he goal is to record most books written or edited by Western Michigan University faculty, staff and students. There is a WMU Authors section in Waldo Library, where most of these books can be found. With a few exceptions, we do not have the rights to put the full text of the book online, so there will be a link to a place where you can purchase the book or find it in a library.
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Philosophies of the Sciences: A Guide
Fritz Allhoff
A collection of essays celebrate a wide range of sciences and the central philosophical issues associated with them, presenting the sciences collectively to encourage a greater understanding of their associative theoretical foundations, and a cross-fertilization of ideas. Offers a new and unique approach to studying and comparing the philosophies of various scientific disciplines, including Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Psychology, Sociology and Economics Encompasses a wide variety of individual sciences. The essays are written by leading scholars in a highly accessible style for the student audience Presents and discusses central debates ...Read More
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Whiskey and Philosophy: A Small Batch of Spirited Ideas
Fritz Allhoff and Marcus P. Adams
Thoughtful essays on the history, significance, and pleasures of whiskey
Everyone becomes a philosopher with a drink in hand, but Whiskey & Philosophy takes this natural pairing to a new level. It explores a range of philosophical topics related to whiskey through engaging reflections written by philosophers, whiskey writers, and others.
You will learn things that are both practical (how do tasting notes vary across guides and whiskey brands?) and thought provoking (why is there the popular conception that drinking whiskey makes people mean, and is it true?). Whether your ...Read More
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What Is Nanotechnology and Why Does It Matter: From Science to Ethics
Fritz Allhoff, Patrick Lin, and Daniel Moore
Ongoing research in nanotechnology promises both innovations and risks, potentially and profoundly changing the world. This book helps to promote a balanced understanding of this important emerging technology, offering an informed and impartial look at the technology, its science, and its social impact and ethics.
- Nanotechnology is crucial for the next generation of industries, financial markets, research labs, and our everyday lives; this book provides an informed and balanced look at nanotechnology and its social impact
- Offers a comprehensive background discussion on nanotechnology itself, including its history, its science, ...Read More
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Forest of Eyes: Selected Poems of Tada Chimako
Jeffrey Angles
One of Japan's most important modern poets, Tada Chimako (1930-2003) gained prominence in her native country for her sensual, frequently surreal poetry and fantastic imagery. Although Tada's writing is an essential part of postwar Japanese poetry, her use of themes and motifs from European, Near Eastern, and Mediterranean history, mythology, and literature, as well as her sensitive explorations of women's inner lives make her very much a poet of the world.Forest of Eyes offers English-language readers their first opportunity to read a wide selection from Tada's extraordinary oeuvre, including nontraditional ...Read More
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Globalization and International Development: Critical Issues of the 21st Century
Sisay Asefa
This collection is based on the papers presented at the 2007-2008 Werner Sichel Lecture-Seminar series held at Western Michigan University. These papers address the issue of globalization with a special emphasis on its impact on poverty.
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Making Hard Choices in Journalism Ethics: Cases and Practice
David E. Boeyink and Sandra Borden
This book teaches students how to make the difficult ethical decisions that journalists routinely face. By taking a case-based approach, the authors argue that the best way to make an ethical decision is to look closely at a particular situation, rather than looking first to an abstract set of ethical theories or principles. This book goes beyond the traditional approaches of many other journalism textbooks by using cases as the starting point for building ethical practices. Casuistry, the technical name of such a method, develops provisional guidelines from the bottom ...Read More
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Ethics and Entertainment: Essays on Media Culture and Media Morality
Sandra Borden and Howard Good
As modern media shift from the distribution of information to its creation, a fresh inquiry into the ethics of media is needed. This collection of 19 essays provides useful perspectives for both producers and consumers of entertainment. Topics include the creation of celebrity, the effects of entertainment on children, the hybridization of entertainment and news, author and intellectual property rights, and the role of human dignity in modern media, among many others.
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Telling the Kalamazoo Community RACE Story
Sue Ellen Christian and Donna Odom
Local residents of Kalamazoo, Michigan share their stories of race and ethnicity.
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The Time Use of Mothers in the United States at the Beginning of the 21st Century
Rachel Connelly and Jean Kimmel
This book focuses on the time use of mothers of pre-teenaged children in the United States from 2003 to 2006.
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Spatial Policing: The Influence of Time, Space, and Geography on Law Enforcement Practices
Charles E. Crawford
The ghetto, the block, neighborhood, community, and hot spot are all terms that capture a particular space or a familiar location for citizens and law enforcement officers. These spaces may appear welcoming to some, or send waves of fear into others who have to enter. What is it about an area of the city that makes it a hot spot for crime at night? Why do the police act, speak, and patrol so differently across segments of the city? At their core these questions all show an awareness of the ...Read More
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Norwegians in Michigan
Clifford O. Davidson
In Norwegians in Michigan, Clifford Davidson shows how Norwegians took advantage of opportunities when they began settling in Michigan in the nineteenth century. Norwegians sailed Lake Michigan, joined the lumber trade, farmed the northwest part of the state, and mined copper and iron in the Upper Peninsula. At the same time, they brought a unique culture that came to be associated with Michigan and the Midwest. The first generations of Norwegians in Michigan maintained close cultural ties with their homeland. Some Norwegian immigrants adjusted to life in a new land ...Read More
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Heroism and the Supernatural in the African Epic
Mariam Konate Deme
There exists a strong tendency within Western literary criticism to either deny the existence of epics in Africa or to see African literatures as exotic copies of European originals. In both cases, Western criticism has largely failed to acknowledge the distinctiveness of African literary aesthetics. This book revises traditional literary canons in examining the social, cultural and emotional specificity of African epics. Mariam Konate Deme highlights the distinguishing features that characterize the African epic, emphasizing the significance of the fantastic and its use as an essential element in the dramatic ...Read More
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Por escrito: De la palabra a la composición
Jorge M. Febles and Carolyn J. Harris
Por escrito employs a step-by-step, task-oriented approach directed to intermediate and third-year students of Spanish. Students develop fundamental writing skills through a review of very specific grammatical topics and original reading selections. The material evolves from the simple to the complex, focusing first on description, then on narrative prose, and finally on expository writing of an argumentative and analytical nature. By following the prescribed method, students learn to write clearly and to communicate efficiently, avoiding the perils of direct translation. As a result, students increase their understanding of Spanish syntax ...Read More
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Safe from the Sea
Peter Geye
Set against the powerful lakeshore landscape of northern Minnesota, Safe from the Sea is a heartfelt novel in which a son returns home to reconnect with his estranged and dying father thirty-five years after the tragic wreck of a Great Lakes ore boat that the father only partially survived and that has divided them emotionally ever since. When his father for the first time finally tells the story of the horrific disaster he has carried with him so long, it leads the two men to reconsider each other. Meanwhile, Noah's ...Read More
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Lord of Misrule: A Novel
Jaimy Gordon
"Lord of Misrule" is a darkly realistic novel about a young woman living through a year of horse racing at a half-mile track in West Virginia, while everyone's best laid schemes keep going brutally wrong. With her first novel since her acclaimed "Bogeywoman" (1999), Jaimy Gordon bears comparison to other great writers of the American demimonde, such as Nathanael West, Damon Runyon, and Eudora Welty.
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Program Evaluation for Social Workers: Foundations of Evidence-Based Programs
Richard M. Grinnell Jr, Yvonne Unrau, and Peter Gabor
This text presents a practical and tested approach of how to do case- and program-level evaluations within social service programs. It provides an unintimidating conceptual understanding of how programs can become more accountable by incorporating uncomplicated evaluation strategies into their day-to-day service delivery activities. With the above in mind, this edition has been completely updated, revised (some chapters have been totally rewritten), and re-arranged in an effort to present the essential ingredients for programs to become evidence based. The result is a text eminently suited for social work program evaluation ...Read More
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Statistics for Social Workers
Richard M. Grinnell Jr and Robert Weinbach
Now in its eighth edition, this widely used text covers the types of statistical analyses that are most likely to be encountered by social work practitioners and researchers. It requires no prior knowledge of statistics and only basic mathematical competence.
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Mission Expansion in the Federal Home Loan Bank System
Susan M. Hoffmann and Mark M. Cassell
Studies the Federal Home Loan Bank System, how it has changed over time and why.
During the current recession, one of the worst in United States history, the federal government undertook a series of sweeping changes related to the home mortgage foreclosure crisis. These changes, in particular to the Federal Home Loan Bank System, have many implications.Mission Expansion in the Federal Home Loan Bank System draws attention to this arcane but growing public-private organizational network, focusing on expansion of its mission since its origin in 1932 and arguing that it ...Read More
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Becoming the Second City: Chicago's Mass News Media, 1833-1898
Richard Junger
Becoming the Second City examines the development of Chicago's press and analyzes coverage of key events in its history to call attention to the media's impact in shaping the city's cultural and historical landscape. In concise, extensively documented prose, Richard Junger illustrates how nineteenth-century newspapers acted as accelerants that boosted the growth of Chicago in its early history by continually making and remaking the city's public image as the nation's populous "Second City." Highlighting the newspaper industry's involvement in the business and social life of Chicago, Junger casts newspaper editors ...Read More
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The Economics of Natural and Unnatural Disasters
William S. Kern
The essays presented here give the reader a sample of the sort of research now being undertaken on the economics of disasters. Several themes long dominant in this literature are thoroughly discussed. These include the ability of potential disaster victims to accurately assess the risks they face, the role of incentives in ensuring that mitigation efforts are undertaken, the adequacy of our evaluation of the impact of disasters on economies, and discussion of the effectiveness of current government policies toward disaster prevention and relief.
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Semi-detached Empire : Suburbia and the Colonization of Britain, 1880 to the Present
Todd Kuchta
In the first book to consider British suburban literature from the vantage point of imperial and postcolonial studies, Todd Kuchta argues that suburban identity is tied to the empire’s rise and fall. He takes his title from the type of home synonymous with suburbia. Like the semi-detached house, which joins separate dwellings under one roof, suburbia and empire were geographically distinct but imaginatively linked. Yet just as the "semi" conceals two homes behind a single façade, suburbia’s apparent uniformity masks its defining oppositions—between country and city, "civilization" and "savagery," master ...Read More
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Federal State-Building: Challenges in Framing the Nepali Constitution
Mahendra Lawoti
This book discusses challenges in peace-building and democratization and presents guidelines for crafting a new Constitution based on the analysis of Nepal's past attempts at democratization.
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The Maoist Insurgency in Nepal: Revolution in the Twenty-First Century
Mahendra Lawoti and Anup K. Pahari
The book deals with the dynamics and growth of a violent 21st century communist rebellion initiated in Nepal by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) – CPN(M). It contextualizes and explains why and how a violent Maoist insurgency grew in Nepal after the end of the Cold War, in contrast to the decline of other radical communist movements in most parts of the world.
Scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds employ a wide variety of approaches and methods to unravel different aspects of the rebellion. Individual chapters analyze the different causes ...Read More
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Thermal Design: Heat Sinks, Thermoelectrics, Heat Pipes, Compact Heat Exchangers, and Solar Cells
HoSung Lee
The proposed is written as a senior undergraduate or the first-year graduate textbook,covering modern thermal devices such as heat sinks, thermoelectric generators and coolers, heat pipes, and heat exchangers as design components in larger systems. These devices are becoming increasingly important and fundamental in thermal design across such diverse areas as microelectronic cooling, green or thermal energy conversion, and thermal control and management in space, etc. However, there is no textbook available covering this rangeof topics. The proposed book may be used as a capstone design course after the fundamental ...Read More
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Splendor & Pageantry: Textile Treasures from the Armenian Orthodox Churches of Istanbul
Ronald T. Marchese, Marlene R. Breu, Armenian Patriarchate of Istanbul, and Murat Oğurlu
The first-ever detailed presentation of historic and sacred Armenian textiles found in treasury of the Armenian Patriarchate in Istanbul. Text accompanied by 175 color photographs (many full-spread) of the selection of artifacts, exquisite pieces dating from the past three hundred years that were executed by women artisans in embroidery, applique techniques of textile printing, and/or painting. Includes description and histories of the Armenian Orthodox community and its churches, iconography, techniques, and detailed catalogue.
...Read More