When Robert and Michael, a pair of starry-eyed twins see a Boeing 707 at an airport in the mid-1960s, it’s love at first sight.

But who's going to one day pay for their dream to work in aviation? This is apartheid South Africa. Coloured boys can't eat alongside white people, let alone jet off to Paris and study aeronautical engineering!

But in high school they discover an unlikely aptitude for French. Armed with scholarships, they head off to Paris and their once ordinary lives are changed forever.

Bob, a regular guy from the present, finds himself back in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century, when humanity was facing some of its most daunting challenges. They hinged on life-and-death issues such as insufficient food for a rocketing global population; the exhaustion of the coal reserves driving the Industrial Revolution; the ever-growing filth and pollution from horse-drawn transport; and, more recently, the increasing likelihood of a new ice-age by the year 2000. Can Bob convince people that this is not the end of the road? Or will he come across as crazy? Nine parts fact and one part fiction, CONVERSATIONS WITH BOB is a witty, clever take on society's enduring fascination with doomsday scenarios. It puts a fresh, historical twist on the challenges of our own time - from poverty and disease to global warming - and leaves us feeling far more hopeful about the future of the planet.

Go on, admit it: most of the business documents that cross your desk really test your patience. If you're brave enough, you'll skim through them in an attempt to capture the key points. More often than not, you'll find them or throw them into the bin.

That's because most business writing is long, complex and takes forever to get to the point. This is self-defeating as the available reading time is often only a few minutes or less.

In this book, you'll learn to:

• Grab and sustain your reader's attention
• Produce a user friendly layout
• Draw attention to key passages