Good ideas but not very good execution
359735
The topics addressed are good and the information presented is useful, but the errors in the text detract from the final product. I was surprised that for a book which deals with grammar and style that the author did not pay more attention to the details of presentation, breaking even some of her own rules.
1815571
There were some very good ideas in this book. And, the prose was competent, if not particularly artful.

But, the storytelling is poor. The book is burdened by poor narrative development to support the conclusions the characters make. The dialogue is unnatural, the characters sounding like they're parroting the author's need to advance the story. And finally, the characters are poorly developed, if at all.

Unfortunate.
1977282
I really didn't find this book very useful.  Some of the ideas are good but most of them are just very, very slight variations on each other.  As for the good ideas, you can find those in many other books, along with many more useful ones.  Skip this and use The Instant Curriculum, which is wonderful.
4554581
Some good intentions are quite evident. I think further editing and re-organizing could have made this book far better.
94674
I think the idea of this book is great, but it is just so general and vague that it's not a very useful tool. I see that a lot of people have found it helpful, which I find surprising. I truly found that the book kind of just says 'step one: clean out your bedroom. Step 2: clean out your kitchen' etc etc without any really helpful hints as to how to go about it. I was hoping for great new ideas and suggestions rather than just the suggestion that you tidy up your house and you'll feel more organised. Hopefully others will find it more helpful than I did.
3338771
We used this book for a small group. It was NOT very popular and a lot of the people didn't finish the book. Many of the basic ideas that they present are worthwhile, but the delivery style did not connect with most of the group. There were several people in the group who basically said that they were often confused and lost.
3646396
Some really great ideas, but the organization of the book could be improved. And lots of ideas/concepts are not new for me.
1792784
This book had some nice ideas, but overall nothing new.

What I found rather bothersome with this book is that the author seems to be very determined to keep reusing the same ideas and examples over and over and over and over again, which makes the entire book rather hard to get through. And just made me wish this book would have been a third of its length. And honestly i could have been.

It does over some good idea for sales and marketing.

My tip for this book: skip most of it and focus on what you want to get out of it then it is definitely worth it!

* I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a honest review, thanks to NetGalley and the Publishers!*
2603444
One of my friends is a stained glass worker and she showed me where some of the eye candy in this book was messily finished.  I do like the ideas, but there are many ideas and less instruction in this book.
4786856
Some of the ideas of the book is interesting but then most of the so call "Shenanigans" are fairly basic and there wasn't much ground breaking discoveries revealed by Author. May be is good for beginners but certainly not good enough for more sophisticated investors and accounting professionals.

Another compliant author's failure to use financial statements and refer to accounting standards itself to illustrate his points. I guess this is because the author want the book appeal to general readership rather to a specific group of readers. But without being technical, I suspect the average user will find it very hard to try to detect the shenanigans themselves.

I am still waiting for the market to release a more sophisticated book on creative accounting.
4187775
This book is an interesting concept except the author spends too much time explaining why.  Half the book is a history explanation from someone who thinks they're clever, but isn't really. I wish there was a lot more just left to the readers imagination instead of just spelling everything out and removing all ability to really discuss this book.  This could be forgivable if it was at least interesting, but it's just not that good.  It's just too much time trying to sound clever on the why travel  without ever exploring the fun nuances of time travel until the end. Even when the twist hits and the stort gets interesting it feels half finished. Like this was the idea all along to get to this twist and  a great deal of useless build up was included and then the author ran out of time and just rushed the end.
2602598
Some good ideas, but the stories are haphazardly written and tend to lack detail.  Took me about 2 hours to read the book, not enough time to become properly immersed in something.  I have hopes for improvement in this author.
4194779
As one who has studied the New Testament extensively while in college, I was looking forward to reviewing this book to see how those time-tested ideas can be translated into a self-help book for today.  I believe this book was written with good intentions and does have many good ideas, especially in the self-help and goal-setting sections.  I think the author knows much about his topic, but suffers from a lack of organization and a clear voice, so that unfortunately his goal of demonstrating how one can improve their life is really not met by this book.

The entire book is a conversation with the reader.  Many conversations are started, supported with quotes from various sources, and then dropped without giving a clear example of what the reader can actually do to improve his or her life.  Also, there were only a few examples from the authors life, and I would have liked to read more about the authors experiences, so as to have an idea of where his thoughts are coming from.

Other reviewers have mentioned the numerous linguistic and typographical errors, so I will not dwell on these here.  It would be nice to see this book reworked with proper editing so the authors vision can really shine through.
3136064
A lot of good ideas.  However the activities aren't anything that you can't find very easily by doing a search on the internet.  I'm not sure what I expected, but I was disappointed at the quality of the activities included.
4921243
This book posits an interesting idea--that a wealthy eccentric (you stop being weird when you have money I guess) might use his latest invention (the Timescoop of the title) to gather together his ancestors for a huge "family gathering" of sorts.

The problem is that the book doesn't really work all that well.  There's the basic plot of and subplot of industrial espionage against a rival corporation but that isn't nearly as big a player as it might be.  While I liked the "modern" eccentric responsible for all of this (Harold Freitas) I couldn't really say that for his ancestors.  Most of the folks "scooped" from the past just aren't very interesting people--they seem pretty one-dimensional and it's hard to really like any of them much. I thought the ending was a bit flat, though it's probably more realistically handled that one might expect.

Overall I found the book a solid if unexceptional addition to my collection.  Recommended for fans of Brunner's works and for those who find the idea intriguing; just know what you're getting.
480362
Good concept.  Mediocre execution.  Seems this writer took the original idea of the first book and split it into two books.  My impression is that the author also has trouble coming up with resolute endings.  I appreciate a cliff hanger, but at some point there needs to be an idea of a conclusion.  The ending of this book leaves a lot to interpretation and detailed knowledge of the events of the first books ending.  Even still the plot is left hanging there.
2118884
The Concept behind the story was intriguing, but I feel that the author needs a lot of improvements, I hope she keeps writing and tries to improve, because I feel that she has good ideas and could possibly grow into a better author and produce good books, That being said. I could not give this a high rating , because the book was poorly executed. I knew what was going to happen before it happened.