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How to Identify Grasses and Grasslike Plants
Sedges and Rushes
H. D. Harrington
Ohio University Press, 1977

There is no easy way to identify grasses. And no one understands this better than H.D. Harrington, who observed thousands of students struggle and learn. His clear, concise, and well-organized guide will continue to be a basic and essential text for use in the classroom or in the field. The book contains over 500 drawings and an illustrated glossary.

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How To Identify Plants
H. D. Harrington
Ohio University Press, 1957

First issued in 1957 by Swallow Press, this classic guide to the art of plant identification is now familiar to an entire generation of students. Harrington who was Professor of Botany and Curator of the Herbarium at Colorado State University, gives step-by-step instructions and definitions to help readers recognize and classify plants. The new printing has been reset and reformatted, and L.W. Durrell’s drawings and glossary—more than 500 images—have been digitally enhanced for clarity.

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How to Keep Union Records
Michael Nash
Society of American Archivists, 2010
Ten chapters address issues of perennial concern to labor archivists: building relationships with the unions, developing collecting policies that support current labor history scholarship, adapting appraisal theory to the unique challenges of labor union archives, and arranging and describing collections so that finding aids speak to both academic and union audiences. In the tradition of Debra E. Barnhardt's classic text on the subject, this new volume highlights recent transformations in the labor archives world, such as changes in recordkeeping practices, the imapct of union mergers and the consolidation movement on archival collections, the growing importance of media collections, and electronic records and union websites. Also included in the volume are an extensive bibliography and a directory of labor archives in the United States. How to Keep Union Records illustrates how basic archival theory and best practice methodologies can be applied to the challenges presented by labor collections. Archivists in collecting repositories and union records administrators will greatly benefit from this excellent collection of essays by leaders in the field.
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How to Kill a Goat and Other Monsters
Saúl Hernández
University of Wisconsin Press, 2024
One is never sure who the monsters are in these poems, only that the narrator desperately doesn’t want to be one. In his brilliant debut collection, Hernández explores grief, loss, identity, lineage, and belonging with grace, insight, and compassion. 

These pages are infused with comfort, with desire, with heartache. Never absent is love, family. Hernández—hyperaware of American society’s dismissal or hatred of people who look like him—writes with a refreshing confidence, a sure knowledge of who he is and where he comes from. Transcending any particular experience, this volume will continue to resonate with multiple readings.
 
he says I deserve someone who will love me the way 
I love him. I want to kiss him, tell him love isn’t measured.
I squeeze his hand instead, afraid of the thought of anyone looking at us 
from the outside of my car.
—Excerpt from “Defying the Dangers of Being”
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How to Leave Hialeah
Capó Crucet, Jennine
University of Iowa Press, 2009

United in their fierce sense of place and infused with the fading echoes of a lost homeland, the stories in Jennine Capó Crucet’s striking debut collection do for Miami what Edward P. Jones does for Washington, D.C., and what James Joyce did for Dublin: they expand our ideas and our expectations of the city by exposing its tough but vulnerable underbelly.

Crucet’s writing has been shaped by the people and landscapes of South Florida and by the stories of Cuba told by her parents and abuelos. Her own stories are informed by her experiences as a Cuban American woman living within and without her community, ready to leave and ready to return, “ready to mourn everything.”

Coming to us from the predominantly Hispanic working-class neighborhoods of Hialeah, the voices of this steamy section of Miami shout out to us from rowdy all-night funerals and kitchens full of plátanos and croquetas and lechón ribs, from domino tables and cigar factories, glitter-purple Buicks and handed-down Mom Rides, private homes of santeras and fights on front lawns. Calling to us from crowded expressways and canals underneath abandoned overpasses shading a city’s secrets, these voices are the heart of Miami, and in this award-winning collection Jennine Capó Crucet makes them sing.

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How to Lie with Maps, Third Edition
Mark Monmonier
University of Chicago Press, 2018
An instant classic when first published in 1991, How to Lie with Maps revealed how the choices mapmakers make—consciously or unconsciously—mean that every map inevitably presents only one of many possible stories about the places it depicts. The principles Mark Monmonier outlined back then remain true today, despite significant technological changes in the making and use of maps. The introduction and spread of digital maps and mapping software, however, have added new wrinkles to the ever-evolving landscape of modern mapmaking.

​Fully updated for the digital age, this new edition of How to Lie with Maps examines the myriad ways that technology offers new opportunities for cartographic mischief, deception, and propaganda. While retaining the same brevity, range, and humor as its predecessors, this third edition includes significant updates throughout as well as new chapters on image maps, prohibitive cartography, and online maps. It also includes an expanded section of color images and an updated list of sources for further reading. 
 
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How to Live
A memoir-in-essays
Kelle Groom
Tupelo Press, 2023
“At its simplest, this is the story of a restless search for a place to be– a way to live– after a series of devastating events. But there’s nothing simple about it. Kelle Groom has created a marvel: a haunted, haunting, beautifully sustained dream of a book.”
—Joan Wickersham
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How to Live like a Lord Without Really Trying
Shepherd Mead
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2012

In 1958, ad man and soon-to-be best-selling author Shepherd Mead moved to England with his family to pursue his career. Six years later, his observations on the oddities of British culture were enough to compile a satirical guidebook for fellow Americans planning to visit from across the pond. The blunders that could befall them were many. For instance, explains Mead, “Pants are always underpants and what you wear out in the open are trousers. Mistakes in this area can lead to nasty misunderstandings.”

Structured around the fictional Brash family—Peggy and Buckley Brash and their two children—the book, originally published in 1964, includes chapters on such topics as “How to Dress in England,” “The Dream House and How to Rebuild It,” and “How to Live with the Upper Classes Without Having Any Money.” Through the Brash family’s encounters with the British and their amusingly bewildered conversations as they attempt to interpret this alien way of life, Mead answers with obvious affection and quirky humor such questions as “Is England really a pest hole?” and “Do English schools create sex madness?”
 
Written with Mead’s characteristic incisive wit and illustrated with the original dynamic cartoons, How to Live Like a Lord Without Really Trying is packed with pithy advice that is equally revealing of Britain in the 1960s as its bemused American visitors.
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How to Live, What to Do
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens
Joan Richardson
University of Iowa Press, 2018

How to Live, What to Do is an indispensable introduction to and guide through the work of a poet equal in power and sensibility to Shakespeare and Milton. Like them, Stevens shaped a new language, fashioning an instrument adequate to describing a completely changed environment of fact, extending perception through his poems to align what Emerson called our “axis of vision” with the universe as it came to be understood during his lifetime, 1879–1955, a span shared with Albert Einstein. Projecting his own imagination into spacetime as “a priest of the invisible,” persistently cultivating his cosmic consciousness through reading, keeping abreast of the latest discoveries of Einstein, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie, and others, Stevens pushed the boundaries of language into the exotic territories of relativity and quantum mechanics while at the same time honoring the continuing human need for belief in some larger order. His work records how to live, what to do in this strange new world of experience, seeing what was always seen but never seen before. 

Joan Richardson, author of the standard two-volume critical biography of Stevens and coeditor with Frank Kermode of the Library of America edition of the Collected Poetry and Prose, offers concise, lucid captures of Stevens’s development and achievement. Over the ten years of researching her Stevens biography, Richardson read all that he read, as well as his complete correspondence, journals, and notebooks. She weaves the details drawn from this deep involvement into the background of American cultural history of the period. This fabric is further enlivened by her preparation in philosophy and the sciences, creating in these thirteen panels a contemporary version of a medieval tapestry sequence, with Stevens in the place of the unicorn, as it were, holding our attention and eliciting, as necessary angel, individual solutions to the riddles of our existence on this planet spinning and hissing around its cooling star at 18.5 miles per second.

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How to Live/What to Do
H.D.'s Cultural Poetics
Adalaide Morris
University of Illinois Press, 2002
The writing of H.D. is so linguistically rich and multilayered in structure that it has had almost as many interpretations as it has interpreters, from Freudians to feminists, from classicists to postmodernists. In How to Live/What to Do, however, Adalaide Morris removes the work of this iconic poet, dramatist, and novelist from compartments into which it has historically been placed. As she examines the "ongoingness" of H.D.'s writing, Morris makes an eloquent and compelling case for a consideration of poems--all poems--as forms of cultural mediation, instructive historical documents that engage the reader in wide-ranging contemporary debates and use their acoustical richness to generate tangible cultural effects.

Ever since the publication of her first H.D. essay in 1985 (included here in an expanded version), Morris has eschewed prevailing literary trends in favor of new approaches that both challenge and overpass dominant critical constructs. As she argues in this volume, the writing and, crucially, the reading of poetry is a process in which meaning is produced by the interplay of words on a page and in the ear of the reader. This quality of being not heard but overheard, composed within the body, is crucial to an appreciation of H.D.

Morris shows H.D. to be a playful linguistic innovator whose writings bear on debates in science, technology, and cinema as well as on poetry. Foremost, however, H.D. was a profound reshaper of the boundaries and possibilities of poetry, a generative form that, as this book shows, can indeed serve the cultural work of survival and resistance against the violence of modern culture.

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How to Lobby Alaska State Government
Clive S. Thomas
University of Alaska Press, 2019
Lobbying is about getting the right message to the right people in the right form at the right time. Even the most persuasive arguments or most influential groups will come up short if they aren’t combined with personal connections and an understanding of human nature. How to Lobby Alaska State Government is a guide to the essentials of organizing and implementing a lobbying campaign in Alaska that recognizes how you lobby is as important as who you lobby.

This book starts by helping new lobbyists to think politically, by explaining the structure and operation of state government, the psychology and needs of public officials, and where the power lies in Juneau—who’s got political clout. How to Lobby then moves into the nitty-gritty of a lobbying campaign. It covers the basics of group influence, campaign planning and management, the pros and cons of various group tactics, tips on face-to-face meetings, and the challenges of lobbying day-to-day. In addition to extensive guidance on what to do, this book also emphasizes the things to avoid that will undermine or eliminate a lobbyist’s chances of success. Pragmatic and portable, this book will be valuable to new and professional lobbyists both, and anyone looking for fresh perspectives on this important business.
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How to Look Good in a War
Justifying and Challenging State Violence
Brian Rappert
Pluto Press, 2012

How to Look Good in A War examines the methods used to depict, defend and justify the use of state violence. Many books have shown how 'truth is the first casualty of war' but this is the first to analyse exactly how pro-war narratives are constructed and normalised.

Brian Rappert details the 'upside-down' world of war in which revelation conceals, knowledge fosters uncertainty, and transparency obscures. He looks at government spin during recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya where officials manoeuvre between circulating and withholding information.

Examining how organised violence is justified, How to Look Good in A War draws on experiences from recent controversy to consider how ignorance about the operation of war is produced and how concerned individuals and groups can intervene to make a difference.

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How to Lose the Hounds
Maroon Geographies and a World beyond Policing
Celeste Winston
Duke University Press, 2023
In How to Lose the Hounds Celeste Winston explores marronage—the practice of flight from and placemaking beyond slavery—as a guide to police abolition. She examines historically Black maroon communities in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, that have been subjected to violent excesses of police power from slavery until the present day. Tracing the long and ongoing historical geography of Black freedom struggles in the face of anti-Black police violence in these communities, Winston shows how marronage provides critical lessons for reimagining public safety and community well-being. These freedom struggles take place in what Winston calls maroon geographies—sites of flight from slavery and the spaces of freedom produced in multigenerational Black communities. Maroon geographies constitute part of a Black placemaking tradition that asserts life-affirming forms of community. Winston contends that maroon geographies operate as a central method of Black flight, holding ground, and constructing places of freedom in ways that imagine and plan a world beyond policing.
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How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It
Lara Egger
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
Winner of Ploughshares’ 2022 John C. Zacharis First Book Award
Wrestling with desire, shame, and the complications of attempting to resist one's own nature, How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It offers a tragicomic tour of a heart in midlife crisis. Populated by unruly angels, earthbound astronauts, xylophones, wordplay, and glitter glue, these wildly associative poems transform the world line by line, image by image. Part confessional, part kitsch, and often self-deprecating, this debut collection offers an honest and tender exploration of love's necessary absurdity. Lara Egger asks: Who put the end in crescendo, the over in lover? Are metaphors always reliable witnesses? Why does the past sleep with us when we hope the person beside us is the future?
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How to Make a Life
A Tibetan Refugee Family and the Midwestern Woman They Adopted
Madeline Uraneck
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018
An immigration story of crossing cultural bridges and finding family.

When Madeline Uraneck said hello to the Tibetan woman cleaning her office cubicle, she never imagined the moment would change her life. After learning that Tenzin Kalsang had left her husband and four children behind in a Tibetan refugee settlement in India to try to forge a better life for them, Madeline took on the task of helping her apply for US visas. When the family reunited in their new Midwestern home, Madeline became swept up in their lives, from homework and soccer games to family dinners and shared holiday traditions. By reaching out, she found more than she bargained for—a family who welcomed her as their own and taught her more than she offered them.

An evocative blend of immersion journalism and memoir, How to Make a Life shares the immigration story of a Tibetan refugee family who crossed real and cultural bridges to make a life in Madison, Wisconsin, with the assistance of the Midwestern woman they befriended. From tales of escaping Tibet over the Himalayas, to striking a balance between old traditions with new, to bridging divides one friendly gesture at a time, readers will expand their understanding of family, culture, and belonging.
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How to Make a Revolution
Raymond Postgate
Westholme Publishing, 2018
Written During the Ascension of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, an investigation of the Methods of Revolutionary Change
The first third of the twentieth century saw a seismic upheaval in global politics and society that still reverberates today. Communism and fascism toppled both traditional monarchies and representative democracies, while trade unions and other factions effectively challenged existing governments to adopt reforms or face crippling economic or social upheaval. Given these extraordinary events, Raymond Postgate set forth in How to Make a Revolution to objectively discuss revolutionary methods, and which tactics or strategies are the most effective. Drawing on his own idealistic experience as a young labor agitator and editor of a communist newspaper and more than fifteen years of close study of past revolutionary history and theories, the author dispassionately discusses Marxism, fascism, anarchism, and Blanquism (a doctrine within socialism), as well as syndicalism and industrial unionism. He then reviews revolutionary practice, including general strikes, financial pressure, armed revolution, and communist tactics, and ends with a prescient and frightening conclusion: without general consensus and determination, a peaceful revolution is impossible, and “if no action is taken, action of another kind will be taken for us. . . . The continuance of uncertain­ty will mean that the disillusioned will drift steadily across to a Fascist organization. Fascism means war; the character of a Fascist State is fairly well known. Once it is established, those who read, who write, who publish or who print, books like this are likely to be dead or in concentration camps.” Originally published in 1934, Postgate’s book was heralded for its clarity and scholarship. 
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How to Make a Slave and Other Essays
Walker
The Ohio State University Press, 2020
Finalist, National Book Award in Nonfiction
Winner, Massachusetts Book Award

A Book of the Year pick from Kirkus, BuzzFeed, and Literary Hub

“The essays in this collection are restless, brilliant and short.…The brevity suits not just Walker’s style but his worldview, too.…Keeping things quick gives him the freedom to move; he can alight on a truth without pinning it into place.” —Jennifer Szalai, the New York Times

For the black community, Jerald Walker asserts in How to Make a Slave, “anger is often a prelude to a joke, as there is broad understanding that the triumph over this destructive emotion lay in finding its punchline.” It is on the knife’s edge between fury and farce that the essays in this exquisite collection balance. Whether confronting the medical profession’s racial biases, considering the complicated legacy of Michael Jackson, paying homage to his writing mentor James Alan McPherson, or attempting to break free of personal and societal stereotypes, Walker elegantly blends personal revelation and cultural critique. The result is a bracing and often humorous examination by one of America’s most acclaimed essayists of what it is to grow, parent, write, and exist as a black American male. Walker refuses to lull his readers; instead his missives urge them to do better as they consider, through his eyes, how to be a good citizen, how to be a good father, how to live, and how to love.
 
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How to Make a Soul
The Wisdom of John Keats
Eric G. Wilson
Northwestern University Press, 2016

In this innovative hybrid of biography, memoir, and criticism, Eric G. Wilson describes how John Keats gave him solace during a bout of mental illness in spring 2012. While on a tour of the principal sites in Keats’s life—ranging from his London medical school to the small room in Rome where he died—Wilson discovered analogies between the poet’s troubles and his own. He was most struck by Keats’s enlivening vision of the soul.

For Keats, we don’t possess but rather make a soul. We do this by imaginatively transforming our suffering into empathy toward humans and nature alike. Tracking this idea in Keats’s tumultuous yet exhilarating life and work, Wilson struggles to envision his depression anew, desperate to overcome the apathy alienating him from his family.

How to Make a Soul offers fresh perspectives on Keats’s pragmatism, irony, comedy, ethics, and aesthetics, but is above all a lyrical celebration of those galvanizing instances when life springs into art.

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How to Make a Vaccine
An Essential Guide for COVID-19 and Beyond
John Rhodes
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Distinguished expert in vaccine development John Rhodes tells the story of the first approved COVID-19 vaccines and offers an essential, up-to-the-minute primer on how scientists discover, test, and distribute vaccines.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has affected every corner of the world, changing our relationship to our communities, to our jobs, and to each other, the most pressing question has been—when will it end? Researchers around the globe are urgently trying to answer this question by racing to test and distribute a vaccine that could end the greatest public health threat of our time.  In How to Make a Vaccine, an expert who has firsthand experience developing vaccines tells an optimistic story of how three hundred years of vaccine discovery and a century and a half of immunology research have come together at this powerful moment—and will lead to multiple COVID-19 vaccines.

Dr. John Rhodes draws on his experience as an immunologist, including working alongside a young Anthony Fauci, to unravel the mystery of how vaccines are designed, tested, and produced at scale for global deployment. Concise and accessible, this book describes in everyday language how the immune system evolved to combat infection, how viruses responded by evolving ways to evade our defenses, and how vaccines do their work. That history, and the pace of current research developments, make Rhodes hopeful that multiple vaccines will protect us. Today the complex workings of the immune system are well understood. The tools needed by biomedical scientists stand ready to be used, and more than 160 vaccine candidates have already been produced. But defeating COVID-19 won’t be the end of the story: Rhodes describes how discoveries today are also empowering scientists to combat future threats to global health, including a recent breakthrough in the development of genetic vaccines, which have never before been used in humans.

As the world prepares for a vaccine, Rhodes offers a current and informative look at the science and strategies that deliver solutions to the crisis.
 
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How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave
Maya Salameh
University of Arkansas Press, 2022
Winner, 2022 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize

“We need a new poetry lexicon—a new way of moleculing the poem on the page, even—and Maya Salameh brings it. We need all the strange Arabic-diasporic ways we can find for being in this terrible and joyful and often frighteningly banalizing world, and Salameh’s poems are a generous find. Her writing is an unexpected cousin in the colonized and capitalism-razed city, bewildering and divining things you’ve never heard but want to learn. . . . Prepare to be stretched and delighted.”
—Mohja Kahf, from the Foreword

The divine and the digital achieve a distinct corporality in Maya Salameh’s HOW TO MAKE AN ALGORITHM IN THE MICROWAVE, winner of the 2022 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. Layering prayer with code, Salameh brings supposedly unassailable technological constructs like algorithm, recursion, and loop into conversation with the technologies of womanhood, whether liner, lipstick, or blood. Exploring the relationships we have with our devices, she speaks back to the algorithm (“a computer’s admission to blood”), which acts simultaneously as warden, confidant, and data thief.

Here Salameh boldly examines how an Arab woman survives the digitization of her body—experimenting with form to create an intimate collage of personal and neocolonial histories, fearlessly insinuating herself into the scripts that would otherwise erase her, and giving voice to the full mess of ritual.

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How to Make Art at the End of the World
A Manifesto for Research-Creation
Natalie Loveless
Duke University Press, 2019
In recent years, the rise of research-creation—a scholarly activity that considers art practices as research methods in their own right—has emerged from the organic convergences of the arts and interdisciplinary humanities, and it has been fostered by universities wishing to enhance their public profiles. In How to Make Art at the End of the World Natalie Loveless draws on diverse perspectives—from feminist science studies to psychoanalytic theory, as well as her own experience advising undergraduate and graduate students—to argue for research-creation as both a means to produce innovative scholarship and a way to transform pedagogy and research within the contemporary neoliberal university. Championing experimental, artistically driven methods of teaching, researching, and publication, research-creation works to render daily life in the academy more pedagogically, politically, and affectively sustainable, as well as more responsive to issues of social and ecological justice.
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How to Make Dances in an Epidemic
Tracking Choreography in the Age of AIDS
David Gere
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004

    David Gere, who came of age as a dance critic at the height of the AIDS epidemic, offers the first book to examine in depth the interplay of AIDS and choreography in the United States, specifically in relation to gay men. The time he writes about is one of extremes. A life-threatening medical syndrome is spreading, its transmission linked to sex. Blame is settling on gay men. What is possible in such a highly charged moment, when art and politics coincide?
    Gere expands the definition of choreography to analyze not only theatrical dances but also the protests conceived by ACT-UP and the NAMES Project AIDS quilt. These exist on a continuum in which dance, protest, and wrenching emotional expression have become essentially indistinguishable. Gere offers a portrait of gay male choreographers struggling to cope with AIDS and its meanings.

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How to Make It as a Woman
Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present
Alison Booth
University of Chicago Press, 2004
How to Make It as a Woman outlines the history of prosopography or group biography, focusing on the all-female collections that took hold in nineteenth-century Britain and America. The queens, nurses, writers, reformers, adventurers, even assassins in these collective female biographies served as models to guide the moral development of young women. But often these famous historical women presented untrustworthy examples.

Beginning in the fifteenth century with Christine de Pizan, Alison Booth traces the long tradition of this genre, investigating the varied types and stories most often grouped together in illustrated books designed for entertainment and instruction. She claims that these group biographies have been instrumental in constructing modern subjectivities as well as relations among classes, races, and nations.

From Joan of Arc to Virginia Woolf, Booth examines a host of models of womanhood—both bad and good. Incorporating a bibliography that includes more than 900 all-female collections published in English between 1830 and 1940, Booth uses collective biographies to decode the varied advice on how to make it as a woman.
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How to Make Your Mother Cry
Fictions
Sejal Shah
West Virginia University Press, 2024
From the author of This Is One Way to Dance, linked genre-queer short stories braided with images and ephemera explore the experiences of growing up and living as a diasporic Gujarati woman searching for home.
 
In the eleven linked short stories of How to Make Your Mother Cry, Sejal Shah builds a shrine gleaming with memory and myth. Keys, rocks, photographs, fairy tales, fables, and relics all add texture and meaning to an exploration of growing up and living as a diasporic Gujarati woman in a culture that excuses the behavior of men. Throughout, girls and women contend with the expectations, limitations, and challenges of becoming the heroine of one’s own life.
 
How to Make Your Mother Cry—Shah’s follow-up to her award-winning essay collection This Is One Way to Dance—continues the rich tradition of innovative feminist work by Claudia Rankine, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Maxine Hong Kingston. By braiding stories and images with fictional letters to a beloved English teacher, the collection defies traditional autofiction, epistolary, and short story conventions. These astonishing stories about friendship and love, resilience and survival establish Shah as an exciting new voice in contemporary fiction.
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How to Manage Processing in Archives and Special Collections
Pam Hackbart-Dean
Society of American Archivists, 2012
Every archives strives to have an active, well-planned processing program, but achieving this is no easy task. How to Manage Processing in Archives and Special Collections breaks down what you need to know to establish or revitalize your processing program, delivering effective methods to help you succeed. This resource is packed with information about: Creating a framework for a processing program, including developing processing policies, priorities, and strategies; Managing the day-to-day work of processing assessment techniques; Implementing best practices and standards; Administering a patron-based approach to managing processing; Effectively assessing the demands for descriptions and item-level cataloging to make collections available more swiftly; and Applying standards in the adoption of trends and new concepts in processing and in handling outside demands. Whether you manage numerous archivists, operate as one member of a processing team, or are a lone arranger, How to Manage Processing in Archives and Special Collections is your go-to guide for developing and managing a processing program. With an effective processing program in place, your archives will be better positioned to help users find the materials they need.
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How to Manage Processing in Archives and Special Collections
An Introduction
Pam Hackbart-Dean
American Library Association, 2013

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How to Name a Hurricane
Rane Arroyo
University of Arizona Press, 2005
There’s no denying it, media culture has ushered in a new era of visibility for gays in America. Yet somehow the gay Latino doesn’t fit into this sound-bite identity and usually isn’t included in national media images. Rane Arroyo offers a corrective. Known primarily as a poet and playwright representing the gay Latino community, Arroyo has also been publishing prose throughout his career and now gathers into this book a storm of writing that has been gaining strength, drop by drop, for more than ten years.

How to Name a Hurricane collects short stories and other fictions depicting Latino drag queens and leather men, religious sinners and happy atheists, working class heroes and cyberspace vaqueros—a parade of characters that invites readers to consider whether one is more authentic a gay Latino than another. Whereas actual hurricanes are given names, the gays given voice in this collection must name themselves—and these narratives in turn reveal something of the "I" of Hurricane Rane. Whether portraying a family gathering as Brideshead Revisited with a mambo soundtrack, recounting the relationship of transvestite Louie/Lois and her bisexual Superman, or bemoaning "feeling as unsexy as an old bean burrito in a 7-11 microwave," Arroyo tracks the heartbeat of his characters through a shimmering palette of styles. Here are monologues, a story in verse, and other experimental forms appropriate to experimental lives—all affirming the basic human rights to dignity, equality, love, and even silliness.

When the AIDS epidemic first hit, many Latino families destroyed any remembrances of their gay and bisexual sons that might betray their pasts to la familia or el pueblo. Arroyo’s writings return the ghosts of those sons to the families, bars, dance clubs, and neighborhoods where they belong. By penetrating to the I’s of narrative hurricanes, these stories honor the survivors of our ongoing cultural storms.
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How to Play a Poem
Don Bialostosky
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017
Approaching poems as utterances designed and packaged for pleasurable reanimation, How to Play a Poem leads readers through a course that uses our common experience of language to bring poems to life. It mobilizes the speech genres we acquire in our everyday exchanges to identify “signs of life” in poetic texts that can guide our co-creation of tone. How to Play a Poem draws on ideas from the Bakhtin School, usually associated with fiction rather than poetry, to construct a user-friendly practice of close reading as an alternative to the New Critical formalism that still shapes much of teaching and alienates many readers. It sets aside stock questions about connotation and symbolism to guide the playing out of dynamic relations among the human parties to poetic utterances, as we would play a dramatic script or musical score. How to Play a Poem addresses critics ready to abandon New Criticism, teachers eager to rethink poetry, readers eager to enjoy it, and students willing to give it a chance, inviting them to discover a lively and enlivening way to animate familiar and unfamiliar poems.
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How to Quiet a Vampire
A Sotie
Borislav Pekic
Northwestern University Press, 2005
The disquieting novel How to Quiet a Vampire is a rumination on terror and intellect in the tradition of Joseph Heller and George Steiner. Published to acclaim in 1977, Pekic's novel of ideas follows Konrad Rutkowski, professor of medieval history and former Gestapo officer, as he returns to the scene of his war crimes determined to renounce, or perhaps justify, his Nazi past. In a series of letters, Rutkowski lays out his ambivalent reactions to war and violence, connecting his own swirling ideas to those of the major figures of European thought: Plato, St. Augustine, Descartes, Nietzsche, Freud, and others.

Delving far deeper than mere intellect, however, Borislav Pekic was himself a frequent political agitator and occasional prisoner, and he drew on his first hand knowledge of police methods and life under totalitarianism to paint a chilling portrait of a supposedly free-thinking intellectual acting in the service of repression. At the same time he questions whether Rutkowski's ideology puts him outside the philosophical tradition he so admires—or if the line separating European thought from totalitarianism is not as clear as we like to think.
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How to Read a Moment
The American Novel and the Crisis of the Present
Mathias Nilges
Northwestern University Press, 2021
In How to Read a Moment, Mathias Nilges shows that time is inseparable from the stories we tell about it, demonstrating that the contemporary American novel offers new ways to make sense of the temporality that governs our present.
 
“Time is a thing that grows scarcer every day,” observes one of Don DeLillo’s characters. “The future is gone,” The Baffler argues. “Where’s my hoverboard!?” a meme demands. Contemporary capitalism, a system that insists that everything happen at once, creates problems for social thought and narrative alike. After all, how does one tell the time of instantaneity? In this moment of on-demand service and instant trading, it has become difficult to imagine the future. 
 
The novel emerged as the art form of a rapidly changing modern world, a way of telling time in its progress. Nilges argues that this historical mission is renewed today through works that understand contemporaneity as a form of time shaping that props up our material world and cultural imagination. But the contemporary American novel does not simply associate our present with a crisis of futurity. Through analyses of works by authors such as DeLillo, Jennifer Egan, Charles Yu, and Colson Whitehead, Nilges illustrates that the novel presents ways to make sense of the temporality that controls our purportedly fully contemporary world. In so doing, the novel recovers a sense of possibility and hope, forwarding a dazzling argument for its own importance today.
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How to Read an Oral Poem
John Miles Foley
University of Illinois Press, 2002
Though they appear diverse, Homer's Odyssey and slam poetry from contemporary urban America both draw from the well of oral tradition. This unique, practical, and user-friendly guide explores the cultural contexts of verbal art to provide more-than-textual methods for understanding the structure, principles, and social applications of oral poetry.

Using dozens of examples, including a North American slam poet, a Tibetan paper-singer, a South African praise-poet, and an ancient Greek bard, John Miles Foley shows that although oral poetry long predates the invention of writing, it continues to be a vital culture-making and communications tool in societies all over the world. Based on fieldwork and archival research on epics, folktales, lyrics, laments, charms, and other oral traditions, How to Read an Oral Poem answers the questions, What is oral poetry? How does it work? What is reading, literally and figuratively?
This accessible and engaging work is enhanced by audio and video examples of oral poetry, which are available at http://www.oraltradition.org. The book can also be used as companion volume to Foley's Teaching Oral Traditions.
 
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How To Read Descartes's Meditations
Zbigniew Janowski
St. Augustine's Press, 2019

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How to Read Donald Duck
Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic
Ariel Dorfman
Pluto Press, 2020
"The book has a rambunctious humor that complements its polemical spirit . . . As Disney has evolved from an animation studio into a corporate behemoth—with theme parks, a cruise line, and content streaming around the world—How to Read Donald Duck and its charge of cultural imperialism rings all the truer"—The New Yorker                       
 
First published in 1971, How to Read Donald Duck shocked readers by revealing how capitalist ideology operates in our most beloved cartoons. Having survived bonfires, impounding and being dumped into the ocean by the Chilean army, this controversial book is once again back on our shelves.
 
Written and published during the blossoming of Salvador Allende's revolutionary socialism in Chile, the book examines how Disney products reflect capitalist ideology, and are active agents working in this ideology’s favor. Focusing on the hapless mice and ducks of Disney, curiously parentless, marginalized and always short of cash, Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart expose how these characters established hegemonic ideas about capital, race, gender and the relationship between developed countries and the Third World.
 
A devastating indictment of a media giant, a document of twentieth-century political upheaval, and a reminder of the dark undercurrent of pop culture, How to Read Donald Duck is once again available, together with a new introduction by Ariel Dorfman in which he writes.
 
"It is that joy in liberation, that alegria, that spirit of resistance, that I wish to share with America, as the book that Pinochet’s soldiers could not liquidate or Disney’s lawyers stop from entering the United States finally finds its way to its new home, deep into the land that invented Donald Duck and Donald Trump. Is the same country that gave me such a warm welcome as a child, and perhaps may now equally greet with open arms this critique of oppression and it certainty that we don’t have to leave the world as it was when we first encountered it."
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How to Read Donald Duck
Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic
LastName
Pluto Press, 2019

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How to Read Foucault's Discipline and Punish
Stephen Shapiro and Anne Schwan
Pluto Press, 2011

Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is one of the best-selling works of critical theory and a key text on many undergraduate courses. However, it is a long, difficult text which makes Anne Schwan and Stephen Shapiro's excellent step-by-step reading guide a welcome addition to the How to Read Theory series.

Undergraduates across a wide range of disciplines are expected to have a solid understanding of Foucault's key terms, which have become commonplace in critical thinking today. While there are many texts that survey Foucault's thought, these are often more general overviews or biographical précis that give little in the way of robust explanation and discussion. In contrast, Schwan and Shapiro take a plain-speaking, yet detailed, approach, specifically designed to give students a thorough understanding of one of the most influential texts in contemporary cultural theory.

[more]

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How to Read Marx's Capital
Stephen Shapiro
Pluto Press, 2008
Das Capital Volume 1 is essential reading on many undergraduate courses, but the structure and style of the book can be confusing for students, leading them to abandon the text. This book is a clear guide to reading Marx's classic text, which explains the reasoning behind the book's structure and provides help with the more technical aspects that non-economists may find taxing.



Students are urged to think for themselves and engage with Marx's powerful methods of argument and explanation. Shapiro shows that Capital is key to understanding critical theory and cultural production.



This highly focused book will prove invaluable to students of politics, cultural studies, and literary theory.

[more]

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How to Respond Better to the Next Pandemic
Remedying Institutional Failures
Allen Buchanan, with contributions by Cécile Fabre and Sir Paul Tucker
University of Utah Press, 2024
There is no shortage of criticisms of U.S. COVID-19 policy. This book argues that officials at the highest levels lied to the public or deliberately suppressed relevant information, shamelessly over-sold the efficacy of masks and vaccines, and enacted lock-down policies of unproven value that caused massive economic, educational, and psycho-social damage.

In How to Respond Better to the Next Pandemic Allen Buchanan argues that, contrary to widespread opinion, the primary cause of flawed COVID-19 policy was not defective leadership, but rather institutional failure. Decisions were made through processes that lacked the most basic safeguards against the large-institution “yes-man” and group-think phenomena and included virtually no provisions for holding decision makers accountable. More fundamentally, policy makers did not fulfill the crucial duty to provide plausible public justifications for their decisions. They disguised the fact that scientific opinion was divided on the appropriateness of the policies they endorsed and labeled those who disagreed with them as anti-scientific. In some cases, they responded to criticism, not by engaging it on the issues, but by branding their critics as quacks.
[more]

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How to Revise a True War Story
Tim O'Brien's Process of Textual Production
John K. Young
University of Iowa Press, 2017
“You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it,” Tim O’Brien writes in The Things They Carried. Widely regarded as the most important novelist to come out of the American war in Viet Nam, O’Brien has kept on telling true war stories not only in narratives that cycle through multiple fictional and non-fictional versions of the war’s defining experiences, but also by rewriting those stories again and again. Key moments of revision extend from early drafts, to the initial appearance of selected chapters in magazines, across typescripts and page proofs for first editions, and through continuing post-publication variants in reprints.

How to Revise a True War Story is the first book-length study of O’Brien’s archival papers at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center. Drawing on extensive study of drafts and other prepublication materials, as well as the multiple published versions of O’Brien’s works, John K. Young tells the untold stories behind the production of such key texts as Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried, and In the Lake of the Woods. By reading not just the texts that have been published, but also the versions they could have been, Young demonstrates the important choices O’Brien and his editors have made about how to represent the traumas of the war in Viet Nam. The result is a series of texts that refuse to settle into a finished or stable form, just as the stories they present insist on being told and retold in new and changing ways. In their lack of textual stability, these variants across different versions enact for O’Brien’s readers the kinds of narrative volatility that is key to the American literature emerging from the war in Viet Nam. Perhaps in this case, you can tell a true war story if you just keep on revising it.
 
[more]

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How to Save a Constitutional Democracy
Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Z. Huq
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Democracies are in danger. Around the world, a rising wave of populist leaders threatens to erode the core structures of democratic self-rule. In the United States, the tenure of Donald Trump has seemed decisive turning point for many. What kind of president intimidates jurors, calls the news media the “enemy of the American people,” and seeks foreign assistance investigating domestic political rivals? Whatever one thinks of President Trump, many think the Constitution will safeguard us from lasting damage. But is that assumption justified?

How to Save a Constitutional Democracy mounts an urgent argument that we can no longer afford to be complacent. Drawing on a rich array of other countries’ experiences with democratic backsliding, Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Z. Huq show how constitutional rules can both hinder and hasten the decline of democratic institutions. The checks and balances of the federal government, a robust civil society and media, and individual rights—such as those enshrined in the First Amendment—often fail as bulwarks against democratic decline. The sobering reality for the United States, Ginsburg and Huq contend, is that the Constitution’s design makes democratic erosion more, not less, likely. Its structural rigidity has had unforeseen consequence—leaving the presidency weakly regulated and empowering the Supreme Court conjure up doctrines that ultimately facilitate rather than inhibit rights violations. Even the bright spots in the Constitution—the First Amendment, for example—may have perverse consequences in the hands of a deft communicator who can degrade the public sphere by wielding hateful language banned in many other democracies. We—and the rest of the world—can do better. The authors conclude by laying out practical steps for how laws and constitutional design can play a more positive role in managing the risk of democratic decline.
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How to Save a River
A Handbook For Citizen Action
David M. Bolling
Island Press, 1994

How to Save a River presents in a concise and readable format the wisdom gained from years of river protection campaigns across the United States. The book begins by defining general principles of action, including getting organized, planning a campaign, building public support, and putting a plan into action. It then provides detailed explanations of how to:

  • form an organization and raise money
  • develop coalitions with other groups
  • plan a campaign and build public support
  • cultivate the media and other powerful allies
  • develop credible alternatives to damaging projects
How to Save a River provides an important overview of the resource issues involved in river protection, and suggests sources for further investigation. Countless examples of successful river protection campaigns prove that ordinary citizens do have the power to create change when they know how to organize themselves.
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How to Shoot the Longbow
A Guide from Historical and Applied Sources
Hugh D. H. Soar
Westholme Publishing, 2015
A Leading Expert on Traditional Archery Offers Insight Into How the Longbow Was Drawn from Medieval Sources to Modern Recreations
“Soar’s book [The Crooked Stick] is indispensible.”—Bernard Cornwell, New York Times bestselling author
Relying on more than fifty years’ experience in archery, historian Hugh D. H. Soar reflects on how the longbow was drawn and shot across the centuries through examining the design of the bow and early literature about the bow, combined with his and his colleagues’ applied knowledge using replica bows. No complete medieval longbow has survived, but those found aboard the Tudor warship Mary Rose provide the best archaeological evidence to the possible construction of the medieval bow. Contemporary treatises written about the proper manner of shooting the bow, together with the resurgence in interest and construction of replica bows beginning in the late sixteenth century that form part of the author’s collection provide the basis for this work. How to Shoot the Longbow: A Guide from Historical and Applied Sources is a fascinating and practical look at the use of a legendary invention.
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How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today
Simon Goldhill
University of Chicago Press, 2007
From the stages of Broadway and London to university campuses, Paris, and the bourgeoning theaters of Africa, Greek tragedy remains constantly in production. This global revival, in addition to delighting audiences, has highlighted both the promise and the pitfalls of staging ancient masterpieces in the modern age. Addressing the issues and challenges these performances pose, renowned classicist Simon Goldhill responds here to the growing demand for a comprehensive guide to staging Greek tragedy today.

In crisp and spirited prose, Goldhill explains how Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles conceived their works in performance and then summarizes everything we know about how their tragedies were actually staged. The heart of his book tackles the six major problems facing any company performing these works today: the staging space and concept of the play; the use of the chorus; the actor’s role in an unfamiliar style of performance; the place of politics in tragedy; the question of translation; and the treatment of gods, monsters, and other strange characters of the ancient world. Outlining exactly what makes each of these issues such a pressing difficulty for modern companies, Goldhill provides insightful solutions drawn from his nimble analyses of some of the best recent productions in the United States, Britain, and Continental Europe.

One of the few experts on both Greek tragedy and contemporary performance, Goldhill uses his unique background and prodigious literary skill to illuminate brilliantly what makes tragedy at once so exciting and so tricky to get right. The result will inspire and enlighten all directors and performers—not to mention the growing audiences—of ancient Greek theater.
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How to Start a Farm Stop
A Pattern Language for Local Food Systems
Kathryn Barr
Michigan Publishing Services, 2023
Our current agricultural system favors large-scale, industrialized farms made to produce monocrops that are shipped all over the world. Consumers are sold on the idea that this system keeps food cheap and affordable, but it also means that middlemen take much of the profits while greenhouse gas emissions run high. The Argus Farm Stop in Ann Arbor, Michigan’s model provides economic and cultural benefits as well as enhanced resiliency for the farmers and communities they serve. This guidebook outlines the benefits and challenges of implementing this consignment-based business model. It highlights best practices, offers resources and technical assistance for the establishment of additional Farm Stops around the country, and prioritizes the development of regional, circular sustainable food systems that empower local farmers and enrich communities.
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How to Stay Afloat in the Academic Library Job Pool
Teresa Y. Neely
American Library Association

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How to Study Art Worlds
On the Societal Functioning of Aesthetic Values
Hans van Maanen
Amsterdam University Press, 2009

While numerous studies over the years have focused on the ways in which art functions in our society, How to Study Art Worlds is the first to examine it in light of the organizational aspects of the art world. Van Maanen delves into the works of such sociologists as Howard S. Becker, Pierre Bourdieu, George Dickie, and Niklas Luhmann, among others, to examine the philosophical debates surrounding aesthetic experience—and then traces the consequences that each of these approaches has had and continues to have on organizations in the art world.

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How to Study Public Life
Jan Gehl and Birgitte Svarre
Island Press, 2013
How do we accommodate a growing urban population in a way that is sustainable, equitable, and inviting? This question is becoming increasingly urgent to answer as we face diminishing fossil-fuel resources and the effects of a changing climate while global cities continue to compete to be the most vibrant centers of culture, knowledge, and finance.

Jan Gehl has been examining this question since the 1960s, when few urban designers or planners were thinking about designing cities for people. But given the unpredictable, complex and ephemeral nature of life in cities, how can we best design public infrastructure—vital to cities for getting from place to place, or staying in place—for human use? Studying city life and understanding the factors that encourage or discourage use is the key to designing inviting public space.

In How to Study Public Life Jan Gehl and Birgitte Svarre draw from their combined experience of over 50 years to provide a history of public-life study as well as methods and tools necessary to recapture city life as an important planning dimension.

This type of systematic study began in earnest in the 1960s, when several researchers and journalists on different continents criticized urban planning for having forgotten life in the city. City life studies provide knowledge about human behavior in the built environment in an attempt to put it on an equal footing with knowledge about urban elements such as buildings and transport systems. Studies can be used as input in the decision-making process,  as part of overall planning, or in designing individual projects such as streets, squares or parks. The original goal is still the goal today: to recapture city life as an important planning dimension. Anyone interested in improving city life will find inspiration, tools, and examples in this invaluable guide.
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How to Study
Suggestions for High-School and College Students
Arthur W. Kornhauser
University of Chicago Press, 1993
A complete guide for successful studying, How to Study is concise, practical, time-tested, and free of gimmicks. Designed originally for freshmen at the University of Chicago, this smart book has helped generations of students throughout the country improve their skills in learning quickly and effectively. It offers a no-nonsense plan of action filled with techniques, strategies, exercises, and advice for:

*Mastering rather than just memorizing material

*Learning the secrets of mental preparation before tackling difficult assignments or exams

*Strengthening skills for better reading, note taking, and listening

*Improving use of time in the classroom, the library, and at home

It offers a wealth of advice, from the commonsensical ("Never begin study immediately after eating" and "Check every tendency to daydream") to the more psychological ("Use your knowledge by thinking, talking, and writing about the things you are learning").

Thoroughly revised and updated, this powerful little book can help any motivated and capable student work smarter, not just harder, from high school through college.

When he wrote How to Study Arthur W. Kornhauser (1896-1990) was associate professor of business psychology at the University of Chicago.
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How to Succeed in College (While Really Trying)
A Professor's Inside Advice
Jon B. Gould
University of Chicago Press, 2010

After years of preparation and anticipation, many students arrive at college without any real knowledge of the ins and outs of college life. They’ve been focused on finding the right school and have been carefully guided through the nuances of the admissions process, but too often they have little knowledge about how college will be different from high school or what will be expected of them during that crucial first year and beyond. Written by an award-winning teacher, How to Succeed in College (While Really Trying) provides much-needed help to students, offering practical tips and specific study strategies that will equip them to excel in their new environment.

Drawing on years of experience teaching at a variety of campuses, from large research universities to small liberal arts colleges, Jon B. Gould gives readers the lay of the land and demystifies the college experience. In the course of the book, students will learn how to identify the best instructors, how to choose classes and settle on a major, how to develop effective strategies for reading and note taking, and how to write good papers and successfully complete exams.

Because much of the college experience takes place outside of the classroom, Gould also advises students on how to effectively manage their cocurricular activities, work obligations, and free time, as well as how to take advantage of the typically untapped resources on every campus. With candid advice and insights from a seasoned insider, this guide will leave students better prepared not only to succeed in college but to enjoy it as well.

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How to Suppress Women's Writing
By Joanna Russ; foreword by Jessa Crispin
University of Texas Press, 2018

Are women able to achieve anything they set their minds to? In How to Suppress Women’s Writing, award-winning novelist and scholar Joanna Russ lays bare the subtle—and not so subtle—strategies that society uses to ignore, condemn, or belittle women who produce literature. As relevant today as when it was first published in 1983, this book has motivated generations of readers with its powerful feminist critique.

“What is it going to take to break apart these rigidities? Russ’s book is a formidable attempt. It is angry without being self-righteous, it is thorough without being exhausting, and it is serious without being devoid of a sense of humor. But it was published over thirty years ago, in 1983, and there’s not an enormous difference between the world she describes and the world we inhabit.”
—Jessa Crispin, from the foreword

“A book of the most profound and original clarity. Like all clear-sighted people who look and see what has been much mystified and much lied about, Russ is quite excitingly subversive. The study of literature should never be the same again.”
—Marge Piercy

“Joanna Russ is a brilliant writer, a writer of real moral passion and high wit.”
—Adrienne Rich

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How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog)
Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution
Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Tucked away in Siberia, there are furry, four-legged creatures with wagging tails and floppy ears that are as docile and friendly as any lapdog. But, despite appearances, these are not dogs—they are foxes. They are the result of the most astonishing experiment in breeding ever undertaken—imagine speeding up thousands of years of evolution into a few decades. In 1959, biologists Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut set out to do just that, by starting with a few dozen silver foxes from fox farms in the USSR and attempting to recreate the evolution of wolves into dogs in real time in order to witness the process of domestication. This is the extraordinary, untold story of this remarkable undertaking.

Most accounts of the natural evolution of wolves place it over a span of about 15,000 years, but within a decade, Belyaev and Trut’s fox breeding experiments had resulted in puppy-like foxes with floppy ears, piebald spots, and curly tails. Along with these physical changes came genetic and behavioral changes, as well. The foxes were bred using selection criteria for tameness, and with each generation, they became increasingly interested in human companionship. Trut has been there the whole time, and has been the lead scientist on this work since Belyaev’s death in 1985, and with Lee Dugatkin, biologist and science writer, she tells the story of the adventure, science, politics, and love behind it all.  In How to Tame a Fox, Dugatkin and Trut take us inside this path-breaking experiment in the midst of the brutal winters of Siberia to reveal how scientific history is made and continues to be made today.

To date, fifty-six generations of foxes have been domesticated, and we continue to learn significant lessons from them about the genetic and behavioral evolution of domesticated animals. How to Tame a Fox offers an incredible tale of scientists at work, while also celebrating the deep attachments that have brought humans and animals together throughout time.
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How to Teach Art?
Wiktoria Furrer, Carla Gabrí, Nastasia Louveau, Maria Ordoñez, and Artur Zmijewski
Diaphanes, 2021
A cooperative reflection on how to teach art.

How should art be taught? What kind of knowledge should artists absorb? How might an ordinary person become a creature addicted to the creative process? In other words, how can a non-artist become an artist? Such programmatic questions articulated by acclaimed Polish artist Artur Żmijewski were at the heart of the workshop “How to Teach Art?” Żmijewski invited a group of graduate and doctoral students from three Zurich universities—the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the University of Zurich, and the Zurich University of the Arts—to collectively reflect on their artistic practices. Over the course of four months, the group met several times a week for hourlong sessions, following individual and collective exercises induced by Żmijewski himself.
 
This book retraces the workshop and its process by showing inconclusive, fragmentary results between theory and practice. How to Teach Art? presents drawings, videos, photographs, 16mm films, and accompanying reflections on the central premise, “How to teach art?”
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How to Think About Catastrophe
Toward a Theory of Enlightened Doomsaying
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
Michigan State University Press, 2022
During the last century humanity acquired the ability to destroy itself. The direct approach to destruction can be seen in such facts as the ever-present threat of nuclear war, but we have also developed the capacity to do indirect harm by altering conditions necessary for survival, including the looming cloud of climate change. How can we look forward and work past the dire position we now find ourselves in to achieve a sustainable future? This volume presents a new way of thinking about the future as it examines catastrophe and the human response. It examines different kinds of catastrophes that range from natural (e.g., earthquakes) to industrial (e.g., Chernobyl) and concludes that the traditional distinctions between them are only becoming blurrier by the day. This book aims to build a general theory of catastrophes—a new form of apocalyptic thinking that is grounded in science and philosophy. An ethics for the sake of the future is what is required, which in turn necessitates a new metaphysics of temporality. If a way out of the imminent danger in which we find ourselves is to be found, we must first look to radically alter our ethics.
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How to Think about Information
Dan Schiller
University of Illinois Press, 2006

It is common wisdom that the U.S. economy has adapted to losses in its manufacturing base because of the booming information sector, with high-paying jobs for everything from wireless networks to video games. We are told we live in the Information Age, in which communications networks and media and information services drive the larger economy. While the Information Age may have looked sunny in the beginning, as it has developed it looks increasingly ominous: its economy and benefits grow more and more centralized--and in the United States, it has become less and less subject to democratic oversight.

Corporations around the world have identified the value of information and are now seeking to control its production, transmission, and consumption. In How to Think about Information, Dan Schiller explores the ways information has been increasingly commodified as a result and how it both resembles and differs from other commodities. Through a linked series of theoretical, historical, and contemporary studies, Schiller reveals this commodification as both dynamic and expansionary, but also deeply conflicted and uncertain. He examines the transformative political and economic changes occurring throughout the informational realm and analyzes key dimensions of the process, including the buildup of new technological platforms, the growth of a transnationalizing culture industry, and the role played by China as it reinserts itself into an informationalized capitalism.

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How to Think Impossibly
About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else
Jeffrey J. Kripal
University of Chicago Press, 2024
A mind-bending invitation to experience the impossible as fundamentally human.
 

From precognitive dreams and telepathic visions to near-death experiences, UFO encounters, and beyond, so-called impossible phenomena are not supposed to happen. But they do happen—all the time. Jeffrey J. Kripal asserts that the impossible is a function not of reality but of our everchanging assumptions about what is real. How to Think Impossibly invites us to think about these fantastic (yet commonplace) experiences as an essential part of being human, expressive of a deeply shared reality that is neither mental nor material but gives rise to both. Thinking with specific individuals and their extraordinary experiences in vulnerable, open, and often humorous ways, Kripal interweaves humanistic and scientific inquiry to foster an awareness that the fantastic is real, the supernatural is super natural, and the impossible is possible.
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How to Think like a Philosopher
Twelve Key Principles for More Humane, Balanced, and Rational Thinking
Julian Baggini
University of Chicago Press, 2023
An invitation to the habits of good thinking from philosopher Julian Baggini.

By now, it should be clear: in the face of disinformation and disaster, we cannot hot take, life hack, or meme our way to a better future. But how should we respond instead? In How to Think like a Philosopher, Julian Baggini turns to the study of reason itself for practical solutions to this question, inspired by our most eminent philosophers, past and present.

Baggini offers twelve key principles for a more humane, balanced, and rational approach to thinking: pay attention; question everything (including your questions); watch your steps; follow the facts; watch your language; be eclectic; be a psychologist; know what matters; lose your ego; think for yourself, not by yourself; only connect; and don’t give up. Each chapter is chockful of real-world examples showing these principles at work—from the discovery of penicillin to the fight for trans rights—and how they lead to more thoughtful conclusions. More than a book of tips and tricks (or ways to be insufferably clever at parties), How to Think like a Philosopher is an invitation to develop the habits of good reasoning that our world desperately needs.
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How to Win the Nobel Prize
An Unexpected Life in Science
J. Michael Bishop
Harvard University Press, 2004

In 1989 Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery that normal genes under certain conditions can cause cancer. In this book, Bishop tells us how he and Varmus made their momentous discovery. More than a lively account of the making of a brilliant scientist, How to Win the Nobel Prize is also a broader narrative combining two major and intertwined strands of medical history: the long and ongoing struggles to control infectious diseases and to find and attack the causes of cancer.

Alongside his own story, that of a youthful humanist evolving into an ambivalent medical student, an accidental microbiologist, and finally a world-class researcher, Bishop gives us a fast-paced and engrossing tale of the microbe hunters. It is a narrative enlivened by vivid anecdotes about our deadliest microbial enemies--the Black Death, cholera, syphilis, tuberculosis, malaria, smallpox, HIV--and by biographical sketches of the scientists who led the fight against these scourges.

Bishop then provides an introduction for nonscientists to the molecular underpinnings of cancer and concludes with an analysis of many of today's most important science-related controversies--ranging from stem cell research to the attack on evolution to scientific misconduct. How to Win the Nobel Prize affords us the pleasure of hearing about science from a brilliant practitioner who is a humanist at heart. Bishop's perspective will be valued by anyone interested in biomedical research and in the past, present, and future of the battle against cancer.

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How to Woo, When, and to Whom
W. H. Collingridge
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2006
Before eHarmony.com, speed dating, and The Rules, there was W.H. Collingridge and his no-nonsense guide, How to Woo, When, and to Whom. Originally published in 1855 and newly reprinted here, How to Woo wrestles with the same problems men and women face today: seeking, seducing, and snaring a suitable mate. 

The book addresses every step in navigating the perilous territory of love, from instructions on writing love letters to the rules of public displays of affection to gracefully dealing with rejection. Also included are the most important characteristics to keep in mind when choosing The One, such as age, health, fortune, morals, and social position. On marriage, Collingridge wisely advises: “Both men and women vary greatly as to the age at which they arrive at maturity; marriage should never be undertaken before that age, and generally never after.” Even so, Collingridge lauds marriage as an institution of virtues, noting how young men’s “intellects become sharpened, their morals improved, and their energy, by certain necessity, enlarged.” (He does not, interestingly enough, note what marriage does for women.) Passages of verse by such famed literary figures as Shakespeare, Boswell, Dr. Johnson, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu accompany the sensible advice, providing an array of poetic passages that capture the tumultuous and timeless emotions of love and rejection. 

Even though today’s social scene is more analogous to Sex and the City than Emma, much of the counsel in How to Woo is surprisingly applicable to contemporary daters. An invaluable resource for both lovers and the lovelorn, How to Woo is a delightful handbook on the age-old art of courting.
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front cover of How to Write a BA Thesis
How to Write a BA Thesis
A Practical Guide from Your First Ideas to Your Finished Paper
Charles Lipson
University of Chicago Press, 2005
The senior thesis is the capstone of a college education, but writing one can be a daunting prospect. Students need to choose their own topic and select the right adviser. Then they need to work steadily for several months as they research, write, and manage a major independent project. Now there's a mentor to help. How to Write a BA Thesis is a practical, friendly guide written by Charles Lipson, an experienced professor who has guided hundreds of students through the thesis-writing process.

This book offers step-by-step advice on how to turn a vague idea into a clearly defined proposal, then a draft paper, and, ultimately, a polished thesis. Lipson also tackles issues beyond the classroom-from good work habits to coping with personal problems that interfere with research and writing.

Filled with examples and easy-to-use highlighted tips, the book also includes handy time schedules that show when to begin various tasks and how much time to spend on each. Convenient checklists remind students which steps need special attention, and a detailed appendix, filled with examples, shows how to use the three main citation systems in the humanities and social sciences: MLA, APA, and Chicago.

How to Write a BA Thesis will help students work more comfortably and effectively-on their own and with their advisers. Its clear guidelines and sensible advice make it the perfect text for thesis workshops. Students and their advisers will refer again and again to this invaluable resource. From choosing a topic to preparing the final paper, How to Write a BA Thesis helps students turn a daunting prospect into a remarkable achievement.
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front cover of How to Write a BA Thesis, Second Edition
How to Write a BA Thesis, Second Edition
A Practical Guide from Your First Ideas to Your Finished Paper
Charles Lipson
University of Chicago Press, 2018
How to Write a BA Thesis is the only book that directly addresses the needs of undergraduate students writing a major paper. This book offers step-by-step advice on how to move from early ideas to finished paper. It covers choosing a topic, selecting an advisor, writing a proposal, conducting research, developing an argument, writing and editing the thesis, and making through a defense. Lipson also acknowledges the challenges that arise when tackling such a project, and he offers advice for breaking through writer’s block and juggling school-life demands. This is a must-read for anyone writing a BA thesis, or for anyone who advises these students.
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front cover of Human-Built World
Human-Built World
How to Think about Technology and Culture
Thomas P. Hughes
University of Chicago Press, 2004
To most people, technology has been reduced to computers, consumer goods, and military weapons; we speak of "technological progress" in terms of RAM and CD-ROMs and the flatness of our television screens. In Human-Built World, thankfully, Thomas Hughes restores to technology the conceptual richness and depth it deserves by chronicling the ideas about technology expressed by influential Western thinkers who not only understood its multifaceted character but who also explored its creative potential.

Hughes draws on an enormous range of literature, art, and architecture to explore what technology has brought to society and culture, and to explain how we might begin to develop an "ecotechnology" that works with, not against, ecological systems. From the "Creator" model of development of the sixteenth century to the "big science" of the 1940s and 1950s to the architecture of Frank Gehry, Hughes nimbly charts the myriad ways that technology has been woven into the social and cultural fabric of different eras and the promises and problems it has offered. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, optimistically hoped that technology could be combined with nature to create an Edenic environment; Lewis Mumford, two centuries later, warned of the increasing mechanization of American life.

Such divergent views, Hughes shows, have existed side by side, demonstrating the fundamental idea that "in its variety, technology is full of contradictions, laden with human folly, saved by occasional benign deeds, and rich with unintended consequences." In Human-Built World, he offers the highly engaging history of these contradictions, follies, and consequences, a history that resurrects technology, rightfully, as more than gadgetry; it is in fact no less than an embodiment of human values.
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