LSU Faculty Published Books

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Teaching Difficult Topics : Reflections from the Undergraduate Music Classroom

2024
Olivia R. Lucas and Laura Moore Pruett

Teaching Difficult Topics provides a series of on-the-ground reflections from college music instructors working in a wide variety of institutional settings about their approaches to inclusive, supportive pedagogy in the music classroom. Although some imagine the music classroom to be an apolitical space, instructors find themselves increasingly in need of resources for incorporating issues of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and historical trauma into their classrooms in ways that support student learning and safeguard their classroom communities.

The teaching reflections in Teaching Difficult Topics examine difficult themes that fall into three primary categories: subjects that instructors sense to be controversial or emotionally challenging to discuss, those that derive from or intersect with real-world events that are difficult to process, and bigger-picture discussions of how music studies often focuses on dominant narratives while overlooking other perspectives. Some chapters offer practical guidance, lesson plans, and teaching materials to enable instructors to build discussions of race, gender, sexuality, and traumatic histories into their own classrooms; others take a more global view, reflecting on the importance and relevance of teaching these difficult topics and on how to respond in the music classroom when external events disrupt daily life.
White Sports/Black Sports: Racial Disparities in Athletic Programs

2024
Lori Latrice Martin

Sports can serve as an inspirational example of what can be achieved through hard work and perseverance, regardless of one's race. However, race still plays a major role in sports, and sports are key agents of racial socialization.

This new edition challenges the idea that America has moved beyond racial discrimination and identifies the obvious and subtle ways in which racial identities and athletic determinism affect individuals in the world of sports. Featuring a new chapter covering the history of Black athletes in college sports and the historic and contemporary role of the NCAA and including 40% revised material covering major events and players since 2015, Lori Latrice Martin's influential text makes clear the links between sports and society as a whole and demonstrates that the issues surrounding racism in sports are not limited to the playing field.
Conspiracy Narratives from Postcolonial Africa : Freemasonry, Homosexuality, and Illicit Enrichment

2024
Rogers Orock and Peter Geschiere

Decoding conspiracy thinking at the nexus of sexuality, Freemasonry, and the occult.

In this book, anthropologists Rogers Orock and Peter Geschiere examine the moral panic over a perceived rise in homosexuality that engulfed Cameroon and Gabon beginning in the early twenty-first century. As they uncover the origins of the conspiratorial narratives that fed this obsession, they argue that the public's fears were grounded in historically situated assumptions about the entanglement of same-sex practices, Freemasonry, and illicit enrichment.

This specific panic in postcolonial Central Africa fixated on high-ranking Masonic figures thought to lure younger men into sex in exchange for professional advancement. The authors' thorough account shows how attacks on elites as homosexual predators corrupting the nation became a powerful outlet for mounting populist anger against the excesses and corruption of the national regimes. Unraveling these tensions, Orock and Geschiere present a genealogy of Freemasonry, taking readers from London through Paris to francophone Africa and revealing along the way how the colonial past shapes present-day anxieties linking same-sex practices to enrichment.
Psychosocial Theories of Human Behavior and Development : An Evolution of Big Ideas

2024
Timothy Page

Psychosocial Theories of Human Behavior and Development: An Evolution of Big Ideas is about the major psychosocial theories of human development that were created in the 20th century, drawing from the diverse disciplines of developmental psychology, psychiatry, cognitive science, social psychology, sociology, ethology, and neuroscience. A central focus concerns the components of psychological and social development that motivate and influence human behavior over the lifespan. The evolution of the major ideas over time, their integration, and the ways in which their emergence was shaped by their mutual influences is emphasized throughout. Several integrative themes are used to provide linkages and contexts for the emergence of the theories, particularly the social influences on scientific discoveries, the integrative theoretical framework from the National Research Council, referred to as the transactional-ecological model , and an emphasis on the historical evolution of the sources of knowledge on which the theories were based. A major goal of the book is to teach, in addition to the major concepts of growth and development, the historical scientific and social processes by which these organizations of concepts came into being. This integrative discussion creates important opportunities for more critical analysis and synthesis of ideas.
Bayou Harvest : Subsistence Practice in Coastal Louisiana

2024
Helen Regis

To inhabitants of the Gulf Coast region of Louisiana, food is much more than nourishment. The acts of gathering, preparing, and sharing food are ways to raise children, bond with friends, and build community. In Bayou Harvest: Subsistence Practice in Coastal Louisiana , Helen A. Regis and Shana Walton examine how coastal residents deploy self-reliance and care for each other through harvesting and sharing food. Pulling from four years of fieldwork and study, Walton and Regis explore harvesting, hunting, and foraging by Native Americans, Cajuns, and other Bayou residents. This engagement with Indigenous thinkers and their neighbors yields a multifaceted view of subsistence in Louisiana. Readers will learn about coastal residents' love for the land and water, their deep connections to place, and how they identify with their food and game heritage. The book also delves into their worries about the future, particularly storms, pollution, and land loss in the coastal region.

Using a set of narratives that documents the everyday food practices of these communities, the authors conclude that subsistence is not so much a specific task like peeling shrimp or harvesting sassafras, but is fundamentally about what these activities mean to the people of the coast. Drawn together with immersive writing, this book explores a way of life that is vibrant, built on deep historical roots, and profoundly threatened by the Gulf's shrinking coast.
Atmospheric and Oceanic Circulation: An Explanation of Earth's Climate Patterns

2024
Robert V. Rohli

This book provides a one-stop shop for coastal and marine scientists to understand processes that generate atmospheric circulation as integrated with terrestrial and oceanic circulation processes to create an Earth-ocean-atmosphere climate system. It uses the process approach in the first half of the book to set the stage for understanding circulation systems and then for explaining the circulation processes themselves, with the second half of the book dedicated to showing how these processes play themselves out across the Earth's terrestrial and marine surface. The processes explained in the first half of the book assume no prior knowledge of meteorology or oceanography. The regional section includes the major continents or subcontinents, along with their surrounding ocean environs. It begins with the area with which many/most readers are likely most familiar ―the USA and Canada. From there, the tour of the world continues, beginning with the places that have atmospheric and oceanic circulation features that are most similar to the USA and Canada, all in the Northern Hemisphere―Europe, Southwestern Asia, and then East Asia. From there, the discussion builds on principles illustrated in the first half of the book and demonstrated in the beginning of the regional section of the book, while also adding concepts and principles of importance in the tropical and subtropical latitudes, by describing circulation features of South and Southeast Asia. This discussion carries forward naturally for a discussion of Africa, which experiences similar features of subtropical and tropical latitudes. From there, previous material can be applied and built upon further in the discussion of Latin America and the Caribbean. Australia and Oceania are the next area covered, followed by the polar latitudes. The book concludes with a brief review of the major atmospheric and oceanic circulation features around the world and with a reminder of the cascading primary and secondary impacts of the climate system.

The book is intended to fill a niche as both a textbook and a reference source for non-atmospheric specialists. Its purpose is to help coastal, environmental, engineering, and planning professionals to get “up to speed” regarding atmospheric and oceanic circulations and their impacts around the world. This would allow more effective communication with climate modelers, atmospheric and marine environmental consultants, and media. Our book-writing experience allows us to implement “best practices” based on cognitive theory to facilitate learning in the geosciences.
New Critical Nostalgia : Romantic Lyric and the Crisis of Academic Life

2024
Christopher Rovee

New Critical Nostalgia weighs the future of literary study by reassessing its past. It tracks today's impassioned debates about method back to the discipline's early professional era, when an unprecedented makeover of American higher education with far-reaching social consequences resulted in what we might call our first crisis of academic life. Rovee probes literary study's nostalgic attachments to this past, by recasting an essential episode in the historiography of English--the vigorous rejection of romanticism by American New Critics--in the new light of the American university's tectonic growth. In the process, he demonstrates literary study's profound investment in romanticism and reveals the romantic lyric's special affect, nostalgia, as having been part of English's professional identity all along.

New Critical Nostalgia meticulously shows what is lost in reducing mid-century American criticism and the intense, quirky, and unpredictable writings of central figures, such as Cleanth Brooks, Josephine Miles, and W. K. Wimsatt, to a glib monolith of New Critical anti-romanticism. In Rovee's historically rich account, grounded in analysis of critical texts and enlivened by archival study, readers discover John Crowe Ransom's and William Wordsworth's shared existential nostalgia, witness the demolition of the "immature" Percy Shelley in the revolutionary textbook Understanding Poetry , explore the classroom give-and-take prompted by the close reading of John Keats, consider the strange ambivalence toward Lord Byron on the part of formalist critics and romantic scholars alike, and encounter the strikingly contemporary quantitative studies by one of the mid-century's preeminent poetry scholars, Josephine Miles. These complex and enthralling engagements with the romantic lyric introduce the reader to a dynamic intellectual milieu, in which professionals with varying methodological commitments (from New Critics to computationalists), working in radically different academic locales (from Nashville and New Haven to Baton Rouge and Berkeley), wrangled over what it means to read, with nothing less than the future of the discipline at stake.
The American Daughters: A Novel

2024
Maurice Carlos Ruffin

Ady, a curious, sharp-witted girl, and her fierce mother, Sanite, are inseparable. Enslaved to a businessman in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the pair spend their days reminiscing about their family’s rebellious and storied history and dreaming of a loving future. When mother and daughter are separated, Ady is left hopeless and directionless until she stumbles into the Mockingbird Inn and meets Lenore, a free Black woman with whom she becomes fast friends. Lenore invites Ady to join a clandestine society of spies called the Daughters. With the courage instilled in her by Sanite—and with help from these strong women—Ady learns how to put herself first. So begins her journey toward liberation and imagining a new future.

The American Daughters is a novel of hope and triumph that reminds us what is possible when a community bands together to fight for their freedom.
Special Educator's Guide to Behavior Management

2024
Joseph B. Ryan and Paul Mooney

This accessible, practitioner-focused textbook details a comprehensive classroom behavior management framework that is easy to understand and implement within a K-12 classroom. Influenced by decades of classroom teaching and special education teacher candidate preparation experiences, the book features effective evidence-based strategies designed to both prevent problem behaviors from occurring in classrooms and address challenging behaviors that presently exist or may arise.

Each of the book's four sections show readers step-by-step how to develop, implement, and evaluate a personalized behavior management plan that best meets the unique needs of their classrooms which can vary tremendously in both size and types of students served. From the first page to the last, this new text addresses the reader in a friendly, personal way in an effort to enhance accessibility and encourage them to want to understand the "what and how" of each strategy and/or process and how it relates to the overall behavioral framework laid out in section one.

Ideal for both current and prospective special educators, this book supports readers in developing their own comprehensive approach to classroom behavior management that can be implemented across grade levels.
Architectures of Resistance: Negotiating Borders through Spatial Practices

2024
Angeliki Sioli, Nishat Awan, and Kristopher Palagi

Borders between countries, neighbourhoods, people, beliefs, and policies are proliferating and expanding despite what self-proclaimed progressive societies wish or choose to believe. For a wide variety of reasons, the early 21st century is caught struggling between breaking down barriers and raising them. Architecture is complicit in both. It is central to the perpetuation of borders, and key to their dismantling. Architectures of Resistance: Negotiating Borders Through Spatial Practices approaches borders as sites of meaningful encounter between others (other cultures, other nations, other perspectives), guided not by fear or hatred but by respect and tolerance. The contributors to this volume - including architects, urban planners, artists, human geographers, and political scientists - address spatial boundaries as places where social and political conditions are intensified and where new spatial practices of architectural resistance arise. Moving across contemporary, historical, and speculative conditions of borders, Architectures of Resistance discusses new and innovative forms of architectural, artistic, and political practice that facilitate constructive human interaction.
Rural and Small-Town America : Context, Composition, and Complexities

2024
Tim Slack and Shannon Monnat

Contemporary America is centered around urban society. Most Americans reside in cities or their surrounding suburbs, and both the media and modern American sociology focus disproportionately on urban life. Rural and Small-Town America looks at what we can learn from rural society and confronts common myths and misunderstandings about rural people and places. Tim Slack and Shannon M. Monnat examine social, economic, and demographic changes and how these changes pose both problems and opportunities for rural communities. They assess changes in population size and composition, economies and livelihoods, ethnoracial diversity and inequities, population health and health disparities, and politics and policies. The central focus of this book is that rural America is no paragon of stability. Social change abounds, accompanied by new challenges. Through analysis of empirical evidence, demographic data, and policy debates, readers will glean insights about rural America and the United States as a whole.
Exercise Immunology

2024
James Turner, Guillaume Spielmann, and John Campbell

Exercise immunology is a discipline at the nexus of exercise physiology and immunology that aims to characterise the effects of exercise on the immune system in health and disease. This new edition of Exercise Immunology begins by providing an evidence‑based introduction to the effects that individual bouts of exercise and exercise training have on the characteristics and functioning of the immune system. In addition to introducing the immune system and summarising how different forms of exercise affect the characteristics and functioning of the immune system, this new and fully revised edition will explore exercise immunology in the context of immune ageing, cancer, autoimmune diseases and cardiometabolic disease. In addition, the authors discuss other factors that impact immune health, such as nutrition and environmental stressors, and explain the physiological basis of how exercise changes immune function across the healthspan and lifespan. This book is written by leading exercise immunologists and is structured to provide a suggested curriculum of an exercise immunology degree component. Every chapter includes summaries of current and up‑to‑date research and offers practical guidelines to translate laboratory‑based information into clinical settings. This textbook is essential for any exercise immunology degree component or advanced exercise physiology degree and will be vital reading for students in exercise and biological sciences and clinicians and researchers interested in the therapeutic applications of exercise.
Computational Methods and GIS Applications in Social Science

2024
Fahui Wang

This textbook integrates GIS, spatial analysis, and computational methods for solving real-world problems in various policy-relevant social science applications. Thoroughly updated, the third edition showcases the best practices of computational spatial social science and includes numerous case studies with step-by-step instructions in ArcGIS Pro and open-source platform KNIME. Readers sharpen their GIS skills by applying GIS techniques in detecting crime hotspots, measuring accessibility of primary care physicians, forecasting the impact of hospital closures on local community, or siting the best locations for business.
Male Femininities

2023
Dana Berkowitz

Innovative essays that explore how men perform femininity and what femininity looks like without women
What counts as "male femininity"? Is it simply men behaving in effeminate ways or is it the absence of masculinity? Male Femininities presents a nuanced, critical collection of essays that highlight the extent to which male femininities are neither an imitation of femaleness nor an emptying of masculinity. These innovative essays focus on both gay and straight men, and transmasculine and genderqueer people in their construction and performance of femininity, thereby revealing the possibilities that open up when we critically examine femininity without women. Male Femininities asks, What does femininity look like for men?
The contributors--highly regarded scholars and rising stars--cover a range of topics, including drag queens, cosmetic enhancements, trans fertility, and gender-non-conforming childhoods. Male Femininities illuminates what happens when we decouple femininity from female bodies and how even the smallest cracks and fissures in the normative order can disrupt, challenge, and in some cases reaffirm our existing sex-gender regime. This volume pluralizes the concept of male femininities and leads readers through an exploration of how gender, sex, and sexuality are manifested in the United States today.
Strangely Rhetorical: Composing Differently with Novelty Devices

2023
Jimmy Butts

Strangely Rhetorical establishes the groundwork for strangeness as a lens under the broader interdisciplinary umbrella of rhetoric and composition and shares a series of rhetorical devices for practically thinking about how compositions are made unique. Jimmy Butts explores how strange, novel, weird, and interesting texts work and offers insight into how and why these forms can be invented, created, and stylized to generate the effective delivery of rhetorical messages in fun, divergent ways.

Using a new theoretical framework--that strangeness is inherent within all rhetorical interactions and is potentially useful--Butts demonstrates how rhetoric is always already coming from an Other, offering an ethical context for how defamiliarized texts work with different audiences. Applying examples of seven figures for composing in and across written, aural, visual, electronic, and spatial texts (the WAVES of media), Butts shows how divergence is possible in all sorts of refigured multimodal ways.

Strangely Rhetorical rethinks what exactly rhetoric is and does, considering the ways that strange compositions help rhetors connect across a broad range of networks in a world haunted by distance. This is a book about strange rhetoric for makers and creatives, for students and teachers, and for composers of all sorts.
Explaining Life Through Evolution

2023
Prosanta Chakrabarty

A broad overview of the science of evolution, and why understanding it matters in our everyday lives.

Explaining Life through Evolution tells the origin story of life on this planet and how we arrived at the tremendous diversity among organisms that we see around us today.
Prosanta Chakrabarty explains evolution in a concise, accessible, and engaging way, emphasizing the importance of understanding evolution in everyday contemporary life. Weaving his own lived experience among discussions of Darwin and the origins of evolutionary thought, Chakrabarty also covers key concepts to our understanding of our current condition, including mutation; the spectrum of race, sex, gender, and sexuality; the limitations of ancestry tests; and the evolution of viruses like SARS-CoV-2, the virus at the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Offering a contemporary update to classic popular evolution books by Stephen Jay Gould, Jerry Coyne, and others, Explaining Life through Evolution is not only an illuminating read, but also an essential guide to the kind of scientific literacy that we need in order to face the challenges of our collective future.
Black Experiences in Higher Education: Faculty, Staff, and Students

2023
Sherella Cupid

Black Experiences in Higher Education: Faculty, Staff, and Students illuminates the narratives of Black faculty, staff, and students and how they navigate their professional experiences, confront the hidden curriculum and work to transform academia. As we think about the context of Black Lives Matter, intersections of race and gender, and what it means to be Black in America, there is a new consciousness and attention to the uniqueness of Black experiences in the world. This book calls attention to how Black folks are navigating their experiences within higher education.

The book will present an overarching aim to delve into Black voices and experiences in higher education. Contributing authors hold varying roles of faculty, staff, and students, all sharing their experiences in higher education in the USA. In particular these scholars reflect on the challenges and opportunities within the three themes of mental health and wellness, mentorship and creating supportive spaces, and career experiences, trajectories and pathways. The aim of the variety of contributing authors creates a space to reveal unique Black experiences and voices, therefore contributing to the scholarly discourse on race in America, and in higher education, in particular.
What Can U.S. Government Information Do for Me?: Librarians Explain the Discovery and Use of Public Data, Documents, Maps and Images

2023
Tom Diamond and Dominique Hallett

The United States government is one of the world's largest publishers, printing and distributing a wealth of information including resources on American history, crime and justice data, contextualized government images, census data, genealogy research and much more. To serve patrons, library personnel must remain knowledgeable about U.S. government resources, agencies, departments, and websites.

Aimed at librarians and library personnel from all types of libraries, and at researchers, this practical, hands-on volume is a useful resource for learning how to find and apply information from the wealth of U.S. government resources. It aids in answering various types of patron questions, performing community outreach, engaging in civic activities, serving business patrons, and providing classroom instruction. Readers will learn to discover the government's "hidden" information treasures and how to implement and adapt these resources in any library environment.
The Sounds of the Cosmos : Gravitational Waves and the Birth of Multi-Messenger Astronomy

2023
Mario Díaz, Gabriela González, and Jorge Pullin

In 2016, the LIGO and Virgo Collaborations made headlines when they announced the detection of gravitational waves-a century after Albert Einstein first predicted their existence with his general theory of relativity. With unprecedented perspective as physicists at the forefront of this discovery, Mario Diaz, Gabriela Gonzalez, and Jorge Pullin provide a comprehensive and accessible account of the quest to find gravitational waves, their controversial history, and the efforts that culminated with their detection and a Nobel Prize in Physics.

The Sounds of the Cosmos vividly narrates contributions from the ancient Greeks through Einstein, in addition to the breakthroughs of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including the discovery of the Hulse-Taylor binary star system (the first of its kind ever observed) and the technology behind gravitational wave detectors. The authors' fusion of meticulous research and accessible prose makes this book an indispensable resource for the scientifically curious, lending astonishing new context to the revelation that we can "hear" the cosmos through gravitational waves. Written with exceptional historical and conceptual insight, this is a definitive and dazzling journey through "the eternal quest of humankind to understand the universe."
Fabricating Founders in Early Modern England : History, Rhetoric, and the Origins of Christianity

2023
Lauren Horn Griffin

This book argues that in order to understand nationalisms, we need a clearer understanding of the types of cultural myths, symbols, and traditions that legitimate them. Myths of origin and election, memories of a greater and purer past, and narratives of persecution and mission are required for the production and maintenance of powerful national sentiments. Through an investigation of how early modern Catholics and Protestants reimagined, reinterpreted, and rewrote the lives of the founder-saints who spread Christianity in England, this book offers a theoretical framework for the study of origin narratives. Analyzing the discursive construction of time and place, the invocation of forces beyond the human to naturalize and authorize, and the role of visual and ritual culture in fabrications of the past, this book provides a case study for how to approach claims about founding figures. Serving as a timely example of the dependence of national identity on key religious resources, Griffin shows how origin narratives - particularly the founding figures that anchor them - function as uniquely powerful rhetorical tools for the cultural production of regional and national identity.
Curriculum Histories in Place, in Person, in Practice: The Louisiana State University Curriculum Theory Project

2023
Petra Munro Hendry

This book situates the Curriculum Theory Project at Louisiana State University within a larger historical framework of curriculum work, examining the practices which have sustained this type of curricular vitality over the lifetime of the field’s existence.

Divided into seven parts, the authors illuminate seven practices which have sustained the scholarship, graduate programs, mentorship, and networking that have been critical to maintaining a web of international relationships. This exploration and coming together of intergenerational stories reveals a more complete and nuanced narrative of the development of curriculum theory over the last 60 years. Crucially, the project exemplifies the continuing resilience of curriculum theory despite ongoing neo-liberal aspirations to reframe education as a business. Reflecting upon the lived experiences and articulated memories of those who have participated in the project and analysis of documents collected over its 25-year history, it considers curriculum history(ies) writ large through and from this lens of practice. As such, it opens up fresh insights for cultivating the vitality and vigor of curriculum theory more broadly on an international scale and with a view to future directions for the field.

It will appeal to both new and experienced scholars working across education foundations, urban education, philosophy of education, and higher education, and researchers from across history, sociology, anthropology, ethnic studies, and gender studies.
Writing Ambition: Literary Engagements Between Women in France

2023
Katharine Ann Jensen

Focusing on the psychological aspects of the literary engagements between women in France, Katharine Ann Jensen combines close readings of their works with attention to historical and biographical contexts to consider how and why one or both women in the pair express contradictions or anxiety about writing ambition.
Pipeline Rules of Thumb Handbook: A Manual of Quick, Accurate Solutions to Everyday Pipeline Engineering Problems

2023
Mark J. Kaiser

Pipeline Rules of Thumb Handbook: A Manual of Quick, Accurate Solutions to Everyday Pipeline Engineering Problems, Ninth Edition , the latest release in the series, serves as the "go-to" source for all pipeline engineering answers. Updated with new data, graphs and chapters devoted to economics and the environment, this new edition delivers on new topics, including emissions, decommissioning, cost curves, and more while still maintaining the quick answer standard display of content and data that engineers have utilized throughout their careers. Glossaries are added per chapter for better learning tactics, along with additional storage tank and LNG fundamentals.

This book continues to be the high-quality, classic reference to help pipeline engineers solve their day-to-day problems.

Contains new chapters that highlight costs, safety and environmental topics, including discussions on emissions Helps readers learn terminology, with updated glossaries in every chapter Includes renovated graphs and data tables throughout
Creating Costumes for Devised Theatre

2023
Kyla Kazuschyk

Creating Costumes for Devised Theatre combines perspectives from a variety of theatre practitioners to guide artists through the journey of creating costumes for devised work.

Devised theatre can take a number of different forms, and it can be a challenge for the costume department to plan, organize, and assemble things for performers to wear, as the entire shape of the piece is constantly changing. This book provides practical resources to guide the theatre artist through the journey of designing costumes as the characters are created. It addresses a wide range of questions, including how to adapt traditional methods of costume design to non-traditional practices, how to effectively collaborate with a team, and how to adapt costume technology practices to meet the needs of devising. Stories and photographs from performers, designers, technicians, directors, writers, educators, students, and activists working in the realm of devised theatre around the world are contextualized through the author's own involvement in unscripted, partially scripted, and otherwise dynamic drama, dance, and physical theatre to offer tangible solutions to streamline costume design and construction processes.

This book is an invaluable guide for both experienced and novice costume designers, costume technicians, students, teachers, directors, managers, and theatre artists who exist in the spaces where all these roles overlap.
Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU

2023
Robert Mann

No political leader is more closely identified with Louisiana State University than the flamboyant governor and U.S. senator Huey P. Long, who devoted his last years to turning a small, undistinguished state school into an academic and football powerhouse. From 1931, when Long declared himself the ?official thief? for LSU, to his death in 1935, the schools budget mushroomed, its physical plant burgeoned, its faculty flourished, and its enrollment tripled.

Along with improving LSU?s academic reputation, Long believed the schools football program and band were crucial to its success. Taking an intense interest in the team, Long delivered pregame and halftime pep talks, devised plays, stalked the sidelines during games, and fired two coaches. He poured money into a larger, flashier band, supervised the hiring of two directors, and, with the second one, wrote a new fight song, ?Touchdown for LSU.?

While he rarely meddled in academic affairs, Long insisted that no faculty member criticize him publicly. When students or faculty from ?his school? opposed him, retribution was swift. Longs support for LSU did not come without consequences. His unrelenting involvement almost cost the university its accreditation. And after his death, several of his allies including his handpicked university president went to prison in a scandal that almost destroyed LSU.

Rollicking and revealing, Robert Mann?s Kingfish U is the definitive story of Longs embrace of LSU.