Becoming Ray Bradbury

Jonathon Eller, University of Illinois Press, 2011

Read review by Michael Dirda

Becoming Ray Bradbury chronicles the making of an iconic American writer by exploring Ray Bradbury’s childhood and early years of his long life in fiction, film, television, radio, and theater. Jonathan R. Eller measures the impact of the authors, artists, illustrators, and filmmakers who stimulated Bradbury’s imagination throughout his first three decades. Unprecedented access to Bradbury’s personal papers and other private collections provides insight into his emerging talent through his unpublished correspondence, his rare but often insightful notes on writing, and his interactions with those who mentored him during those early years.  

Intercultural Rhetoric in the Writing Classroom

Ulla Connor, University of Michigan Press, 2011

This Birth Place of Souls The Civil War Nursing Diary of Harriet Eaton  

Jane E.Schultz, Oxford University Press, 2010

Read review by Giselle Roberts

After the battle of Antietam in 1862, Harriet Eaton traveled to Virginia from her home in Portland, Maine, to care for soldiers in the Army of the Potomac. Portland’s Free Street Baptist Church, with liberal ties to abolition, established the Maine Camp Hospital Association and made the widowed Eaton its relief agent in the field. One of many Christians who believed that patriotic activism could redeem the nation, Eaton quickly learned that war was no respecter of religious principles. 

Doing the work of nurse and provisioner, Eaton tended wounded men and those with smallpox and diphtheria during two tours of duty. Eaton struggled with the disruptions of transience, scarcely sleeping in the same place twice, but found the politics of daily toil even more challenging. Conflict between Eaton and coworker Isabella Fogg erupted almost immediately over issues of propriety. Though Eaton praised some of the surgeons with whom she worked, she labeled others charlatans whose neglect had deadly implications for the rank and file. If she saw villainy, she also saw opportunities to convert soldiers and developed an intense spiritual connection with a private, which appears to have led to a postwar liaison.

Published here for the first time, the uncensored nursing diary is a rarity among medical accounts of the war, showing Eaton to be an astute observer of human nature and not as straight-laced as we might have thought. This edition includes an extensive introduction by the editor, transcriptions of relevant letters and newspaper articles, and a comprehensive biographical dictionary of the people mentioned in the diary.   

"Jane Schultz is arguably the nation’s leading expert on Civil War nursing, whose articles and book, Women at the Front , have had a profound effect on how scholars-including literary critics and historians-have viewed women’s contributions to the American Civil War. First-person accounts of northern women nurses (and of northern women in general) during the Civil War remain rare-and so it is a pleasure to see that Schultz has produced this carefully edited and beautifully written volume documenting Harriet Eaton’s nursing. This is a great discovery and a significant contribution to Civil War literature." -Alice Fahs, UC Irvine

Read a review.

Whose Lives Are They Anyway?  The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre

Dennis Bingham, Rutgers University Press, 2010

"A charmingly written, impressively researched, consistently intelligent study of the movies’ most critically neglected genre. Few film books in the past decade have given me so much pleasure and edification."—James Naremore, author of "More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts."

Cooling Board: A Long-Playing Poem

Mitchell L. H. Douglas, Red Hen Press, 2009

As the book’s first "Liner Notes" poem recognizes, "Cooling Board is about life lessons, the difficult things you don’t always get on the first take." With Douglas as a guide versed in the power of possessing many tongues, Cooling Board captures its reader like the best Hathaway song: passionately, honestly, and with an undeniable sense of purpose. (Synopsis from Barnes & Noble website)

Contrastive Rhetoric: Reaching to Intercultural Rhetoric

Edited by Ulla Connor, Ed Nagelhout, & William V. Rozycki, John Benjamins Publishing, 2008

This volume explores contrastive rhetoric for audiences in both ESL contexts and international EFL context, exposing the newest developments in theories of culture and discourse and pushing the boundaries beyond any previously staked ground. The book presents a comprehensive set of empirical investigations involving a number of first languages; 13 of the 17 authors are English-as-a-second-language speakers, many working in non-US contexts. This work develops a coherent agenda for contrastive rhehtoric researchers, studying genres such as school writing, grant proposals, business letters, newspaper editorials, book reviews, and newspaper commentaries. Four chapters provide ethnographies and observations about contrastive rhetoric and the teaching of EFL and ESL. The book ends with a look to the future, suggesting it is more accurate to use the term ‘intercultural rhetoric’ to account for the richness of rhetoric variation of written texts and the varying contexts in which they are constructed. 

Discourse on the Move. Using Corpus Analysis to Describe Discourse Structure

Douglas Biber, Ulla Connor & Thomas A. Upton, John Benjamins Publishing, 2007

Discourse on the Move is the fi rst book-length exploration of how corpusbased methods can be used for discourse analysis, applied to the description of discourse organization. _ e primary goal is to bring these two analytical perspectives together: undertaking a detailed discourse analysis of each individual text, but doing so in terms that can be generalized across all texts of a corpus. _ e book explores two major approaches to this task: ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’. In the ‘top-down’ approach, the functional components of a genre are determined fi rst, and then all texts in a corpus are analyzed in terms of those components. In contrast, textual components emerge from the corpus analysis in the bottom-up approach, and the discourse organization of individual texts is then analyzed in terms of linguistically defined textual categories. Both approaches are illustrated through case studies of discourse structure in particular genres: fund-raising letters, biology/biochemistry research articles, and university classroom teaching.

Internet-mediated Intercultural Foreign Language Education

Edited by Julie A. Belz & Steven L. Thorne, Heinle & Heinle, 2005

This volume explores the “intercultural perspective” on foreign language education. From this perspective, the focus of language learning is redefined in terms of intercultural rather than communicative competence. Internet-mediation is a praxiological reflex of this conceptual shift in that it affords the embedding of foreign language learning and instruction in the sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts of language use and development in the form of classroom-based intercultural collaborations between internationally dispersed representatives of the languacultures under study. The contributions to the volume examine the pedagogy, processes, and outcomes of NS-NNS Internet-mediated language and culture learning partnerships in French, German, Spanish, EFL, and Russian from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, including model learning, reflective practice, learner corpus analysis, cultural studies, ethnography, interactionism, and critical theory. Internet-mediated Intercultural Foreign Language Education represents the 2005 volume of the annual series Issues in Language Program Direction sponsored by the American Association of University Supervisors and Coordinators of Foreign Language Programs.

Metropolis Burning

Karen Kovacik, Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2005

Winner of the Best Poetry of Indiana, 2006, awarded by the Indiana Center.

The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course in Business Writing and Communication

Ken Davis, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005

Filled with the contemporary case studies, handson exercises, and self-tests that are the trademark  of McGraw-Hill’s 36-Hour series, The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course in Business Writing and Communication shows readers what they must do to craft a strong message and deliver that message in e-mails, memos, reports, and more. 

Reading Skills for Success: A Guide to Academic Texts

Thomas A. Upton, University of Michigan Press, 2004

Reading Skills for Success is a guide to advanced reading skills that can be used in conjunction with any freshman-level text. It is an excellent sequel to Reader’s Choice, 4th edition. Students using this book will develop their text-based processing skills by developing better understanding of word-level clues and recognizing different types of text structures. The appendixes include two sample textbook chapters—the first on ecosystems and the second on the diffusion of languages—so students may practice what they have learned. (Synopsis by University of Michigan Press)

Women at the Front: Female Hospital Workers in Civil War America

Jane E. Shultz, University of North Carolina Press, 2004

"This absorbing book recovers a largely unknown history of the twenty thousand women who served Confederate and Union hospitals during the Civil War…[A] compelling…account that is both empathic and unsentimental toward [the] subjects. The result is a nuanced and thoughtful interpretation of women at the front."—The Journal of Southern History

Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction

Jonathan R. Eller & William F. Touponce, Kent State University Press, 2004

Runner-up (to science fiction author Ursula K. LeGuin), for the 2004 Locus Award, best non-fiction book in the science fiction and fantasy field.

Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction is the first comprehensive textual, bibliographical, and cultural study of sixty years of Bradbury’s fiction. Drawing on correspondence with his publishers, agents, and friends. as well as archival manuscript, The Life of Fiction examines the story of Bradbury’s authorship over more than a half-century, from his earliest writings, which include The Martian Chronicles, to his most recently published novel, Let’s All Kill Constance. It shows in detail the often devious and unsuspected interconnections between his unpublished fiction, his story collections, and his most celebrated novels. (Synopsis by Kent State University Press)

Moving from the influence of the carnivalesque on Bradbury’s style to his meticulous revision process to his uique reception as both a serious and a popular writer, this chronicle details Bradbury’s influence through the course of sixty years."—American Literature

Discourse in the Professions: Perspectives from Corpus Linguistics

Edited by Ulla Connor & Thomas A. Upton, John Benjamins Publishing, 2004

This book explores the structure and use of academic and professional discourse through the lens of corpus linguistics. The goal of this book is to show how insights from corpus linguisitic analyses can help us better understand how we use academic and professional language and help us find ways to better train newcomers to the genres used in various professional contexts. The contributions to this book show that specialized corpora of specific genres from a variety of fields allow us to make more relevant observations about the function and use of language for particular purposes. The specialized corpora examined include written and spoken academic genres, written and spoken business and legal genres, and written philanthropic genres. The book showcases a variety of approaches to analyzing the discourse of specialized corpora, and each chapter concludes with a reflection on the practical and pedagogical implications of the analysis. 

Applied Corpus Linguistics: A Multidimensional Perspective

Edited by Ulla Connor & Thomas A. Upton, Rodopi Publishers (Amsterdam), 2004

This book will be of particular interest to anyone interested in the application of corpus linguistic techniques to language study and instruction. This volume includes selected papers from the Fourth North American Symposium, held in Indianapolis and hosted by the Indiana Center for Intercultural Communication at Indiana University Purdue University in Indianapolis (IUPUI) in November, 2002. These papers - from authors representing eight countries including the U.S., Belgium, China, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Spain - provide a wide range of views of and approaches to corpus linguistic. Topics range from theory and analysis to classroom application, and include the study of oral discourse as well as the study of written discourse, including internet-based discourse. Consequently, this volume is divided into two sections. The first section focuses on the use of corpus linguistics in the analysis of spoken and written discourse; the second section focuses on the direct pedagogical application of corpus linguistics, reflecting the applied foundation of this branch of linguistics.

Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion

Thomas Marvin, Greenwood Press, 2002

"Vonnegut’s remarkable contribution to American literature is quirky and controversial. Marvin offers biographical information on the author and discusses how his life affected his writing. He also examines Vonnegut’s rise to a cult figure in the 1960’s."-Curriculum Connections/School Library Journal

Hicks, Tribes, & Dirty Realists: American Fiction after Postmodernism

Robert Rebein, University Press of Kentucky, 2001

Language and the Global Workplace: A Handbook for Indiana Businesses

Ulla Connor and M. Seig, Indiana Center for Intercultural Communication, 2001

Reflections on Multiliterate Lives

Edited by Diane Belcher & Ulla Connor, Multilingual Matters Limited (England), 2001

"Reflection on Multiliterate Lives" is a collection of personal accounts, in narrative and interview format, of the formative literacy experiences of highly successful second language users, all of who are professional academics. Representing fourteen countries in origin, the contributors, well-known specialists in language teaching as well as a variety of other fields in the social and physical sciences, recount in their own words past and present struggles and successes as learners of language and of much else.

Beyond the Velvet Curtain

Karen Kovacik, Kent State University Press, 1999

Winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Prize

In Beyond the Velvet Curtain, Karen Kovacik illustrates Czeslaw Miloszs dictum that the purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person. Peopled with such characters as Richard Nixon, Nikita Khruschev, Kafkas father, William Carolos Williams, Lawrence Welk, Robespierre, and a feisty Catholic saint, this original collection of poems takes us on an amusement park ride through world history and art.

Toni Morrison: A Companion Volume

Missy Dehn Kubitschek, Greenwood Press, 1998

"This volume provides a clear, basic introduction to Morrison’s work and analyses of her novels from The Bluest Eye (1970) to Paradise (1998). The writing is direct, without critical jargon or highly technical language, which makes it accessible to beginning students and general readers. Given Morrison’s popularity, this will be a welcome addition to any public, school, or academic library collection."-American Reference Books Annual

Nixon and I

Karen Kovacik, Kent State University Press, 1998

Winner of the 1996 Wick Chapbook Competition

Contrastive Rhetoric: Cross-Cultural Aspects of Second Language Writing

Ulla Connor, Cambridge University Press, 1996

‘... this book provides excellent insights into the cultural differences that many students bring to their writing in English. These differences are clearly described in a way that makes them accesible to both teachers and learners themselves (at least those whose English is at Intermediate - advanced level) and should prove useful to teachers working with students who know that their writing in English is not as communicatively effective as they would wish it to be and want to learn why.’ ESL, 1997

 Writing: Process, Product, and Power

Ken Davis & Kim Brian Lovejoy, Prentice Hall, 1993

This introductory guide helps students focus on the 7 major features of a well-written product with writing activities and stratagies. Key Topics: The guide includes 7 writing assignments and 34 student papers for analysis and discussion, and techniques for situating the writing, giving content to writing, organizing the writing, writing paragraphs, writing sentences, writing words, and handling mechanics. Market: A well-organized introductory reference for composition.

Coherence in Writing: Research and Pedagogical Perspectives

Edited by Ulla Connor & Ann M. Johns, TESOL, 1990

Writing Across Languages: Analysis of L2 Text

Edited by Ulla Connor & Robert B. Kaplan, Addison-Wesley, 1987