College and University Books

Every student contemplating attending Loyola Chicago should read this book. Whether you plan to commute or live on campus, there is valuable info on safety and recreation and campus life. The school itself is sometimes reluctant to share this info, as not all of it fits in with its self-image.

A quick read, this book provides information that you won't find in Loyola's recruitment pamphlets. It gives prospective students a detailed look not only at Loyola, but also Chicago and all it has to offer. Information is accurate and up to date with student opinions interwoven throughout. Prospective students are finally able to get a 'real' look at Loyola before deciding their college destination.

I can't recommend this book enough for Indiana fans, especially those like me with no memory of the 1953 championship. It was incredibly well-researched, with great information about the state of the game at the time (coming off the point-shaving scandals at CCNY, LIU, and Kentucky), the opposing teams and coaches, the individual players on the team, and the play-by-play action of each of the games. The play-by-play was especially exciting for me, because I went into the book without knowing which games we'd won and lost, so I didn't know the outcomes until the final whistle sounded. It is full of quotes by the players, coaches, and the press articles of the time. Buy it and read it - you won't be disappointed.

Here's a few anecdotes to whet your appetite:

- Indiana lost 3 games that season, and each of them were lost on the last-second shots.

- Branch McCracken told his players at the beginning of each season to avoid "drinking, smoking, and gambling." This worried the players, because they knew these were three of Bobby Leonard's favorite things.

- The Minnesota coach was Ozzie Cowles, who went to Minnesota from Michigan, where he led Michigan to their first ever NCAA tournament appearance. After returning from the NCAA tournament, here's what Cowles had to say: "We'd been gone for a week, but no one seemed to notice. A couple of days after we got back, Fritz Crisler [UM AD and head football coach] stuck his head in my office and asked me where I'd been. That was when I decided that Michigan was no place to coach basketball."

- Because of the draft for the Korean War, there was an exemption that allowed freshmen to play in 1951-52, which allowed Don Schlundt to play as a freshman. He was a sophomore in 52-53, and (answering my trivia question below) he broke the all-time B10 scoring record a bit more than halfway through his sophomore season. Remarkable.

- Though IU beat Kansas in the championship game, it was that Kansas team that really changed college basketball in the years that followed. Kansas had lost Clyde Lovelette the year before and weren't considered contenders. But they changed the way they played defense and adopted Iba's Oklahoma A&M pressure defense that Iba played in the final few minutes of the game when down by less than 6 points. This was a pressure defense that played passing lanes and guarded players without the ball (and new concept). That year's Kansas team decided to play that way for the entire game and almost road their defense to the title.

- Kentucky was banned from playing the entire 52-53 season because of recruiting violations and point-shaving. Kentucky chose not to penalize Rupp, though. At all.

The book starts by laying an excellent historical foundation prior to the '53 seaon. The GI Bill, growth in big state universities, increased emphasis on college sports and the invention of the point spread all led to corruption that threatened the legitimacy of college athletics in the early post WWII years. Hiner goes into fascinating details involving Godfather-like characters with names like Sollazzo to illustrate how the great New York City basketball colleges were brought down by gambling scandals.

Game fixing struck not only the east coast but migrated out to the heartland. Hiner discusses the corruption that forced Kentucky to give up its 1953 SEC season.

The next chapters involve the individual players and how they ended up coming to IU.

There was Leonard, the deadend runt from the railroad tracks of Terre Haute who grew from 5'4" as a sophomore to 6'3 in high school. Rangey Charlie Kraak, whom Branch McCracken snagged from Illinois' Harry Combes' backyard. Dick Farley , the poor kid from a huge family in southern Indiana (Winslow). Burke Scott, the gym rat from Tell City who never really quite believed that McCracken wanted him, and had to decommit from Western Kentucky to attend Indiana. And Don Schlundt, the "rich kid" from South Bend. Schlundt was rich because his family could afford to give him a basketball, which was a rare possession in those days. As a young kid Schlundt was so fat, dumpy and lacking in skills that he needed that basketball so that other kids would play with him.

The following chapters deal with Branch McCracken. Starting with him as a boyhood neighbor of John Wooden to Branch's excellent playing career as a high schooler, collegian and pro. Terrific background on the things that shaped McCracken's philosophies on coaching. Through every phase of his playing career, McCracken loved the running game and couldn't wait to implement as a coach.

To use the running game effectively, McCracken was a stickler for conditioning and Hiner does a good job of describing all the things he did to keep his players in shape, including having them spied on if necessary.

The rest of the book effectively weaves the games of the great '53 IU seaon with wonderful personal stories involving players, coaches, family and friends. The details on the games themselves are very thorough and greatly appreciated by an IU basketball historical nut like me. But since I knew a lot of those details, I liked the personal stories even more. I loved reading about what a scoundrel Bobby Leonard was, and it was all McCraken could do to keep him in line. There are a lot of other nice gems, but one that sticks out is how a few college kids, with no money or a plan to speak of, get themselves to the champioship game in Kansas City and end up storming the court in victory.

If you have much interest at all in the tradition of Indiana University basketball, then you'll enjoy this book.

As a high-school student, I was fascinated by the captivating simplicity of this book.  It described a system of education so complete that I was irresistibly drawn to it. I feel that Maharishi Vedic University--Introduction should be a prerequisite for attending any university. Gain total knowledge, more happiness, creativity, and brilliance in all that you do. 
This is its offering.  Take it!

The knowledge in this book is profound and original, and the new paradigm for education contained within it is a new paradigm for life itself. The book is not only about an innovative approach to education, based upon knowledge and experience leading to a physiologically measurable state of enlightenment, but also about the nature of the most subtle aspects of life: how matter emerges from what physicists call the unified field, a field of pure consciousness, and how programs that enliven consciousness expand one's horizons and possibilities to their highest level. This book is small in size, but deep and rich, and new gems come out each time I read it, so I carry it wherever I go.

Dobie Gillis would NEVER fit into the modern university. Today's college kids are highly-disciplined, rigorously prepared, wildly ambitious. They pursue their training in highly-remunerative professions with single-minded dedication, and if they fall short of the grade needed to guarantee a Fortune 500 placement interview, their equally-determined parents raise Holy Hell until the poor professors (those who don't just pass everyone with an "A" so they can get on with writing books and articles while their TA's actually teach the class) cry uncle. Mind you, such students' idea of blowing off steam seems to consist of becoming poisonously drunk and either wrapping their vehicles around trees or becoming the perpetrator or victim of a date rape . . . Ah, Golden College Days.

Poor Dobie Gillis would just like to figure out what he's going to do when he grows up. At various times, he's studying literature, law, even Egyptology. His real major, of course, is girls. And like him, they're not quite sure what the future holds, but they're going to have fun getting there.

Beneath the surface silliness of these stories, which is often quite charming, lies a gentle portrait of kids becoming adults, and the many possibilities of making a complete idiot of yourself along the path. And a reminder that at one time colleges were not just expensive technical schools, but places where students went to learn about life and the wider world, and, of course, each other.
The junior Mr. Gillis may wind up a grocer (or a newpaper editor, or a banker) like his dad, but he'll be a really lively one for his college experiences.

You might not know it, but THE MANY LOVES OF DOBIE GILLIS: ELEVEN CAMPUS STORIES has been an influence on American humor for over fifty years. Already established as a key humorist by the breakthrough BEARFOOT BOY WITH CHEEK (1943), Max Shulman created an enduring type in a charming Minnesotan named Dobie Gillis, whose ineffable spirit and go-for-it quality has been charming readers ever since this book was published, in 1951.

It's no exaggeration to say that Schulman's brainchild, through Dobie, brought campus humor into the forefront of postwar American life and humor. Two years later the book came out again, just in time for a lackluster MGM musical, THE AFFAIRS OF DOBIE GILLIS, with Bobby Van playing the eternal teen and Debbie Reynolds as one of his many dreamboats (Bob Fosse, who also had a role in the 1953 movie, joked that it was the only black-and-white musical out of Metro since 1938, and he wasn't far from the truth.) Order the VHS if you want, but don't say I told you.

In 1959, CBS-TV turned THE MANY LOVES OF DOBIE GILLIS into a situation comedy starring Dwayne Hickman as Dobie, Frank Faylen as his irascible father and introduced Bob Denver to the world as beatnik "Maynard G. Krebs." The show's four-year run attests to its popularity and excellence, but please don't confuse it with the book, which, once again, seized on a marketing hook and was reissued in this format in 1960. On TV, most of Dobie's foils are adult or male, while in the book--again fortuitously released in this version during 1960--a glamorous if highly idiosyncratic parade of "dreamboats" populates Dobie's social and fantasy life. (Thalia Menninger, played by Tuesday Weld, was the main holdover.)

But the book, which is not a novel but a set of witty narratives, casts Dobie in any number of lights. He is by turns a high-school senior, college freshman, sophomore, senior and law school student with majors in English, Journalism, Engineering, and more, with a father who is by turns an irascible grocery-store owner (which survived into Frank Faylen's role on TV), but also a teacher, small-town Minnesota newspaper editor, and more. Dobie's encounters (or perhaps better-said, clashes with) the opposite sex extend beyond the high-maintenance Thalia Menninger to even less euphonious belles. In fact, the almost Dickensian relish with names that Shulman bestows on Dobie's belles is part and parcel of this book's fun, including Pansy Hammer, Poppy Herring, Chlotilde Ellingboe, and Lola Pfefferkorn. Situations include such horrors as an impossible-to-complete chemistry assignment, an attempt to secure a thousand-dollar dance band with $[...], a round of innocent plagiarism that threatens to turn deadly, and (shades of Seinfeld) - Dobie meets yet another wonderful girl but doesn't know her name!

Although the book runs not much more than 200 pages and the price, no matter what condition the book is in, is bound to run more than the $[...] the hardbound commanded in 1960, this is a definite go-for-it treasure of American wit and humor. Highly recommended. Those who get the Dobie habit big-time will probably also want to seek out some of Shulman's non-Dobie work: 1943's BAREFOOT BOY WITH CHEEK and the novel RALLY `ROUND THE FLAG, BOYS, which inspired the movie comedy with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.

The McDonaldization of Higher Education is a timely reminder of what is being lost in HE today. The book contains contributions from British, American and Australian academics, who engage with, and in some instances go beyond, the themes of the McDonaldization thesis in relation to the university. In particular, Dennis Hayes, Frank Füredi, Claire Fox and Robin Wynyard offer new insights into the shift towards the 'therapeutic' university (Hayes), how the bureaucratisation of HE in Britain has gone far beyond the flexibility and efficiency associated with McDonaldization (Füredi), why students do not benefit from mass access to HE (Fox), and how what is on offer to students is not knowledge, but a simulated fantasy world (Wynyard). I thoroughly recommend this very challenging, original, readable book, that alerts us to the dangers which lie ahead for HE. It is unfortunate that at present it is only available in an expensive hardback edition. Many academics, students and media people want the book but cannot pay such a price. This is a ridiculous state of affairs. I am sure that a paperback version would make a significant impact on the contemporary debate about the future of HE.

Not since C. Wright Mills wrote the Power Elite has a sociological theory captured the popular imagination as has George Ritzer's McDonaldization thesis. While I find Ritzer's approach more salty and less nourishing than a Big Mac, clearly I am in a minority. The 14 contributors to this thought provoking anthology have gone a long way toward enriching the theory of McDonaldization and providing empirical grounding for the analysis of developments in higher education. As the editors noted in their introduction, Ritzer's entire theoretical antecedent consists of Max Weber's nineteenth century concept of rationalization. Like Weber, Ritzer sees the spread of rational organization into all areas of social life as inevitable and basically beneficial. But also like Weber he is concerned that the application of rationality to social organizations increasingly disenchants the world and leads to an "iron cage" of bureaucracy and standardization. As the authors in this anthology attest, nowhere is this worry more salient than in the halls of academe.
"McDonaldization" was summarized conceptually by Ritzer (1996) as "efficiency," "calculability," "predictability," and "control." The fast-food industry serves as the modern model including: a decentralized franchised structure of ownership; global markets; rational scientific processes of production and management; emphasis on "means of consumption" of standardized products that allows one to "have it your way"; low-wage jobs with no degrees of freedom to depart from a taylorized script; the shift of some productive labor to the consumer (picking up your order, bussing your table); and consumption offered as spectacle and recreation. That is a lot of baggage hanging on a single term; and, as the readings in this anthology reveal, McDonaldization in the university functions less as an analytical concept than as a "free floating signifier" revealing deep seated uncertainties in the professorate. Like Ritzer, half of the contributors to this volume are sociologists (full disclosure: I am also one.) With a couple of exceptions, all the authors are currently professors or administrators in academia, most teach in Britain and draw their examples from British universities. This does not, however, lessen the importance of the book for American readers who may be surprised that processes of McDonaldization have penetrated further in the United Kingdom than in the U.S.

I attended the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine longer ago than I care to recall, but I am personally familiar with many of the doctors and incidents depicted in this well-researched and interestingly written book. It contains more facts per page than anything I have ever read (with the possible exception of the Yellow Pages), but that's the way it should be in a history that documents the key years of an institution that changed from a small medical outpost on the prairie to--as the authors brand Oklahoma taxpayers' expectations--a "Harvard on the plains" medical complex. While the school perhaps never achieved that level of academic excellence, it certainly rose far higher than the Oklahoma state legislature and it's turf-protecting politicians had any right to expect, given their meager level of support both financial and political. Politics aside, the 50's and 60's were great times to be living in Oklahoma City, and this book brings back many of my fondest memories--and reminds me of the many brilliant and industrious men and women I met and worked with at the Medical Center. The book captures it all beautifully, and I highly recommend it for anybody interested in the subject.

I found the book to be extremely interesting, and even humorous at times. The book offers a play by play event listing of the establishment of the medical school and tells a candid story of the founders and individuals that were ultimately responsible for what kind of medical facilities, Oklahoma has today. A "must-read" for Medical Students, Educators and generally any History Buff that would enjoy the "inside" story behind the Oklahoma Medical Center. The photographs are a plus.

I bought this book for my husband's first father's day ... he will love reading it to our daughter!

Made from heavy cardboard with bright colors. Book is cut-out to a football helmet shape.
Inside: One wolverine mascot (photo of wolverine)
Two thunderous stadiums (photo of Big House & Crisler Arena)
Three cheerleaders (photo of three girls)
Four types of equipment (photo of football helment, track gear, golf club & baseball glove)
Five tickets to the game (photos of tickets)
Six tropies of champions (photos of tropies)
Seven bouncing balls (photos of balls)
Eight talented athletes (photos of men & women althletes)
Trying their hardest
Nine wolverine souvenirs (photos of sweatshirts, etc.)
Showing our pride
Ten band members (photos of people playing instruments)
Playing their instruments
Twenty colorful pennants (photos of all the same UofM pennant)
Waving in the wind
Thirty football helmets
Protecting our players
One hundred yards (photo of football field)
In a football field
Thousands of loyal fans (photo of Big House full of people)
Cheering for our team

This book does a great job at illistrating USC athletics into terms that child can understand. It includes the band, different sports teams, the Coliseum, as well as sports equipment.
This book is also well contructed and can take some punishment from little ones. If you are a USC Trojan and have children, then you need to get this book.

Detailed and exhaustive book by/about Ichihashi who came to the US from Japan in 1984 at the age of 16 to study. He graduated from Stanford, got a Ph.D. from Harvard, became a professor at Stanford. He and his wife and son "relocated" to Santa Anita and then Tule Lake and then Granada (Amache) during WWII. He became embittered and an elitist during the war years, which is told in a very dramatic albiet exhaustive fashion in the book via his letters. Following relocation he and his wife returned to a very different Stanford University and environs, which he found very difficult to cope with. Very enjoyable book, personal as well as historical.

Though long and at times cumbersome to read, this is a valuable addition to the literature in Asian American and World War II internment history. Yamato Ichihashi is an all but forgotten figure who has left a written record of his internment experience as he lived it, making this book a rare and important piece that all students of the internment should read. At the same time, this book belongs to the body of literature in Asian American social history. Who knew that in the early 1900s, Stanford University had a Japanese American professor among its faculty? What kind of life did he lead considering his anomalous position as an academic compared to other Japanese in America and the intense anti-Asian atmosphere of those times in the West? How does knowledge of this man's life enrich our understanding of Asian American history and American history at large? All of those questions are satisfyingly answered. Ichihashi's writings take center stage in the book, but Chang provides lucidly written annotations and a bibliographic essay that make the volume quite readable and enjoyable. Chang allows Ichihashi's words to speak for themselves which allows the reader to get a very vivid picture of life in the internment camps. In addition, reading his thoughts about his circumstances as an academic, a professor at Stanford, and an internee offer rare and revealing insights.

Not every funny book is as funny as you would like it to be, and not every funny book makes you happy inside. There are kinds of funny books which in opposite make you feel that your pleasure is empty, and that you after you have laughed yourself out feel sadder.
This is the way I remember ' A Mother's Kisses' a funny book but something whose irreverence made me feel a bit not alright. It was not in any case one of those books that I put aside, and told myself I must reread, simply because it was so so enjoyable. "The Catcher in the Rye" Or "Portnoy's Complaint"
This was for me an amusing book , and one well worth reading and enjoying. But not more.

I read this back in the early 60's when I was about 14 or so. I am still laughing. You will not believe the way this guy writes.It is indescribable. If you are lucky enough to come upon a copy, buy it. You will be so glad you did. Bruce Jay Friedman is a national treasure. His take on life is at first glance quite askew..but, upon further reading, you will find that he "writes" like you "think." I've never experienced this with any other writer. Check out his other books, as well...especially the Lonely Guy's book of Life.

This book is very important for minority students. Unfortunately, it is now 2006 and this version was published in 1996. Minority students need to know about colleges and how they can be accepted on campus. They also need to know the groups on a college campus in which they can seek support and help when needed. I hope that a new version comes out at some point so minority students have somewhere to turn.

Wow! I just received my copy of the guide in the mail from, yes, amazon.com, and I think it's a terrific resource. It will be of use to me and my students as i work with them to gain admission to America's top colleges. A college admissions officer told me Mitchell's guide was a great resource for her, and i can tell already it will be a great resource for me as well