The 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 near you.
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The Baby Can Sing and Other Stories
Judith Slater
udith Slater's debut collection, The Baby Can Sing and Other Stories, was selected by Stuart Dybek as the 1998 Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction.
The Baby Can Sing and Other Stories introduces a writer who approaches the world at a surprisingly oblique angle. Judith Slater writes in a prose dance, dramatizing the lives of ordinary people who wonder what they can do to bring more passion into their lives, or at least less loneliness.
The characters in these stories are a diverse bunch-a floral clerk with aspirations of being a ballet dancer, a photographer volunteering to take the pictures at his ex-girlfriendÕs wedding, a father playing the role of reluctant chaperon at his daughter's school dance-but all of them are alert to the moments of possibility, transcendence, and sometimes even magic that exist just under the surface of ordinary life.
Slater is unafraid to employ the surreal or absurd twist: in the title story, a woman creates a perfect baby in her mind; in "Phil's Third Eye," a chance encounter at a Laundromat ends in a bizarre battle of wills; in "Our New Life," a woman finds that her former therapist has decided to make the same drastic change in her own life as she had encouraged in her patient's, and a strange challenge is issued to decide who has taken the greater risk; the narrator of "Soft Money," worried about job security in the large corporation she works for, hits upon a unique solution to the problem of downsizing.
In vivid, witty prose, Judith Slater presents a world where people come together and make do, as they learn to live with the odd possibilities in life.
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Language and Time
Quentin Smith
This book offers a defense of the tensed theory of time, a critique of the New Theory of Reference, and an argument that simultaneity is absolute. Although Smith rejects ordinary language philosophy, he shows how it is possible to argue from the nature of language to the nature of reality. Specifically, he argues that semantic properties of tensed sentences are best explained by the hypothesis that they ascribe to events temporal properties of futurity, presentness, or pastness and do not merely ascribe relations of earlier than or simultaneity. He criticizes the New Theory of Reference, which holds that "now" refers directly to a time and does not ascribe the property of presentness. Smith does not adopt the old or Fregean theory of reference but develops a third alternative, based on his detailed theory of de re and de dicto propositions and a theory of cognitive significance. He concludes the book with a lengthy critique of Einstein's theory of time. Smith offers a positive argument for absolute simultaneity based on his theory that all propositions exist in time. He shows how Einstein's relativist temporal concepts are reducible to a conjunction of absolutist temporal concepts and relativist nontemporal concepts of the observable behavior of light rays, rigid bodies, and the like.
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Medieval England: An Encyclopedia
Paul E. Szarmach, M. Teresa Tavormina, and Joel T. Rosenthal
This valuable reference work offers concise, expert answers to questions on all aspects of life and culture in medieval England-art, architecture, law, literature, kings, commoners, women, music, commerce, technology, warfare, religion, and many others. It takes as its scope English social, cultural, and political life from the Anglo-Saxon invasions in the fifth century to the turn of the sixteenth century. To make it even more useful to information seekers, the Encyclopedia also traces England's ties to the Celtic world of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, to the French and Anglo-Norman world of the Continent, to the Viking and Scandinavian world of the North Sea, and to the world of medieval Christendom. The result is a detailed portrait of the English Middle Ages and their key historical events, personages, and cultural contexts.
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Medievalism in the Modern World
Richard Utz and Tom Shippey
An interdisciplinary collection of essays from leading scholars in Europe, North America, and Australia examine the phenomenon of medievalism from the perspective of history, politics, scholarship, art, and literature.
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The Intellectual Climate of the Early University
Nancy Van Deusen
Universities, in the early Middle Ages and now, are monuments to cultivation--monuments to the fact that complex, hidden things and issues do, in fact, exist, to be slowly exposed through a lifetime of patient, daily effort. This is the seat of the power of the university and the crux of its message as an institution as it actively forms a polarity to exigency and daily necessity-a contrast to what is obviously, hastily, conveniently perceived. A university exists to make known what can only be revealed by consistent, dedicated effort. Ultimately, a university exists in order to understand the things that are hidden from ordinary, casual view. This is a message that is subtly reinforced by all of the articles in this volume.
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Lessons to Share on Teaching Grammar in Context
Constance Weaver
With Teaching Grammar in Context, thousands of teachers discovered why students achieve better results when they learn grammar during the process of writing. In Lessons to Share, Connie Weaver's promised sequel, she focuses on the practical, offering valuable "lessons" from educators at all levels.
The first section of the book addresses the learning and teaching of grammar, setting the stage for subsequent sections. The purpose behind the article on how language is learned is to help readers understand that babies and preschoolers acquire the grammar of their language without direct instruction and that language continues to develop indirectly during children's school years. Connie's article on teaching grammar in the context of writing articulates other aspects of the rationale that underlies this book: teaching grammar in the context of its use.
The second and major section deals with teaching grammar through writing, across the grades. The authors address punctuation, parts of speech, effective word choice and syntax, and conferencing with students to teach revision and editing. The next section focuses on style, with emphasis on sentence composing, "image grammar," and "breaking the rules" for stylistic effect. There is also a discussion of the power of dialects and the dialects of power. The last section deals with teaching the English language and its grammar to ESL students in kindergarten through college. The section and book conclude with an article on using grammar checking computer software.
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Practicing What We Know : Informed Reading Instruction
Constance Weaver
Collection of articles, some previously published. Includes bibliographical references and index.
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Reconsidering a Balanced Approach to Reading
Constance Weaver
Reconsidering a Balanced Approach to Reading
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Christianity
Brian Wilson
Christianity is a concise and readable survey of the history of Christianity, from its beginnings in late antiquity, through the Reformations in the West, to its present-day globalization. Focusing particularly on the modern period, it provides a valuable introduction to contemporary christian beliefs and practices, and looks at the ways in which this diverse religion has adapted, and continues to adapt, to the challenges of the modern world.