"Exploitation, hypocrisy, duplicity are harsh words yet precisely describe the workings of the NCAA and its member schools in their treatment of college revenue athletes, the young men and women upon whose backs this multi-billion dollar college revenue sports empire rests. It is America's modern plantation.

Allen Sack has been the athlete's champion his entire working life. His personal story, beginning as a Notre Dame athletic scholarship football player and his focused, patient, passionate efforts to change this shameful reality of the American sports scene is a terrific story. Counterfeit Amateurs explicitly lays out who the 'bad guys' are, how greed tears to shreds academic values, how the athletes are getting shafted and what needs to be done." —David Meggyesy, author of Out of Their League and NFL Players Association, Western Regional Director, retired

Confessions of a Spoilsport is the story of an English professor who, having seen the University of New Mexico sink academically in the period of a major basketball scandal, was galvanized into action when Rutgers joined the Big East. It is also the story of the Rutgers 1000 students and alumni who set out against enormous odds to resist the decline of their university—eviscerated academic programs, cancellation of minor sports, loss of the “best and brightest” in-state students to the nearby College of New Jersey—while tens of millions of dollars were being lavished on Division IA athletics. Ultimately, however, the story of Rutgers 1000 is what the New York Times called it when Milton Friedman issued his ringing statement: a struggle for the soul of a major university.

“Synthesizing memoir, history, and policy analysis, Dick Combs’s book, Inside the Soviet Alternative Universe, combines an instructive inside account of a high-ranking American diplomat’s years in the Soviet Union with a critical analysis of the evolution of Soviet thinking about world affairs. It also analyzes American thinking about the USSR and applies the lessons of all this to understand post-Soviet Russian politics and foreign policy, and American misperceptions thereof.”
—William Taubman, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Khrushchev: The Man and His Era

Cézanne’s Bathers: Biography and the Erotics of Paint by Aruna D’Souza proposes a new way of reading Cézanne’s biography not simply as a form of myth-making but also as a form of art criticism; at the same time, it proposes a reading of Cézanne’s images of bathers that accounts for their strangenesses and for the pleasures they produce. It is a book that is fiercely engaged with arguments about these paintings that have come before, mining the writings of figures such as Meyer Schapiro, Tamar Garb, and T. J. Clark to discover a new way of looking at these strange works.

Known in Pennsylvania Dutch as brauche or braucherei, the folk-healing practice of powwowing was thought to draw upon the power of God to heal all manner of physical and spiritual ills. Yet some people believed, and still believe today, that this power to heal came not from God, but from the devil. In Powwowing Among the Pennsylvania Dutch, David Kriebel examines the practice of powwowing in a scholarly light and shows that, contrary to popular belief, the practice of powwowing is still active today. Because powwowing lacks extensive scholarly documentation, David Kriebel’s research is both a groundbreaking inquiry and a necessity for the scholar of Pennsylvania German history and culture.

The Wingless Crow joins together thirty-three superb short essays on nature, science, country living, and self. They are written by a man who—watchful, inquisitive, at times prickly—is animated by delight, wonder, and love for the rural places and wildlife of Pennsylvania.

Propelled by an unrelenting curiosity, a wry sense of humor, and the tough heart of a born curmudgeon, Fergus is astonished at how little he sees at first—and how much, with care and dedication, there is to see. Readers will delight in his observations of and insights into the everyday life, both human and wild, animating the wooded mountains and farmed valleys of the author's central Pennsylvania home.

Tenderfooted freshmen and seasoned alumni alike can find Penn State to be a mysterious place, with its hundreds of buildings, thousands of people, and stories too numerous to count. This Is Penn State: An Insider's Guide to the University Park Campus can help orient and enlighten anyone with an interest in Penn State, from visiting parents to lifelong State College residents.