Invoking the words and spirit of Thomas Paine, investor-turned-historian John Bogle concedes that his ideas for revamping the mutual-fund industry are perhaps "not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor." But despite likening the "ills and injustices suffered by mutual fund investors" to those "our forebears suffered under English tyranny," Bogle—founder of the Vanguard Group—makes a strong case for index funds with this exhaustive study of investing.

He begins with primer-like essays on investment strategy, championing mutual funds for their inherent investment value, and then grinding each point home with a bevy of graphs, charts, entertaining anecdotes, and common sense. He repeatedly stresses time as a basic tenet for investing, listing these simple rules: "Time is your friend";"Impulse is your enemy";"Stay the course." And then he proceeds to blast fund managers, who have become marketers rather than managers.

The trade-off between the profits that accrue to fund shareholders and the profits that accrue to the fund management companies seems subject to no effective independent watchdog or balance wheel, despite the fact that the shareholders actually own the mutual funds.

It's an interesting concept: smart, reasoned investors can all but secure their financial future, but the system itself, run unchecked by fund managers, needs a major overhaul. And considering the amount of reasoned, historically based support he includes, readers will have a hard time finding fault with the sometimes controversial Bogle. Equal parts instructional and crusade, Common Sense on Mutual Fundsdeserves the attention it's likely to receive. Recommended. —Rob McDonald

In the gripping tradition of Presumed Innocent, Compelling Evidence is a courtroom drama of epic proportions. Mesmerizing in its pace, captivating in its action, this story will hold the listener right up to its final verdict and shocking conclusion. Defense attorney Paul Madriani was on the rise with the firm of Potter and Skarpellos until a short-lived affair with Potter's wife cost him his job. Now, Potter's wife is accused of murdering her husband, and Paul is forced to uncover secrets that may end his career - and his life.

The only one-volume complete Sherlock Holmes...every story Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ever wrote about the most famous detective in fiction. All Four Novels and All Fifty-six Adventures.

For the first time in paperback, a revised edition of the book that launched the term “customer evangelism” and inspired the creation of an industry. Updated with new statistics and figures, this landmark book has shown countless companies how to harness the power of evangelism marketing and increase customer loyalty, sales, and profitability.

When customers are truly thrilled about their experience with a product or service, they become outspoken “evangelists” for a company. For most businesses, customers are loyal to people, not brands. Creating a culture of not only loyalty but belief is the formula for creating authentic and powerful word of mouth.

By researching companies with dedicated groups of outspoken, buss-spreading evangelists, authors Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba distill the formulas of the successful companies into the six tenets of customer evangelism. Creating Customer Evangelistsexplains why many traditional loyalty programs fail and how organic word-of-mouth programs often create communities of influencers who accelerate a company’s success.

Creating Customer Evangelistsis the bible for any business hoping to convert good customers into exceptional ones who willingly spread the word.

John Knoll was 14 years old when the first Star Wars film (Episode IV) came out in 1977, and it changed his life. By the time the first prequel, The Phantom Menace, was released in 1999, he was its visual effects supervisor-in charge of all special effects-a position he held through Episodes II (Attack of the Clones) and III (Revenge of the Sith). With Knoll as tour guide, this deluxe addition to Abrams' 365 Days series provides the single most comprehensive collection of Star Wars images, including breathtaking 360-degree panoramic shots of sets and models, as well as concept art, props, film stills, and memorabilia.

The only book that covers all six films, Star Wars: 365 Days is Knoll's spectacular survey of the visual world created by those films. It shows us George Lucas and his crew creating their universe on location and in the studio-in pages dense with imagery and information, documenting a remarkable sustained creative effort by hundreds of devoted filmmakers and craftsmen. A CD-ROM, with nearly 100 QuickTime panoramas of the sets, adds to the beauty of this edition.

Popular speaker, multimillionaire, and author of the all-time bestselling real-estate book Nothing Down, Robert G. Allen knows how to bring you financial success. With his seminars sweeping the nation, Allen is at the cutting edge of strategic wealth creation now more than ever. And in this completely revised edition of his classic bestseller Creating Wealth Allen gives you the basic principles that you need to stop thinking poor and start growing rich.

Moving beyond just real estate, Allen goes straight to the core of people's inner motivations and beliefs about money to give you all the fundamentals of wealth creation. By developing a wealthy mind-set, anyone can take off into financial self-reliance — and Allen shows you how. He explains the ways in which most of us have been programmed to think that only saving is good and debt and risk are bad, so that in our efforts to gain security, we cheat ourselves out of getting rich. The key to changing that mind-set is Allen's unique integration of real estate with other wealth-generating investments.

In his trademark, easy-to-understand style Allen spells out all his practical applications and shows you how to:

Take advantage of recent tax lawsUse leverage to multiply holdings while minimizing risksBenefit from high-yield discount mortgagesAcquire long-term profits in gold and silver coinsSet up corporations and trusts to protect assetsFind the highest rate of return with the greatest liquidity

As Robert Allen has proved in his own life — becoming a multimillionaire well before he was thirty-five — it doesn't matter how much or how little money you have when you start as long as you understand the right principles — timeless principles that can make you a fortune.

Author Geoffrey Moore makes the case that high-tech products require marketing strategies that differ from those in other industries. His chasm theory describes how high-tech products initially sell well, mainly to a technically literate customer base, but then hit a lull as marketing professionals try to cross the chasm to mainstream buyers. This pattern, says Moore, is unique to the high-tech industry.

Moore suggests remedies for the problem that can help businesses meet their long-term goals. He coaches marketing professionals on how to move slowly through the gulf, teaching them to create profiles and target specific segments of the population rather than trying to plow right into the mainstream. He cites examples of successful chasm crossings by such companies as Apple, Tandem, Oracle, and Sun, showing what they all had in common and exposing the different weaknesses in their strategies. Moore also assigns responsibility for success to programmers and developers by suggesting they design a "whole product model." Here, because integration tasks are daunting to the mainstream market, all the components of a technological product must be in one package. Moore also describes strategies for competing with rival companies and assessing the best distribution channels for penetrating the target market.

Written not just for marketing specialists but for all employees whose futures ride on the success of a technical product, Crossing the Chasmdelivers crucial information in an engaging, readable tone.

Cujois so well-paced and scary that people tend to read it quickly, so they mostly remember the scene of the mother and son trapped in the hot Pinto and threatened by the rabid Cujo, forgetting the multifaceted story in which that scene is embedded. This is definitely a novel that rewards re-reading. When you read it again, you can pay more attention to the theme of country folk vs. city folk; the parallel marriage conflicts of the Cambers vs. the Trentons; the poignancy of the amiable St. Bernard (yes, the breed choice is just right) infected by a brain-destroying virus that makes it into a monster; and the way the "daylight burial" of the failed ad campaign is reflected in the sunlit Pinto that becomes a coffin. And how significant it is that this horror tale is notsupernatural: it's as real as junk food, a failing marriage, a broken-down car, or a fatal virus.

Lots of books have been written about how to do business on the Internet, but few can match the understanding and passion for making e-commerce work of Patricia Seybold's Customers.com. Drawing on case studies of companies and organizations as diverse as Boeing, Babson College, National Semiconductor, Hertz, PhotoDisc, and Wells Fargo, Seybold identifies what makes e-commerce work successfully. She argues that any e-commerce initiative has to begin with the customer. She writes:

In the electronic commerce world, knowing who your customers are and making sure you have the products and services they want becomes even more imperative than it is in the "real" world.... The corner grocery needs only to approximate what customers really want because the convenience factor brings in the business. But when you eliminate this advantage—when customers can go anywhere to get what they want—you—you'd better know what they're looking for.

The first section of the book outlines five steps aimed at any organization grappling with the challenge of doing e-commerce right. The final section offers a technology roadmap and suggestions for getting e-commerce initiatives off the ground. But the heart of the book is the 16 case studies of companies that have successfully embraced e-business and e-commerce. Each is well researched, and includes an executive summary and "take-aways" about what each firm did right. If you're looking to develop your business online, this book belongs on your desk, not your bookshelf. Highly recommended. —Harry C. Edwards

Using the exploits of three international hackers, Cyberpunkprovides a fascinating tour of a bizarre subculture populated by outlaws who penetrate even the most sensitive computer networks and wreak havoc on the information they find — everything from bank accounts to military secrets. In a book filled with as much adventure as any Ludlum novel, the authors show what motivates these young hackers to access systems, how they learn to break in, and how little can be done to stop them.

With The Da Vinci Code,Dan Brown masterfully concocts an intelligent and lucid thriller that marries the gusto of an international murder mystery with a collection of fascinating esoteria culled from 2,000 years of Western history.

A murder in the silent after-hour halls of the Louvre museum reveals a sinister plot to uncover a secret that has been protected by a clandestine society since the days of Christ. The victim is a high-ranking agent of this ancient society who, in the moments before his death, manages to leave gruesome clues at the scene that only his granddaughter, noted cryptographer Sophie Neveu, and Robert Langdon, a famed symbologist, can untangle. The duo become both suspects and detectives searching for not only Neveu's grandfather's murderer but also the stunning secret of the ages he was charged to protect. Mere steps ahead of the authorities and the deadly competition, the mystery leads Neveu and Langdon on a breathless flight through France, England, and history itself. Brown (Angels and Demons) has created a page-turning thriller that also provides an amazing interpretation of Western history. Brown's hero and heroine embark on a lofty and intriguing exploration of some of Western culture's greatest mysteries—from the nature of the Mona Lisa's smile to the secret of the Holy Grail. Though some will quibble with the veracity of Brown's conjectures, therein lies the fun. The Da Vinci Codeis an enthralling read that provides rich food for thought. —Jeremy Pugh

You know what they say: build a better a Death Star and the Hutts will beat a path to your door. Poor Bevel Lemelisk, the inventor of the Empire's signature moon-size battle station, has done just that, and now he's in the service of Durga the Hutt (only a marginal improvement over working for Emperor Palpatine, who was in the habit of gruesomely executing Lemelisk, only to recombobulate him into a newly cloned body).

It's eight years after the battle of Endor, and the Hutts are hoping to make a galactic power play using Lemelisk's latest project, a sort of cylindrical Death Star superlaser-on-steroids, dubbed Darksaber. But the newly empowered Rebels and the recovering Empire aren't sitting idle. As the book opens, Han and Luke are sneaking their way across Tatooine's Dune Sea, dressed in Tusken drag. Luke's looking to commune with Obi-Wan to learn how to save his Jedi squeeze, Callista, recently rescued from the innards of the ship computer on Palpatine's super-duper Star Destroyer. Meanwhile, the ranks of the Imperial Fleet swell under the charismatic Admiral Daala. Will Luke help Callista touch the Force again? Where will Daala's fleet strike a blow against the New Republic? Will Lemelisk's new invention hold together long enough to save his own hide? The skilled Kevin J. Anderson sure makes it fun to find out. —Paul Hughes

Michael J. Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University, presents here a scientific argument for the existence of God. Examining the evolutionary theory of the origins of life, he can go part of the way with Darwin—he accepts the idea that species have been differentiated by the mechanism of natural selection from a common ancestor. But he thinks that the essential randomness of this process can explain evolutionary development only at the macro level, not at the micro level of his expertise. Within the biochemistry of living cells, he argues, life is "irreducibly complex." This is the last black box to be opened, the end of the road for science. Faced with complexity at this level, Behe suggests that it can only be the product of "intelligent design."

Zounds! Spaceman Spiff, Stupendous Man, the ferocious tiger Hobbes, and the rest of Calvin's riotous imagination are all included in The Days Are Just Packed. Calvin, the irrepressible pint-sized tyrant, is always bursting with energy. And the new volume's oversized 12-by-9 inch format provides Calvin's outrageous fantasies room to explode. Nowhere does the spiky-haired miscreant stretch out more than in the Sunday paper. And dozens of Sunday strips are lavishly reproduced in color for The Days Are Just Packed, along with Calvin's always amusing weekday adventures. In eight years, Calvin and Hobbes has conquered the syndicated cartoon world. Bill Watterson's work appears in more than 2,200 newspapers worldwide and is consistently voted "favorite comic" in reader's polls. All seven Calvin and Hobbes collections have sold over one million copies within a year of publication. With the advent of its exciting new size, The Days Are Just Packed has topped the bestseller lists even quicker than Calvin lands in the principal's office.