#1 NYT Bestselling Author Barbara Freethy delivers an emotional and poignant story with touches of humor and a cast of quirky, lovable characters. A touch of mysticism adds an extra layer to this story of love and family.

Alone in the world, Faith Christopher had always yearned for love ... and a man who'd make her heart pound. But her dreams of a place to call home were getting harder to hold on to ...

Alex Carrigan liked fast cars, fast women and fast deals - then a tough-talking teenager arrived on his doorstep claiming she was his long-lost daughter, and his meddling grandfather decided to move in. Suddenly, Alex has to face the family he never expected.

Enter Faith. Little did the outspoken and beautiful baker know that deep inside Alex was a well of tenderness ... and that she might have the recipe to bring him true love - the sweetest thing life has to offer.

Reviews...

"The Sweetest Thing is a heart-tugging tale of family and the healing power of love. Barbara Freethy has created a delightful cast of quirky yet lovable characters and brought them to full life. The Sweetest Thing is a story as enjoyable and richly satisfying as one of the heroine's chocolate eclairs!" Romance Fiction Forum - AOL

"Freethy has crafted an entertaining and moving contemporary romance. The paranormal elements are well handled and enrich the story. But ultimately, The Sweetest Thing is about the importance of love and family, for it is love that makes family sweet." The Romance Reader

"Ms. Freethy has again done a wonderful job of crafting an intriguing plot line and peopling it with fully developed characters that have all of the flaws and foibles common to human beings." Bookbug on the Web

Setting: Contemporary San Francisco

Sensuality: 6

Successful entrepreneur Alex Carrigan's life is neatly organized and focused on building his company. But fate drops a series of bombshells when his eccentric grandfather appears on his doorstep to move in with him, the sudden death of his ex-wife leaves him with a precocious 12-year-old daughter he's convinced he didn't sire, and beautiful redhead Faith Christopher walks into his life.

Faith has her own set of problems. She's been in emotional limbo since the death of her fiancé several years before, and the ties to his family are growing increasingly troublesome. She's wondering if she should give in to family pressure and marry the second son when Alex wanders into her bakery looking for his grandfather. The physical connection she feels with Alex is instantaneous and mutual, making her question whether a marriage based on companionship is wise or even possible.

Meanwhile, Alex's grandfather has an agenda of his own. Fifty-six years earlier, he'd fallen in love, broken a piece of ancient Indian pottery, and brought a curse on himself and his heirs. He's convinced he must locate his lost love, return the pottery to its hiding place, and lift the curse, a plan Alex has heard many times before and doesn't want to get involved in. But Faith is intrigued by the elderly gentleman's tale and agrees to help him. Little does she know what life-changing forces have been set in motion by her decision.

Can a woman who wants commitment find happiness with a man who doesn't believe in love? Will Alex be able to accept that not only is Faith everything he wants but also everything he needs? If Alex and Faith don't help his grandfather solve the more than half-century-long mystery, will the curse doom the two lovers and all the people they love? And what about the child he doesn't believe is his but who needs him so desperately? It's a pleasure to read Freethy's answers to these questions and more, thanks to her charming writing style and expert plotting in The Sweetest Thing.--Lois Faye Dyer

#1 NYT Bestselling Author Barbara Freethy delivers an emotional and poignant story with touches of humor and a cast of quirky, lovable characters. A touch of mysticism adds an extra layer to this story of love and family.

Alone in the world, Faith Christopher had always yearned for love ... and a man who'd make her heart pound. But her dreams of a place to call home were getting harder to hold on to ...

Alex Carrigan liked fast cars, fast women and fast deals - then a tough-talking teenager arrived on his doorstep claiming she was his long-lost daughter, and his meddling grandfather decided to move in. Suddenly, Alex has to face the family he never expected.

Enter Faith. Little did the outspoken and beautiful baker know that deep inside Alex was a well of tenderness ... and that she might have the recipe to bring him true love - the sweetest thing life has to offer.

Reviews...

"The Sweetest Thing is a heart-tugging tale of family and the healing power of love. Barbara Freethy has created a delightful cast of quirky yet lovable characters and brought them to full life. The Sweetest Thing is a story as enjoyable and richly satisfying as one of the heroine's chocolate eclairs!" Romance Fiction Forum - AOL

"Freethy has crafted an entertaining and moving contemporary romance. The paranormal elements are well handled and enrich the story. But ultimately, The Sweetest Thing is about the importance of love and family, for it is love that makes family sweet." The Romance Reader

"Ms. Freethy has again done a wonderful job of crafting an intriguing plot line and peopling it with fully developed characters that have all of the flaws and foibles common to human beings." Bookbug on the Web

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

• ISBN13: 9780142000281
• Condition: New
• Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

In today's world, yesterday's methods just don't work. In Getting Things Done, veteran coach and management consultant David Allen shares the breakthrough methods for stress-free performance that he has introduced to tens of thousands of people across the country. Allen's premise is simple: our productivity is directly proportional to our ability to relax. Only when our minds are clear and our thoughts are organized can we achieve effective productivity and unleash our creative potential. In Getting Things Done Allen shows how to:

* Apply the "do it, delegate it, defer it, drop it" rule to get your in-box to empty
* Reassess goals and stay focused in changing situations
* Plan projects as well as get them unstuck
* Overcome feelings of confusion, anxiety, and being overwhelmed
* Feel fine about what you're not doing

From core principles to proven tricks, Getting Things Done can transform the way you work, showing you how to pick up the pace without wearing yourself down.

With first-chapter allusions to martial arts, "flow," "mind like water," and other concepts borrowed from the East (and usually mangled), you'd almost think this self-helper from David Allen should have been called Zen and the Art of Schedule Maintenance.

Not quite. Yes, Getting Things Done offers a complete system for downloading all those free-floating gotta-do's clogging your brain into a sophisticated framework of files and action lists--all purportedly to free your mind to focus on whatever you're working on. However, it still operates from the decidedly Western notion that if we could just get really, really organized, we could turn ourselves into 24/7 productivity machines. (To wit, Allen, whom the New Economy bible Fast Company has dubbed "the personal productivity guru," suggests that instead of meditating on crouching tigers and hidden dragons while you wait for a plane, you should unsheathe that high-tech saber known as the cell phone and attack that list of calls you need to return.)

As whole-life-organizing systems go, Allen's is pretty good, even fun and therapeutic. It starts with the exhortation to take every unaccounted-for scrap of paper in your workstation that you can't junk, The next step is to write down every unaccounted-for gotta-do cramming your head onto its own scrap of paper. Finally, throw the whole stew into a giant "in-basket"

That's where the processing and prioritizing begin; in Allen's system, it get a little convoluted at times, rife as it is with fancy terms, subterms, and sub-subterms for even the simplest concepts. Thank goodness the spine of his system is captured on a straightforward, one-page flowchart that you can pin over your desk and repeatedly consult without having to refer back to the book. That alone is worth the purchase price. Also of value is Allen's ingenious Two-Minute Rule: if there's anything you absolutely must do that you can do right now in two minutes or less, then do it now, thus freeing up your time and mind tenfold over the long term. It's commonsense advice so obvious that most of us completely overlook it, much to our detriment; Allen excels at dispensing such wisdom in this useful, if somewhat belabored, self-improver aimed at everyone from CEOs to soccer moms (who we all know are more organized than most CEOs to start with). --Timothy Murphy

We’ve all met people who made a difference for us, who stepped up at just the right time with advice and wisdom. Finnegan, a mysterious, congenial man who may or may not be British, is just such a person. He’s the focus of this life-changing fable: Finnegan’s Way: The Secret Power of Doing Things Badly. Finnegan is not dispensing advice on how to grind the last bit of work out of underpaid employees. Instead, he has a life-affirming message for everyone: the manager, the employee, the lonely man seeking a relationship, the stressed-out woman seeking to lose a few pounds, the dispirited person trying to get going again. Finnegan forgives. He understands human failings. He doesn’t chide us for complaining that someone moved our cheese. Instead, he shows us a way to use our mistakes to get us where we want to go. Once you meet Finnegan, your life will never be the same again.

We’ve all met people who made a difference for us, who stepped up at just the right time with advice and wisdom. Finnegan, a mysterious, congenial man who may or may not be British, is just such a person. He’s the focus of this life-changing fable: Finnegan’s Way: The Secret Power of Doing Things Badly. Finnegan is not dispensing advice on how to grind the last bit of work out of underpaid employees. Instead, he has a life-affirming message for everyone: the manager, the employee, the lonely man seeking a relationship, the stressed-out woman seeking to lose a few pounds, the dispirited person trying to get going again. Finnegan forgives. He understands human failings. He doesn’t chide us for complaining that someone moved our cheese. Instead, he shows us a way to use our mistakes to get us where we want to go. Once you meet Finnegan, your life will never be the same again.

• ISBN13: 9780316346627
• Condition: New
• Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate. This widely acclaimed bestseller, in which Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas.

"The best way to understand the dramatic transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life," writes Malcolm Gladwell, "is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do." Although anyone familiar with the theory of memetics will recognize this concept, Gladwell's The Tipping Point has quite a few interesting twists on the subject.

For example, Paul Revere was able to galvanize the forces of resistance so effectively in part because he was what Gladwell calls a "Connector": he knew just about everybody, particularly the revolutionary leaders in each of the towns that he rode through. But Revere "wasn't just the man with the biggest Rolodex in colonial Boston," he was also a "Maven" who gathered extensive information about the British. He knew what was going on and he knew exactly whom to tell. The phenomenon continues to this day--think of how often you've received information in an e-mail message that had been forwarded at least half a dozen times before reaching you.

Gladwell develops these and other concepts (such as the "stickiness" of ideas or the effect of population size on information dispersal) through simple, clear explanations and entertainingly illustrative anecdotes, such as comparing the pedagogical methods of Sesame Street and Blue's Clues, or explaining why it would be even easier to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with the actor Rod Steiger. Although some readers may find the transitional passages between chapters hold their hands a little too tightly, and Gladwell's closing invocation of the possibilities of social engineering sketchy, even chilling, The Tipping Point is one of the most effective books on science for a general audience in ages. It seems inevitable that "tipping point," like "future shock" or "chaos theory," will soon become one of those ideas that everybody knows--or at least knows by name. --Ron Hogan

Countless books through the ages have offered wisdom on how to be more productive. "Things To Do While Avoiding Things To Do" humorously tackles the flip side of time efficiency with essential lists to make you a proud procrastinator. Here's a few:

Productive Ways To Spend An Unproductive Day

1. Research the genealogy of the trees on your property.
2. Buy a pair of back up shoelaces for every pair of shoes you own.
3. Create a riveting Wikipedia entry for yourself.
4. Recondition the leather on your slippers.
5. Create a beautiful collage of your childhood memorabilia.
6. Thoroughly clean the soap scum out of your soap dishes.
7. Photograph every room in your house, so you'll always have a memory of it.
8. Carefully remove all lint and dust from between your computer keyboard keys.
9. Buy a battery tester and determine the power strength left in all of your household batteries.
10. Track the usage of everyday household items and create a monthly projection budget. Then comparison shop to lower your cost by 10%.

Things To Do On Partially Rainy Days

1. Check the weather and make a list of things to do for the next sunny day.
2. Call a friend who lives in a different part of town and ask if it's raining where they are.
3. Ask the first person you see if they know when the weather is supposed to clear up.
4. Look through all your recipes and find the best ones for soup and chocolate chip cookies.
5. Complain to a neighbor how you would like the rain if only you had a fireplace.
6. Take inventory of your board games.
7. Go outside and check your umbrella to make sure it's ready for a heavier storm.
8. Walk around your house and check to see that all the gutters are draining properly.
9. Drive around in your dirty car until it's partially clean.
10. Do nothing and relish the excuse that it's not good "working weather."

Each list is interspersed with invaluable tips, like:

* Do your most critical work at the same time every day--the last minute.
* If life is what happens while you're busy making other plans, why make any?
* How can I be a procrastinator if I always eat my chocolate right away?

"Things To Do While Avoiding Things To Do" is guaranteed to put a smile on your face and keep guilt and stress away!

Countless books through the ages have offered wisdom on how to be more productive. "Things To Do While Avoiding Things To Do" humorously tackles the flip side of time efficiency with essential lists to make you a proud procrastinator. Here's a few:

Productive Ways To Spend An Unproductive Day

1. Research the genealogy of the trees on your property.
2. Buy a pair of back up shoelaces for every pair of shoes you own.
3. Create a riveting Wikipedia entry for yourself.
4. Recondition the leather on your slippers.
5. Create a beautiful collage of your childhood memorabilia.
6. Thoroughly clean the soap scum out of your soap dishes.
7. Photograph every room in your house, so you'll always have a memory of it.
8. Carefully remove all lint and dust from between your computer keyboard keys.
9. Buy a battery tester and determine the power strength left in all of your household batteries.
10. Track the usage of everyday household items and create a monthly projection budget. Then comparison shop to lower your cost by 10%.

Things To Do On Partially Rainy Days

1. Check the weather and make a list of things to do for the next sunny day.
2. Call a friend who lives in a different part of town and ask if it's raining where they are.
3. Ask the first person you see if they know when the weather is supposed to clear up.
4. Look through all your recipes and find the best ones for soup and chocolate chip cookies.
5. Complain to a neighbor how you would like the rain if only you had a fireplace.
6. Take inventory of your board games.
7. Go outside and check your umbrella to make sure it's ready for a heavier storm.
8. Walk around your house and check to see that all the gutters are draining properly.
9. Drive around in your dirty car until it's partially clean.
10. Do nothing and relish the excuse that it's not good "working weather."

Each list is interspersed with invaluable tips, like:

* Do your most critical work at the same time every day--the last minute.
* If life is what happens while you're busy making other plans, why make any?
* How can I be a procrastinator if I always eat my chocolate right away?

"Things To Do While Avoiding Things To Do" is guaranteed to put a smile on your face and keep guilt and stress away!

Why is it so hard to make lasting changes in our companies, in our communities, and in our own lives?

The primary obstacle is a conflict that’s built into our brains, say Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the critically acclaimed bestseller Made to Stick. Psychologists have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different systems—the rational mind and the emotional mind—that compete for control. The rational mind wants a great beach body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie. The rational mind wants to change something at work; the emotional mind loves the comfort of the existing routine. This tension can doom a change effort—but if it is overcome, change can come quickly.

In Switch, the Heaths show how everyday people—employees and managers, parents and nurses—have united both minds and, as a result, achieved dramatic results: 
●      The lowly medical interns who managed to defeat an entrenched, decades-old medical practice that was endangering patients.
●      The home-organizing guru who developed a simple technique for overcoming the dread of housekeeping.
●      The manager who transformed a lackadaisical customer-support team into service zealots by removing a standard tool of customer service
            
In a compelling, story-driven narrative, the Heaths bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change. Switch shows that successful changes follow a pattern, a pattern you can use to make the changes that matter to you, whether your interest is in changing the world or changing your waistline.

Chip Heath and Dan Heath on Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

"Change is hard." "People hate change." Those were two of the most common quotes we heard when we began to study change.

But it occurred to us that if people hate change, they have a funny way of showing it. Every iPhone sold serves as counter-evidence. So does every text message sent, every corporate merger finalized, every aluminum can recycled. And we haven’t even mentioned the biggest changes: Getting married. Having kids. (If people hate change, then having a kid is an awfully dumb decision.)

It puzzled us--why do some huge changes, like marriage, come joyously, while some trivial changes, like submitting an expense report on time, meet fierce resistance?

We found the answer in the research of some brilliant psychologists who’d discovered that people have two separate “systems” in their brains—a rational system and an emotional system. The rational system is a thoughtful, logical planner. The emotional system is, well, emotional—and impulsive and instinctual.

When these two systems are in alignment, change can come quickly and easily (as when a dreamy-eyed couple gets married). When they’re not, change can be grueling (as anyone who has struggled with a diet can attest).

In those situations where change is hard, is it possible to align the two systems? Is it possible to overcome our internal "schizophrenia" about change? We believe it is.

In our research, we studied people trying to make difficult changes: People fighting to lose weight and keep it off. Managers trying to overhaul an entrenched bureaucracy. Activists combatting seemingly intractable problems such as child malnutrition. They succeeded--and, to our surprise, we found striking similarities in the strategies they used. They seemed to share a similar game plan. We wanted, in Switch, to make that game plan available to everyone, in hopes that we could show people how to make the hard changes in life a little bit easier. --Chip and Dan Heath

(Photo © Amy Surdacki)

After surviving a near-fatal accident, thirty-year-old Lizzy Mitchell faces a long road to recovery. She remembers little about the days she spent in and out of consciousness, save for one thing: She saw her beloved deceased uncle, Father Mike, the man who raised her in the rectory of his Maine church until she was nine, at which time she was abruptly sent away to boarding school. Was Father Mike an angel, a messenger from the beyond, or something more corporeal? Though her troubled marriage and her broken body need tending, Lizzy knows she must uncover the details of her accident–and delve deep into events of twenty years before, when whispers and accusations forced a good man to give up the only family he had. With deft insight into the snares of the human heart, Monica Wood has written an intimate and emotionally expansive novel full of understanding and hope.

It is no secret that most people want to eat healthy and live a healthier lifestyle. Ufortunately, those two goals seem "out of reach" for the majority of us.Why is it so difficult for us to find the time to eat healthy meals? Why is it so difficult for us to find the time to exercise and reach that goal of "living a healthier lifestyle?"Here are some of the common excuses people use for not eating healthy:

"It costs too much money"
"I don't have the time"
"I am afraid I won't like healthy foods"
"It is easier to stop and pick up fast food on the way home from work"
"I really want to, but I keep procrastinating"

And the list goes on and on!

Want to take control of your body? Begin today to tip the scales in your favor.

About the author:
John Riddle is a freelance writer and author from Bear, Delaware. His byline has appeared in major newspapers, magazines, Web sites and trade journals all across the country. He is the author of 34 books and has worked as a ghostwriter on numerous projects.

John is also the Founder of I Love To Write Day, a grassroots campaign he launched in 2002 to have people of all ages practice writing every November 15. Last year over 20,000 schools all across the United States held special I Love To Write Day events and activities. He is a frequent speaker at both Christian and secular writing conferences, and recently appeared at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. You can learn more about John by visiting www.ilovetowriteday.org.

It is no secret that most people want to eat healthy and live a healthier lifestyle. Ufortunately, those two goals seem "out of reach" for the majority of us.Why is it so difficult for us to find the time to eat healthy meals? Why is it so difficult for us to find the time to exercise and reach that goal of "living a healthier lifestyle?"Here are some of the common excuses people use for not eating healthy:

"It costs too much money"
"I don't have the time"
"I am afraid I won't like healthy foods"
"It is easier to stop and pick up fast food on the way home from work"
"I really want to, but I keep procrastinating"

And the list goes on and on!

Want to take control of your body? Begin today to tip the scales in your favor.

About the author:
John Riddle is a freelance writer and author from Bear, Delaware. His byline has appeared in major newspapers, magazines, Web sites and trade journals all across the country. He is the author of 34 books and has worked as a ghostwriter on numerous projects.

John is also the Founder of I Love To Write Day, a grassroots campaign he launched in 2002 to have people of all ages practice writing every November 15. Last year over 20,000 schools all across the United States held special I Love To Write Day events and activities. He is a frequent speaker at both Christian and secular writing conferences, and recently appeared at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. You can learn more about John by visiting www.ilovetowriteday.org.

In the forty years since Max first cried "Let the wild rumpus start," Maurice Sendak's classic picture book has become one of the most highly acclaimed and best-loved children's books of all time. Now, in celebration of this special anniversary, introduce a new generation to Max's imaginative journey to Where the Wild Things Are.

Where the Wild Things Are is one of those truly rare books that can be enjoyed equally by a child and a grown-up. If you disagree, then it's been too long since you've attended a wild rumpus. Max dons his wolf suit in pursuit of some mischief and gets sent to bed without supper. Fortuitously, a forest grows in his room, allowing his wild rampage to continue unimpaired. Sendak's color illustrations (perhaps his finest) are beautiful, and each turn of the page brings the discovery of a new wonder.

The wild things--with their mismatched parts and giant eyes--manage somehow to be scary-looking without ever really being scary; at times they're downright hilarious. Sendak's defiantly run-on sentences--one of his trademarks--lend the perfect touch of stream of consciousness to the tale, which floats between the land of dreams and a child's imagination.

This Sendak classic is more fun than you've ever had in a wolf suit, and it manages to reaffirm the notion that there's no place like home.