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Making Good And Bad Times Work For You -- At Work And In Life

Peaks and Valleys is a story of a young man who lives unhappily in a valley until he meets an old man who lives on a peak, and it changes his work and life forever.

Initially, the young man does not realize he is talking with one of the most peaceful and successful people in the world. However, through a series of conversations and experiences that occur up on peaks and down in valleys, the young man comes to make some startling discoveries.

Eventually, he comes to understand how he can use the old man's remarkable principles and practical tools in good and bad times and becomes more calm and successful himself.

Now you can take a similar journey through the story and use what you find to your advantage in your own work and life.

Mike's company has returned from duty, but he is missing; Hank flies from Tennessee to Fort Rudd in the Southwest, to conduct his own investigation into the disappearance. There he meets a smart but put-upon police officer (Charlize Theron, glammed-down but still showing a bit too much sexy collarbone for a cop) who also smells something off in the Army's official story of the disappearance. The two form an unlikely team, but as a friend tells Deerfield early on, "You gotta trust somebody sometime, Hank," and Mike's vanishing is Hank's tipping point.

As Hank pieces together the horrifying story of Mike's fate, the incremental pain becomes etched in Jones' ragged features, and the camera captures all of it--far more powerfully than could a million words of reportage from the front lines. Theron's performance is also strong, and Susan Sarandon is moving if underutilized as Hank's grief-stricken wife, robbed of the simple nuclear family life she so wanted. "They shouldn't send heroes to places like Iraq," says one of Mike's buddies late in the film, and it's the viewers' collective sorrow--and the film's great achievement--to feel that at the deepest human level. --A.T. Hurley

SF CLASSIC OF LOST VALLEYS. INTELLIGENT ANIMALS AND ALIEN INTERVENTION

In The Valley of Creation, where Eric Nelson is one of a desperate band of soldiers-of-fortune who have fought on the loosing side in a war and eagerly take on a mysterious assignment deep in the borderlands of Tibet. There, in a legendary valley, Shan Kar, the man who has hired them, tells Nelson and the other mercenaries that their weapons are humankind's last ditch defense against the valley's intelligent animals, who plan to take over the world. If they are successful, the mercenaries' reward is to be a fabulous treasure in platinum not far from the city of the animals. But after an encounter with a warrior-maid who fights along side the animals, and an encounter with a telepathic wolf, Nelson wonders if he has been told the whole story. To find out he will have to enter the city of the animals, have his own personality transferred into the body of a wolf and run with the pack. Little does this cynical soldier realize that this will be an experience which will change him forever. No wonder The Science Fiction Encyclopedia calls The Valley of Creation, "A strongly-written sword-and-sorcery story with an sf denouement - carefully composed and dark in texture."

Here in this peaceful community, folks look out for one another like family, though sometimes a little too well. In a town like this, it's hard to keep a secret—but Dr. June Hudson has managed to keep one heck of a humdinger.…

Though visits from her secret lover, undercover DEA agent Jim Post, are as clandestine as they are passionate, somehow it fits with her demanding schedule as the town's doctor—a calling that requires an innate ability to exist on caffeine, sticky buns and nerves of steel.

But how can a secret lover compete with a flesh-and-blood heartthrob from her past? June's old flame has just returned to town after twenty years—and he's divorced. June is seriously rattled. So when the town's most devoted wife takes buckshot to her husband and some human bones turn up in her aunt Myrna's backyard, she's almost happy for the distraction.

Sooner or later, love will have its way in Grace Valley. It always does.