UBC Reports | Vol. 49 | No. 7 | Jul.
3, 2003
The top 10 UBC selling authors
1. Toxic Emotions at Work: How Compassionate Managers Handle
Pain and Conflict
Peter Frost
Harvard Business School Press, 2003
A study of the causes and effects of emotional pain in organizations,
and what can be done to alleviate pain before it becomes toxic.
Toxicity, the outcome of emotionally insensitive attitudes
and actions of managers and of the practices of their companies,
doesn’t simply ruffle a few feathers. Rather, it acts
as a noxious substance, draining vitality from individuals
and your entire organization, potentially causing everything
from missed deadlines to a mass exodus of your key staff.
[…] Left unchecked, toxicity will seep into your organization’s
performance and right down to your bottom line. Despite the
pervasiveness of emotional toxins in organizations and their
negative effects on people and on profits, no one will raise
the
subject since, as most of us have experienced first-hand,
the discussion of emotion and pain in work situations tends
to be seen as “weak” or “soft,” leaving
those who do see it-and help to resolve it-with their mouths
shut and their heads down.
(Chapter 1, Emotional Pain in Organizations, page 13)
Reprinted with permission from the author.
Peter J. Frost is the Edgar F. Kaiser Professor of Organizational
Behaviour at the Sauder School of Business at UBC.
2. Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada
Edited by William H. New
University of Toronto Press, 2002
An extensive record of Canadian authors and literary achievements,
and a thorough analysis of the defining themes and events
in Canadian literature.
"The U Toronto historian Frank Underhill (1889-1971)
used to say that Canada had no intellectual history. He meant
by this that no great ideas had originated in Canada and that
neither ideas nor intellectuals had played any significant
role in Canadian public life. This apparent deficiency distinguished
Canada both from Britain and France and from the United States,
whose founding texts had become classic documents in the history
of political thought. […] No one today would say Canada
had no intellectual history. Two generations and more of professional
historians, philosophers, literary critics, and political
scientists, inspired in part by Underhill’s quest and
his indictment, have explored and analyzed the record of what
Canadians of an intellectual bent have thought in the past.
It may be too much to say that a ‘tradition’ of
Canadian thought has been uncovered, but much has been learned
about how Canadians have adapted to and shaped their environment
as sentient and thinking beings. In the process, and under
the influence of study elsewhere, our understanding of what
constitutes intellectual history has itself changed. Students
of the subject are no longer so much concerned with “high”
ideas and their origins as with thought and expression as
forms of action in which all men and women engage, the record
of which is referred to ever more commonly as varieties of
“discourse.” Intellectual history in this mode —
the study of attitudes, beliefs, communication, and meaning,
as well as of ideas as such — shades imperceptibly into cultural
history.
(Intellectual History entry, page 528)."
By Kenneth C. Dewar and reprinted with permission from the
editor and University of Toronto Press.
William H. New is a University Killam Professor in the
UBC English department.
3. No Place to Learn: Why Universities Aren’t Working
Tom Pocklington / Allan Tupper
UBC Press, 2002
A challenging critique of the structure and functioning of
modern Canadian universities.
“The idea that teaching is improved by interaction with
research is a foundational concept in Canadian universities.
Among other things, the mutual enrichment notion is used to
distinguish universities from other educational institutions.
As professors often declare, research universities differ
from colleges and technical institutes in that they conduct
research that inspires teaching. The idea of mutual enrichment
is also employed to differentiate modern research universities
from their predecessors. Research universities are depicted
as vigorous places where cutting-edge research sustains and
bolsters teaching. Great teachers are dynamic researchers
whose classes come to life as they review their latest findings.
The contrast is the dreary university of yesteryear where
teaching was the dominant activity and where professors, who
were not obliged to do research, transmitted established wisdom.
The theory of mutual enrichment performs important political
functions in universities. It justifies the commitment of
university resources to research. […] Finally, mutual
enrichment is an aspect of professors’ drive for social
status and influence. It is an idea that makes professors
seem talented and multiskilled. […]
We argue that mutual enrichment does not reflect university
reality. Teaching and research are generally in conflict with
each other. The mutual enrichment thesis is an impediment
to necessary university reform. Effective undergraduate teaching,
which demands general knowledge, considerable energy, and
reflective inquiry, is a very different activity from the
preparation of specialized professorial research.”
(Chapter 6, Teaching and Research at Canadian Universities,
pages 105-111).
Reprinted with permission from UBC Press.
Allan Tupper is the Associate VP, Government Relations
at UBC.
4. Book of Contradictions
George McWhirter
Oolichan Books, 2002
Book of poems.
"Which is it to be?
Ideals
or meals.What if the ideal
is a meal?What shall we do then
with all the fresh ideas
in our new republic?"
(Whatever It Is You Must Eat It, page 19).
Reprinted with permission from the author.
George McWhirter teaches in the UBC Creative Writing program.
5. Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves
in British Columbia
Cole Harris
UBC Press, 2002
A comprehensive history of the Indian reserves in British
Columbia.
“For 150 years a contested division of land between
Natives and non-Natives has underlain the Canadian province
of British Columbia. Everyone has a stake in it: Native people
most directly because most of their land was taken away and
they have had to make do with minimal remainders, the Indian
reserves, but all others, too, because their lives here have
been made out of the lands taken away. Recently, as a result
of decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada, the treaty process
in the province, the signing of the Nisga’a treaty, and,
underlying them all, increasingly forceful Native voices,
the Native land question is more to the fore than ever. Lawyers,
consultants, and researchers gather around the issues involved.
Protracted and expensive court cases generate mountainous
collections of evidence and reports. The political temperature
rises, not always overtly, because people are afraid to be
thought racist, but to the point where throughout the province
the Native land question is probably now more volatile than
at any time since the 1870s."
(Chapter 10, Towards a Postcolonnial Land Policy, page 293).
Reprinted with permission from the author.
Cole Harris is a Professor Emeritus in the UBC Department
of Geography.
6. (tie) Canada and the Idea of North
Sherrill E. Grace
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001
An extensive examination of the way Canadians have defined
themselves as a northern people throughout their history and
culture.
"The idea that Canada’s future is somehow linked
to the North is […] hardly new. Depending upon where
North is located and how it is determined, it has symbolized
future hopes for purity, freedom, adventure, wealth, fame,
and regional and national identity — for Quebec rayonnement
and for national unity — as long as there has been a Canada.
Just as there is always a personal politics of location, there
is as well a national politics of location, and at the beginning
of a new century that politics of northern location seems
to hold challenges and promises beyond anything Haliburton
or Stefansson or Diefenbaker could have imagined. Nunavut
is one of those promising challenges, as is the writing back
of the northern Cree or the land-claims agreements of the
Inuvialuit and Nishga peoples."
(Epilogue, Magnetic North, page 267).
Reprinted with permission from the author.
Sherrill E. Grace is a professor in the UBC English department.
6. (tie) The Arbutus/Madrone Files: Reading the Pacific
Northwest
Laurie Ricou
NeWest Press, 2002
An exciting look at 20th-century Pacific Northwest writing.
"Just sticking with the West Coast version of logging
language, one can quickly come up with a vocabulary recorded
in print sources of 9,000 to 10,000 terms. Logging jargon
is a rich, revealing study in its own right: as with any other
separate language, learning woodswords uncovers new understandings:
that the ubiquitous donkey (engine) appears to have been named
because the original was less than one horse-power, or that
“gandy dancer,” the movement traced by a worker
driving spikes into ties, may allude, however indirectly,
to India. Moreover, it’s surprising to find that such
an extensive dialect has developed in an economy where workers
are separated by long distances. This language […] seems
to be a bunkhouse language […], an afterwork language,
a bull-shitting language. All of which should give it a great
appeal to writers. On the West Coast, logging dialect seems
to be the closest we have to an indigenous language in English."
(Afterfile: Woodswords, page 195).
Reprinted with permission from the author.
Laurie R. Ricou is a professor of English at UBC.
8. Academic Writing: Writing and Reading in the Disciplines,
3rd edition
Janet Giltrow
Broadview Press, 2002
A stimulating introduction to academic writing, with numerous
examples and exercises.
“Scholarly style does exclude many readers. Even within
the larger academic community, readers who are members of
one discipline can be excluded from the ongoing discourses
of other disciplines. While researchers seem to be generally
respectful of those working in other fields, smirks and raised
eyebrows are not unknown when a researcher comes within earshot
of the wordings of another discipline. The “post-modernism”
of the humanities and some of the social sciences can inspire
ridicule amongst those who do not work in those terms. And,
equally, the classifying vocabularies of the sciences and
some other social sciences can arouse suspicion amongst those
who work with less technical terminologies. […] any social
group – skateboarders or pilots or childcare workers — will
develop and maintain speech styles which serve and represent
the routines which organize their activities. And these styles
will, to a greater or lesser degree, exclude people who don’t
belong to the group and incur the risk of social reactions
to that exclusion."
(Chapter 5, Scholarly Styles and the Limits of Knowledge,
page 213).
Reprinted with permission from the author.
Dr. Janet Giltrow is an Associate Professor in the UBC
English department.
9. Pawprints of History: Dogs and the Course of Human Events
Stanley Coren
Free Press, 2002
A history of the relationship between famous historical figures
(from Saint Roche to Bill Clinton) and their dogs.
“It is difficult to know whether Freud simply had a
predisposition to love dogs, or whether they fulfilled a need
that could not be otherwise expressed in his life. This was
an era of great formality; open and playful affection could
only be expressed toward young children (and even then with
some restraint) or to dogs. Judging from some of the home
movies that we have, Freud loved playing and clowning with
his dogs. They also helped him to deal with difficult moments
in his life. For example, Freud hated birthdays, perhaps because
they were a sign of his aging and mortality. However, Anna
[Freud’s youngest daughter] managed to get him to celebrate
them through the dogs. At each of his birthdays, the family
would gather around the table, where there was a birthday
cake. Each of the dogs […] were seated in chairs and
they, as well as Sigmund himself, would all be wearing paper
party hats. Hanging around the neck of one of the dogs would
be an envelope containing a poem, which was composed by Anna
but signed in the name of one of the dogs. Sigmund would always
read the poem out loud, with great dramatic flourishes, then
thank the dog in whose name it was signed and offer the dog
the first slice of birthday cake."
(Chapter 10, The Dog on the Therapist’s Couch, page
137).
Reprinted with permission from the author.
Stanley Coren is a Professor of Psychology at UBC.
10. Failing Our Kids: How We Are Ruining Our Public Schools
Charles Ungerleider
McClelland & Stewart, 2003
A critical analysis of the Canadian public school system.
“Canadians might as well begin teaching their grandchildren
how to sing the “Star-Spangled Banner” and pledge
allegiance to the American flag if they continue treating
Canada’s public schools the way they have been recently.
Our public schools, and what they teach our children, help
define Canada as a unique nation. But we are neglecting our
public schools in a perversely malicious way: making impossible
demands upon them, strangling them financially, creating trivial
changes for the sake of ideology, avoiding necessary changes
for lack of fortitude, saying their graduates don’t measure
up, making fatuous comparisons between one public school and
another, decrying their accomplishments, and just plain ignoring
them. It’s true what they say, “You don’t know
what you have till it’s gone.” Our public schools
are collapsing from malign neglect."
(Chapter 1, You don’t know what you have till it’s
gone, page 8).
Reprinted with permission from the author.
Charles Ungerleider is a professor of Sociology of Education
in the UBC Department of Educational Studies. He was the UBC
Associate Dean for teacher education from 1993 to 1998.
