The United States has long been a model for accessible, affordable education, as exemplified by the country's public universities. And yet less than 60... percent of the students entering American universities today are graduating. Why is this happening, and what can be done? Crossing the Finish Line provides the most detailed exploration ever of college completion at America's public universities. This groundbreaking book sheds light on such serious issues as dropout rates linked to race, gender, and socioeconomic status. Probing graduation rates at twenty-one flagship public universities and four statewide systems of public higher education, the authors focus on the progress of students in the entering class of 1999--from entry to graduation, transfer, or withdrawal. They examine the effects of parental education, family income, race and gender, high school grades, test scores, financial aid, and characteristics of universities attended (especially their selectivity). The conclusions are compelling: minority students and students from poor families have markedly lower graduation rates--and take longer to earn degrees--even when other variables are taken into account. Noting the strong performance of transfer students and the effects of financial constraints on student retention, the authors call for improved transfer and financial aid policies, and suggest ways of improving the sorting processes that match students to institutions. An outstanding combination of evidence and analysis, Crossing the Finish Line should be read by everyone who cares about the nation's higher education system.

This award winning and tragically timely book examines religion's strained and often violent role in some fourteen countries around the globe, ranging... from Brazil and Guatemala to Poland, Northern Ireland, Sweden, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, Israel, India, Thailand, Japan, China and the United States. It offers both a personal account of the author's travels to each of these nations and bold new observations on issues such as globalization, fundamentalism, terrorism, and secularization, now vexing scholars and policy-makers alike. Jay Demerath describes how each world religion differs in its various national contexts by, for example, depicting "Islams" in no less than six countries. He argues that the crucial factor in religion's relation to violence is its relation to power, but draws a careful distinction between religion's unavoidable involvement in politics and its unjustifiable involvement in the state. Finally, he views America's claim as the world's most religion nation through a comparative kaleidoscope. The result is a country that is not "more religious" but "differently religious," with its unique combination of congregational religion, religious pluralism, civil religion, and the separation of church and state. In short, this is a uniquely valuable work, especially in a post-9/11 world.

The 1990s were years of turmoil and transformation in American work experiences and employment relationships. Trends including the growth of contingent... labor, the erosion of the stable employment contract, the restructuring of jobs and companies, and the emergence of opportunity-enhancing employee participation programs reconfigured occupations, career paths, and labor market opportunities. Vicki Smith analyzes this shift, asking how workers navigated their way across the divide between bad jobs and good jobs, between jobs organized hierarchically and jobs requiring greater worker involvement, and between temporary and stable work.Crossing the Great Divide uses original case study data from four diverse organizational settings around the country. Smith compares the situations of nonunionized, white-collar workers at a photocopy service firm; unionized blue-collar workers in a wood-products processing factory; temporary assemblers and clerical workers in a high-tech firm; and unemployed managers, technical workers, and professionals participating in a job search club. The very different experiences revealed in Crossing the Great Divide highlight the way diverse new relationships between companies and their employees play out in workplaces, where new forms of work organization simultaneously create opportunity, instability, and risk for workers. Smith's goal is to construct a new framework of employment that accommodates the unpredictability and turbulence of the 21st century, but that is also "characterized at its core by attachment, reward, protection, commitment, and dignity."

In this beautifully crafted, Rashomon-like novel, Maryse Conde has written a gripping story imbued with all the nuances and traditions of Caribbean... culture. Francis Sancher--a handsome outsider, loved by some and reviled by others--is found dead, face down in the mud on a path outside Riviere au Sel, a small village in Guadeloupe.  None of the villagers are particularly surprised, since Sancher, a secretive and melancholy man, had often predicted an unnatural death for himself.  As the villagers come to pay their respects they each--either in a speech to the mourners, or in an internal monologue--reveal another piece of the mystery behind Sancher's life and death.  Like pieces of an elaborate puzzle, their memories interlock to create a rich and intriguing portrait of a man and a community. In the lush and vivid prose for which she has become famous, Conde has constructed a Guadeloupean wake for Francis Sancher.  Retaining the full color and vibrance of Conde's homeland, Crossing the Mangrove pays homage to Guadeloupe in both subject and structure.

In "Crossing the Next Meridian," Charles F. Wilkinson, an expert on federal public lands, Native American issues, and the West's arcane water laws... explains some of the core problems facing the American West now and in the years to come. He examines the outmoded ideas that pervade land use and resource allocation and argues that significant reform of Western law is needed to combat desertification and environmental decline, and to heal splintered communities. Interweaving legal history with examples of present-day consequences of the laws, both intended and unintended, Wilkinson traces the origins and development of the laws and regulations that govern mining, ranching, forestry, and water use. He relates stories of Westerners who face these issues on a day-to-day basis, and discusses what can and should be done to bring government policies in line with the reality of twentieth-century American life.

In this eloquent guide to the meanings of the postmodern era, Albert Borgmann charts the options before us as we seek alternatives to the joyless and... artificial culture of consumption. Borgmann connects the fundamental ideas driving his understanding of society's ills to every sphere of contemporary social life, and goes beyond the language of postmodern discourse to offer a powerfully articulated vision of what this new era, at its best, has in store."[This] thoughtful book is the first remotely realistic map out of the post modern labyrinth."—Joseph Coates, The Chicago Tribune"Rather astoundingly large-minded vision of the nature of humanity, civilization and science."—Kirkus Reviews

This is the second in a series of publications from the Institute of Medicine's Quality of Health Care in America project. Today's health care providers... have more research findings and more technology available to them than ever before. Yet recent reports have raised serious doubts about the quality of health care in America. "Crossing the Quality Chasm" makes an urgent call for fundamental change to close the quality gap. This book recommends a sweeping redesign of the American health care system and provides overarching principles for specific direction for policymakers, health care leaders, clinicians, regulators, purchasers, and others. In this comprehensive volume the committee offers: a set of performance expectations for the 21st century health care system; a set of 10 new rules to guide patient-clinician relationships; a suggested organizing framework to better align the incentives inherent in payment and accountability with improvements in quality; and key steps to promote evidence-based practice and strengthen clinical information systems. Analyzing health care organizations as complex systems, "Crossing the Quality Chasm" also documents the causes of the quality gap, identifies current practices that impede quality care, and explores how systems approaches can be used to implement change.

Although they are among the most important sources of the history of the American Southwest, the lives of ordinary immigrants from Mexico have rarely... been recorded. Educated and hardworking, Luis G. Gómez came to Texas from Mexico as a young man in the mid-1880s. He made his way around much of South Texas, finding work on the railroad and in other businesses, observing the people and ways of the region and committing them to memory for later transcription. Few of the 150,000 immigrants in the last half of the nineteenth century left written records of their experiences, but Gómez wrote his memoir and had it privately published in Spanish in 1935. Crossing the Rio Grande presents an English edition of that memoir, translated by the author’s grandson, Guadalupe Valdez Jr., with assistance from Javier Villarreal, a professor of Spanish at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi. An introduction by Thomas H. Kreneck explains the book’s value to scholarship and describes what has been learned of the publication history of the original Spanish-language volume. “Gómez says explicitly in the prologue to his memoirs that the purpose of recording the events of his life is to entertain; however, his memoirs accomplish much more than this as they fill a void in the history of the American Southwest of the late nineteenth century.”—Journal of the American Studies Association for Texas

Crossing the River is a personal memoir—and more. Against the backdrop of Lithuania’s occupation—first by the Red Army, next by the Germans, and... then again by the Russians—it is a story reflected through the prism of a sharp-eyed young child, Shalom Eilati. His story starts in the occupied Kovno Ghetto and ends with his flight across the Soviet border, through Poland and Germany and finally, his arrival in Palestine. The adult survivor, while recalling the terrorized child that he was and how he then perceived the adult world, also takes stock of his present life. Throughout the memoir, Eilati attempts to reconcile his present life as a husband, father, scientist, and writer, with the images, feelings, and thoughts from the past that have left an indelible mark on his life and that continue to haunt him.

From the acclaimed author of Cambridge comes an ambitious, formally inventive, and intensely moving evocation of the scattered offspring of Africa. It... begins in a year of failing crops and desperate foolishness, which forces a father to sell his three children into slavery. Employing a brilliant range of voices and narrative techniques, Caryl Phillips folows these exiles across the river that separates continents and centuries.Phillips's characters include a freed slave who journeys to Liberia as a missionary in the 1830s; a pioneer woman seeking refuge from the white man's justice on the Colorado frontier; and an African-American G.I. who falls in love with a white Englishwoman during World War II. Together these voices make up a "many-tongued chorus" of common memory—and one of the most stunning works of fiction ever to address the lives of black people severed from their homeland.

Students who often complain when faced with challenging word problems will be engaged as they acquire essential problem solving skills that are... applicable beyond the math classroom. The authors of Crossing the River with Dogs: Problem Solving for College Students: - Use the popular approach of explaining strategies through dialogs from fictitious students - Present all the classic and numerous non-traditional problem solving strategies (from drawing diagrams to matrix logic, and finite differences) - Provide a text suitable for students in quantitative reasoning, developmental mathematics, mathematics education, and all courses in between - Challenge students with interesting, yet concise problem sets that include classic problems at the end of each chapter With Crossing the River with Dogs, students will enjoy reading their text and will take with them skills they will use for a lifetime.

Crossing the River with Dogs: Problem Solving for College Students has been adapted from the popular high school text to provide an accessible and... coherent college-level course in mathematical problem solving for adults.  Focusing entirely on problem solving and using issues relevant to college students for examples, the authors continue their approach of explaining classic as well as non-traditional strategies through dialogs among fictitious students.  This text is appropriate for a problem solving, liberal arts mathematics, mathematics for elementary teachers, or developmental mathematics course.

Crossing the River with Dogs: Problem Solving for College Students has been adapted from the popular high school text to provide an accessible and... coherent college-level course in mathematical problem solving for adults. Focusing entirely on problem solving and using issues relevant to college students for examples, the authors continue their approach of explaining classic as well as non-traditional strategies through dialogs among fictitious students. This text is appropriate for a problem solving, liberal arts mathematics, mathematics for elementary teachers, or developmental mathematics course.

The last few decades have seen a revolution in debates about the rationality of Christian belief. Among the array of current options for justifying... religious belief, however, nearly every one assumes that a general theory of knowing and a minimal version of theism must be adopted before the rationality of Christian belief can be tackled.In Crossing the Threshold of Divine Revelation William J. Abraham confronts both of these assumptions, arguing that epistemology must begin with its particular target of inquiry — in Abraham’s case the full-blooded “canonical theism” of the early, undivided Christian church. He argues, moreover, that special divine revelation forms a crucial threshold at the entrance to the epistemology of Christian belief. Sure to intrigue philosophers, theologians, and curious students, Abraham’s robust vision of Christian faith provides a creative solution to many of the current difficulties in philosophy and theology.

A great international bestseller, the book in which, on the eve of the millennium, Pope John Paul II brings to an accessible level the profoundest... theological concerns of our lives. He goes to the heart of his personal beliefs and speaks with passion about the existence of God; about the dignity of man; about pain, suffering, and evil; about eternal life and the meaning of salvation; about hope; about the relationship of Christianity to other faits and that of Catholicism to other branches of the Christian faith.With the humility and generosity of spirit for which he is known, John Paul II speaks directly and forthrightly to all people. His message: Be not afraid!