Purdue University Press - Innovation is our Pressing Mission

Becoming a Self
A Reading of Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript

Soren Kierkegaard (1818-55) is perhaps best known for his existentialism, and his critique of the Western metaphysical tradition makes him a religiously committed postmodernist. Becoming a Self provides a reader's guide to the book often taken to be Kierkegaard's most important contribution to philosophy and theology. [More]

Sets out to explain the concept of telebusiness, looking into a variety of areas in which the telephone can be more fully integrated. Explores related aspects of marketing, and discusses information technology. [More]

A review and exploration of the evidence that animals have a significant influence on human life and health. [More]

A dozen Purdue University Jewish faculty members --10 men and 2 women -- who were forced to flee their homes in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary during the Holocaust, tell their stories in a series of interviews conducted by Kleine-Ahlbrandt, a history professor at Purdue and the author of The Burden of Victory: France, Britain and the Enforcement of the Versailles Peace, 1919-1925 (1995). [More]

As reviewers of research on school desegregation have pointed out, it is important to learn more about the conditions under which interracial contact in schools has positive, rather than negative, effects on students. This book presents the results of a major study, which investigates this issue. Based on research in all the public high schools of Indianapolis, it is probably the most in-depth investigation of interracial contact in schools, which has ever been conducted. [More]

Blood and Belief
Family Survival and Confessional Identity among the Provincial Huguenot Nobility

The story told here of is one of adaptation and determination as the petty noble. Lacger family of Castres in southwestern France evolved--and sometimes advanced their position--through the troubled times of the Reformation and Wars of Religion, an all too brief period of tolerance, and the later proscription, of Protestantism. [More]

In Blue Flame, noted regional biographer Robert C. Kriebel devotes his admiring attention to documenting Herman's life and music. No aspect of Herman's career escapes his gaze: the musicians-both famous and obscure who played in his bands, the music they played, the writers and arrangers of that music, the famous recordings, and the ups and downs of band life from the big-band heyday of the 1930s through half a century of changing tastes and changing times. [More]

In poems that are at once colloquial and elegant, Perillo strives to bridge the gap between the exuberant voice of the streets and the rarefied voice of literary tradition. Using the long lines and narrative style that have been identified with some of the finest male poets of our times, Perillo tells the stories of female experience with a grim eye for the comic and an ear turned to language's highest pitch. [More]

The traditional equation of the death of a person with irreversible cessation of cardiorespiratory function--the absence of heartbeat, pulse, or respiration--is being replaced by modern medicine with a definition of death in terms of irreversible destruction of function-brain death. [More]

Breaking Open
Reflections on Italian American Women's Writing
edited by Mary Ann Vigilante Mannino and Justin Vitello

Breaking Open explores the deep connection between prominent Italian American women writers, their heritage, and their writing. In-depth discussions of these writers’ family traditions and memories of growing up in an American culture as an Italian child, including the difficulties of dueling dialects and dual cultures, explain how their unique cultural connections have impacted their work.
[More]

Bridging the Bond
The Cultural Construction of the Shelter Pet
by Tami L. Harbolt

What happens behind the doors of the animal shelter? This book will introduce the reader to the work culture of animal shelter employees, volunteers, activists, educators, and pets. By weaving together her own personal memoirs with interviews with workers, the author describes the traditions, philosophies, history, and current social dynamics of a typical animal welfare community. [More]

The author defines and analyzes the new type of theatrical perspective invented by Samuel Beckett. She begins with an overview of the major changes of the definition of perspective in a variety of domains of twentieth-century knowledge (e.g., art, science, philosophy, psychology), then discusses the concepts of time, space, and movement which underlie Beckett's notion and use of perspective in the theater. The Broken Window shows how Beckett translates a number of twentieth-century esthetic and philosophical concerns-the impossibility of separating subject and object, the indeterminacy of time and space, the inevitability of movement and change-into specific dramatic techniques, and traces their evolution through close textual analyses of six plays. [More]

Brood Bitch is a mother’s reflection inspired by her hand-raising a litter of Pembroke Welsh corgis whose own mother died after a Caesarian delivery. Devastated by the loss of her only companion and awed by the task of saving the puppies, the narrator is surprised to discover she enjoys this exclusive commitment. [More]

Brute Force

Policing Animal Cruelty

by Arnold Arluke

Brute Force looks at people having the most contact with everyday animal abuse - humane law enforcement officers who are charged with enforcing anti-cruelty statutes. The author spent one year studying 30 "animal cops" and dispatchers in two large cities. [More]

Building New-York's Sewers
The Evolution of Mechanisms of Urban Management

This wide-ranging study offers a unique perspective to examine the conditions, constraints, and concerns of city government during the first half of the nineteenth century. Decisions concerning wastewater disposal in New York City reflect nineteenth-century notions of disease, the environment, and city responsibility. [More]

This book is an examination of the contemporary ethical problems of business in a philosophical context. It analyzes various types of capitalism, in particular, the Anglo-American type which is practiced primarily in the English-speaking world, and is exemplified by the commercial and financial systems of Wall Street and the City of London. [More]

Business in a Virtual World
Exploiting Information for Competitive Advantage

Every organization consists of two parts: the physical and the virtual. Traditionally, it has been a company's physical assets that determined its success. In the future, it will be its virtual assets-knowledge. Business in a Virtual World explains the new economic laws that apply to this scenario, describes how leading-edge companies are exploiting the opportunities offered, and provides the reader with a practical tool kit to ensure survival and success in this new world. [More]

This inquiry into matters of heart, conducted under the shadows of pending surgery, awakens themes of boyhood, education, and marriage and prompt questions about loyalty to a deceased father, connections with immigrant grandparents, loss and rediscovery of faith, and solitude versus community. [More]