Books about Misunderstandings from Amazon.com

Former Congressman and Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations Mark D. Siljander takes us on an eye-opening journey of personal, religious, and political discovery. In the 1980s, Siljander was a newly minted Reagan Republican from Michigan who joined Congress in the same generation as Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay, ready to remake the world. A staunch member of the Religious Right, he once walked out of the National Prayer Breakfast when a speaker quoted from the Qur'an.

But after losing reelection, Siljander dove into the Bible to look for the passage in which the Bible says it is our job as Christians to convert others in order to save them from eternal damnation. He couldn't find it; in fact, he couldn't even find a passage saying that Jesus set out to form a new religion. This discovery was the first step on a spiritual and political journey that started with an in-depth linguistic study of the Bible and led to the discovery that Christianity and Islam share many base words and concepts. In his role as ambassador to the United Nations Siljander began sharing his insights on the connections between Islam and Christianity, with surprising results.

A Deadly Misunderstanding recounts Siljander's amazing discoveries as he travels to some of the most remote and hostile places in the world—deep into Libya, Sudan, Pakistan, and India—forging deep ties with both heads of state and religious leaders. What he has learned could radically shift the contemporary religious landscape and help heal the rift between Islam and the West. No Christian or Muslim will be unaffected after reading this book.

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With eloquence and accessibility, Dr. Aaron T. Beck analyzes the actual dialogue of troubled couples to illuminate the most common problems in marriage--the power of negative thinking, disillusionment, rigid rules and expectations, and miscommunication..
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One Man. One Woman.

10,000 Years of Misunderstanding Between the Sexes Cleared Right Up

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Modaff and DeWine's new undergraduate text, Organizational Communication: Foundations, Challenges, and Misunderstandings, offers a unique perspective on the field of internal organizational communication The authors review the foundational material, but intersperse the discussions with excerpts from interviews conducted with over 60 leaders and workers in a variety of organizations.

A central feature of the text is the concept of misunderstandings, which highlights the idea that organizations are inherently problematic. This focus positions communication at the center of organizational life, and shows the reader how and why communication can serve to create and resolve misunderstandings of all types. The authors advance a model, the Communicative Organization, which allows the reader to see the significance of communication to every aspect of organizational functioning.

Benefits to instructors and students include:

The use of real-life problems as told by organizational leaders and workers to illustrate the material discussed in every chapter, which provides an easy mechanism for starting class discussions.

Chapters on realistic recruitment and organizational socialization, which are not typically found in other introductory organizational communication textbooks.

Integration of the concepts of gender and diversity throughout the text.

Discussions of current applications of theories and concepts as students have or will experience them.

A postscript that ties all of the material from the text together.

A writing style that is student-centered yet sufficiently challenging..
Price: $58.75 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In April 1990 the U.S. Navy's A-12--a replacement aircraft for the outdated A-6 Intruder--had the support of the Secretary of Defense before Congress. Nine months later Secretary Cheney cancelled the A-12, making it the largest weapons program ever terminated by the Pentagon and the first cancelled for default with the Pentagon making demands that the contractors return the money already paid them. Ten years later, questions remain unanswered and lessons are still to be learned.

With access to a wealth of government and contractor documents and more than a hundred players at all levels of involvement, James Stevenson takes readers into the once-forbidden world of "special access" programs to examine the demise of the A-12, charging that the documents exposed fraudulent and even illegal activity. He faults the navy not just for mismanagement but for ignoring the statutes and regulations that require Congress to appropriate money before entering into contracts. Rather than a single big mistake, he finds the A-12's path from honor to derision to be littered with hundreds of mistakes and attempts to right wrongs or cover them up. In recounting the events that eventually led to the Stealth bomber's cancellation, Stevenson cites countless examples of the mismatch between perception and reality experienced by navy program managers, the defense department, Congress, and the contractors. In the process of telling the story, he takes on the entire defense acquisition process and its responsibility for the program that cost American taxpayers over $5 billion yet produced not a single airplane for their defense..
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What would have happened if Mr. Darcy had written his sister, Georgiana, to inform her that he was going to ask for Elizabeth Bennet's hand in marriage? She would have likely, but erroneously, assumed that Elizabeth would accept. This story picks up after Chapter 36 in Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice." On his return trip to Pemberley from Rosings after being refused by Miss Elizabeth Bennet, Mr. Darcy's carriage overturns and he is rendered unconscious. Georgiana, thinking they are engaged, writes to Elizabeth, begging her to come to Pemberley, thinking she may be able to help draw him out. This is a variation of Jane Austen's captivating novel. Visit "KaraLou's" website at Jane Austen's Land of Ahhhs (www.ahhhs.net) to read some preview chapters of this book and additional stories.

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Many books take you inside a first-year composition class. Misunderstanding the Assignment takes you inside the minds of first-year composition students Drawing on hours of videotaped interviews and copious ethnographic notes, Douglas Hunt has fashioned a nonfiction novel about learning and teaching writing. It traces the lives of six first-year students and their teacher from their first day together in a comp classroom through the end of the semester.

Hunt's book will excite theorists and ethnographers with its thick descriptions and offer questions worth considering to both new composition teachers and veterans. How do first-year college students experience their teachers? Their assignments? Their separation from home? How do these feelings support or inhibit learning? Are typical eighteen- and nineteen-year-old freshman developmentally ready for the demands of college? Hunt invites readers to draw their own conclusions from the multiple layers of information that he provides based on both his own research and the insights of composition theory, developmental psychology, and discourse theory.

Hunt frames the narrative as a modern novel, complete with a point of view that alternates among the individual students and their teacher, Rachel Palencia Harper. As you read, you will experience a typical composition class-with its new understandings and its many misunderstandings. In addition, a foreword by ethnographer Wendy Bishop situates the book within the discipline, and an afterword by Harper details how this experience changed her teaching. Finally, Hunt's own notes in the appendix describe his ethnographic processes and source materials.

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