Notable books and media produced by faculty, staff and alumni

Life Movies: Exercise For The Love Of
The Lifestyle
By Karen S. Danner,
Good Press

Can’t seem to get yourself off the couch and into a regular exercise program? Danner, a faculty associate with the Exercise and Wellness department, asserts that successful exercisers go inside themselves and find the intrinsic motivation that move themselves, both literally and figuratively.

Danner’s book covers a broad array of exercise-related issues, from developing a vision of yourself as an exercising person to journaling as a method to boost motivation. For fitness beginners, this book may provide a tool that keeps them on the road to good health.

A Yellow Ribbon For Daddy
By Anissa Mersiowsky
Illustrated by Rey Contreras
Veritas Media Inc.

This charmingly simple book for children of soldiers attempts to answer the questions that younger children may have about a parent’s deployment to a combat zone — why is daddy fighting when he said I shouldn’t get into fights? Why will he be gone for so long? Why are other parents at home with their children? Mersiowsky, who graduated with a B.S. in 1996, uses her experience as a soldier’s wife to touch on issues that many military families will face. Her uncle, Rey Contreras '77 B.F.A. gives the book a comforting, upbeat feel with his illustrations.

TSEYI'/Deep In The Rock: Reflections On The Canyon De Chelly
Text by Laura Tohe
University of Arizona Press

The Canyon de Chelly, known to the Navajo people as Tseyi’ or “deep in the rock,” has profound meaning for the Native Americans who live there. Tohe, a member of the Navajo Nation who is an associate professor of English, serves up bite-sized poems and essays about the beauty and majesty of the area, the attempts by whites to wrest her people from the canyon, and the passion that “this canyon, sexy, ancient and all at once dangerous” inspires in those who visit and dwell here. Stephen Strom’s photographs are a perfect complement to Tohe’s words.

MBA In A Day®: What You Would Learn At Top Tier Business Schools (If You Only Had The Time!)
By Steven Stralser,
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Stralser, who earned his MBA from ASU in 1970, boils down the secrets of business administration into a 298-page tome, which is designed as an overview suitable for doctors, lawyers or other professionals building a practice or small business. He has taught the basics of this book as a professor at Thunderbird: the Garvin School of International Management, as well as in a series of successful seminars.

“MBA in a Day®” covers leadership, business ethics, accounting and finance, as well as marketing, human resources issues, quality management, and project management
principles. Stralser explains even complex business topics in an easy-to-read style.

The Prison Called Hohenasperg
By Arthur D. Jacobs,
Universal Publishers (Upublish)

Art Jacobs (’63 B.S., ’66 M.B.A and a former professor in the W.P. Carey School of Business) started out as the All-American boy, born in the early 1930s to German émigré parents. However, his father was falsely accused of pro-Nazi sympathies during World War II, and his family spent 1945 in internment camps in New York City and Crystal City, Texas.

This modestly self-published memoir describes Jacobs’ journey from an ordinary boyhood in Brooklyn, to the horrors of being held in the German prison of Hohenasperg and watched by American soldiers who did not believe he was a U. S. citizen, to his plucky attempts to return to the United States. The book is a tale of triumph, and of a boy (and later, a man) fiercely in love with his American birthplace.

Sanctuaries Of The Heart
By Margarita Cota-Cardenas,
University of Arizona Press

Petra Leyva, the main character of this tale, is just beginning research on a novel about the Sanctuary Movement when she learns her father, widowed and showing signs of dementia, has burned his house to the ground in a rage. The incident marks a sharp decline for him, and sends Petra into an extended period of contemplation about the metaphor of “sanctuary” and its implications.

Cota-Cardenas, a professor emerita of Spanish, has written a captivating novella (presented in both English and Spanish) that blends stream of consciousness with sharply carved narrative descriptions. The story’s characters seek sanctuary, or relief, from poverty, oppression, abuse and other injustices. The author seasons her storyline throughout the book with the complexities of Chicana identity in present-day America.

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