UDM Libraries Book of the Week

College drinking: reframing a social problem

by George W. Dowdall

Drinking has become recognized as one of the most important problems facing today’s college student. Even though college drinking has increased only modestly over the past few decades, concern about its health, behavioral, and safety consequences has risen rapidly. This book examines college drinking as a social problem within higher education, based on interviews with many leading figures engaged in addressing the problem. It assesses the evidence about how many students drink or drink excessively, and what kinds of behavioral and health problems they have as a consequence. The book answers the crucial questions of why students drink and what mixture of personal and environmental factors shape college drinking. The complex links to campus crime and sexual assault are discussed fully. Key practical questions about effective prevention programs and countermeasures are answered in detail. Students and parents can take action to lower the risk of binge drinking by consulting an appendix, which explains how to use college guide data on 400 leading institutions or data about alcohol violations and crime available for several thousand colleges. Anyone concerned with higher education today will find a full discussion of the scope of the problem and what can be done about it.

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Margaret Mead: Making of an American Icon

by Nancy C. Lutkehaus

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.”–Margaret Mead

This quotation–found on posters and bumper stickers, and adopted as the motto for hundreds of organizations worldwide–speaks to the global influence and legacy of the American anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-78). In this insightful and revealing book, Nancy Lutkehaus explains how and why Mead became the best-known anthropologist and female public intellectual in twentieth-century America.

Using photographs, films, television appearances, and materials from newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals, Lutkehaus explores the ways in which Mead became an American cultural heroine. Identifying four key images associated with her–the New Woman, the Anthropologist/Adventurer, the Scientist, and the Public Intellectual–Lutkehaus examines the various meanings that different segments of American society assigned to Mead throughout her lengthy career as a public figure. The author shows that Mead came to represent a new set of values and ideas–about women, non-Western peoples, culture, and America’s role in the twentieth century–that have significantly transformed society and become generally accepted today. Lutkehaus also considers why there has been no other anthropologist since Mead to become as famous.

Margaret Mead is an engaging look at how one woman’s life and accomplishments resonated with the issues that shaped American society and changed her into a celebrity and cultural icon.

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Critical play: radical game design

by Mary Flanagan

For many players, games are entertainment, diversion, relaxation, fantasy. But what if certain games were something more than this, providing not only outlets for entertainment but a means for creative expression, instruments for conceptual thinking, or tools for social change? In Critical Play, artist and game designer Mary Flanagan examines alternative games—games that challenge the accepted norms embedded within the gaming industry—and argues that games designed by artists and activists are reshaping everyday game culture.

Flanagan provides a lively historical context for critical play through twentieth-century art movements, connecting subversive game design to subversive art: her examples of “playing house” include Dadaist puppet shows and The Sims; her discussion of language play includes puns, palindromes, Yoko Ono’s Instruction Paintings, and Jenny Holzer’s messages in LED. Flanagan also looks at artists’ alternative computer-based games, examining projects from Persuasive Games and Gonazalo Frasca and other games created through the use of interventionist strategies in the design process. And she explores games for change, considering the way activist concerns—among them Darfur, worldwide poverty, and AIDS—can be incorporated into game design.

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The Ruin of the Roman Empire

by James J. O’Donnell

The dream Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar shared of uniting Europe, the Medi­terranean, and the Middle East in a single community shuddered and then collapsed in the wars and disasters of the sixth century. It was a looking-glass world, where some Romans ideal­ized the Persian emperor while barbarian kings in Italy and France worked tirelessly to save the pieces of the Roman dream they had inherited. At the center of the old Roman Empire, in his vast and pompous Constantinople palace, the emperor Justinian, with too little education and too much religion, set out to restore his empire to its glories. Step by step, the things he did to bring back the past sealed the doom of his entire civilization.

Historian and classicist James J. O’Donnell—who last brought us his masterful, disturbing, and revelatory biography of Saint Augustine—revisits this old story in a fresh way, bringing home its sometimes painful relevance to issues of our own time.

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