March Madness: Staff Picks

 
In case you haven’t heard the buzz . . .

. . . we’re running a little sale at SUP.

Through the end of March, over 600 titles will be available for $10 and $5. To help you sift through this bountiful bevy of scholarly books we tapped a few shoulders around the SUP office and asked which titles they thought were the best bargains. Here’s what they had to say: 

Margo, our senior Business and Economics editor recommends:
The Handbook of Transformative Cooperation
Edited by Sandy Kristin Piderit, Ronald E. Fry, and David L. Cooperrider 

At 5% of the list price, the Handbook of Transformative Cooperation is a bargain not to be missed.  Business readers will continue to see a call for work across sectors, strategy that speaks to the triple bottom line, and leadership and team practices that rely on relationship building and sense-making. This cheap and cheerful volume takes a forward thinking approach that considers these trends.  The chapters are written by some of the best minds tackling these issues today, including SUP authors Nadya Zhexembayeva, Paul Shrivastava, and Ted London.  Shoppers who like this book may also appreciate Negotiating Genuinely and The Co-Creation Paradigm.  So, on top of being a worthy purchase, this handbook is a great jumping off point for exploring our business list.

Frances, associate editor in Sociology suggests:
The New Entrepreneurs
by Zulema Valdez

Think the American Dream is open to everybody? Not so fast, Zulema Valdez argues in The New Entrepreneurs. Valdez introduces us to a diverse contingent of entrepreneurs—such as Doña Toña, the epicurean behind the Houston-based eatery La Pambazo—to provocatively undermine our dominant understanding of “ethnic entrepreneurship,” which presumes that members of the same ethnic group have the same resources and thus reap the same entrepreneurial payouts. But by revealing differences in outcomes within and across not only ethnicity, but also gender and class, she reveals very real constraints on certain people’s agency and, accordingly, potential to “make it big.” This eye-opening book also asks us to consider the nuances that define success.

Kalie, SUP's digital media speicalist, recommends:
New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller
Edited by Hsiao-Yun Chu and Roberto G. Trujillo

The Fuller Archive at Stanford University Libraries is a staggering 750-volume collection of ephemera meticulously collected by the famous futurist and inventor, Buckminster Fuller, over the course of his life. In essence, the archive is a collection of mental breadcrumbs that includes manuscripts, news clippings, blueprints, and business cards as well as love letters and overdue library notices, which Fuller kept in an attempt to map the origins of his ideas. It is around this corpus that New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller is pivoted. The book features a series of insightful essays penned by "Bucky" scholars dissecting his vast personal archive and the result is a surprisingly intimate scholarly portrayal of one of the most eccentric and prodigious thinkers of recent times.

Michelle, acquisitions editor in Law, Asian Studies, & Anthropology suggests:
All Judges Are Political–Except When They're Not
by Ketih Bybee

It seems you can’t finish reading a news story on the Supreme Court without encountering the phrase “splitting along ideological lines,” in some form—usually involving speculation about whether the Roberts court will adhere to their trademark 5-4 split or whether various justices will “go rogue,” and vote against what many believe to be their personal political positions. This book explores the tension between whether or not judges are politically motivated, and why that tension is so important. As Bybee lucidly explains, the Court’s survival depends on judges fulfilling both roles as “apolitical oracles and ideological politicians” (as aptly characterized by Dahlia Lithwick in her review of the book). 

Ryan, SUP's advertising and direct mail coordinator, recommends:
Beyond the Acropolis
by Tjeerd H. van Andel and Curtis Runnels

Published in 1987, Beyond the Acropolis takes readers away from the iconic sites of ancient Greece. Instead, the two authors, Tjeerd H. Van Andel and Curtis Runnels, lead us through an extensive history of the rural and relatively isolated southern Argolid peninsula. The image we get is one of a difficult but seemingly persistent period of settlement and resettlement over the last 50,000 years. Runnels and van Andel paint a bleak picture of life, with the threat of soil erosion hanging over the heads of the region to this day. It’s not all dreary, though, as there are charming line-drawn illustrations of the region dispersed throughout the book.

To see the full sale offerings, where you can browse by discipline, go to sup.org/marchmadness