Books by WMU Authors from 2010-2014

Follow

• 

  The Political and Social Vocabulary of John the Deacon’s 'Istoria Veneticorum'

  Luigi Andrea Berto

  Based on an extensive linguistic analysis, this book provides the first examination of the political and social vocabulary of John the Deacon’s Istoria Veneticorum, thus offering significant insights to the history of Venice in the early Middle Ages. The Istoria Veneticorum, a chronicle attributed to John the Deacon, chaplain and ambassador of the Venetian Duke Peter Orseolo II (991-1008), is of fundamental importance for the reconstruction of early medieval Venetian history. In addition to being the only historical narrative of that period, it covers the entire early Middle Ages, from the invasion of the Lombards in 569, an action that forced a part of the Veneto’s population to seek refuge on the islands of the Venetian lagoon, to the beginning of the eleventh century. Its importance is further emphasized by the limited number of the surviving early medieval Venetian sources. Berto’s study of the political and social vocabulary of this work analyses the chronicler’s use and contextualization of key words and provides the reader with an enhanced understanding of the Istoria Veneticorum. The attentive and skilful use of terminology by the chronicler confirms that the author was, in all likelihood, a member of the Orseolo entourage, that he was acquainted with the art of diplomacy, and that he was, in fact, John the Deacon. Furthermore, he did not limit himself to a mere recording of dates and events; rather, by a careful use of terminology—probably in order to avoid reopening recent wounds—he was able to express his opinions about the dukes who had ruled his country. From publisher

• 

  Serving Military Families in the 21st Century

  Karen R. Blaisure

  This text introduces readers to military families, their resilience, and the challenges of military life. Personal stories from active duty, National Guard, reservists, veterans, and their families, from all branches and ranks of the military, and those who work with military personnel, bring their experiences to life. A review of the latest research, theories, policies, and programs better prepares readers for working with military families. Objectives, key terms, tables, figures, summaries, and exercises, including web based exercises, serve as a chapter review. The book concludes with a glossary of key terms. Engaging vignettes are featured throughout: · Voices from the Frontlineoffer personal accounts of issues faced by actual program leaders, practitioners, researchers, policy makers, service members, and their families. · Spotlight on Researchhighlights the latest studies on dealing with combat related issues. · Best Practicesreview the optimal strategies used in the field. · Tips from the Frontlineoffer suggestions from experienced personnel. The book opens with an introduction to military culture and family life. Joining the military and why people do so are explored in chapter 2. Next, life in the military including relocation, employment, education, and deployment are examined. Daily lives of children in military families are explored in chapter 4. How stress and resilience theories are used in working with military families are then reviewed. Chapter 6 focuses on milestones experienced by service members and programs that support them through these transitions. Everyday issues caused by the trauma of war are reviewed in Chapters 7 and 8. Programs, policies, and organizations that serve military families in dealing with deployment, education, and health and child care are explored in chapters 9 and 10 followed by initiatives supporting reintegration and reunification issues. Next, how to work with families and those who have experienced traumatic events is considered. The book concludes with a review of career opportunities and stories from working professionals. Intended as a text for advanced undergraduate or graduate courses on military families or as a supplement for courses on the family, marriage and family, stress and coping, or family systems taught in family studies, human development, clinical or counseling psychology, sociology, social work, and nursing, this book also appeals to helping professionals who work with military families.

• 

  Causatives in Minimalism

  Mercedes Tubino Blanco

  This monograph studies issues of current minimalist concern, such as whether differences in the expression of argument and syntactic structure can all be attributed to the parameterization of specific functional heads. In particular, this book studies in-depth the extent to which variation in the expression of causation, available both intra- and cross linguistically, can be accounted for by appealing only to the microparameterization of the causative head, Cause, as previously argued for by linguists such as Pylkkänen. It concludes that the microparameterization of Cause may explain some major characteristics associated with causatives, but it cannot be regarded as the only explanation behind variation in these structures. The book includes relevant discussion on argument structure and looks in detail at languages, such as the Uto-Aztecan Hiaki, that have not received much attention before. It is mostly intended for an audience interested in theoretical approaches to argument structure and variation.

• 

  Von einer Liebe zur Andern : Roman

  Peter Blickle

  “His novel recounts an extraordinary love story,” expressed the director of the library where Dr. Blickle’s reading took place. The story is remarkably close to Dr. Blickle’s own world, several sources have noted, as it tells the love story of a literature professor originally from upper Swabia and an American-Jewish violinist. Yet when asked if his wife plays a role in the novel, Blickle replies: “My wife is not a violinist.” Dr. Blickle recounts his narratives in scenic images, rich metaphors of language often purposefully and eloquently mysterious in their tension and struggle. The author explains that his latest novel is about love, about various qualities of love. Soon, the reader also realizes it is a novel deeply rooted in German history and in the human soul, written in sentence fragments, prompting more questions than answers, a sort of Hemingway approach, as one reviewer notes.

  --From an article by Olivia Gabor-Peirce and Cynthia Running-Johnson

• 

  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 up by reasoning analogically from an "easy" ethical case (the "paradigm") to "harder" ethical cases. Thoroughly grounded in actual experience, this method admits more nuanced judgments than most theoretical approaches.

• 

  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.

• 

  Once Upon a River : A Novel

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Bonnie Jo Campbell has created an unforgettable heroine in sixteen-year-old Margo Crane, a beauty whose unflinching gaze and uncanny ability with a rifle have not made her life any easier. After the violent death of her father, in which she is complicit, Margo takes to the Stark River in her boat, with only a few supplies and a biography of Annie Oakley, in search of her vanished mother. But the river, Margo's childhood paradise, is a dangerous place for a young woman traveling alone, and she must be strong to survive, using her knowledge of the natural world and her ability to look unsparingly into the hearts of those around her. Her river odyssey through rural Michigan becomes a defining journey, one that leads her beyond self-preservation and to the decision of what price she is willing to pay for her choices.

• 

  A Companion to St. Paul in the Middle Ages

  Steven Cartwright

  This volume surveys the interpretation of St. Paul by patristic and medieval exegetes. It also examines the use of Paul by medieval reformers, canon lawyers, and spiritual teachers and Paul’s portrayal in medieval literature and art.

• 

  Victors in Blue: How Union Generals Fought the Confederates, Battled Each Other, and Won the Civil War

  Albert E. Castel and Brooks Simpson

  Make no mistake, the Confederacy had the will and valor to fight. But the Union had the manpower, the money, the matriel, and, most important, the generals. Although the South had arguably the best commander in the Civil War in Robert E. Lee, the Norths full house beat their one-of-a-kind. Flawed individually, the Unions top officers nevertheless proved collectively superior across a diverse array of battlefields and ultimately produced a victory for the Union. Now acclaimed author Albert Castel brings his inimitable style, insight, and wit to a new reconsideration of these generals. With the assistance of Brooks Simpson, another leading light in this field, Castel has produced a remarkable capstone volume to a distinguished career. In it, he reassesses how battles and campaigns forged a decisive Northern victory, reevaluates the generalship of the victors, and lays bare the sometimes vicious rivalries among the Union generals and their effect on the war. From Shiloh to the Shenandoah, Chickamauga to Chattanooga, Castel provides fresh accounts of how the Union commanders-especially Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Thomas, and Meade but also Halleck, Schofield, and Rosecrans-outmaneuvered and outfought their Confederate opponents. He asks of each why he won: Was it through superior skill, strength of arms, enemy blunders, or sheer chance? What were his objectives and how did he realize them? Did he accomplish more or less than could be expected under the circumstances? And if less, what could he have done to achieve more-and why did he not do it? Castel also sheds new light on the war within the war: the intense rivalries in the upper ranks, complicated by the presence in the army of high-ranking non-West Pointers with political wagons attached to the stars on their shoulders. A decade in the writing, Victors in Blue brims with novel, even outrageous interpretations that are sure to stir debate. As certain as the Union achieved victory, it will inform, provoke, and enliven sesquicentennial discussions of the Civil War.

• 

  Mathematical Proofs: A Transition to Advanced Mathematics

  Gary Chartrand, Albert Polimeni, and Ping Zhang

  Mathematical Proofs: A Transition to Advanced Mathematics, Third Edition, prepares students for the more abstract mathematics courses that follow calculus. Appropriate for self-study or for use in the classroom, this text introduces students to proof techniques, analyzing proofs, and writing proofs of their own. Written in a clear, conversational style, this book provides a solid introduction to such topics as relations, functions, and cardinalities of sets, as well as the theoretical aspects of fields such as number theory, abstract algebra, and group theory. It is also a great reference text that students can look back to when writing or reading proofs in their more advanced courses.

• 

  Graphs & Diagraphs

  Gary Chartrand, Ping Zhang, and Linda Lesniak

  Continuing to provide a carefully written, thorough introduction, Graphs & Digraphs, Fifth Edition expertly describes the concepts, theorems, history, and applications of graph theory. Nearly 50 percent longer than its bestselling predecessor, this edition reorganizes the material and presents many new topics.

  New to the Fifth Edition

  • New or expanded coverage of graph minors, perfect graphs, chromatic polynomials, nowhere-zero flows, flows in networks, degree sequences, toughness, list colorings, and list edge colorings
  • New examples, figures, and applications to illustrate concepts and theorems
  • Expanded historical discussions of well-known mathematicians and problems
  • More than 300 new exercises, along with hints and solutions to odd-numbered exercises at the back of the book
  • Reorganization of sections into subsections to make the material easier to read
  • Bolded definitions of terms, making them easier to locate

  Despite a field that has evolved over the years, this student-friendly, classroom-tested text remains the consummate introduction to graph theory. It explores the subject’s fascinating history and presents a host of interesting problems and diverse applications.

• 

  Overcoming Bias : A Journalist's Guide to Culture & Context

  Sue Ellen Christian

  Journalists go out of their way to avoid purposeful bias in the news. But there is a more pervasive set of internal biases and flaws in thinking that can lead to unintentional inaccuracies and distortions in news coverage. This engaging book offers a fresh take on reporting without bias, targeting the way that we categorize people, filter information and default to rehearsed ways of thinking.

  Included throughout are stories and on-target advice from reporters and editors, providing real-world voices and experiences. This advice and guidance is coupled with practical exercises that give readers the chance to apply what they learn.

  Overcoming Bias will teach readers to edit their thinking for habitual errors, making them more perceptive journalists. It provides a career-long foundation for challenging bias.

  This is an ideal text for a course on multi-cultural reporting or journalism ethics; it may also be used as a supplement in any course on reporting and writing, as each chapter deals with potential biases that emerge at each stage of the story process, from story ideas to editing.

  From Amazon

• 

  Telling the Kalamazoo Community RACE Story

  Sue Ellen Christian and Donna Odom

  Local residents of Kalamazoo, Michigan share their stories of race and ethnicity.

• 

  Rawlsian Political Analysis : Rethinking the Microfoundations of Social Science

  Paul Clements

  In Rawlsian Political Analysis: Rethinking the Microfoundations of Social Science,Paul Clements develops a new, morally grounded model of political and social analysis as a critique of and improvement on both neoclassical economics and rational choice theory. What if practical reason is based not only on interests and ideas of the good, as these theories have it, but also on principles and sentiments of right? The answer, Clements argues, requires a radical reorientation of social science from the idea of interests to the idea of social justice.

• 

  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.

• 

  The Fed and the Credit Crisis

  J. Kevin Corder

  What was the role of the Federal Reserve System in the 2008 financial crisis as a cause of the crisis, as the most important government agency to respond, and as the center of federal efforts to prevent another crisis? J. Kevin Corder provides an incisive account of the Fed choices that contributed to the crash of 2008. Centering his analysis on the oversight of mortgage lending and the regulation/supervision of financial institutions and instruments, Corder draws out the implications of the crisis for the Fed's mission. Equally, he charts the new political and technical challenges that the system faces as the financial sector recovers.

• 

  A History of Women in America

  Janet L. Coryell and Nora H. Faires

  A History of Women in America integrates the stories of women in America into the national narrative of American history. By weaving women's lives into the heart of the country's narratives, readers will see women where they were, rather than having them appear as appendages to events controlled largely by men. Coryell and Faires use accessible language, telling stories that will attract beginning scholars to the field of history. Major ethnic groups are incorporated, from Native American and African women who appear earliest in the text, to the major immigrant groups, such as Hispanic, Latina, Chicana, and Asian women, who occupy increasingly larger roles throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

• 

  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 power of space. Spatial Policing is a fascinating look at how the contexts of space, location, and time influence law enforcement, which can result in differential treatment and controversial patrol practices. Each chapter in Spatial Policing, written by leading experts in law enforcement, spatial, and cultural issues in criminal justice provides a highly readable text, and offers an in depth discussion of theory, research findings, as well as real world examples of the most important spatial contexts for police actions. Spatial Policing explores in rich detail the numerous contexts of space, from urban settings, to rural, to the space of minorities, and international borders to examine how each represents a unique challenge for individual officers, departments, and their patrol efforts in our society. Recognizing how space is used and defined as well as how it conditions the interactions between citizens and the police is at the heart of Spatial Policing. Ultimately, for law enforcement, space matters.

• 

  Sustainable Development : Authoritative and Leading Edge Content for Environmental Management

  Sime Curkovic

  In recent years the topic of environmental management has become very common. In sustainable development conditions, central and local governments much more often notice the need of acting in ways that diminish negative impact on environment. Environmental management may take place on many different levels - starting from global level, e.g. climate changes, through national and regional level (environmental policy) and ending on micro level. This publication shows many examples of environmental management. The diversity of presented aspects within environmental management and approaching the subject from the perspective of various countries contributes greatly to the development of environmental management field of research.

• 

  Piano Trio No. 2 : "The Secret Heart of Sound"

  Curtis Curtis-Smith

  Music score

• 

  The Apocalyptic Adventures of Private Winfred Scott Biegle

  Clifford Davidson

  A modernist novel, describing a dystopian military in the imaginary dictatorship of Atlantis, written more than a half century ago when the author was a conscript in the army during the Cold War. As editor of the post newspaper at the Granite City Engineer Depot, Clifford Davidson was in a privileged position for observing the military mentality of the time, in particular the propensity for bullying intended to turn men into mindless killing machines. From other soldiers he was also able to hear disturbing stories at first hand about World War II and the very recent Korean War, only concluded four years earlier. Private Biegle was invented as an anti-hero to satirize those who those accepted authoritarianism as normative and patriotism as uncritical obedience. In other words, in the pages of the novel the author was exploring the very subversion of civil society by probing the implications of the master-slave dichotomy that had been introduced by Hegel and relatively recently put to good use in feminist thought by Jessica Benjamin. But the novel also deserves to be understood as an antic expression that foreshadows the media personality Stephen Colbert, who has popularized irony for so many in this century. Those who have read it have declared it "a good read."A critical introduction to the writing of this Orwellian novel and its relation to literature of the mid-twentieth century is provided by Oscar Haugen in the Afterword. The Apocalyptic Adventures of Winfed Scott Biegle is a work previously only known to a few readers, and now is available to a larger readership in the present edition.

• 

  The York Corpus Christi Plays

  Clifford Davidson

  The feast of Corpus Christi, celebrated annually on Thursday after Trinity Sunday, was devoted to the Eucharist, and the normal practice was to have solemn processions through the city with the Host, the consecrated wafer that was believed to have been transformed into the true body and blood of Jesus. In this way the “cultus Dei” thus celebrated allowed the people to venerate the Eucharistic bread in order that they might be stimulated to devotion and brought symbolically, even mystically into a relationship with the central moments of salvation history. Perhaps it is logical, therefore, that pageants and plays were introduced in order to access yet another way of visualizing and participating in those events of times past that were believed to matter most for the lives of the citizens as well as of other residents and visitors in cities such as York. Thus the “invisible things” of the divine order “from the creation of the world” might be displayed, and this might be done in order to bring these events into the orbit of the collective memory. There are, however, problems with the popular view that would take York as typical of an entire genre of early civic drama that was supposed to have been generated by the religious feast.

  The York Corpus Christi plays, contained in London, British Library, MS. Add. 35290 and comprising more than thirteen thousand lines of verse, actually represent a unique survival of medieval theater. They form the only complete play cycle verifiably associated with the feast of Corpus Christi that is extant and was performed at a specific location in England.

  From the introduction to the book.

• 

  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 more quickly than others. Among these, according to Davidson, were engineers trained in Norway who developed Michigan's bridges, tunnels, and eventually even the cars that used them.

  Illustrated with photographs, maps, and documents, Norwegians in Michigan vividly chronicles a now-familiar pattern of immigrants' cultural understandings prodding and shaping the culture of an emerging region and nation.

• 

  Joseph De Luca: Selected Works: Five Decades (Drawings, Paintings, Constructions)

  Joseph De Luca and Anne Leonardi

  Subtitle from cover.
  Catalog of a retrospective exhibition held in Gallery Fifty of Building Fifty at the Grand Traverse Commons in Traverse City, Michigan. "Three dimensional constructions and other works executed [from 1958-2010] were added to give the catalog greater continuity"--P. iii.

• 

  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 structure of African epics. As Deme notes, the fantastic can be fully appreciated only against the cosmological background of the societies that produce those heroic tales. This book not only contributes to the scholarship on African oral literature, but also adds reshapes our understanding of heroic literature in general.