Vanderbilt University Press

Additive schooling in subtractive times; bilingual education and Dominican immigrant youth in the Heights.

Bartlett (international and transcultural studies, Columbia U.) and García (urban education and Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian literatures and languages, City U. of New York) report on their study of the efforts of Gregorio Luperón High School in New York City to educate Dominican immigrant youth. Over a period of four years, they conducted observations and interviews with administrators, faculty, students, and parents, and examined public policies to consider how the school supports the development of new Latino students; the challenges they face and responses to them; how they progress through the school; and how the school facilitates their social mobility, showing the value of a social approach to teaching bilinguals that situates language learning as a community rather than individual endeavor. They provide a history of the school's formation and demographics on the students, and discuss how No Child Left Behind, state accountability, and city reforms affected the school as it practiced an additive method that builds on and extends the social, cultural, and linguistic assets of students while dealing with opposition to bilingual education, intensification of policies that undermine bilingual approaches, and practices that lead students into working-poor jobs. They also consider challenges identified by students to their adaptation and how the school helped them, and how they transitioned into further education, work, and family life. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Bioethics mediation; a guide to shaping shared solutions, rev. ed.

Taking the perspective that mediation skills should be at the core of clinical ethics consultation, this book is designed to help bioethics committees and clinical ethics consultants conduct more effective clinical ethics consultations. It will also be of interest to palliative care providers, doctors, and other medical staff. The guide begins by offering a framework for understanding bioethics mediation, using cases and scholarly discussions. The authors then outline eight stages of bioethics mediation and describe mediation techniques. Part 3, on writing bioethics mediation chart notes, is new to this edition. Three case analyses present examples of the types of cases that bioethics consultants encounter. The book includes six role plays (two new for this edition), with detailed descriptions of the patient and the situation, and specific notes and instructions for each participant in the role-play, including patient, family, health care professionals, social workers, and the bioethics mediator. Corresponding transcripts and comments are provided of four actual role-playing sessions using this case material, recorded during retreats as part of the Certificate Program in Bioethics and Medical Humanities at Montefiore-Einstein Center for Bioethics. Dubler is senior associate at the Montefiore-Einstein Center. Liebman directs the Columbia Law School Mediation Clinic. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Higglers in Kingston; women's informal work in Jamaica.

From her childhood in Jamaica, Brown-Glaude (African American studies, College of New Jersey) has a nostalgic fondness for "higglers," a term used by Jamaicans to refer to lower-class' women street vendors. In this Black feminist study, she situates the experiences of these micro-entrepreneurs, both traditional market women and modern informal commercial importers, in the contexts of Kingston's informal economy, history of slavery and prejudices, mostly unflattering representations of higglers, and how the construction of gender intersects with race and class. The book includes several illustrations and a list of the higglers interviewed. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

"My nerves are bad"; Puerto Rican women managing mental illness and HIV risk.

In Cleveland, Ohio, fully one percent of the city's Hispanic population is HIV infected, the highest rate of HIV infection for any racial/ethnic group in the city. This study seeks to discover what it is about being Latina that results in increased risk for HIV. Loue (director, Center for Minority Public Health, Case Western Reserve University) and her team of researchers followed 53 Puerto Rican women in northeastern Ohio living with bipolar disorder, severe depression, or schizophrenia as they coped with daily challenges in family relationships, employment, substance use, and obtaining health care and social services. Going beyond interviews, the researchers visited women's homes and accompanied them to churches, schools, doctor's offices, and family events, in order to understand how their mental illness, their gender, and their language and culture affected their relationships and their understanding of their own situations. The voices of the women themselves offer insight on their efforts to survive despite histories of childhood physical and sexual abuse, partner violence, substance abuse, and poverty. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

A promise in Haiti; a reporter's notes on families and daily lives.

Having first been introduced to Haiti as a volunteer with the aid organization Hands Together, Curnutte (a reporter with the Cincinnati Enquirer) travelled to the Haitian city of Gonaives in 2006 and 2008 in order to document the daily lives of three poor Haitian families in both text and photographs, explicitly modeling his project after James Agee and Walker Evans's documentation of the Great Depression in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Romances of the white man's burden; race, empire, and the plantation in American literature, 1880-1936.

The iconic image of Colonel Sanders and his chicken might not look quite the same to readers of this study. Wells (English, Allegheny College) doesn't deal with popular culture or fast food chains but rather with writers such as Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, Henry W. Grady, Thomas Dixon, and William Faulkner. In his introduction he states "...in the plantation South we may perceive a locality in which regional distinctiveness, national centrality, and imperial expansiveness are being imagined simultaneously." This study investigates the plantation — real and imagined — as central to American identity. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)