College and University Books

Thoughtful advice on everything from selecting a major to partying to pop quizzes. I enjoyed the planning worksheets in the book - they helped me organize my thoughts and prioritize my game plan. Great illustrations!

It was nice to finally find a book that high school juniors and senior want to read. The other books on the market dealing with the high school to college transition are too boring and preachy! I highly recommend this book for college prep counseling programs because I know how busy juniors and seniors are. It covers very serious topics in a very open, fresh manner. The books make great graduation gifts too!

Every student-athlete in the nation should read this book by Rodney McKissic

Amesome, entertaining book!!!!

Ralph McInerny is best known for his Father Dowling series of mysteries. In his memoir, I Alone Have Escaped to Tell You he goes beyond a mere story about his life. He talks about his life, yet offers advice to aspiring authors on getting started, persevering in the face of rejection and handling success. He explains how to write a mystery story.
His discussions on life and philosophy, a subject he teaches at Notre Dame, gives the readers reason to pause and think. And in some cases, a desire to look at some of the other books he mentions.
Despite being a relatively short book, and a quick read, the information presented makes you go back and reread some sections looking for a different perspective.
Well worth the time to read. I highly recommend it for writers, philosophers and people looking for a good story about an amazing life.

Ralph McInerny has only gained skill as a craftsman as he ages. This account is tightly written and carries the reader along through a remarkable life, but manages to be self-depracating in the process.

As a wordsmith, McInerny is unparelleled and having a dictionary in this journey might be wise. However, his style and grace makes the occasional unfamiliar term non-threatening.

I would recommend this to anyone who loves the academic life or the life of the spirit.

Stephanie Swee

A delightful autobiography -- one can only wish it were longer. The author's life has been full of adventures that most of us can experience only second-hand. Of particular interest may be the chapter on Vatican II and its aftermath, or the chapter delineating the problems of modernist philosophers and the Scholastic antidote. For many readers, especially those of the author's multitudinous mysteries, the chapter titled "Author" will be the best. It refers to several of McInerny's early novels, which though sadly out of print are well worth the trouble of tracking down in libraries.

One would think that Notre Dame could employ a scholarship student to do the proofreading. Apparently only a spell-checker is used, as words occasionally appear under the guise of other words' spellings, but misspellings that coincide with no other word do not. This book deserved better. The upshot is that a few sentences have to be read several times over in order to be degarbled. But there are many more sentences worth rereading for their intrinsic interest -- I think you'll be glad to have read this book.

Even though I'm not from the Urbana area, I found this book to be very enjoyable. I liked the idea of 150 different stories that were told. Many of them were very interesting. I would definitely recommend this book and hope that the author, Tom Kacich, will write future books. I thought his insight into the stories was very informative.

I consider myself to be an avid reader and I like the books I read to be interesting and easy to read. I found that Hot Type by Tom Kacich is the best of both worlds for me - the stories come from Champaign and Urbana in Illinois but they could easily be from any town in this country. The stories in the book are compelling and the format of the book allows the reader to read a few stories at a time or the entire book at once. Mr. Kacich has done a fine job researching the stories and the photos are interesting, too. Hot Type is not just a book for people from Illinois but a must for all avid readers!

..but is it too late? No it isn't if just regents and professors would finally be humble and honest enough to open their eyes and understand why there are universities. But are they...?

I was extremely pleased to read such a well written and well researched analysis of the profound problems facing higher education in America. This book should be required reading for all boards of regents and those supervising policies at universities! Anyone supporting universities-which is all of us, in the case of public institutions-should read this book to understand what your (our) money is being used for. Rather than just pointing fingers, Anderson offers valuable suggestions that could really help improve our system.

In Search of Susanna is a remarkable transgeneric experiment in life writing, a densely textured "word quilt" in Bunkers' words, testifying to the author's passionate determination not only to reclaim her family past but to affirm a vital future for the female descendants who look back to Susanna and discover themselves." --William L. Andrews, University of North Carolina.

"In Search of Susanna is a lovely weaving together of threads from the ancestral past to tell a story of the present and future. The Susanna sought in this book--and beautifully evoked--is not only Suzanne Bunkers' great-great-grandmother but the author and her daughter as well. No one restores to us the lives of women across generations as gracefully and as movingly as Suzanne Bunkers."--James Olney, Editor, Southern Review

This book documents the history of women in education. It is a wonderful resource for those of us who did not run across the obstacles that our mothers and our grandmothers did when they pursued education. I feel that this should be a required text for all women in higher education instituitons.

I used the book as an optional text in a course on the history of higher education. It adds a dimension to the topic that is missed by most text books-yes there were women involved in the history of higher education!!! While most texts mention women, they tend to highlight the unique rather than the norm. This book does an excellent job of explaining how the average American woman faired in higher education beginning in the early 19th century.

All I can say in incredible. If you're an IU fan you NEED this book.

Incredibly comprehensive, historically correct, and utterly fascinating telling of the history of Indiana University Basketball. I read this book cover to cover and even use it to look up different facts (like seeing if 45 points WAS the Assembly Hall shot clock record low point total).

If you are a fan of one of the most storied programs in NCAA history, the IU men's basketball team, this is as close to a must have as you can get.

With this, his name-making book, Hilal Khashan offers insightful analysis of the Lebanese predicament as manifested by the Lebanese themselves. He is to be commended for his courageous and path-breaking study. Professor Khashan has done what no other specialist on Lebanon has dared or could articulate before -- he has the presented the bitter facts as they are. This is one of the very few books on Lebanon that will guide us to a better understanding of Lebanese politics in the next millenium and beyond!

Hilal Khashan, Lebanon's leading pollster, has written a cogent book that provided me with deep theoretical and methodological insights during the preparation of my Ph.D. thesis. In fact, many researchers on education employing the content analysis approach to confessional pluralism in Lebanon find this impressive empirical work useful to uncover the complex set of aggregated political factors which are pronounced and perhaps reproduced in this country's educational policies and practices. Judged by the sheer mass of new data and complex analysis which Professor Khashan provides, this book represents a major contribution to the understanding of the subtle and complex nature of the confessional conflict in Lebanon. This monograph has a twofold objective; first, it reviews some interesting methodological issues; and second, it presents the cornucopia of original findings reported by the author. The title of the book signifies a relatively new approach to research on the roots of the corrosive confessional conflict in Lebanon. This approach incorporates a range of theoretical perspectives and original quantitative-qualitative research techniques.... Khashan's work transcends all other works on Lebanon by the quality and comprehensiveness of his data, as well as the sophisticated statistical techniques which he expertly utilizes. This is a truly an unsurpassed book on Lebanese society. It tackles without apology difficult issues which most Lebanese do not like to discuss or even admit. ...Khashan's incorporation of regression analysis filled much of the gap caused by the paucity of empirical data on Lebanon's political viability. Shortage of statistics as those generated by the author in the past tended to stymie research on politics in Lebanon. In this book Khashan has addressed the political arena of Lebanon from a wholly new perspective for which he must be commended. Any observer of post-Tai'f Lebanese politics will readily endorse the author's conclusions and approve of his recommendations. This work shall continue to guide scholars surfeited of research in their own field into provocative horizons. Kamal E. Abouchedid, PhD., Center for Ethnic Studies in Education, The University of Manchester, UK.

This really is a very nice book, with fabulous photgraphy which makes the book worth every penny of its price. The book was written just before the admission of women to its school, and therefore focuses on it being an all male school.

One of the things I loved about this book is how contemporary it is. Normally when I have picked up books on military colleges, the author spends pages and pages going on about the schools hisotry and its early formation and those who were involved in it. A miniscule amount of time is spent looking at the lives of cadets and how the school is structured (such was the case with Drawing out the Man, a historical book by a VMI grad). Fortunetly this is not the case with the Institute. The book looks at the lives of Rats (first year cadets) as it is right now and their transitions through the school.

This book has also taught me how far VMI has come. VMI is not afraid of positive making positive changes. Unlike another somewhat infamous military college. VMI will shed some of it more archaic traditions in order to be welcoming to others (There were several shots of multi-ethnic cadets). The school has seemed to shed some of its old emphasis on worhipping the Confederate Old South. And has now turned into a school dedicated to educating young people and building them up with character and fortitude. Which in my eyes is what makes this school truly great and unique.

I am too old to attend VMI now, but if I could I would quickly enter.

Rah! Rah! VMI

This is a very impressive book. The photography is exceptional, and the reproduction of the images on these pages is of high quality. You can practically count the individual threads in the cadets' coatees. I was also pleased to find that the captions accompanying the photos tend to explain what's happening in them, or at least provide some sort of context to the images.

An explanation of the Ratline and the phenomenon of Rat year is an essential component of any book about VMI, and Geoffrey Norman's text does a fine job here, too. This book was produced with the cooperation of VMI itself, and that access shows in the detail and thoroughness with which the VMI experience is explained. It may well be true that nobody who hasn't been through the Ratline can ever truly understand it -- but within those limitations, I feel like I have a much better grasp of what is involved, and what it all means, than I did before.

Certainly this book would make a fine gift for a VMI alum, or something he (or she!) would like to get for themselves. VMI parents and friends would get a lot out of it too, as would students and parents thinking about attending the Institute. I've been doing what I can to find and read as many books about "the I" as possible, and so far this is one of the, or perhaps THE, very best. I don't see that evaluation changing any time soon