Books by WMU Authors from 2020-2024

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  Muslim American City: Gender and Religion in Metro Detroit

  Alisa Perkins

  In 2004, the al-Islah Islamic Center in Hamtramck, Michigan, set off a contentious controversy when it requested permission to use loudspeakers to broadcast the adhān, or Islamic call to prayer. The issue gained international notoriety when media outlets from around the world flocked to the city to report on what had become a civil battle between religious tolerance and Islamophobic sentiment. The Hamtramck council voted unanimously to allow mosques to broadcast the adhān, making it one of the few US cities to officially permit it through specific legislation.
  
  Muslim American City explores how debates over Muslim Americans’ use of both public and political space have challenged and ultimately reshaped the boundaries of urban belonging. Drawing on more than ten years of ethnographic research in Hamtramck, which boasts one of the largest concentrations of Muslim residents of any American city, Alisa Perkins shows how the Muslim American population has grown and asserted itself in public life. She explores, for example, the efforts of Muslim American women to maintain gender norms in neighborhoods, mosques, and schools, as well as Muslim Americans’ efforts to organize public responses to municipal initiatives. Her in-depth fieldwork incorporates the perspectives of both Muslims and non-Muslims, including Polish Catholics, African American Protestants, and other city residents.
  
  Drawing particular attention to Muslim American expressions of religious and cultural identity in civil life—particularly in response to discrimination and stereotyping—Perkins questions the popular assumption that the religiosity of Muslim minorities hinders their capacity for full citizenship in secular societies. She shows how Muslims and non-Muslims have, through their negotiations over the issues over the use of space, together invested Muslim practice with new forms of social capital and challenged nationalist and secularist notions of belonging.

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  Advanced Calculus: Theory and Practice

  John Srdjan Petrovic

  Advanced Calculus: Theory and Practice, Second Edition, expands on the material covered in elementary calculus and presents this material in a rigorous manner. The text improves students' problem-solving and proof-writing skills, familiarizes them with the historical development of calculus concepts, and helps them understand the connections among different topics. The book explains how various topics in calculus may seem unrelated but in reality have common roots. Emphasizing historical perspectives, the text gives students a glimpse into the development of calculus and its ideas from the age of Newton and Leibniz to the twentieth century. Nearly 300 examples lead to important theorems.

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  The Evolution Of The Critical Theory Of Religion And Society : Union, Disunion And Reunion Of The Sacred And Profane

  Rudolf J. Siebert

  This book describes the structure and dynamic of the 'critical theory of religion and society' (CRTS), which my friends and I have developed in Europe and America, since the end of World War II in continual discourse with the 'critical theory of society' of the Frankfurt School, from 1946-2020. The book is rooted in the often personal experience of World War II, the following restauration period, the Cold War, and the conflict between West and the Islamic Middle East, Africa and Far East.

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  A Fine Canopy

  Alison Swan

  Alison Swan's collection of poems, A Fine Canopy, illustrates how the natural world envelops and encloses us with so many beautiful things: crowns of leaves, the ubiquitous blue sky, our luminous moon, and snow. So much snow. An ecopoet whose writing shows her advocacy for natural resources, in this collection Swan calls the reader to witness, appreciate, and sustain this world before it becomes too late. These poems were written out of an impulse to track down wisdom in the open air, outside of the noisy world of cars and commerce. Swan seeks insight on shores and in scraps of woods and fields-especially on four particular peninsulas: Michigan's upper and lower, Florida, and Washington state's Olympic-and also inside motherhood, which might be the wildest place of all. These are poems about the interconnection of all things, and "knowing things we cannot see". A journey through seasons with a soundtrack of birdsong, Swan's words are incredibly sensory. The reader is made to feel the weight of muddy jeans, the jolt at the tug of a dog's leash, and to see the bright flash of a cardinal's red plumage. Swan's poems remind us that although we all want to make a mark on our world, the smaller the better: stepping into fresh snow, dashing through forests atop dry leaves, laying wet bodies on warm concrete. These quiet interactions with places are as hopeful as they are harmless. Without necessarily tackling the topics head-on, A Fine Canopy evokes the devastation of climate change and the destruction of natural resources. This book engages deeply with the other-than-human to express and investigate alarm, dismay, anger, admiration, adoration in what feels like the end of the world unless we begin to think outside the box. These poems will carry weight with all readers of poetry, especially those who are interested in ecopoetry and connecting with the world around them.

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  How to Walk on Water and Other Stories

  Rachel Swearingen

  In Rachel Swearingen's debut collection, How to Walk on Water and Other Stories, we meet grifters, account executives, waitresses, scientists, and artists who willingly open their doors to trouble. An investment banker falls for a self-made artist who transforms the rooms of her dingy apartment into eerie art installations. A young au pair turns her mundane life into a scene from Key Largo, endangering the child in her care. A down-on-his-luck son moves in with his mother and tries to piece together the brutal attack she survived when he was a baby. A brother helps his wayward sister kidnap her grandson to baptize him in the North Woods. Whether it's a run-down movie theater in Minneapolis, a haunted brownstone in Chicago, a primitive chapel in Northern Michigan, a seedy bar in Seattle, or a tourist hotel in Venice, Italy, Swearingen's powers of observation and suspense show that thoughts as much as place can haunt. The prose is nimble and often heartbreaking. Even as these stories bristle with menace, they soothe with tenderness and humor. The themes of crime and complicity, as well as art and commerce underpin many of these narratives, as does the question of what it means to survive in a world marked by violence and trauma.

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  Children's and Young Adult Comics

  Gwen Athene Tarbox and Derek Parker Royal

  A complete critical guide to the history, form and contexts of the genre, Children's and Young Adult Comics helps readers explore how comics have engaged with one of their most crucial audiences.
  
  In an accessible and easy-to-navigate format, the book covers such topics as:
  
  - The history of comics for children and young adults, from early cartoon strips to the rise of comics as mainstream children's literature
  - Cultural contexts – from the Comics Code Authority to graphic novel adaptations of popular children's texts such as Neil Gaiman's Coraline
  - Key texts – from familiar favourites like Peanuts and Archie Comics to YA graphic novels such as Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese and hybrid works including the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series
  - Important theoretical and critical approaches to studying children's and young adult comics

  
  Children's and Young Adult Comics includes a glossary of crucial critical terms and a lengthy resources section to help students and readers develop their understanding of these genres and pursue independent study.