Recently retired Air Force commando Thomas Mazuko was looking forward to a quiet future spent teaching karate in his small Tampa, Florida, studio. His dreams were of little more than days on the sandy beaches and nights in the company of his wife and children. Little did he know that his instinctive reaction to witnessing the mugging of an elderly woman would set in motion a chain of events that would drastically alter the course of his life. By sheer accident, Mazuko becomes a primary target for the wrath of a powerfully connected local syndicate figure. When the wealthy and egomaniacal Martin DeValdez sends out wise guys to "teach this upstart a lesson" Mazuko's foster son and a young student are caught up the maelstrom of uncontrolled chaos. As the level of violence escalates, Mazuko realizes that he has become the target of vengeance of a man who will stop at nothing to right what he perceives as personal wrongs. With the body count rising and the lives of his tenaEUR"yearaEUR"old daughter and twoaEUR"yearaEUR"old son, as well as the lives of friends, new and old, hanging in the balance, Mazuko must set aside his plans for a quiet retirement and return to the skills of his past in order to fight for his life and the lives of his children.

Criticizes the system of motivating through reward, offering arguments for motivating people by working with them instead of doing things to them.

Why should we be good? How should we be good? And how might we more deeply understand the moral and ethical failings--splashed across today's headlines--that have not only destroyed individual lives but caused widespread calamity as well, bringing communities, nations, and indeed the global economy to the brink of collapse? In The Difficulty of Being Good, Gurcharan Das seeks answers to these questions in an unlikely source: the 2,000 year-old Sanskrit epic, Mahabharata. A sprawling, witty, ironic, and delightful poem, the Mahabharata is obsessed with the elusive notion of dharma--in essence, doing the right thing. When a hero does something wrong in a Greek epic, he wastes little time on self-reflection; when a hero falters in the Mahabharata, the action stops and everyone weighs in with a different and often contradictory take on dharma. Each major character in the epic embodies a significant moral failing or virtue, and their struggles mirror with uncanny precision our own familiar emotions of anxiety, courage, despair, remorse, envy, compassion, vengefulness, and duty. Das explores the Mahabharata from many perspectives and compares the successes and failures of the poem's characters to those of contemporary individuals, many of them highly visible players in the world of economics, business, and politics. In every case, he finds striking parallels that carry lessons for everyone faced with ethical and moral dilemmas in today's complex world. Written with the flair and seemingly effortless erudition that have made Gurcharan Das a bestselling author around the world--and enlivened by Das's forthright discussion of his own personal search for a more meaningful life--The Difficulty of Being Good shines the light of an ancient poem on the most challenging moral ambiguities of modern life.

A brilliant work from the most influential philosopher since Sartre. In this indispensable work, a brilliant thinker suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.

The problem is that the majority of parents don't know any other way to manage difficult behavior in their children, so they resort to what their parents used with them - traditional punishment.