Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2024 -

This book is a guide for crafting audience-centered communication. Scholarly communication is impactful when it is comprehensible to a wider audience. Seethaler (Univ. of California, San Diego) emphasizes that the purpose of scholarly communication is not just to convey facts but to help readers in their decision-making process, to foster critical thinking, and to influence changing minds. Throughout the book, the author gives valuable information about how readers are influenced by the structure and positioning of texts and visuals. Seethaler highlights that a writer must consider the three-dimensional communication landscape for effective storytelling. These dimensions, namely audience, context, and goals, allow writers to determine strategies for creating tailored communication. This is an excellent book for learning how to optimize communication. All communication strategies are documented with practical examples. Seethaler provides checklists for information on planning for the three dimensions, combining words and visuals for crafting logical stories, informing complex decisions and numerical data, avoiding ideological clashes, and establishing trust with the audience. This resource is indispensable for communicators from all disciplinary backgrounds. It is recommended as a reference book, not a textbook.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through professionals.

This detailed, challenging book looks at the roles that modeling and statistical inference can play in identifying causal evolutionary patterns. Conceiving of evolution in terms of "natural, stochastic machines" (p. ix), Abrams (philosophy of science, Univ. of Alabama, Birmingham) looks at the statement "survival of the fittest" and considers what the measure "fitness" should be, how fitness is to be understood, and to what extent it can be measured in terms of probabilities of the appearance of certain traits deemed the fittest. Is fitness determined at the level of an individual, a group, or an entire population? Adopting a "probabilistic 'population-environment'" (p. 4) perspective, Abrams acknowledges that the evolution of any organism in response to changing environments is enormously complex. This book will interest readers looking for the most recent discussions and finer points of current thinking about evolution. Those with a technical background in the mathematics of probability and statistics will find parts of this book especially informative, but those preferring to skip the technicalities will discover plenty that illuminates the "machinery of change" behind evolution without the mathematics.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.