This book exemplifies what a professor can do to provide students with a "capstone experience" as they graduate from a
university
Bachelor's degree program. Arizona State University's nationally prominent Russian Language BA program has required since 2005 that its graduating seniors include a "capstone
experience" into their curriculum in their final year of study. This experience is supposed to pair these advanced students with a senior professor in their field of major and require that they, under the professor's direction, engage in some project of value to them that utilizes the knowledge, attitudes, and skills they have gained in the course of their undergraduate work. As Prof. Lee B Croft explains it: "I decided that, utilizing our hard-earned research, writing, and polylingual, polyalphabetic word-processing skills, we should conceive, research, write, edit, and publish a book together. That way the students would finish their undergraduate academic careers having a co-authored book to their credit in seeking future career opportunities. And, of course, I thought that they would learn much about the entire process of
publishing...something that I had learned as a consequence of being a major university professor and having to 'publish or perish' in order to stay one..." The method of this particular book, Prof. Croft's THIRD such "capstone experience," as he explains in the foreword, is to collect student 'presentations' of selected scholarly articles that Prof. Croft published in the past, going back to the early 1970s...with each 'presentation' describing the article's particular circumstances of publication, its subsequent importance as measured by its citation by others, and etc. In this way, each student becomes, as a result of this process, not only a co-author of the book,
NOT TO PERISH: Articles By An American Professor of Russian, but also the sole author of a discrete and separately titled article of presentation in it. So, as the co-authors present thirteen of Prof. Croft's scholarly articles (chosen, he writes, for their "quirky appeal"...and all presented IN ENGLISH with Russian examples), the articles fascinate as they advance the reader's knowledge of: glossolalia, poetic decipherment and translation, interlingual homography, language philosophy and psychology, linguistic iconicity and language universals, an American Nobel laureate scientist's inspiration, literary pornography, pervasive triplicity, spontaneous human combustion, and polylingual alphamagic squares, some as generated by a novel computer program published in the appendix. The book includes photographs of all its co-authors plus some "filler photos" of interesting monuments and sites in Russia. The striking cover is iconic--with shipwrecked sailors in the powerful seascapes of Russian artist Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky trying in their own small groups "NOT TO PERISH." Readers interested in language, literature, and culture will surely find something of interest here.