Manhattan self-help author Julia Goodman thinks she's got her addictive personality under control. Then her psychoanalyst moves away, her husband takes off to L.A. and her best friend moves to Ohio. Feeling lonely and left out, Julia fills in the void with food. This is a huge problem--especially since she's about to go on national television to plug her hot new self-help book about how she conquered her sugar addiction. Julia desperately sees eight shrinks in eight days, speed-dating for Dr. Replacement to help shrink back her body and anxiety in time for her close-up.

Ours is the era of ‘reinvention’. From psychotherapy to life coaching, from self-help manuals to cosmetic surgery, and from corporate rebranding to urban redesign: the art of reinvention is inextricably interwoven with the lure of the next frontier, the breakthrough to the next boundary – especially boundaries of the self. In this insightful and provocative book, Anthony Elliott examines ‘reinvention’ as a key buzzword of our times. Through a wide-ranging and impassioned assessment, Elliott reviews the new global forms of reinvention – from reinvention gurus to business reinvention, from personal makeovers to corporate rebrandings. In doing so, he undertakes a serious if often amusing consideration of contemporary reinvention practices, including super-fast weight loss diets, celebrity makeovers, body augmentations, speed dating, online relationship therapies, organizational restructurings, business downsizings, and many more. This absorbing book is an ideal introduction to the topic of reinvention for students and general readers alike. Reinvention offers a provocative and radical reflection on an issue (sometimes treated as trivial in the public sphere) that is increasingly politically urgent in terms of its personal, social and environmental consequences.

Essential Astrophysics is a book to learn or teach from, as well as a fundamental reference volume for anyone interested in astronomy and astrophysics. It presents astrophysics from basic principles without requiring any previous study of astronomy or astrophysics. It serves as a comprehensive introductory text, which takes the student through the field of astrophysics in lecture-sized chapters of basic physical principles applied to the cosmos. This one-semester overview will be enjoyed by undergraduate students with an interest in the physical sciences, such as astronomy, chemistry, engineering or physics, as well as by any curious student interested in learning about our celestial science. The mathematics required for understanding the text is on the level of simple algebra, for that is all that is needed to describe the fundamental principles. The text is of sufficient breadth and depth to prepare the interested student for more advanced specialised courses in the future. Astronomical examples are provided throughout the text, to reinforce the basic concepts and physics, and to demonstrate the use of the relevant formulae. In this way, the student learns to apply the fundamental equations and principles to cosmic objects and situations. Astronomical and physical constants and units as well as the most fundamental equations can be found in the appendix. Essential Astrophysics goes beyond the typical textbook by including references to the seminal papers in the field, with further reference to recent applications, results, or specialised literature.

The goal of this text is to describe the technical design aspects of the IT infrastructure; it does not give the details of installing and customizing SAP software, nor business process reengineering. Using primarily HP products for the solution examples, the chapters guide the reader through the foundation of the systems from an IT perspective, reviews its business application and architecture and introduces the server systems, then describes data storage, high availability and recovery solutions, client PCs with front-end user interfaces, output management and printing solutions, network infrastructure and requirements, cabling designs, LANs and WANs, and connecting mySAP.com to the Internet. Both authors are members of the HP-SAP International Competence Center. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR