volume is organised according to the four subthemes of the symposium and to issues commonly perceived as relevant by scientists concerned with the study, protection and management of Marine Biodiversity: patterns and processes, assessment, threats and management and conservation.

The 32 papers that make up this book represent current research and concerns about Marine Biodiversity in Europe, and will have wide appeal to all those interested in understanding and preserving the marine ecosystems of the world's oceans.

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