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Just Passing Through: A German-American Family Saga – Revised Edition
$3.99 – $29.99In this updated and revised edition of Just Passing Through: A German American Family Saga, first published in 2011, the author tells the story of several generations of his unique but dysfunctional family spanning over a hundred years including the two world wars. Peter Zell was eight years old when World War II ended and in a prologue entitled A German – American Childhood recounts his boyhood experiences that included the apocalyptic firebombing of his hometown of Stuttgart by the western Allies, the postwar occupation of Germany, and his family’s emigration to America. The book centers on the author’s mother, whom her children called Mutti, and her ordeal during the Nazi era for having been married to a Jew, the son of prosperous Frankfurt business owners, with whom she had two children. With anti-Semitism on the rise in Germany, her husband decided to emigrate to America but Mutti chose to remain behind to take care of her ailing father. The couple had an amicable divorce and while her ex-husband
took their son with him, their daughter remained with Mutti in Germany. Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, mother and daughter now found themselves classified as non-Aryans which meant that Mutti could not remarry while their teenage daughter, being half Jewish, was put in dire jeopardy of her life. At this point Mutti’s older brother, himself a dedicated National Socialist, proposed an unconventional solution that ensured her survival. Following his advice, Mutti had more children, fathered by so-called Aryans, who were eventually all brought to America. The book follows the lives of the five siblings, all half-brothers and half-sisters, and their difficult relationships with each other as each sought to achieve his or her version of the American Dream.
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Pricing the Profitable Sale: The Manager’s Guide to Value Pricing
$7.99 – $26.99Pricing the Profitable Sale: The Manager’s Guide to Value Pricing represents a complete revision of a prior work entitled Pricing for Profit: The Manager’s Guide to Market Oriented Pricing. Like the earlier book, its purpose is to assist corporate managers in realizing the full potential available in the product or service price as a company’s primary revenue and profit generator. The book is a radical departure from standard texts in its practical and quantitative approach. Because of its heavy use of formulas, graphs, reference tables, and pricing rules and guidelines, it will appeal primarily to marketers with a background in the sciences or engineering and less so to individuals who prefer a less rigorous treatment of the subject. A special feature of the book is three chapters devoted to price optimization techniques for determining sell prices of products or services designed to achieve maximum sales revenues, market share, or profits for the firm. Numerous examples throughout the text demonstrate the use of the material presented. Pricing the Profitable Sale should also be of interest to academia. In a business school MBA program, it could serve either as the primary text in a course on pricing or, in an advanced marketing class, as a supplement to one of the standard marketing texts.
Peter Zell grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, and Oak Park, Illinois, where he attended high school. He holds a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois. After two years of active duty with the U.S. Army Reserve, Mr. Zell was employed as an engineer by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Virginia. He subsequently left for New York City to study business administration earning an MBA degree from the Columbia Business School. There followed a successful career in marketing and sales management with diverse multinational companies, both stateside and abroad. Mr. Zell also holds a law degree and is a retired member of the Illinois State Bar Association. Since 2003, he has lived in retirement near Phoenix, Arizona.