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Winter 2001

Investment Madness: How Psychology Affects Your Investing and What to Do About It

In Investment Madness: How Psychology Affects Your Investing…and What to Do About It, John R. Nofsinger (’88 Elect. Engr., ’96 Ph.D. Fin.) debunks the accepted wisdom that people make rational investment decisions. They don’t. The book lays out the psychological biases and emotions that often trip up investors, impair their decisions, and consequently jeopardize their wealth.

Unlike other books on finances, this one “focuses on the reader—the investor, rather than on the stock market and investment strategy,” says the Washington State University assistant professor of finance.

While investors blame financial analysts and overhyped stocks for the depressed state of many nest eggs following the recent … » More …

Fall 2004

Global Media: Menace or Messiah?

Revealing the answer to the question posed by the title of this book by David Demers, associate professor of communication at Washington State University, will not deprive anyone of a reason to read it. Global media, the planet-embracing corporations like Time Warner and Disney that bring us information and entertainment, are neither menace nor messiah. Few prospective readers would suspect the latter. The book’s value lies in its refutation of the former, a charge popularized by Noam Chomsky and other Jeremiahs of the left.

The charge—that the corporatization and consolidation of media organizations lead inevitably to their uncritical acceptance of powerful institutions and failure to … » More …

Summer 2005

Genes and DNA: A Beginner's Guide to Genetics and Its Applications

Evelyn Fox Keller, a well-known social critic and professor of philosophy of science at MIT, termed the 20th century the “Century of the Gene.” Five years into the 21st century, it can be easily argued that we are in for another century full of genetic wonder, hope, frustration, and fear.

It is impossible to read a newspaper or watch the news without hearing about the discovery of a gene that will affect all of our lives. Recently, genes have been reported to be responsible for problems ranging from compulsive shopping, obesity, and alcoholism to breast and prostate cancer. How do nonscientists wade through the hype … » More …

Fall 2006

The Dozier-Jarvis-Young Quartet: You Guys From Around Here?

The photo of the Moscow/Pullman highway which graces the cover of the Dozier-Jarvis-Young Quartet’s debut CD release, You Guys From Around Here? brought the memories flooding back, as I settled down to listen to the opening track, “Homecoming.” You see, I’m able to easily answer that particular query, since I was from “around there” for a little over eight years. In one of the group’s earlier incarnations—the Dozier-Jarvis-Jensen Quartet—I performed regularly at Roger Johnson’s venerable Pullman music establishment, Rico’s, and at clubs and concert halls throughout the Pacific Northwest. My objectivity as a reviewer having now been fully compromised, let us forge ahead with a … » More …

Fall 2006

Writing Pauline: Wisdom from a Long Life

Gail Stearns’s biography, Writing Pauline: Wisdom from a Long Life, is the story of an ordinary eastern Washington woman who came to some extraordinary conclusions in the twilight of a long and often frustrated life. Stearns, director of the Common Ministry and an adjunct faculty member in Women’s Studies and the Honors College at Washington State University, wrote the biography based on notes, journals, and oral interviews with Spokane native Pauline Thompson, an educator, nurse, veteran, and activist who died in 2000 at age 95. Stearns notes in Chapter One that “one cannot understand Pauline without acknowledging paradox.” Paradox is a constant theme throughout Pauline’s … » More …

Summer 2004

Competing Devotions: Career and Family Among Women Executives

To be or not to be a devoted mother, corporate executive—or both? These are the choices and challenges facing career women more than ever. In Competing Devotions: Career and Family Among Women Executives, former Washington State University sociology professor Mary Blair-Loy examines the lifestyles of two groups of women and the decisions they made regarding the delicate balance of raising children along with—or versus—the long hours they spend behind an executive’s desk.

The first group, made up of 56 predominantly white female finance executives, was called the career-committed group. The second group, the family-committed group, was made up of 25 white women who left full-time, … » More …

Winter 2004

Chicana Leadership: The Frontiers Reader

This collection of inspired and thoughtful articles, originally published in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies from 1980 to 1999, examines not only Chicana leadership, but also Chicana activism, history, and identity. According to the primary editor, Yolanda Flores Niemann, chair, Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University, Chicanas are virtually invisible to U.S. society and oftentimes even to their own communities. Nevertheless, from leading boycotts, challenging injustice, and shaping the creative and performing arts to carving out sexual, cultural, political, and national identities in public and not-so-public ways, Chicanas are ubiquitous.

The problem is that we do not see Chicanas’ work, their … » More …

Spring 2006

A Genetic and Cultural Odyssey: The Life and Work of L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza

Anthropology embraces four disparate subfields: archaeology, physical anthropology, linguistics, and cultural anthropology. Few people today are able to make significant contributions to more than one of these. This book celebrates a career marked by signal contributions to all four, and to genetics as well. Born Luigi Cavalli in Genoa in 1922 and, following his father’s death, formally adopted at age 27 by his maternal stepgrandfather, Count Sforza, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (hereafter, Cavalli) has come to be a leading figure in anthropological genetics—a field which he in fact has helped define. His accomplishments have been recognized by election to the National Academy of Sciences (U.S.) and … » More …

Winter 2001

Beyond Outcomes

For the first time in the 126-year history of college-level writing programs, a single scholarly book focuses on one university’s writing program.

Beyond Outcomes: Assessment and Instruction Within a University Writing Program tells the story of Washington State University’s Campus Writing Programs. Beyond Outcomes fully describes a set of innovations that have become models for the nation: the University Writing Portfolio, a system of peer-led group writing tutorials at the freshman and the junior levels, and an “expert rating system” that Brian Huot, co-editor of the journal Assessing Writing and a leading expert on writing assessment, has called one of the most promising developments in … » More …

Spring 2007

With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture since 1830

For many years, the study of popular culture, like comedian Rodney Dangerfield, “got no respect.” Only with the vast amount of excellent, sophisticated research in the last three decades has the culture preferred by millions of Americans become serious history. LeRoy Ashby’s With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture Since 1830 is the first book to synthesize hundreds of recent studies of specific aspects of popular culture into a single, sweeping story. Both in time frame—from the 1830s, when innovations in communication and transportation first made a truly mass, national culture possible, to the present era of proliferating new media—and in scope—including … » More …