UDM Libraries Book of the Week

Love & marriage in early African America

Edited by Frances Smith Foster

Love and Marriage in Early African America brings together a remarkable range of folk sayings, rhymes, songs, poems, letters, lectures, sermons, short stories, memoirs, and autobiographies. Spanning over 100 years, from the slave era to the New Negro Movement, this extraordinary collection contradicts or nuances established notions that slavery fractured families, devalued sexual morality, distorted gender roles, and set in motion forces that now produce dismal and dangerous domestic situations. A culmination of twenty years of diligent research by noted scholar Frances Smith Foster, this anthology features selections on love and courtship, marriage, marriage rituals, and family. A compelling introduction places the primary texts in their social and literary context. A bibliography offers suggestions for further reading.

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African American folktales

Edited by Thomas A. Green

“Aimed at students, educators, and general readers, this volume collects 50 folktales from the African American tradition, including fictional tales, legends, myths, and personal experience narratives, with brief introductions to each. Green (anthropology, Texas A&M U.) organizes tales by theme: origins, heroes, heroines, villains, and fools, society and conflict, and the supernatural. Tales have been modified from their original forms.”

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Prefab green

By Michelle Kaufman and Catherine Remick

Prefabricated housing, an all-purpose term that is used to describe any home that is built partly off-site, is enjoying a revival, thanks to a handful of innovative architects and hip shelter magazines. In its new incarnation, prefab is catching the eye of design-conscious consumers who appreciate its style and efficiency. Now, “built in a factory” means lower cost and higher-quality building components than many site-built homes. Most importantly, prefab and sustainability are a great match. Green prefab offers a more efficient way of building a home. People want homes that are affordable, enduring, healthy, and-now more than ever-environmentally sound.
In Prefab Green, architect Michelle Kaufmann shares her vision of creating thoughtful sustainable design for everyone. Her firm, Michelle Kaufmann Designs, blends sustainable home layouts, eco-friendly materials, and low-energy options to create a “prepackaged” green solution to home design. Kaufmann tells about five eco-principles that are present in every design her firm creates-smart design, eco-materials, energy efficiency, water conservation, and healthy environment-and how they work together to create homes that make a difference.

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King’s dream

By Eric J. Sundquist

“‘In highlighting the roots and ongoing struggle over the content and use of the speech, Eric J. Sundquist has produced one of the best short books we have on the ideas of racial equality from the early days of the American republic up to current Supreme Court decisions.’ George Bornstein, Times Literary Supplement ‘The speech and all that surrounds it – background and consequences – are brought magnificently to life in Eric Sundquist’s new book, King’s Dream… Sundquist has written about race and ethnicity in American culture. In this book he gives us drama and emotion, a powerful sense of history combined with illuminating scholarship.’ Anthony Lewis, New York Times Book Review (Editor’s Choice)”

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Using wikis for online collaboration: the power of the read-write web

By James A. West and Margaret L. West

How can online instructors and course designers’ instruction harness the popular Web 2.0 tool, the wiki, for successful collaboration and learning outcomes? This book focuses on using wikis in the active learning processes that are the hallmark of collaborative learning and constructivism. It provides both the pedagogical background and practical guidelines, tools, and processes for accomplishing these goals with special emphasis on wikis and other collaborative design tools. This book supports the effective design and delivery of online courses through the integration of collaborative writing and design activities.

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Invitation to holistic health: a guide to living a balanced life

By Charlotte Eliopoulos

Invitation to Holistic Health: A Guide to Living a Balanced Life provides solid principles and proven measures to promote optimal health and well-being using a holistic approach. Divided into three parts: Strengthening Your Inner Resources, Developing Health Lifestyle Practices, and Taking Charge of Challenges to the Mind, Body, and Spirit, this easy-to-read guide it provides how-to information when dealing with a variety of health-related issues that includes, but is not limited to, nutrition, exercise, herbal remedies, and homeopathic remedies. The Second Edition as been completely revised and includes current research on the effectiveness and safety of herbs and other complementary and alternative medicine therapies. The chapter on Menopause has been updated to reflect current thinking about the safe use of estrogen replacement, soy products, and other approaches to manage symptoms and new suggested readings and resources have been provided for further exploration into topics.

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Reality TV: remaking television culture

By Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette

The Apprentice. Project Runway. The Bachelor. My Life on the D-list. Extreme Makeover. American Idol. It is virtually impossible to turn on a television without coming across some sort of reality programming. Yet, while this genre has rapidly moved from the fringes of television culture to its lucrative core, critical attention has not kept pace.

Beginning by unearthing its historical roots in early reality shows like Candid Camera and wending its way through An American Family and The Real World to the most recent crop of reality programs, Reality TV, now updated with eight new essays, is one of the first books to address the economic, visual, cultural, audience, and new media dimensions of reality television and has become the standard in the field. The essays provide a complex and comprehensive picture of how and why this genre emerged, what it means, how it differs from earlier television programming, and how it engages societies, industries, and individuals. Topics range from the blending of fact and fiction, to the uses of viewer labor and “interactivity,” to issues of surveillance, gender performativity, hyper-commercialism, and generic parody.

By spanning reality television’s origins in the late 1940s to its current overwhelming popularity, Reality TV demonstrates both the tenacity of the format and its enduring ability to speak to our changing political and social desires and anxieties.

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Seeing through the eyes of Jesus: his revolutionary view of reality and his transcendent significance for faith

By John Baggett

This book is intended for both the religiously committed and the religiously curious. It is an invitation to thoughtful readers from diverse backgrounds to view the realities of their lives through a unique and transforming set of eyes. It is an opportunity to see the particular relationships that constitute the experience of one’s own personal reality today from the standpoint of a remarkable spiritual revolutionary who lived two millennia ago. Consequently, this book is about Jesus, the historical human being, and, at the same time, about the contemporary quest for spiritual consciousness.

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Detroit: ragtime and the jazz age

By Jon Milan

Detroit has always been at the forefront of American popular music development, and the ragtime years and jazz age are no exception. The city’s long history of diversity has served the region well, providing a fertile environment for creating and nurturing some of America’s most distinctly indigenous music. With a focus on the people and places that made Detroit a major contributor to America’s rich musical heritage, Detroit: Ragtime and the Jazz Age provides a unique photo journal of a period stretching from the Civil War to the diminishing years of the big bands in the early 1940s.

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Ad women: how they impact what we need, want and buy

By Juliann Sivulka

Most of the workers in advertising, the media, retail, and fashion are women. Holding key marketing and advertising positions, women shape the basic promotional appeal of almost every consumer product in America. How did the advertising business go from a handful of women in a man’s world to women working in virtually every mass consumer goods industry in America in the space of the twentieth century? Ad Women tells the story of how women have risen to the top of the advertising profession. Juliann Sivulka, a former marketing communications manager and now an advertising educator, describes how, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the recognition of women as primary consumers resulted in the hiring of more women to promote products aimed at the women’s market. At that time manufacturers began to emphasize color, fashion, and style, while advertising embraced a new language of persuasion aimed at women consumers. Soon agencies were recruiting an ensemble of businesswomen–copywriters, product designers, merchandisers, fashion and beauty experts, home economists, editors, and publicists. Through close collaboration with manufacturers, mass media, and retailers, they participated in developing strategies to convince women to buy goods and wove their selling messages into women’s reading, shopping, housework, and leisure activities.

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