REVIEW: People in poverty face challenges virtually unknown to those in middle class or wealth--challenges from both obvious and hidden sources. The reality of being poor brings out a survival mentality, and turns attention away from opportunities taken for granted by everyone else. If you work with people from poverty, some understanding of how different their world is from yours will be invaluable. Whether you're an educator--or a social, health, or legal services professional--this breakthrough book gives you practical, real-world support and guidance to improve your effectiveness in working with people from all socioeconomic backgrounds. Since 1995 A Framework for Understanding Poverty has guided hundreds of thousands of educators and other professionals through the pitfalls and barriers faced by all classes, especially the poor. Carefully researched and packed with charts, tables, and questionaires, Framework not only documents the facts of poverty, it provides practical yet compassionate strategies for addressing its impact on people's lives.

This report documents significant progress in the strategic action areas on which the AACC

Board has focused the Association. Since the August report, AACC has continued to affect

federal policies as well as the work of the Spellings Commission and the other Big Six higher

education associations, has continued to build and educate the new Community College Caucus,

has strengthened relationships with major foundations, has assisted in the development of major

news stories and a significant new community college documentary, and has made substantial

progress in programmatic areas such as Achieving the Dream, leadership development,

international education, and workforce development. In addition, we are preparing for important

meetings and conferences including, the Advanced Technological Education PI Conference with

NSF, our November meeting, the National Legislative Summit (NLS), the Workforce

Development Institute (WDI), Future Leader Institutes (FLI), the World Federation of Colleges

and Polytechnics, and the AACC Convention. The report also documents the progress being

made in developing relationships between AACC and corporate America.

http://www.aacc.nche.edu/Content/NavigationMenu/AboutAACC/Board/CEO_Reports/PresidentsReportOctober2006.pdf

REVIEW: Today's leaders are reinventing everything but themselves, and this is why so many attempts

to revolutionize business fail. The last word on power is the key method in reinventing executives so

they can take on "a mission impossible" based on a course designed and run exclusively for the past

fifteen years by Tracy Goss. Do you want to do work that is worthy of your time and talent? Do you

want to make your mark on your company, industry, community? Are you dissatisfied with the fact that

reengineering, quality improvements, and other changes never make a lasting impact? Then you need to

go beyond the techniques of improvement and learn the skills of being extraordinary. The power to be

extraordinary is not one we are born with. It's not the power to fix what's wrong or improve what's

right. It is a power one learns in a course that for the past fifteen years has been designed and run

exclusively for top executives by consultant Tracy Goss. For the first time, Goss makes her coursework

available to the general reader in The Last Word On Power. Goss's unique methodology shows how "you

can put at risk the success you have achieved for the 'possibility' you can be." She positions

executives to take on the future they dream about. She teaches how to behave differently so you can be

free of constraints from the past. She shows how you can be at home in an environment in which you are

constantly surrounded by threats, and how to transcend the ordinary so that you can make the

impossible happen. Her work has resulted in important life changes and organizational reinventions throughout the world.

Review Rather than focusing on addictions to such substances as alcohol, drugs, or food or to

processes such as gambling, sex, or work, this interesting and unusual treatise uses the concept of

relationship addiction. According to this concept, an individual is seen as always being in a superior

(or inferior) position to another, an addictive situation that creates self-centeredness, dishonesty,

and greed. The symptons associated with relationship addiction are equated with those associated with

the "White Male System" (described in Schaef's Women's Reality , LJ 6/15/81) and provide telling

insights into why we have a dysfunctional society many of whose members are addicted to substances and

processes. Barbara J. Powell, Veterans Administration Medical Ctr., Kansas City, Mo.

Review Schaef ( When Society Becomes an Addict ) and Fassel (an organizational consultant) add

a new dimension to our understanding of the institutions in which we live and work. They explain the

reality of addiction, apply it to four levels of organizational behavior, and explore fully the negative

effects of the active addict's and co-dependents' behavior in organizations. The authors describe how

organizations act as addictive substances for employees by creating cultures of workaholism reinforced

through reward structures, and how the organization itself can function as an active addict. Well

written and sure to be controversial. Highly recommended for all management collections. Jane M.

Kathman, Coll. of St. Benedict, St. Joseph, Minn.

Review "The Bill of Rights stands as the high temple of our constitutional order--America's

Parthenon--and yet we lack a clear view of it," Akhil Reed Amar writes in his introduction to The Bill

of Rights. "Instead of being studied holistically, the Bill has been broken up ... with each segment

examined in isolation." With The Bill of Rights, Amar aims to put the pieces back together and take a

longer view of a document few Americans truly understand. Part history of the Bill, part analysis of

what the Founding Fathers' intentions really were, this book provides a unique interpretation of the

Constitution. It is Amar's hypothesis that, contrary to popular belief, the Bill of Rights was not

originally constructed to protect the minority against the majority, but rather to empower popular

majorities. It wasn't until 19th-century post-Civil War reconstruction and the introduction of the 14th

Amendment that the notion of individual rights took hold. Prior to that, the various amendments to the

Constitution that make up the Bill of Rights were more about the structure of government and designed to

protect citizens against a self-interested regime. Yet so great has been the impact of the 14th

Amendment on modern legal thought that the Bill's original intentions have almost been forgotten.

Through skillful interpretation and solid research, Amar both reconstructs the original thinking of the

Founding Fathers and chronicles the radical changes that have occurred since the inclusion of the 14th

Amendment in the Bill of Rights. The results make for provocative reading no matter where you stand on

the political spectrum.

Review It is the thesis of this monumentally argued book that the United States Supreme Court—

largely through abuses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution—has embarked on "a continuing

revision of the Constitution, under the guise of interpretation." Consequently, the Court has subverted

America's democratic institutions and wreaked havoc upon Americans' social and political lives.

One of the first constitutional scholars to question the rise of judicial activism in modern times,

Raoul Berger points out that "the Supreme Court is not empowered to rewrite the Constitution, that in

its transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment it has demonstrably done so. Thereby the Justices, who

are virtually unaccountable, irremovable, and irreversible, have taken over from the people control of

their own destiny, an awesome exercise of power."

The Court has accomplished this transformation by ignoring or actually distorting the original intent of

both the framers and the supporters of the Fourteenth Amendment. In school desegregation and legislative

reapportionment cases, for example, the Court manipulated the history, meaning, and purpose of the

amendment's Equal Protection Clause in order to achieve a desired political result. In cases involving

First Amendment freedoms and the rights of the accused, the judges converted the Fourteenth Amendment's

Due Process Clause into a vehicle for the nationalization of the Bill of Rights. Yet these actions were

nothing less than "usurpations" that robbed "from the States a power that unmistakably was left to

them."