Twenty-first century life, for most people, will be an urban experience. As millions migrate to cities in search of opportunity and connection, our conception of how a city runs, uses resources and manages public services must change. The city itself must be reimagined as a matrix of functions and information, with digitized networks harnessing and multiplying the power of data. 

This is not the future; this is today. Caspar Herzberg explains how ambitious new city plans across the world are moving from the drawing board into reality. As a top Cisco consultant, he participated in groundbreaking projects in South Korea, Saudi Arabia, India, China and many other countries. In Smart Cities, Digital Nations, he recounts the origins of seminal digital city-building projects, including Songdo, South Korea the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor and Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Economic City, and explains how these early attempts have provided the groundwork for city planning efforts across the globe. 

Importantly, Herzberg moves beyond theory and discusses the delicate alliances between tech companies, city planners, municipal and national bureaucracies and citizen groups that undergird successful urban development. And while tech companies do not have all the answers, he explains their multifaceted contributions as absolutely necessary to the smart, forward-thinking digital infrastructure being created today. 

While recognizing the immense challenges of both engineering and consensus among diverse stakeholders, Smart Cities, Digital Nations makes clear that digital cities are essential to the future prosperity of many developing countries, and to the continuing vitality of the West. This is a unique perspective on the recent past, present and future of the modern city, a guide through its challenges and a vision of its success.

In its first hundred years, Stanford Men's Basketball has seen huge successes and bitter disappointments. You can almost feel the sweat coming off the players as John Platz, their broadcaster and reporter for three decades, narrates key games with heart-pounding excitement in this definitive history of a truly legendary team.

Review

I’m privileged to be the head coach of a college basketball program with a terrific history, and I am glad the 100-year Stanford Men’s Basketball story is being told so thoroughly and thoughtfully in John’s book. The rich portrayal of the program’s many accomplishments, as well as the occasional setbacks and how they were handled, makes me appreciate prior-era players, my predecessor coaches, and this university even more.
--Johnny Dawkins, Stanford Basketball head coach (2008-present)

About the Author

Longtime Cardinal radio voice John Platz played basketball for Stanford in the early 80's before joining the broadcast booth, where he has been for 26 years. His feature writing on Stanford sports subjects has appeared in Stanford magazine and on gostanford.com. He currently resides in Mountain View, CA.

The Never-Ending Digital Journey provides readers with the concepts and steps needed to create successful user experiences. The authors look ahead and explore digital scenarios of the future. They probe how technology is changing the way users interact with brands, and they address today’s digital challenges with new ways of surprising consumers, integrating design and engineering.

The authors leverage knowledge gleaned from working with renowned global companies to describe the recipe needed to build a Digital Journey. With a strong focus on Agile Pods, they dive into technolo- gies, processes, team building, motivation, and met- rics that enable businesses to construct and nurture the dynamic ecosystems necessary in this digital era to foster success.

Over the last several years, customers, employees, and partners have become tech-savvy users whose expectations of “Give me more and deliver it faster” require manageable solutions. The desire to interact with digital ecosystems anywhere, anytime demands that today’s businesses create personalized and frictionless experiences to create value for its end users. It’s a recipe that must be followed exactly in order to remain relevant. When done correctly, enhancing consumer’s daily lives with digital touch points goes far beyond creating a new website, a flashy app, or a “unified” omnichannel experience. The end goal is to construct memorable experiences in a never-ending cycle that increase the ability to retain, convert, and enrich the relationship between businesses and their users. Welcome to The Never-Ending Digital Journey.

Art Greco is discovering that God kills and the devil gives life — that Christ is in the business of destroying and Satan is in the business of sustaining. While God seeks to kill that which should not be allowed to live in us, Satan tries to breathe life into it. Perhaps that’s why he finds himself addressing God in a rather strange way when he prays lately, using a much less common title, his dominant title in a dying man’s life: “Oh dear Holy Assassin: Be loving enough to eliminate what pollutes my heart and erodes my soul. And when the day comes that I attempt to annul this contract, to withdraw the permission I now give, listen instead to the instructions of Your own headstrong mercy. Swallow hard, breathe deep, take aim, and pull trigger. Amen.”

Sid Garza-Hillman, nutritionist, philosopher, actor, and musician introduces his original philosophy of health. Sid’s philosophy is simple: the closer the human species moves by degrees to its natural design, the healthier and therefore happier it will be.

In the years he has been a practicing nutritionist and health coach, Sid has honed an approach that makes achieving health and happiness a real possibility for virtually everyone. He has done this by addressing both the mental and physical aspects of achieving sustainable long-term health, and goes well beyond what any quick-fix diet/health plan can ever achieve. He passionately argues that health profoundly affects our happiness, and vice-versa, and applies his philosophy to nutrition, exercise, the mind, the family, and the world as a whole.

Approaching the Natural: A Health Manifesto is accessible, clear, edgy and humorous. Sid distills his years of research into a book readers will want to carry with them as a quick reference when negotiating our most unnatural world – especially gen-x and gen-y’ers for whom there is a substantial lack of result-oriented health books that are this easy and actually fun to read.

A Pediatrician's Blueprint is written by an experienced pediatrician with the help of experts in various fields and using information gained from many sources that are cited. Parents have come to trust their pediatricians and the advice given by them. Rather than addressing the issues of nutrition, education, sex, drugs and drinking and violence as issues to be treated separately, this book sees the prevention of all best served by one common approach to parenting that stresses the setting of goals here enumerated and the development of a mission statement with a strategy for its implementation.

Something’s happened – now what do we do? What do I do? What do I really owe my loved one? And how can I even ask such a question?

Having exchanged marriage vows – or even if they haven’t – most people expect their partners to support them when a devastating diagnosis is made or an accident occurs. It is not a matter of if, but of when, and every couple faces a new “after” reality. This is an increasingly vital concern for people as the majority of the population ages.

In Sickness As In Health includes dozens of real couples’ frank discussions of navigating the medical maze. For most, a health crisis means both partners need to recalibrate their roles in the new reality of their relationship. The book offers tips and how-to advice from a variety of experts interviewed from the medical, spiritual, and legal realms.

“For couples, illness is never a solo flight,” write Barbara Kivowitz and Roanne Weisman, co-authors of In Sickness As In Health. Having both been devastated by health crises, they know first-hand how illness affects relationships.mines their professional and personal experiences dealing with life-changing health events.

When sickness or tragedy come calling, they do not ask if you are ready for them. This book will help people feel less alone and frightened in their most trying times. In Sickness As In Health is a power tool not just for the suffering partner, but for the well one, their caregivers and family and friends who love them.

Author Bios:
Barbara Kivowitz MSW, is a psychotherapist, organizational consultant, and advisor to several health systems. She has authored articles on couples and illness and on living with pain, one of which was published in Women’s Day and another in the journal of the American Pain Foundation.

Roanne Weisman is an award-winning medical/science author of seven trade health books published by McGraw Hill, Harvard Medical School, and Health Communications, Inc. Her feature stories have appeared in Prevention magazine, Country Living magazine, Alternative Medicine magazine, and Body and Soul magazine.

This book tells the story of a hard working, middle class couple, who tried investing in different areas and then decided to focus their strategy on rental real estate investment in rural areas to build wealth and generate a source of continuous passive income because of volatility in the stock market, 401K and other investments. The authors tell their own successful experience of how they started with the purchase and rental of their first property and how they grew to fourteen units in five years. The book provides a practical guide that can be easily implemented by working individuals, especially couples who are both working, but aren’t sure on how to build for their future and become financially independent. Couples can work from home in the evenings as well as weekends to accomplish this goal. The authors share with you how they leveraged each other’s strengths and divided up roles and responsibilities to make it work.

They share their fun road-trip experiences to different rural areas, provide check-lists, resources and calculators to help you research, assess, and make an informed decision of where to invest your hard-earned money. They also offer valuable tips on how to build and maintain your relationship with real-estate agents, property management companies, and contractors, and provide resources on how you can manage your cost and cash flow when you remodel or update a rental property. The authors also share some of their mistakes as first time real estate investors to help you avoid potentially costly investments.

You don’t need a significant investment upfront, and you certainly don’t want to quit your day-job as soon as you start investing. The investment strategy discussed in this book is focused on long-term investment in the future, that is aimed to generate passive income. If you’re looking for a book on how to get rich quick, this book is probably not for you.

Author Bios
Jinan and Chakib Jaber met in 1997; they got engaged shortly thereafter on Valentine’s day in 1998 and then got married in Long Island, NY on September 2nd of that same year. They’ve been happily together since, and they now live in Falls Church, Virginia with their daughter. Both Jinan and Chakib hold Masters in Business Administration degrees from George Mason University. Chakib works in the IT industry, leading software development efforts, while Jinan works in sales and business development in the cyber security industry.

Not yet published...