College of Arts & Letters Bookshelf

A gallery of books by faculty from the College of Arts & Letters, Old Dominion University. Faculty books are also listed under specific departments.

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Deviance and Social Control: A Sociological Perspective
2016
Michelle L. Inderbitzin, Kristin A. Bates, and Randy R. Gainey

This book serves as a guide to students delving into the fascinating world of deviance for the first time. Authors ... offer a clear overview of issues and perspectives in the field, including introductions to classic and current sociological theories as well as research on definitions and causes of deviance and reactions to deviant behavior. The unique text/reader format provides the best of both worlds, offering both substantial original chapters that clearly explain and outline the sociological perspectives on deviance, along with carefully selected articles on deviance and social control taken directly from leading academic journals and books. The Second Edition features updated research, examples of specific forms of deviance, and discussions of policy, as well as a new chapter and readings on global perspectives on deviance and social control. [from Amazon.com]
Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary
2016
Joe Jackson

The epic life story of the Native American holy man who has inspired millions around the world
Black Elk, the Native American holy man, is known to millions of readers around the world from his 1932 testimonial Black Elk Speaks. Adapted by the poet John G. Neihardt from a series of interviews with Black Elk and other elders at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, Black Elk Speaks is one of the most widely read and admired works of American Indian literature. Cryptic and deeply personal, it has been read as a spiritual guide, a philosophical manifesto, and a text to be deconstructed―while the historical Black Elk has faded from view. … [Amazon.com]
Routledge Revivals: Guards imprisoned (1989): Correctional Officers at Work
2016
Lucien X. Lombardo

First published in 1989, Guards Imprisoned provides an in-depth look into the work and working life of prison guards as they perceive and experience it. The author, who was a teacher at Auburn Prison, New York, discovered that little was known about the guard’s perceptions of his "place" in the prison community and set out to explore the dynamics of this key correctional occupation from the perspective of those who do it. The raw data was provided by over 160 hours of interviews with guards and is presented in the order of a "natural history" — from their pre-recruitment images of prison to the search for satisfaction as experienced guards. The book also includes a follow-up with the officers who were originally interviewed in 1976, assessing patterns of change and stability in their attitudes and behaviors... [From Amazon.com]
Crimes of the Powerful: An Introduction
2016
Dawn L. Rothe and David Kauzlarich

Crimes of the Powerful: An introduction is the first textbook to bring together and show the symbiotic relationships between the related fields of state crime, white-collar crime, corporate crime, financial crime, organized crime, and environmental crime. Dawn L. Rothe and David Kauzlarich introduce the many types of crimes, methodological issues associated with research, theoretical relevance, and issues surrounding regulations and social controls for crimes of the powerful… [From Amazon.com]
Crisis Communication and Crisis Management: An Ethical Approach
2016
Burton St. John III and Yvette E. Pearson

The text introduces students to the fundamentals of crisis communication using an ethical approach, integrating ethical reasoning into all the key steps that communicators must take to successfully manage a crisis. The book combines comprehensive coverage of the key skills, concepts and theories with an extensive collection of case studies.
Advancing Interdisciplinary Approaches to International Relations
2016
Steve A. Yetiv (Editor) and Patrick James (Editor)

This edited volume breaks new ground by innovatively drawing on multiple disciplines to enhance our understanding of international relations and conflict. The expansion of knowledge across disciplines and the increasingly blurred boundaries in the real world both enable and demand thinking across intellectual borders. While multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary are prominent buzz words, remarkably few books advance them. Yet doing so can sharpen and expand our perspective on academic and real world issues and problems. This book offers the most comprehensive treatment to date and is an invaluable resource for students, scholars and practitioners. [From Amazon.com]
Bilateral Aid to Latin America: Foreign Economic Assistance from Major Donor Nations
2015
Francis Adams

This book offers a comprehensive, detailed account of the bilateral economic assistance of six major donor nations-the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, Japan, and China-to the nations of Latin America. Focus is placed on assistance that is structured to meet basic human needs, enhance social equity, promote economic growth, preserve natural environments, and support political reform... [From Amazon.com]
Communicating Hope and Resilience Across the Lifespan
2015
Gary A. Beck and Thomas J. Socha

From serious illness to natural disasters, humans turn to communication as a major source of strength to help us bounce back and to keep growing and thriving. Communicating Hope and Resilience Across the Lifespan addresses the various ways in which communication plays an important role in fostering hope and resilience. Adopting a lifespan approach and offering a new framework to expand our understanding of the concepts of «hope» and «resilience» from a communication perspective, contributors highlight the variety of «stressors» that people may encounter in their lives. They examine connections between the cognitive dimensions of hope such as self-worth, self-efficacy, and creative problem solving. They look at the variety of messages that can facilitate or inhibit experiencing hope in relationships, groups, and organizations. Other contributors look at how communication that can build strengths, enhance preparation, and model successful adaptation to change has the potential to lessen the negative impact of stress, demonstrating resilience. As an important counterpoint to recent work focusing on what goes wrong in interpersonal relationships, communication that has the potential to uplift and facilitate responses to stressful circumstances is emphasized throughout this volume. By offering a detailed examination of how to communicate hope and resilience, this book presents practical lessons for individuals, marriages, families, relationship experts, as well as a variety of other practitioners. [Amazon.com]
Voting Rights Under Fire: The Continuing Struggle for People of Color
2015
Donathan L. Brown and Michael L. Clemens

With the increasing demands for changes in how we vote, the authors analyze the complications of race tied to these proposed policies through historical and contemporary challenges.
Massively Parallel Globalization: Explorations in Self-Organization and World Politics
2015
David C. Earnest

In this era of globalization, people organize into fluid, adaptive networks to solve complex problems and provide resources that nation-states cannot. Examples include the Grameen Bank, mHealth, and the Ushahidi open source software project. Why do these networks succeed where nation-states fail? Only recently have social scientists developed tools to understand exactly how these complex networks self-organize, emerge, adapt, and solve collective problems. Three of these tools—agent-based modeling, social network analysis, and evolutionary computing—are converging in a field known as computational social science. In this provocative book, David C. Earnest discusses how computational social science helps us understand “massively parallel globalization.” Using “explorations” of global systems ranging from fisheries to banking, Earnest illustrates the promise of computer models for explaining the surprises, cascades, and complexity that characterize global politics today. These examples of massively parallel globalization contrast sharply with the hierarchical and inflexible governmental bureaucracies that are poorly suited to solve many of today’s transnational and global challenges. [From Amazon.com]
A Survivor′s Guide to R: An Introduction for the Uninitiated and the Unnerved
2015
Kurt Taylor Gaubatz

Focusing on developing practical R skills rather than teaching pure statistics, Dr. Kurt Taylor Gaubatz’s A Survivor’s Guide to R provides a gentle yet thorough introduction to R. The book is structured around critical R tasks, and focuses on applied knowledge, rather than abstract concepts. Gaubatz’s easy-to-read approach helps students with little or no background in statistics or programming to develop real-world R skills through straightforward coverage of R objects and functions. Focusing on real-world data, the challenges of dataset construction, and the use of R’s powerful graphing tools, the guide is written in an accessible, sympathetic, even humorous style that ensures students acquire functional R skills they can use in their own projects and carry into their work beyond the classroom. [From Amazon.com]
Leaving Iran: Between Migration and Exile
2015
Farideh Goldin

In 1976, at the age of twenty-three, Farideh Goldin left Iran in search of her imagined America. While she settled uneasily into American life, the political unrest in Iran intensified and in 1979, Farideh's family was forced to flee. They arrived in Israel as refugees. Farideh's father was a well-respected son of the chief rabbi and dayan of the Jews of Shiraz. During his last visit to the United States in 2006, he handed Farideh his memoir that chronicled the years of his life after exile. Leaving Iran knits together his story of dislocation and loss with Farideh's own experience as an Iranian Jew in a newly adopted home. [Amazon.com]
Foundational Practices of Online Writing Instruction
2015
Beth L. Hewitt (Editor) and Kevin Eric DePew (Editor)

This is an Open Textbook available through the Open Textbook Library: https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/foundational-practices-of-online-writing-instruction. Reviews are available there.

Foundational Practices in Online Writing Instruction (OWI) addresses the questions and decisions that administrators and instructors most need to consider when developing online writing programs and courses. Written by experts in the field (members of the Conference on College Composition and Communication Committee for Effective Practices in OWI and other experts and stakeholders).... The editors believe that the field of writing studies is on a trajectory in which most courses will be mediated online to various degrees; therefore the principles detailed in this collection may become the basis for future writing instruction practices. ... [Amazon.com]
Newswomen: Twenty-Five Years of Front-Page Journalism
2015
Joyce Hoffmann (Editor)

[This] is an anthology of stellar work by 17 seventeen great female literary and investigative reporters whose newspaper writing has garnered awards over the past quarter century. Each chapter features a bio, a selected story, and an author's afterwords prepared especially for this book. A large percentage of college and graduate school journalism students are women. Yet textbooks and resource material available is decidedly male centric. ... [This book] includes the work of women journalists who wrote for top newspapers and alternative weeklies during the golden age of newsprint journalism.
Perspectives on Deviance and Social Control
2015
Michelle Lee Inderbitzin, Kristin Ann Bates, and Randy R. Gainey

Perspectives on Deviance and Social Control by Michelle Inderbitzin, Kristin Bates, and Randy Gainey is a core textbook that provides a sociological examination of deviance and social control in society. Derived from the successful text/reader version, this concise and student-friendly resource uses sociological theories to explain a variety of issues related to deviant behavior and societal reactions to deviance. The authors briefly explain the development of major sociological theoretical perspectives and use current research and examples to show how those theories are used to think about and study the causes of deviant behavior and the reactions to it. [from Amazon.com]
Fox Tooth Heart: Stories
2015
John McManus

John McManus's long awaited short story collection encompasses the geographic limits of America, from trailers hidden in deep Southern woods to an Arkansas ranch converted into an elephant refuge. His lost-soul characters reel precariously between common anxiety and drug-enhanced paranoia, sober reality and fearsome hallucination. These nine masterpieces of twisted humor and pathos re-establish McManus as one of the most bracing voices of our time. [Amazon.com]
The Path of Humility: Caravaggio and Carlo Borromeo
2015
Anne Muraoka

The Path of Humility: Caravaggio and Carlo Borromeo establishes a fundamental relationship between the Franciscan humility of Archbishop of Milan Carlo Borromeo and the Roman sacred works of Caravaggio. This is the first book to consider and focus entirely upon these two seemingly anomalous personalities of the Counter-Reformation. The import of Caravaggio’s Lombard artistic heritage has long been seen as pivotal to the development of his sacred style, but it was not his only source of inspiration. This book seeks to enlarge the discourse surrounding Caravaggio’s style by placing him firmly in the environment of Borromean Milan, a city whose urban fabric was transformed into a metaphorical Via Crucis. This book departs from the prevailing preoccupation – the artist’s experience in Rome as fundamental to his formulation of sacred style – and toward his formative years in Borromeo’s Milan, where humility reigned supreme. This book is intended for a broad, yet specialized readership interested in Counter-Reformation art and devotion. It serves as a critical text for undergraduate and graduate art history courses on Baroque art, Caravaggio, and Counter-Reformation art. [From Amazon.com]
Family Violence and Criminal Justice: A Life-Course Approach
2015
Brian K. Payne and Randy R. Gainey

The historical context of family violence is explored, as well as the various forms of violence, their prevalence in specific stages of life, and responses to it made by the criminal justice system and other agencies. The linkage among child abuse, partner violence and elder abuse is scrutinized, and the usefulness of the life-course approach is couched in terms of its potential effect on policy implications; research methods that recognize the importance of life stages, trajectories, and transitions; and crime causation theories that can be enhanced by it. [from Amazon.com]
Introduction to Criminal Justice: A Balanced Approach
2015
Brian K. Payne, Willard M. Oliver, and Nancy E. Marion

Introduction to Criminal Justice: A Balanced Approach provides students with engaging, comprehensive, and up-to-date coverage of all aspects of the criminal justice system. Esteemed authors Brian K. Payne, Willard M. Oliver, and Nancy E. Marion explore criminal justice from a student-centered perspective by presenting research-driven material in an accessible, clear, and succinct writing style. Two unique chapters on Perspectives on Crime and Criminal Justice Research and Crime Typologies provide students with the foundational knowledge that they need to be critical thinkers and active participants within their chosen field. Students are encouraged to imagine themselves in specific criminal justice situations and decide how they would respond to the situation with a balanced and effective solution. By exploring criminal justice from a balanced perspective with an issues-oriented approach, students will understand how decision-making is critical to the criminal justice process. In particular, students will come to appreciate how their own future careers will be shaped by the decisions they make. [From Amazon.com]
Reading Life: On Books, Memory, and Travel
2015
Michael Pearson

A unique blend of memoir, literary appreciation, and travel narrative, Reading Life is a series of interrelated essays tracking the relationship between books and experience, dramatizing and reflecting on how stories lead us into the world, and how we transform that engagement with the world back into personal narrative. A love story about books and travel, Reading Life is, by turns, comic and serious. Chapters shift in tone--from a lyrical quality akin to Adam Gopnik's to a tongue-in-cheek humor reminiscent of Ian Frazier's. The book transports the reader from the high desert landscape of Cather's New Mexico and the rocky coastline of E. B. White's Maine to the pilgrimage paths of Cervantes's Spain and the hallucinogenic heat of Bowles's Morocco. At the heart of Reading Life is the belief that stories are vital to our existence. [Amazon.com]
Crimes of Globalization
2015
Dawn L. Rothe and David O. Friedrichs

This book addresses immensely consequential crimes in the world today that, to date, have been almost wholly neglected by students of crime and criminal justice: crimes of globalization. This term refers to the hugely harmful consequences of the policies and practices of international financial institutions – principally in the global South. A case is made for characterizing these policies and practices specifically as crime. Although there is now a substantial criminological literature on transnational crimes, crimes of states and state-corporate crimes, crimes of globalization intersect with, but are not synonymous with, these crimes… [From Amazon.com]
Selling the Silver Bullet: The Lone Ranger and Transmedia Brand Licensing
2015
Avi Santo

Deciphering how iconic characters gain and retain their status as cultural commodities, Selling the Silver Bullet focuses on the work done by peripheral consumer product and licensing divisions in selectively extending the characters' reach and in cultivating investment in these characters among potential stakeholders. Tracing the Lone Ranger's decades-long career as intellectual property allows Avi Santo to analyze the mechanisms that drive contemporary character licensing and entertainment brand management practices, while at the same time situating the licensing field's development within particular sociohistorical and industrial contexts. He also offers a nuanced assessment of the ways that character licensing firms and consumer product divisions have responded to changing cultural and economic conditions over the past eighty years, which will alter perceptions about the creative and managerial authority these ancillary units wield. [Amazon.com]
Gilded Age, Norfolk, Virginia: Tidewater Wealth, Industry and Propriety
2015
Jaclyn Spainhour

Norfolk's rise as a premier seaport brought with it an increase in power, wealth and industry in the nineteenth century. Local prominent families lived in exquisitely crafted homes and owned flourishing local businesses. Cobblestone lined the Freemason District and downtown streets. The area's elite participated in numerous social clubs, religious groups and philanthropic organizations. One family, the Hunters, lived so luxuriously that they became one of the most fashionable families in the city. Join author Jaclyn Spainhour as she explores Norfolk's social customs, cosmopolitan soirées and more that truly embodied the Gilded Age. [From Amazon.com]
Kongo in the Age of Empire, 1860-1913 The Breakdown of a Moral Order
2015
Jelmer Vos

This richly documented account of the arrival of rubber traders, new Christian missionaries, and the Portuguese colonial state in the Kongo realm is told from the perspective of the kingdom’s inhabitants. Jelmer Vos shows that both Africans and Europeans were able to forward differing social, political, and economic agendas as Kongo’s sacred city of São Salvador became a vital site for the expansion of European imperialism in Central Africa. Kongo people, he argues, built on the kingdom’s long familiarity with Atlantic commerce and cultures to become avid intermediaries in a new system of colonial trade and mission schools.

Vos underlines that Kongo’s incorporation in the European state system also had tragic consequences, including the undermining of local African structures of authority—on which the colonial system actually depended. Kongo in the Age of Empire carefully documents the involvement of Kongo’s royal court in the exercise of Portuguese rule in northern Angola and the ways that Kongo citizens experienced colonial rule as an increasingly illegitimate extension of royal power. [From the publisher]
Secessia
2015
Kent Wascom

New Orleans, May 1862. The largest city in the ill-starred confederacy has fallen to Union troops under the soon-to-be-infamous General Benjamin “the Beast” Butler. The city is rife with madness and rage. When twelve-year-old Joseph Woolsack disappears from his home, he draws into the unrest his mother, Elise, a mixed-race woman passing for white, and his father, Angel, whose long and wicked life is drawing to a close. What follows forces mother and son into a dark new world: Joseph must come to grips with his father’s legacy of violence and his growing sentiment for Cuban exile Marina Fandal, the only survivor of a shipwreck that claimed the lives of her parents. Elise must struggle to maintain a hold on her sanity, her son and her own precarious station, but is threatened by the resurgence of a troubling figure from her past, Dr. Emile Sabatier, a fanatical physician who adores disease and is deeply mired in the conspiracy and intrigue surrounding the occupation of the city. Their paths all intersect with General Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts, a man who history will call a beast, but whose avarice and brutal acumen are ideally suited to the task of governing an “ungovernable city.”

Alternating between the perspectives of the five characters of Elise, Dr. Sabatier, Joseph, Marina, and Butler, Secessia weaves a tapestry of ravenous greed and malformed love, of slavery and desperation, set within the baroque melting-pot that is New Orleans. A Gothic tableaux vivant of epic scope and intimate horror, Secessia is the netherworld reflection of the conflict between north and south. [Amazon.com]