Don Levin – författare

Even the best of parents with the purest and most idealistic intentions to provide a better life for their children can set them up for failure by confusing better with easier.

So how do we provide our children with the opportunities and tools for greater success without spoiling them? How do we insure that we have positioned them for this greater standard of living without overly indulging them? No doubt it is a balancing act, and requires planning, forethought, and consistency. It also requires a long term vision, short term goals, and an incredible degree of hard work on the part of both parents working in unison to provide a stable foundation. It means not sacrificing teaching experiences when an easier choice or route presents itself. It means that from the day that youngster is born you plan on working hard, making a plan, and then working your plan as parents. It means modeling the way by living an exemplary life of courage, integrity, and character. It requires a positive attitude through which we can constantly encourage their hearts. It means establishing standards and requirements, and enforcing them. A newly planted tree can be straightened or held in place with the thinnest of wires. However, if we ignore the crooked sapling for any length of time it is often too late and too difficult to make a change when it has had a chance to grow in ways contrary to those that we desire. Children require constant nourishment to the soul, probably even more than they need to have their physical needs met by us. Remembering this is often our greatest challenge.

If you are a parent, you need to read this book.

-Chris Sorensen

Author of The Greatest Discovery

As timeless as the rules established by Abner Doubleday to govern the play of America''s national past time, baseball, the five bases of effective team leadership are presented in a light hearted story with Little League baseball as the backdrop against which these lessons are illustrated and learned.

Trey Langston, a regional sales manager for a large national sales organization is struggling to lead his team of sales representatives. Rising costs and competition as well as other challenges have forced him to examine just what kind of manager and leader he has become. A devoted father and little league coach, Trey soon discovers that the answers to all of the challenges that have eluded him at the office can be discovered between the chalk lines of the little league baseball diamond as he leads his team, and he himself receives gently mentoring from a devoted fan of the game.

November 10, 1938. Germany. Kristallnacht. Night of Broken Glass. Eleven year old Alex Lebenstein comes face to face with the Nazi regime that is determined to exterminate all Jews from the face of Europe. After witnessing the beating of his family, they escape to be hidden for a few days before being forced into the newly created Jewish Ghetto where he will spend the next three years. A six day cattle car ride during one of the coldest winters on record to the larger Jewish Ghetto in Riga, Latvia is merely the first destination of what will become a three year battle of survival. From the concentration camps Kaiserwald and Stutthof, and slave labor camps Hasenpot and Burggraben to liberation and escape, teenaged Alex Lebenstein lived the sights, sounds, and smells of death. Despite facing execution, and living under the shadows of the crematoria chimneys that darkened the skies with black smoke, this is a tale of hope and wonder.

It has been some sixty plus years since I have thought about a number of the events that I witnessed or survived during the time that I was a teenager. I must refer to myself as a teenager, and cant say child, because I largely did not have a childhood after the evening of Kristallnacht. This dark period of my life was so traumatic that it is only recently that I have been able to confront the shadows and noises that still cause me to start whenever I see or hear them.

Of all the sights and sounds that left a lasting impression on me during the years that I fought to survive, there is no doubt that the sounds I experienced while we huddled on the gazebo are the ones that will forever haunt me. Even now, I cannot hear the sound of leaves scraping on the sidewalk or the bricks of my apartment without flashing back to the time that we huddled on that old gazebo and that eerie sound of dead leaves and vines added to the sheer terror that I was feeling.

More than a story of survival, this is a tale of good triumphing over evil, and one mans battle to make a difference in the lives of children. With a new lease on life, he now promotes tolerance through education on two continents, and tells his remarkable story so that the children will know.

A young US Army lieutenant, from a long and distinguished family line of soldiers, stationed in the Federal Republic of Germany, faces court martial charges of murder and of being involved in a black marketing operation that reach the higher echelons of the Division command. Rather than trusting his fate to a military lawyer, the family reaches across the sea to the United States, and retains the services of former Army officer turned civilian attorney Colt Donaldson. With links to unsolved murders in Vietnam and Korea, as well as insights into the CIA, the White House, and the inner workings of the officer corps, Colt must battle command influence and the subtleties of military justice, as well as a gang of ruthless criminals to refute the burden of proof that the Government has established, and fight the Code to secure his clients freedom.

What if the United States really was not the land of the government of the people, by the people, for the people? What if instead of the duly elected President and Congress, there was a second, secret corporate organization with Government ties dominating the affairs of state within the United States? Was Pearl Harbor a plot conceived by Roosevelt and Churchill to get an isolationist U.S. into WWII? What force thrust Harry Truman into a position to lead us into the atomic age? How was he elected, and who really killed JFK? Why did Lyndon Johnson leave the White House at the height of the Vietnam War? Why did we stop at the gates of Baghdad during the first Desert War against Saddam Hussein? The political and military leaders of the latter sixty years of the 20th Century come alive in these pages, and the historical events actually took place. Where does the line between fiction and historical fact become blurred? The answer to all of these questions is Knights Code.

One Man, Two Codes. The dilemna: the moral code of his church and community in conflict with the Canon of Ethics of his profession.

Doug Long is a husband, father of seven, an attorney at law, and respected elder in his church where he serves as an advisor in the youth program, enjoying popularity with the youth and their parents, while counting many friends among his burgeoning clientele.

After many years of scraping by financially, he accepts the challenge from a friend and fellow attorney to begin defending clients charged with Driving Under the Influence (DUI). With this addition to his practice he realizes financial rewards beyond his wildest dreams, but with a potentially devastating price of its own on a fateful night that the two codes by which he has lived his life come crashing into conflict with one another. For no matter what choice he makes, he will be guilty of at least one BROKEN CODE.

Leaders today come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and creeds. It is also quite common to use the term manager and leader interchangeably.This book is about the person who strives to take the giant step to become the Leader Coach. While certainly still a manager and a leader, the role of Leader Coach is all about the special relationship that develops between Leader Coach and Player through the art of effective communication.

By developing your team (players) through the use of the Social, Performance, and Developmental Conversations, a Leader Coach can help release achievement drive and enhance performance in their players. It is also about the joy and self-actualization thatoccurs during the Journey when a Leader Coach and the Player mutually take the risk and expose their souls to one another during this evolutionary and sometimes extraordinary process. The Leadership Coaching Coefficient Triangle is presented for the leader to conduct self-analysis, to determine current and future leadership capabilities.

This book is designed as a pragmatic, how-to book for the leader who is serious about building or improving his or her organization, one person at a time. Intended more as a guide, the authors share personal insights, anecdotesand experiences from both theirprofessional and personal livesthat have made them successful in these endeavors.

From servant leadership and selfless giving on the part of the Leader Coach to the ownership of the change that takes place in the person being coached, Leader Coaching is both the hardest, yet most rewarding, work that a leader can engage in, and when done properly, becomes the Leader Coach''s legacy.

Why are so many people wandering aimlessly through life? Why has there been such a shift in values from generation to generation?

Facing imminent mobilization during the first Persian Gulf War, a father was faced with these questions as well as the challenge of who would teach his children the attributes that he most valued and wished to pass on to their generation.

In Eight Points of the Compass the attributes of Integrity (True North), Gratitude, Character, Balance, Commitment, Abundance, Vision, and Relationships are presented in anecdotal fashion so as to make them a lasting and timeless legacy of direction and wisdom for each succeeding generation.

A must read for every parent.

Chris Sorensen, author of The Greatest Discovery