The New Humanities Reader 3rd Edition by Richard E. Miller and Kurt Spellmeyer

Introduction

Conclusion

BOOK REVIEW

Book Review

Book Review

Introduction

The New Humanities Reader presents 33 challenging and important essays from diverse fields that address current global issues. This cross-disciplinary anthology helps readers attain the analytical skills necessary to become informed citizens. Ideas and research from wide-ranging sources provide opportunities for students to synthesize materials and formulate their own ideas and solutions. The thought-provoking selections engage students and encourage students to make connections for them as they think, read, and write about the events that are likely to shape their lives. The Third Edition contains 14 new readings, drawn from the latest books and journals. These selections continue in the text's pattern of being current, globally oriented, interdisciplinary, and probing (Richard, 15).

The New Humanities Reader: Book Review

The book challenges us to look directly at the devastating assumptions underlying the very mechanisms of the modern world. We believe with certainty in the inevitable forward march of progress, in the natural rightness of humankind's control of the environment, and, most pervasively, in the idea of an epic struggle that requires righteousness to utterly destroy evil. These images of apocalypse and dominance pervade our language, our politics, and, with coming of 2012, even our escapist entertainment. In the book the author offers us an alternative view that comes like breath of cool, fresh air in these times. Drawing on the book the author makes an impassioned clarion call to awaken from the culture of destruction or perish within it. The book also features a foreword by the most high-profile Buddhist academic in America — and possibly the world (Richard, 15).

The New Humanities Reader invites you to enter into a conversation with the writers you read. The words of others are always yours to use as you build your responses to the course readings, but the writing you produce must explain why the quotations you have chosen are important and it must clearly mark (with quotation marks) the boundaries between your voice and the voices of other writers. This guide shows how to make a place for the words of others within your essays and how to make those words consistent with the grammar of your own sentences. Most of the examples in this guide identify the writer or the speaker of each quotation. In addition to providing this basic information, you should make an effort to embed your quotations within your own explanation. When you quote another writer, you create an opportunity to say something about that writer's words. What problem does the quotation raise for discussion? What idea or issue does it open up, extend, complicate, or contradict? Your words and the way they surround a quotation will give that quotation something to do. Your words will tell readers how the quotation fits into or complicates the line of thought that your paper is exploring. Here are a few examples of the explanatory atmosphere that your words can create around the act of ...