SHELF LIFE

Recently published works by Mason faculty and staff

Bridging the Seas: The Rise of Naval Architecture in the Industrial Age

Larrie D. Ferreiro, adjunct faculty, History

MIT Press, January 2020 As technology advanced in the 19th century, the building of ships changed as well. A new era of materials led to new practices, new possibilities, and new expectations for what naval transportation could be. This text delves into several topics, including the theoretical developments in naval architecture.

We Are the Leaders We’ve Been Waiting For: Women and Leadership Development in College

Julie Owen, associate professor, Leadership Studies

Stylus Publishing, May 2020 In the world we live in, there’s no longer any justification for keeping women out of leadership roles. The demand has grown for colleges to help prepare women to become modern leaders. In this book, Owen examines intersectional identities, critical consciousness, and student development theory and situates them within the context of helping women leaders.

Family Violence in the United States: Defining, Understanding, and Combating Abuse

Denise Hines, associate professor, Social Work, with Kathleen Malley-Morrison and Leila B. Dutton SAGE Publishing, August 2020 A wellrounded and accessible approach to discussing the concept of violence and abuse within family units, this book emphasizes the role that larger social systems play and how they contribute to abuse, in addition to discussing effective prevention and intervention of family violence.

If Food Could Talk: Stories from 13 Precious Foods Endangered by Climate Change

Theodore Dumas, associate professor, Psychology

Koehler Books, September 2020 This book recognizes the broader dangers of climate change, focusing on the potential loss of food sources. It analyzes the history of these foods and their cultivation, with an explanation of their value within society, including the spiritual, sociological, and nutritional impacts. Each chapter ends with a recipe featuring an endangered food.

Understanding University Committees: How to Manage and Participate Constructively in Institutional Governance

David Farris, PhD ’16, executive director, Safety and Emergency Management

Stylus Publishing, September 2020 Committees play a vital role in the effective operations of any college or university. However, there is not usually a great amount of guidance available to determine how to best organize and conduct these committees. The author uses empirical analysis, interviews, and organizational theory to address concepts like planning, composition, conduct, and the structural support necessary to ensure a successful committee.

Creating Good Data: A Guide to Dataset Structure and Data Representation

Harry Foxwell, PhD ’03, associate professor, Information Sciences and Technology Apress, October 2020 Many people do not view data as necessarily good or bad, but rather as a set of facts or circumstances that have been collected. This text argues otherwise and provides an outline for the creation of good data during the collection process. This book is designed to help researchers and data analysts conduct analyses and report their findings in a more effective way.

Teaching Math at a Distance: A Practical Guide to Rich Remote Instruction

Theresa Wills, MEd ’07, PhD ’15, assistant professor, Math Education

Corwin, November 2020 2020 has led to a drastic increase in the amount of distance learning taking place across the many levels of education. In this guide, the author uses her own experience and the experiences of other teachers in K12 virtual classrooms to provide a groundwork for effective remote instruction.

Demography and Economic Emergence of Sub-Saharan Africa

John May, research professor, Schar School of Policy and Government Académie royale de Belgique, November 2020 More than 48 countries make up subSaharan Africa, an area that has long been considered less developed compared to Europe or the Americas. This text addresses the numerous challenges that stand between these countries and continued economic growth and analyzes how they can be overcome.

The Unitary Executive Theory: A Danger to Constitutional Government

Mark Rozell, founding dean, Schar School of Policy and Government, with Jeffrey Couch and Mitchel Sollenberger University Press of Kansas, November 2020 The Unitary Executive Theory can be best summed up by a quote from former president Donald Trump about Article II of the U.S. Constitution: “I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” This theory stands in opposition to the system of checks and balances that some think defines the American system of government. This text traces the rise of the theory from its roots in the Reagan administration to the Trump administration.

The City of Good Death

Priyanka Champaneri, BA ’05, MFA ’10, editorial manager, Office of Communications and Marketing Restless Books, February 2021 Winner of the 2018 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, this debut novel takes place inside India’s holy city of Banaras, where the manager of a death hostel shepherds the dying who seek the release of a good death, while his own past refuses to let him go.

60 SECONDS TO NUCLEAR WAR

In a recent episode of the Access to Excellence podcast, Pulitzer Prizewinning author and Mason history professor Martin Sherwin discusses his new book, Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis (Knopf, October 2020), and tells a terrifying, and not wellknown, story of how close we came to nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

Do most Americans realize just how perilously close we came to nuclear war in October 1962?

Until I researched this book, I really didn’t realize how close we had come. It was literally a matter of a minute or less. That’s one of the reasons that the crisis ended so precipitously on October 28, 1962. Nikita Khrushchev was terrified that things were spinning out of control and a nuclear war could result. And it was even closer than Khrushchev thought. For example, one of his submarine captains—worried that U.S. Navy antisubmarine forces were trying to sink his boat—came within a minute of launching a nuclear torpedo at an American aircraft carrier. The book begins with a detailed description of that terrifying story because I saw it as a metaphor for the entire crisis.

How did this whole crisis begin in the first place?

Well, there are lots of different ways to define the crisis. Initially, it was defined as the 13 days from October 16 to 28. October 16 was the day that President Kennedy was informed that a U2 [aircraft] had taken photos that demonstrated that the Soviets had medium and intermediaterange missiles in Cuba.

However, what Gambling with Armageddon does is to go back to Hiroshima and to look at the crisis as what I call the long Cuban Missile Crisis, from the Truman administration through the Kennedy administration. It is not unreasonable to argue that the Cuban Missile Crisis was initiated by the United States, along with the Soviet Union. We introduced nuclear weapons as weapons of war with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Eisenhower administration escalated the role of nuclear weapons enormously. Eisenhower had an arsenal of about 1,200 nuclear weapons in 1953 when he was inaugurated, and when he left eight years later, there was an arsenal of more than 22,000 nuclear weapons. And that created the framework for the whole Cuban Missile Crisis.

Listen to the podcast at bit.ly/sherwinbook.