Bookshelf

(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.”

(New York: Routledge, 2018)
The author examines how, despite the intertwined histories of Africa and Europe, space and place remain racialized, impacting everyday experiences among African Italians, immigrants, and refugees. One reviewer praised Merrill for taking aim at “Italian common sense concerning race, while passionately foregrounding the lives of African migrants and ­Afro-Italians who daily navigate the deadly politics of exclusion.”

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
This book not only provides an introduction to formal deductive logic; it also presents essays on logic and its application in philosophy and beyond. The goal is to integrate writing into what is traditionally a course on strictly formal (i.e., mathematical) methods in philosophy: formal symbolic logic.

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2018)
The author considers dozens of poems from the Middle Ages to the present that reveal approaches to recognizing and valuing animals’ difference and similarity. In doing so, he demonstrates “how the forms and modes of poetry can sensitize us to the moral standing of animals and give us new ways to think through the problems of the human-animal divide.” On the cover is a photo of Oerlemans’ greyhound, Beloki.

(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.”