Colleges and Universities Books

Great book to read, if want to prepare for tomarrow.

Assistant Professor Adrian Rodgers and Associate Professor Emily M. Rodgers present The Effective Literacy Coach: Using Inquiry To Support Teaching and Learning, a guide that goes a step beyond the nuts and bolts of day-to-day coaching in the search to understand how literacy coaching can breathe renewed life into instructional practice. Offering research-based strategies to improve the teacher-coach connection, The Effective Literacy Coach discusses how to guide group discussions, the art of asking the right question, how to get the most out of one-on-one coaching, and much more. Enthusiastically recommended for remedial reading teachers, whether they work with children, teens, or adults.

George Brown and Madeleine Atkins are both deeply respected researchers and practitioners in this field. Though treatment of each topic is necessarily brief the sections on lectures, small group teaching and research supervision are particularly good. The mnemonics used for example in the section on evaluation, are, perhaps, a little gimmicky; but overall the book is useful.

General Eisenhower's five year tour of duty as president of Columbia is told with great gusto and just the right amount of detail by historian Travis Jacobs. It's jammed with stories that make it fun to read from beginning to end. Plus you really get a sense of history about this nationally renown university. It starts with Murray Butler's 44 year reign--old, blind, and deaf--and the desparate search for a new dynamic replacement.

Was Ike anti-intellectual and anti-academic? Here you see both sides: He refused to honor John Dewey at a 1949 banquet; He was found sitting at his clean desk one day reading a Western novel; yet he spoke eloquently before a history class about the military books that influenced his decisions in Europe during WW2; he made surprise appearances in classes, including an economics course, although he was clearly more fond of Baker Field and the football games.

Critics said he vacationed too much, played too much golf and bridge with his buddies, made too many off-campus appearances, and was seldom available to Columbia professors and administrators. But some of that was due to his staff handlers, who shielded him from his Columbia colleagues. Jacobs tells a delightful story of how history professor Robert Livingston Schuyler got around his handlers and met up with the General on his way home for lunch (pp. 125-26).

After reading Jacobs' biography, I'm amazed how much Eisenhower accomplished, given his constant interruptions--trips to Washington, NATO leader, and running for President in 1952. Yet he gave a lot of good publicity to Columbia, which was hurting financially after the war, and got involved in many university projects (although he hated fundraising).

Jacobs is even handed in reporting on Ike's supporters and detractors. His conclusion is that Ike was ultimately good for Columbia, and Columbia good for Ike even into his presidency; a surprise ending. My only complaint is that you learn very little about his wife Mamie in the book. She's around, but you never know what she's thinking. Otherwise, a mighty enjoyable reading of a little-remembered part of Eisenhower's career.

As a former college teacher who has seen much of the academic dismissal process that Professor Westhues delineates, I must give high praise to this book. It is as informative as any such text should be, and as true to fact--but the reader will find as well a graceful, tongue-in-cheek style that entertains as it educates. This is a daring book of its kind--very clearly written, deeply personal in part, full of humor, and containing many aspects of a narrative story. Some might criticise the informality, but to my mind this is the way some, at least, of the best academic books should be presented. Westhues appeals to all legitimate aspects of rhetoric to prove his case, and he succeeds brilliantly. This is a book for young scholars to read, providing as it does a needed antidote to the pretension, moral aimlessness (and sometimes intellectual emptiness) of too many post-modern texts.

I'm a senior who has been to tons of colleges searching for the "right" one. However when you go to visit you often don't get the full story. What are the people like? How are the professors? What's the food really like? So on and so on however College Prowler gives an accurate description of the school with all of it's dirty little secrets! It's very simple to read and it's an excellent source of reliable information for the school of your choice. The College Prowler dishes about everything in the school that's going to be important to know when you go there. I chose Elon and that's where I'm planning to go all because of the College Prowler!

What a super book! My mom got me this book the other day, and I read through it in one sitting. I have learned what Emory University is really like through the quotes, remarks and editorials written by students who actually go to Emory.

Religion is a touchy subject - one wrong word can imply a deep, personal insult to someone one merely intended to have an intellectual discussion with. "Encountering Faith in the Classroom: Turning Difficult Discussions into Constructive Engagement" is a deftly written look at how to handle discussions in a classroom - a setting unlikely to have students who are all of one faith. Focusing on changing religion from a controversial matter to an enlightening one for all involved, "Encountering Faith in the Classroom: Turning Difficult Discussions into Constructive Engagement" is a seminal pick for any educator who deals with religion on a common basis, and for community library education collections.

An incredibly good book. McAlister dissects and analyzes the representations of the Middle East in various media -- movies, news, plays, books, etc. -- and their relationships to the projection of US global power and the shaping of US cultural identity since the end of World War II. As she puts it, her goal is to address the absence of culture from discussions of the history of US imperialism, the absence of empire from discussions of US culture, and the absence of the US from discussions of postcolonial imperialism.

Among her subjects, all of which she treats deftly and with attentive detail, are: Amiri Baraka's "A Black Mass," the Israeli military raid on Entebbe, the 1977 John Frankenheimer movie "Black Friday," the tour of King Tutankhamen's artifacts through the United States during 1977-1978, Hal Lindsey's "The Late Great Planet Earth," the rise of the Moral Majority, the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1980 and its obsessive coverage in the US media, the prevalence of military revenge movies in the 1980s like "Navy Seals" and "Delta Force," Betty Mahmoody's book "Not without My Daughter," and the Gulf War.

I found particularly compelling her discussion of 1950s biblical epics, such as "Ben-Hur" and "The Ten Commandments." The recent controversy over "The Passion of the Christ" is put into definite context when you see how "The Ten Commandments" was received (and what purposes it served) when it was released in 1956.

I am busy so I will not fill you full of a bunch of reasons this book is so great because it was a bit thick to read start to finish. However, I found it nicely referenced and cross referenced on an assortment of topics current in the area of educational sociology. I was able to easily access what I needed and found it helpful for finishing up my undergraduate thesis work. I think if I pursue graduate level work on this topic that I will find many of the findings in this book quite helpful. The book was well cited and written in a natural and easy prose to read.I reccommend this book over the other thirty I read this semester.