Humanities Books

This is an excellent resource for teachers who want to incorporate the arts into their everyday teaching. Brady's ideas are fresh, fun, and very interesting and valuable for the students! Enjoy!

This book sheds light on a number of topics plaguing music education today. The author is experienced in the field in all grade levels and offers practical advice on what to do in various situations. It is a nice reminder of what we should be doing for the music education profession.

Being a Philosophy major at Oklahoma State University I found this book to be very informative in an ethical perspective. The two authors, Prado and Taylor, have different views on the hot button topic of Physician Assisted Suicide. This gives the reader a broad overview of opinions toward the subjects. The book starts with the basic definition of assisted suicide and goes to the ethics dealing with it. However, the book does not mention anything about the leaglization of assisted suicide because they state regardless of the legality it happens. Personally, I would reccomend this book to anyone who has an intrest in learning about the ethics and morals in the issue of assisted suicide.

This book abounds with guided activities. Activities often build on each other. The instructions for most of the activities are in English. The activities are designed to help one learn to find information in german text of various forms, to aid in building vocabulary, grammatical skills and understanding, and to familiarise one more thoroughly (both linguistically and culturally) with the following topics and more:

Love, Marriage, and Partnership; Typical Men and Women; Family Life; The Older Generation In Business; Problems of the German Youth; Foreigners in Germany; The Search For America; Germany and the Germans; Pollution and Environmental Issues; The Computerworld; Berlin in the Separated Germany; The Thousand Year (Reich) Kingdom; Distinction Between the East and West;

The publication date is 1991, so the cultural information isn't completely up-to-date. For those who haven't any first-hand information on Germany, this information gives a good start.

This book builds on your moderate knowledge of German. It aims not only at improving one's German, but also at helping one learn to understand written German in which one may not recognise every word. There are also dialogues designed to help imporve the construction of one's spoken German.

This is a rare type of book that can change one's life, and even make one a better person. At one level, the ten stories that make up this book are moving reminders of the crushing hardships, deprivations, and injustices that are all-too-common in the so-called "developing" world. Each of these captures a different set of tragic circumstances while describing how the person tries to cope, often through unimaginable degrees of courage and resilience. A number of stories pay tribute to specific humanitarian agencies and the unselfish individuals working within them who are trying to make a positive difference in the lives of largely forgotten people. And that is the central theme that unites all aspects of this book, namely making a difference. Beyond the stories themselves, Ben Schumaker becomes the voice of our common humanity and our collective conscience. His book is a beautifully crafted call for greater compassion, and for a re-evaluation of our priorities and of the sources of meaning in our lives. It's timing could not be better as the world continues to descend into self-interest, and unscrupulous economic systems that ignore social justice. Anyone with a heart will be deeply touched by this wonderful book. Absolutely essential reading.

A volume in the Greenhaven At Issue in History series and edited by Jean Alicia Elster, The Outbreak Of The Civil War is a scholastic text for young adults offering both primary and secondary sources concerning the morass of causes and conflicting agendas that contributed to the eruption of the American Civil War. An excellent, balanced, fair-minded and well-researched resource, The Outbreak Of The Civil War is part of the Opposing Viewpoints series and very highly recommended for both school and community library collections.

Collection of opinions on the treaty by contemporary authors as well additional assessments that is more modern.

Drs. Rankin and Ingersoll have taken the art of management and applied it to health care. This book has a target audience of athletic trainers but it is approproiate for any health care facility. The selection and progression of chapters assists the student in learning the complex subject of management. They have done an excellent job of presenting various views in a non-partial manner. Well recommended!

This is an extraordinarily well-crafted work, and I deeply regret that I did not read it in time to include in the bibliography of my forthcoming book on Information Operations (Amazon, February 2006). This becomes the first of three books I recommend as basic instruction for the adult professional seeking to do Public Diplomacy or Strategic Communication. The second book would be Robert Cialdini's "Influence: Science and Practice," and the third is Lev Manovich, "The Language of the New Media." Of course there are many other good books, but these are the three I have selected from among many possibilities, and I recommend all of them.

The book begins with "know your audience." I consider this very important, because the normal American approach to both Public Diplomacy and Strategic Communication is "who cares what they think, just give them our message." The author excels at including religious and cultural influences in his treatise on evaluating the audience and its interests **in order to be relevant and in order to connect.** I have said this before, but this author says it better: if you do not understand the psychology and sociology of your audience, you will NOT be able to communicate any message to them with credibility or "stickiness."

The book segues to "finding common ground" and then spends an entire chapter on the importance of listening. I am reminded of the book on Iraq, "Squandered Victory," whose most important point was that we failed to listen to anyone in Iraq as we planned and executed our invasion and subsequent "liberation" which most Iraqis now appear to see as "occupation."

Fully a third of the book focuses on what can only be considered to be "intelligence preparation of the battlefield," i.e. know your audience before you even *begin* to conceptualize a message that achieves common ground and desired outcomes. The author then moves on to the message, spending over 60 pages on the minutia of developing the topic, the purpose, and the content. The author excels at both suggesting useful forms of documentation to increase credibility, and useful forms of organization to increase effectiveness of delivery. The author concludes this section of the book with an excellent discussion of how to achieve and leverage "shared values."

Finally, and very much last, the author focuses on the speaker, and how to craft a self-image that is welcomed by the audience. One is reminded of the military spokespeople in combat fatigues, sending their message to the US audience, but portraying an entirely different message to the indigenous audience by simple virtue of being in combat fatigues. Following this section the author focuses on mechanics, with details on visuals, on making "high-stakes" presentations, and includes a check-list for getting it right.

The book concludes with a final chapter on meeting ethical standards. This is the section that confirmed my already strong view that this author is a superb practitioner and teacher. He understands the tangible value of telling the truth and holding the best interests of the audience foremost in mind.

Although this book was written as a college text, and is superb for its intended function, in my personal view most US diplomats and most US military officers have not received in-depth training of this nature, and I regard this book as a superb adult self-study manual that will significantly enhance the professionalism and the achievements of any information operations professional.

The audio CD is essential for the textbook - depending on your piano skills you could get by playing most of the examples, but the CD is a great help. Because some tracks have more than one example on them, using it in the classroom can mean you have to skip through some examples. If you don't mind doing this occasionally, there's nothing else wrong with this CD. Overall, an excellent publication.