Corbin Reviews

Thank you for giving us (teachers) a very useful tool for jumpstarting writing. The kids so need help on understanding how to write a decent paragraph. This book does it! I appreciate all of the other ideas and reproducible pages to help teach writing. We need all of the help we can get. What a practical book.

"Richard W. Corbin served with the Army of Northern Virginia for only the last nine months of its existence. His letters describing Confederate service made a book of fewer than one hundred pages in the original edition, and more than one-fourth of that volume covered Corbin's interesting and arduous trip from Europe to Virginia. Despite the author's relatively short tenure with the army, and the slender extent of the resultant book, Corbin's Letters of a Confederate Officer to His Family in Europe During the Last Year of the War of Secession stands out as an important item in Confederate bibliographical annals for several reasons. It is one of the meager handful of Confederate books published in France; the only published Army of Northern Virginia account by a French emigrant (albeit of Virginian blood); among the half-dozen rarest Army of Northern Virginia books; the most important single source for the curiously unrecorded military career of General Charles W. Field; and, in my admittedly subjective judgment, the best written and most literate book by any Confederate." Robert K. Krick

"Unfortunately rare, this book includes the candid letters of a member of Major General C. W. Field's staff, who described interesting details of operations North of the James subsequent to June, 1864." Douglas Southall Freeman, excerpt from the select bibliography of Lee's Lieutenants

The book lives up to its title. It is an excellent example of a study of material remains and how they actually relate to the people who left them behind. The fascinating thing about shipwrecks and what material items they house, is that people did not get a chance to pick and choose what they left behind, such as when a Great Plains family left a sod house for their first frame house. Instead, everything they brought, except for that on their back, they were forced to leave behind. It is an instant snapshot of time, place, people, and lifestyle. Dr. Corbin has done an excellent job of explaining why she undertook this project, as well as explaining her conclusions. Granted, she was only able to research so much, but these brief "pictures" of lives gone before us, are illuminating. She does a fine job of bringing the historical record to bear on the artifactual evidence, and vice-versa. Not meant as a book for public consumption, it will have a welcoming audience in "students" of the past and the westward expansion of the United States. The only drawback is the "as usual" high price for a Plenum series book.

This book has an amazing cast of characters, and is good for nearly all ages. The author has put great detail into the townsfolk, and you will feel like you know them all personally.
Lulu is a feisty little girl, who will remind everyone of their own childhood adventures. Plus, a good twist on the conventional murder mystery. It's not the same old "Whodunnit!" The reader is told about a dead body in the beginning. You learn throughout the book that several townspeople have a certain tatoo like the dead man, and you can't help but wonder, "Who IS it?" instead of Whodunnit!
This book is a good length. Not too long...and can be read within a few nights.
The first in a series, I believe....

PR Visionaries is a remarkable piece of work! It provides you with the techniques and secrets of the best and leading members of the industry, from Ketchum, Porter Novelli, Brodeur Worldwide, and other leading players.

While strong on the strategic side, PR Visionaries is a bit weaker on the tactical side. I don't hold the editors responsible for this, however, as this is not a how-to manual, per se. For the tactical side, I found Guerrilla PR: Wired by Michael Levine to be a more than adequate resource.

PR Visionaries, as the title says, has the giants of the public relations industry tell you how to get noticed, build a brand, develop and protect a reputation, and how to be effective with key opinion-leaders, including the CEO. While it might be overly dramatic to say the book spills their secrets, PR Visionaries covers the various facets on how to successfully manage a powerful public relations campaign on all levels, one that clearly resonates with key stakeholders and publics.

I borrowed this book from the library and now I want to own a copy. This book is short, only 66 pages of material and then great book lists at the end. It's a book that you can read in one night and then put to use the next day. I was so confused how to start the whole process of teaching my five year old twins to read. This step-by-step approach solved my problem. I am already using these steps with my two year old too!

Michael Calvin McGee died last month after one of those maddeningly cruel lengthy illnesses that prematurely forced him out of the classroom he so dearly loved. "Rhetoric in Postmodern America: Conversations with Michael Calvin McGee" is a cherished reminder of McGee as a mentor to those of us who studied under him at the University of Iowa and elsewhere, and an introduction to his approach to the study of rhetoric for the rest of the world. The conversations themselves are based on a series of seminars in which McGee developed with complex web of ideas. Those who studied with McGee will quickly find themselves in familiar territory as they read these five conversations (for me it was the Todd Willey anecdote about why English Departments consider rhetoricians bastard stepchildren unworthy of entry into the ivory towers of academia):

The volume begins with what amounts to an introductory first chapter entitled "McGee Unplugged," written by John Louis Lucaites, who was the first American born student to complete his doctorate under McGee. Lucaites reminds us that stylistically, conversations were McGee's forum of choice and that the conversations included in this volume do not have to be read sequentially. You can just as easily get from Isocrates as an example of "phronimos" in Chapter 2 to the notion of collectivity in Chapter 5 as you can the importance of representation to rhetoric. From the materialist conception of rhetoric to the need to remodel liberalism, the topics McGee talks about dance in and around the pivotal relationship between rhetoric and social theory, which was on one level simply the conventional name given at Iowa to McGee's work.

Chapter 2, Formal Discursive Theories reconsiders the relationship between rhetoric and dialectic and then the notion of wisdom, for which Isocrates and not Plato is the Dead Greek of choice. This leads to representations as the key way of characterizing our study of human action.

Chapter 3, The Postmodern Condition follows the lead of Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan in considering orality to be humanity's state of nature. Ironically technology has allowed us to return to a more oral view of the world and creates new problems for looking at a "text," which can no longer be considered a single, finite entity.

Chapter 4, American Liberalism is more about the Whig-Liberal tradition that harkens back to Edmund Burke than it does to contemporary left-wing politics. With the shift from the Aristotlean rhetoric of persuasion to the Burkean rhetoric of identification, McGee posits the goal of scholarly endeavor to be political effectiveness in general and remodeling liberalism in particular. Within this context McGee looks at property and capital (i.e., how to tell the difference between liberals and communists), and how morality creates the space between law and liberty that establishes a code of conduct. Multicultrualism raises the issue of heterogeneity in our society while McGee returns to a favorite topic when he talks about the dynamic between "male" sovereignty and "female" solidarity."

Chapter 5, The People reconsiders the key elements of McGee's first seminal QJS essay by contrasting the spectatorship created by a world dominated by television with the collectivity that television can create in crisis. This returns us to the intellectual problem of subjectivity and ontology, which is what gets McGee to his friends Jose Ortega y Gasset and Jurgen Habermas.

Chapter 6, Materialism is established as a coherent philosophical position that is a variant of realism, which historical materialism (a pivotal term) as coded human practice. The idea of objectivity merely reminds us that human discourse is both referential and subjective at the same time. McGee uses the term instantiation to help us tell how materialism is different from the word as used by Communists and Wall Street types. A materialist's morality takes a more political turn that the Christian morality that serves as an idealistic exemplar.

As an example of McGee's "performance criticism," the volume concludes with a previously unpublished work "Fragments of Winter: Racial Discontent in America, 1992," in which McGee finds an extension of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech in Spike Lee's film, "Do the Right Thing." Without getting into the particulars of this compelling essay, I would point out that McGee considers Lee's film on a cultural par with Picasso's painting "Guernica."

After reading this book the comparison between McGee and Kenneth Burke is perhaps the most relevant (flashback: McGee escorting the elderly Burke, who was about half McGee's size, at an SCA convention), for the simple reason that their public arguments display the same astounding breadth and depth of sources. For McGee reading Burke alone provided a superficial understanding; the only appropriate alternative was to read everything Burke had read (a premise fated to stay the heart of many a graduate student). For this reason you will find McGee talking about everything from Louis Althusser's understanding of the relationship between aesthetics and power to Thomas Szasz's study of the myth of mental illness (and that is just the names "dropped" over the course of these five conversations and one essay).

It must be noted that both of the reviewer comments by colleagues of McGee on the back of this volume use the word "exasperating" to describe these conversation, the term being contrasted with "stimulating" and "intriguing" respectively. The explanation for such exasperation, dear friends, lies within the cognitive realm of the receiver. I would advance this brief example of exorcism by appropriating a political slogan McGee would have found unsettling in his younger days: in your heart, you know he's right.

Lawrance M. Bernabo, "The Scopes Myth: The Scopes Trial in Rhetorical Perspective," Disseration, University of Iowa, 1990, directed by Michael Calvin McGee.

I was so pleased to finally read Tommy Wu's completed life story that takes you through the turbulent times of recent Chinese history. I was especially delighted because I met Tommy at the Central Institute of Fine Arts in 1987 and read his incomplete manuscript and wondered how he would get his story out. Tommy is an incredible person and a delightful storyteller. His book will share the pain, suffering, and turmoil of life in China but his bubbling optimism brings hope for the future. This book is a must read for anyone interested in China and the spirit of survival.

It is very rare that one can read a religiously oriented book and end up with a feeling of respect and awe. The Shii/Sufi teachings are most fascinating. A wonderful book to read, to say the least.

This truly is a comprehensive resource for substitute teachers! I've been subbing for years and this book inspired me to buy a three-ring-binder and really get organized. It has lots of useful pages to copy, ideas for the classroom, tips, pages to photocopy for recordkeeping and activities, and motivational ideas. The pages are also perforated and hole-punched for immediate usefulness. The book is really well-done and useful for new subs as well as experienced ones. I highly recommend it.