Faculty Authors

Writing Your Way Through College: A Student’s Guide
Cherryl Smith, Professor of English (Heinemann, 2005, $19.50)

Despite warnings to the contrary, the often slack syntax of today’s texting, blogging and online networking is not clouding the writing abilities of incoming freshmen. In fact it may be making them more prolific, says Cherryl Smith.

“I think incoming students write much more today because they’re always on the Internet,” she says. “They are more fluent because they are so used to being in constant communication with their friends.”

While acknowledging today’s students are productive, Smith says her new book is designed to help students channel their now customary free flow of information. “What they don’t know how to do is take an initial burst of writing and rework it, research it and provide evidence for a position,” she says.

To help new academic writers, Smith’s book (written with co-author Sheryl I. Fontaine, English professor at Cal State Fullerton), emphasizes the importance of organization, evidence, research and revision. The rhetoric for freshmen was intentionally designed to be short.

While geared to incoming students, Smith says the book works as a reference tool for advanced writing students as well as a guideline for new instructors.

“It’s meant to demystify writing essays for college,” she says. In doing so, she invites novice scribers to write about their own interests and challenges them to find their own angle to pursue in assigned work.

Ultimately, she wants her handbook to offer academic writers practice and the tools to develop their own style, areas she underscored as the director of Sac State’s Writing Center for 10 years.

“In an English paper the expectation is to lay out your own ideas. And you can write you own ideas but there are some constraints on them in academic writing,” Smith says. “The book seeks to help students to write appropriate academic discourse but also be able to keep their own voices and say what they want to say.”

—Robyn Eifertsen

Once Upon a Time in War: The 99th Division in World War II
Robert Humphrey, Professor of Communication Studies (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008, $24.95)

Numerous books have been written about the Battle of the Bulge, and many pay tribute to notable units like the 82nd Airborne or Easy Company (The Band of Brothers), but Robert Humphrey chose to chronicle a less-recognized outfit—soldiers of the 99th Infantry Division—after meeting some of its members in 2001.

“They were in their late 70s and were ready to talk,” says Humphrey. “Their lives were almost over, and they wanted to leave a record. They hadn’t told anybody, including their wives and children, about what they went through.”

Humphrey says the book is a collective memoir of the more than 350 members of the unit he interviewed. “On occasion, someone would break down and cry. That told me that after all these years, they still have that pain.”

For six horrific weeks, exhausted veterans and raw replacements engaged in some of the bloodiest fighting of World War II as Germany poured nearly all of its remaining forces into one final desperate stand. Troops fought in record-cold conditions and lacking winter gear, many suffered trench foot or frostbite. Conditions were so bad, Humphrey says, some soldiers broke down mentally and some shot themselves so they could be taken off the front.

“Unlike the pretty versions of war, I let it all out,” he says. “I tell all the bad stuff, like some members of the unit shooting or beating prisoners and stealing food and souvenirs.”

Of the 14,000 members of the division, 1,130 were killed and 4,000 were wounded in combat.

“There wasn’t anything particularly extraordinary about this division. They were just part of this gigantic war machine,” Humphrey says. “They were just like all the other GI Joes, ordinary guys that went off to war. But it was the most memorable experience of their lives.”

—Michael A. Ward

Author Update

Two books by faculty authors that have been featured in previous issues of Sac State Magazine—The Populist Vision by History Professor Charles Postel (in the Fall 2007 issue) and Cancer and Death: A Love Story in Two Voices by Communication Studies Professors Nick Trujillo and the late Leah Vande Berg (previewed in the Spring 2006 issue)—have achieved additional notice.

Postel’s book, which examines the original U.S. populist movement of the 1890s, received both the prestigious Bancroft Prize from Columbia University, and the Frederick Jackson Turner award, given by the Organization of American Historians.

The Bancroft Prize has been called one of the most coveted honors in the field of history. It is awarded annually to the author of a book of exceptional merit and includes a $10,000 prize. The Populist Vision also was selected to receive the Turner Award, which is given annually for an author’s first book dealing with some significant phase of American history.

Trujillo and Vande Berg’s book about Vande Berg’s battle with cancer, told from both of the authors’ perspectives, was released over the summer by Hampton Press. It immediately picked up the endorsement of actress, activist and uterine cancer survivor Fran Drescher, who said, “I applaud Nick Trujillo for his courage to share the story of his love for his wife who sadly lost her battle with cancer. It is both touching and inspiring.”