Bookshelf

(Hong Kong, China: Hong Kong University Press, 2019)
This book, awarded Choice’s Outstanding Academic Title of 2020, features 10 essays that demonstrate that the connection between laughter and political culture during the Mao years was far more complex than conventional conceptions of communist indoctrination can explain. By examining a variety of genres — including dance, cartoon, children’s literature, comedy, regional oral performance, film, and fiction — the editors uncover many nuanced innovations and experiments with laughter during what has been too often misinterpreted as an unrelentingly bleak period.

(Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2020)
Dolly Parton’s success as a performer and pop culture icon often overshadows her achievements as a songwriter. According to the publisher, “Hamessley’s expert analysis and Parton’s characteristically straightforward input inform this comprehensive look at the process, influences, and themes that have shaped the superstar’s songwriting. Hamessley reveals how Parton’s loving, hardscrabble childhood in the Smoky Mountains provided the musical language, rhythms, and memories of old-time music that resonate in so many of her songs. Hamessley further provides an understanding of how Parton combines her cultural and musical heritage with an artisan’s sense of craft and design to compose eloquent, painfully honest, and gripping songs about women’s lives, poverty, heartbreak, inspiration, and love.”

(Anderson, S.C.: Parlor Press, 2016)
“As the writing across the curriculum movement has grown, so has the awareness that we need to address students’ oral communication as well as their writing skills if they are to fully develop as effective communicators,” notes one reviewer, who says this book helps educators do just that. Topics include oral communication assignments, student performance complexities unique to each and how to evaluate oral communication work.

(University of Chicago Press, 2016)
Drawing on interviews with leaders of more than 60 religious environmental organizations, the author illustrates “how activists borrow and rework resources from various traditions to create new meanings for religion, nature and the religious person’s duty to the natural world.”