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...

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....

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...

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...