Anyone who has been asked to read and understand a poem has probably wondered: What does this really mean? Have I understood this the way I was supposed to? Did I get it? As the least literal of all of forms of creative writing, poetry is for many readers also the most cryptic. Confronted by the mysteries of poetic interpretation, some people are intrigued, some become addicted, others are left frustrated. Shira Wolosky's accessibly written book, The Art of Poetry, provides a road map of the ...

Studies in religion are flourishing internationally, and one of the central topics discussed in the field today-perhaps the most discussed topic-is religious diversity. With the influx of religious traditions in the West and the growing diversity of religious adherents and practitioners worldwide, people across the globe are currently nterested in exploring issues in religious diversity. The present work is a response to this ubiquitous interest.

It is a substantial volume of thirty-three ori...

Managing, controlling and improving quality is a critical activity in modern business organizations. Quality is directly linked to productivity, competitiveness, customer satisfaction, business growth, elimination of waste and other non-value added activities, and overall business success. Cycle time and throughput is just as important in a hospital emergency room as it is in a semiconductor factory.

Defects and errors don't occur just in factories, they occur in transactional and service bus...

Adopts a pluralist approach introducing students to both environmental economics and ecological economics highlighting the explanatory power, and complementarity, of both approaches in exploring the economics of environmental and natural resource issues. This edition includes enhanced and updated coverage of topics such as the Green New Deal, post-Paris climate discussions, development in carbon trading systems, and deforestation in the Amazon to ensure the text is up-to-speed with the latest...

The secret to productivity isn't discipline. It's joy.

We think that productivity is all about hard work. That the road to success is lined with endless frustration and toil. But what if there's another way?

Dr Ali Abdaal - the world's most-followed productivity expert - has uncovered an easier and happier path to success. Drawing on decades of psychological research, he has found that the secret to productivity and success isn't grind - it's feeling good. If you can make y...

Already cited by the Financial Times, Forbes.com, The Economic Times, WSJ/Mint and several other prominent global business publications, Winning in Emerging Markets is quickly becoming the go-to book for mapping a strategy for entering new markets--and then quickly gaining a competitive edge in those high growth regions. Advancing the discussion about emerging markets themselves and how organizations can best leverage the potential of these regions, Tarun Khanna and Krishna Palepu -- both wel...

The Secret Is in the Numbers

There’s a common belief in the hospitality industry that the financials are best left to professionals who can sort out the complex interplay between the different departments of a hotel. This idea is just a myth—one you can bust wide open with this book. Having confidence and knowledge around the financials is the key to a successful hotel career and—to a very large extent—your own personal prosperity.

This book is about the business of hotels. It's writt...

An introduction to the modeling of business information systems, with processes formally modeled using Petri nets. This comprehensive introduction to modeling business-information systems focuses on business processes. It describes and demonstrates the formal modeling of processes in terms of Petri nets, using a well-established theory for capturing and analyzing models with concurrency. The precise semantics of this formal method offers a distinct advantage for modeling processes over the in...

By investigating thousands of descriptions of epidemics reaching back before the fifth-century-BCE Plague of Athens to the distrust and violence that erupted with Ebola in 2014, Epidemics challenges a dominant hypothesis in the study of epidemics, that invariably across time and space, epidemics provoked hatred, blaming of the 'other', and victimizing bearers of epidemic diseases, particularly when diseases were mysterious, without known cures or preventivemeasures, as with AIDS during the la...