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Books: Text Books: American Literature
How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Linesby Thomas C. Foster List Price: $13.95 Available from Amazon $10.74 On 7-21-2006 
See Item's Page Book Description What does it mean when a fictional hero takes a journey?. Shares a meal? Gets drenched in a sudden rain shower? Often, there is much more going on in a novel or poem than is readily visible on the surface -- a symbol, maybe, that remains elusive, or an unexpected twist on a character -- and there's that sneaking suspicion that the deeper meaning of a literary text keeps escaping you. In this practical and amusing guide to literature, Thomas C. Foster shows how easy and gratifying it is to unlock those hidden truths, and to discover a world where a road leads to a quest; a shared meal may signify a communion; and rain, whether cleansing or destructive, is never just rain. Ranging from major themes to literary models, narrative devices, and form, How to Read literature Like a Professor is the perfect companion for making your reading experience more enriching, satisfying, and fun. About The Author Tom Foster is Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Flint, where he teaches classes in contemporary fiction, drama and poetry as well as creative writing and composition. He has written several books on twentieth-century British and Irish literature and poetry and lives in East Lansing, Michigan. |
Miss American Pie: A Diaryby Margaret Sartor List Price: $19.95 Available from Amazon $12.97 On 7-21-2006 
See Item's Page From Publishers Weekly Beginning in 1972, at age 13, Sartor records the highlights and low points of her formative years in Montgomery, Ala. Through succinct diary entries (Mar. 1, 1973: "I hate my buck teeth. I love Edgar Napoleon") that grow more insightful as she ages, the author, who teaches documentary studies at Duke, reveals her insecurities, spiritual awakening and early sexual encounters. Hers is a very normal American childhood, though a few things stand out: she experiences desegregation firsthand (she's white, but witnesses racism toward black kids) and is torn between her evangelical Christian community and her sectarian household. There are moments of impressive maturity and self-awareness, such as the May 18, 1977, entry: "I'm giving the invocation at the graduation ceremony. I'm sure they asked me because I'm the only kid willing to pray out loud who doesn't hand out pamphlets on the Second Coming"; or June 1, 1977: "Can you be alone when you are physically with someone?" Sartor's reproduction of her diaries differs from traditional memoirs in its lack of adult interpretation of events, told through the distance of time and wisdom. That may make it unusual, but publishing such generally mediocre diaries feels self-indulgent. Copyright © Reed business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Two journals, both written by teens, offer intimate, documentary views of disparate adolescent lives. Sartor, a teacher at Duke University, presents her diary-format account, based on letters and notebooks, of her teen years in Montgomery, Louisiana, during the 1970s. The entries are timely, with references to desegregation and racism and also to the Evangelical Christianity gaining prominence in the Deep South: "Satan came closer to me tonight than I've ever felt," she writes. Most entries, though, speak about common adolescent experiences, and her candor makes even the familiar captivating, whether she is frustrated with her body, suffering depression and insecurity, or finding the bold strength to tell a boyfriend that "her personality is not up for a total renovation." The creators of The Notebook Girls are four contemporary Manhattan teens, who started the notebook as a way to stay connected with each other. As in Sartor's diary, the power here is in the raw honesty, and the format--handwritten pages and pasted-in photos--gives even more immediacy. These are girls who, like Sartor, speak in bawdy, vulgar language; tease and tell fart jokes; worry about their bodies, their futures, and their friendships; and experiment with drinking, drugs, and sex. And like Sartor, these girls share sharp observations and a strong sense of identity. "Who the fuck are these guys?" asks one girl. "Who gave them the right to comment on girls' bodies like that?" The communal format creates more jockeying and joking and less personal revelation than a diary might. But taken together, these titles offer a fascinating view of what it means, then and now, to grow up female. Gillian Engberg |
The American Home Front: 1941-1942by Alistair Cooke List Price: $24.00 Available from Amazon $14.40 On 7-21-2006
See Item's Page From Booklist Composed during World War II for British readers, whom the late cultural commentator Cooke felt had heard "rather too much of Washington and New York," this travelogue of America was never published--until now; it proves an interesting eyewitness record on several levels. It recalls transcontinental travel in the pre-interstate highway era, and with greater depth, social problems that Cooke detected beneath the win-the-war exhortations he encountered from coast to coast. Driving out of Washington in February 1942, Cooke headed south, observing the Jim Crow regime en route to Gulf Coast ports bursting with military construction and a housing crisis. He then took a train to California, where he was disgusted by the internment of Japanese Americans, then in full swing. Circling back east in a car via Seattle, Denver, Kansas City, Minneapolis and St. Paul, and the Great Lakes cities, Cooke discovered their war industries and ethnographic compositions. Perceptive about the moment, prescient about postwar possibilities, Cooke's tour makes for profitable reading. Gilbert Taylor Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Book Description From the famous BBC correspondent and television host comes a remarkably insightful and detailed firsthand portrait of America during the early days of World War II. Shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Alistair Cooke, a newly naturalized American citizen, set out to see his country as it was undergoing monumental change. Cooke traveled small highways, with their advertising signs and their local topography, in an age before the interstate highway system. In The American Home Front — a fascinating artifact, a charming travelogue, and a sharp portrait of America — Cooke chronicles the regional glories he encounters and the reactions of the citizens to war, from indifference to grief, from opportunism to resilience under military threat. Filled with touching personal stories of the effects of war, from a Japanese family facing internment that tries to sell Cooke their car, to the experiences of the unemployed relocating in hopes of jobs in a gunpowder factory, The American Home Front is the work of an experienced, talented journalist; it is intelligent, touching, and funny. |
A Little History of the Worldby E. H. Gombrich List Price: $25.00 Available from Amazon $15.75 On 7-21-2006 
See Item's Page From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. This is an unusual work for Yale: a children's history originally published 70 years ago. But it is a work one can quickly come to love. Gombrich, later known as an art historian, wrote this primer in 1935, when he was a young man in Vienna (it was soon banned by the Nazis as too "pacifist"). Rewritten (and updated) in English mainly by Gombrich himself (who died in 2001, age 92, while working on it), the book is still aimed at children, as the language makes clear: "Then, slowly the clouds parted to reveal the starry night of the Middle Ages." But while he addresses his readers directly at times, Gombrich never talks down to them. Using vivid imagery, storytelling and sly humor, he brings history to life in a way that adults as well as children can appreciate.The book displays a breadth of knowledge, as Gombrich begins with prehistoric man and ends with the close of WWII. In the final, newly added chapter, Gombrich's tone sadly darkens as he relates the rise of Hitler and his own escape from the Holocaust—children, he writes, "must learn from history how easy it is for human beings to be transformed into inhuman beings"—and ends on a note of cautious optimism about humanity's future. (Oct. 13) Copyright © Reed business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist This is the first English translation of a book written in 1935 in German and translated into 18 languages. Thirty years later, a second German edition was published with a new final chapter. In 40 brief chapters, Gombrich relates the history of humankind from the Stone Age through World War II. In between are historic accounts of such topics as cave people and their inventions (including speech), ancient life along the Nile and in Mesopotamia and Greece, the growth of religion, the Dark Ages, the age of chivalry, the New World, and the Thirty Years' War. Much of this history is told through concise sketches of such figures as Confucius, Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Jesus Christ, Charlemagne, Leonardo da Vinci, Napoleon, and Columbus. Gombrich was asked to write a history geared to younger readers, so the book is filled with innumerable dates and facts, yet it is one to be read by adults. With 41 black-and-white woodcut illustrations and nine maps, it is a timeless and engaging narrative of the human race. George Cohen Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved |
From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literatureby Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury List Price: $18.00 Available from Amazon $12.60 On 7-21-2006 
See Item's Page From Library Journal In this breezy but densely packed new study of American literature from the founding fathers through 1990, the authors touch on all the major and many of the minor works in the context of both their contemporary literary traditions and modern iconoclastic views. Although more space is devoted to the modern and postmodern scene, this is an excellent and readable survey of nearly 300 years of American writing and literary criticism in a flowing style that shows no signs of the tremendous concentration of information. Sure to become a classic; for general and special literature collections. - Shelley Cox, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale Copyright 1991 Reed business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Kirkus Reviews From Ruland (English and American Literature/Washington State Univ.) and critic-novelist Bradbury (The Modern World: Ten Great Writers; Unsent Letters--both 1988, etc.)--a sound, balanced account of how American writers created works that reflected ``a new nation with new experience, a new science and a new politics on a new continent.'' Neither idiosyncratic nor iconoclastic, this introductory history is, though, sometimes excessively respectful toward the academically au courant. Ruland and Bradbury, an American and Englishman, respectively, nervously tip their hats to multiculturalism, and will leave their audience of general readers scratching their heads over why more attention is paid to the structuralists and deconstructionists than to luminaries like John Cheever, Thomas Wolfe, Edmund Wilson, H.L. Mencken, and Tennessee Williams. American theater (with the exception of Eugene O'Neill) is inexcusably slighted, while popular genres such as detective and science fiction are more understandably ignored. When it comes to the early development of American literature, however, the authors are on surer ground and perform ably. In tracing the transition from the allegorical mode of the Puritans to the symbolist mode of the American Literary Renaissance, they explore how ``America became a testing place of language and narrativepart of a lasting endeavor to discover the intended nature and purpose of the New World.'' By examining authors in their historical as well as aesthetic context, they make a number of connections not commonly discussed (e.g., how Mark Twain and his contemporaries missed out on the combat experience in the Civil War). Despite its unwillingness to lance some academic sacred cows, then, this is a comprehensive, often vibrant history of how American writers declared independence from older European forms before making their own unique contributions to world literature. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. |
A First Book in American Historyby Edward Eggleston List Price: $19.95 Available from Amazon $12.97 On 7-21-2006
See Item's Page Education Reporter, "Children Will Love Discovering 'Lost Classics,'" May 1997 This book is particularly teacher-friendly and well-suited for home schoolers Book Description Continuing the biographical approach to teaching history found in his Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans, Eggleston draws a more in-depth picture of the development of the United Ststes using the stories of the living and breathing Americans who made it all happen. Especially valuable for home schoolers or those simply wishing to supplement their children's education, here you'll find all the features you would expect in a teacher-friendly textbook: study questions after each chapter, definitions of pertinent words, maps and illustrations, and an index for easy cross-reference. |
Flag: An American Biographyby Marc Leepson and Nelson DeMille List Price: $24.95 Available from Amazon $15.72 On 7-21-2006
See Item's Page From Publishers Weekly Leepson notes that "no country in the world can match the intensity of the American citizenry's attachment to the Stars and Stripes." He goes on to chart the evolution of the flag and Americans' relationship with it in its detail-packed history. Despite the famous image in George Washington Crossing the Delaware, Leepson (Saving Monticello) says, the general's boat did not display the Stars and Stripes; the Continental Congress hadn't yet determined what the American flag would be. And "flagmania," as a 19th-century newspaper termed it, began only with the start of the Civil War. Embraced by the Ku Klux Klan, burned by Vietnam War protestors, the Stars and Stripes was again embraced in the wake of 9/11 as a ubiquitous symbol of American solidarity. Such was the revived flagmania, Leepson relates, that the flag was used to sell everything from contact lenses to disposable diapers. From reverence to kitsch, Americans' attitudes to their flag and its mythology have changed over the years, and Leepson does a creditable job of recounting those changes just in time for July 4. Copyright © Reed business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Chronicling the two-centuries-plus history of the U.S. flag, Leepson considers the abundant stories that purport to be the truth about Old Glory. That moniker, like Francis Scott Key's naming the flag the "star-spangled banner," arose from reliable historical sources. But other commonly accepted views of the flag are more dubious, such as its depiction in historical paintings of the Revolutionary War--impossible, rules Leepson, since the Continental Army marched under regimental flags, not the drapery Betsy Ross stitched together under George Washington's approving eye, a legend almost certainly made from whole cloth. In truth, explains the author, interest in the flag's origins dates from the Civil War and its aftermath, when nationalistic feeling about the flag first welled up, and ever since, in times of crisis, has been a distinctive American trait. Previously, the Stars and Stripes simply identified government installations. Its evolution into a symbol of popular affection, though one invested with divergent emotions, as laws and lawsuits concerning its proper display evince, animate Leepson's evenhanded, myth-sifting account. Gilbert Taylor Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved |
Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Fifth Editionby American Psychological Association Available from Amazon $26.95 On 7-21-2006 
See Item's Page Book Description a new and improved style manual for writers and students in psychology and other behavioral and social sciences gives writers easy-to-use guidelines on how to prepare manuscripts according to APA style. Book Info Style manual for writers, editors, students, educators, and professionals across all fields. Provides clear guidance on grammar, the mechanics of writing, and APA style. Includes examples, new guidelines and advice, and more. Previous edition: c1994. Softcover, wire-spiral edition is also available. Hardcover edition due later. |
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