Making a Difference in Academic Life: A Handbook for Park, Recreation, and Tourism Educators and Graduate Students edited by Dan Dustin and Tom Goodale. This book is the culmination of a 20-year inquiry into the nature and meaning of academic life. When the inquiry began, however, there was no thought given to this particular end. Its two predecessors, Beyond Promotion and Tenure: On Being a Professor and For the Good of the Order: Administering Academic Programs in Higher Education, were rooted in a concern for better understanding a professor's life and just what it is about administration that draws some professors to it. The idea for this third book was motivated by a desire to "put things in order" as this generation of professors makes way for the next. Combining the first two books with what was to be the content of a third book was fortuitous — a matter of good timing and good luck. Available from Venture Publishing, Inc.

Service Living: Building Community Through Public Parks and Recreation by Doug Wellman, Dan Dustin, Karla Henderson and Roger Moore This book challenges us to reconsider what it means to be responsible citizens in a participatory democracy. It asks us to see ourselves not only as individuals, but as part of a much larger unfolding story—the growth and development of a nation. It suggests that we have both the opportunity and the obligation to become engaged in public life, and that such engagement defines a life worth living. The book suggests further that self-fulfillment, if it is to come our way, will be a byproduct of that engagement. We make our case by telling the stories of four individuals who made remarkable contributions to our nation’s history: Frederick Law Olmsted, Jane Addams, Benton MacKaye, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas. They were living proof that each one of us can make a positive difference in this world if only we would try. How they did it, and how we can do it as well, is through service living. Available from Venture Publishing, Inc.

Challenging Mountain Nature: Risk, Motive, & Lifestyle in Three Hobbyist Sports, by Robert A. Stebbins, is an extensive examination of the rarely studied questions of how and why committed hobbyists in mountaineering, kayaking, and snowboarding meet notable challenges posed by nature in the Canadian Rockies. Here he applies the serious leisure perspective to help us understand why some people become so passionate about such sports and how they arrange their lives so as to consistently pursue them. Common belief has it that people go in for such activities expressly because they endanger life and limb of the participant, even at the individual's high level of competence to execute them. Nevertheless, this study reveals that, with rare exceptions, extreme sports are not at all risky in any major way; hobbyists in these fields are not, as a rule, suicidal. Nature-challenge activity involves surmounting barriers posed by the natural environment for deep fulfillment, and offers an exhilarating peak experience. Thus, this is not the language of risk, but rather it is the language of leisure and psychological flow. Available from Temeron Books, Inc.

Constraints To Leisure, edited by Edgar L. Jackson. The goals of this book are threefold. The first objective is to lay out a series of "local maps," at a fine scale, of what we know about specific aspects of constraints to leisure after 25 years of attention. The second purpose is to integrate this knowledge by moving sufficiently far back from the detail to provide a sort of continental-scale view, perhaps a satellite image, of the constraints to leisure "topography." The third goal is to use these maps to chart journeys in the future. The book begins with a section of eight chapters broadly linked under the heading of Impacts of Constraints on Diverse Populations, with chapters on gender, race, ethnicity and immigration, adolescents, the elderly, women and fear in the outdoors, transitions and constraints over the lifespan, and negative life events. The next section, New Approaches to the Study of Constraints, begins with theory and concludes with method. In between there is consideration of broad issues of culture, time, outdoor recreation, disciplinary foundations and interdisciplinary connections, new concepts (affordance), and an integrating framework (benefits and constraints). The penultimate section, Constraints Research and Practice, comprises three chapters that focus largely on applications. The book concludes with a two-chapter section entitled Critique that in a sense "stands back" from everything that has preceded it. Available from Venture Publishing, Inc.

Client Assessment in Therapeutic Recreation Services, by Norma J. Stumbo.
The purpose of this text is to fill a gap in the therapeutic recreation literature concerning client assessment. It aims to educate the reader about the importance of client assessment, how assessment relates to treatment planning and programming, and ways to improve the process of data collection, analysis, interpretation, and reporting. This book intends to aid the therapeutic recreation specialist in learning, understanding, and applying information about client assessment for use in therapeutic recreation intervention services. Available from Venture Publishing, Inc.

Client Outcomes in Therapeutic Recreation Services, edited by Norma J. Stumbo. Therapeutic recreation is in the midst of exciting and challenging changes in health and human services. One of the toughest challenges is creating, planning, implementing, and evaluating TR intervention programs that are based on "best practice" and provide maximum accountability to invested persons and parties. These services are designed and delivered to produce outcomes that are valued by, meaningful to, and important to the consumer as well as other service providers. This book represents a synergistic, collective effort to bring the newest information on outcomes, accountability, and evidence-based practice to the field of therapeutic recreation. The actions and decisions described in these chapters apply to all population groups with which therapeutic recreation specialists work. Available from Venture Publishing, Inc.

Consumer Psychology of Tourism, Hospitality and Leisure, edited by G.I. Crouch, R.R. Perdue, H.J.P. Timmermans, and M. Uysal. Knowledge of consumer psychology and consumer behaviour in relation to tourism is valuable in determining the success of tourism and hospitality ventures. The book is an edited collection of papers from the 3rd Symposium on Consumer Psychology of Tourism, Hospitality and Leisure, held in Melbourne, Australia in January 2003. Themes covered by the papers include attitudes, emotions and information processing; motivation and learning; consumption systems; decision and choice; experience and satisfaction; market segmentation; attraction and loyalty; and image and interpretation. Available from CAB International.

Outdoor Recreation for 21st Century America: A Report to the Nation: The National Survey on Recreation and the Environment, by H. Ken Cordell, Principal Author. Outdoor Recreation for 21st Century America will provide recreation planners, public land managers, academicians, media, students, industry, and others interested in outdoor recreation with a resource describing trends and contemporary Americans' participation in outdoor recreation. The first section describes long-term and short-term trends, going back to 1960 and linking to earlier nationwide recreation surveys. The second section describes participation in different groupings of outdoor activities. The third section describes participation and trends by type of outdoor resource or setting (e.g., forest, farm, marine). The final section provides comparisons across major metropolitan areas, across regions and states, and between enthusiasts and others. This book is a professional information resource to be used in planning, decision making, marketing, and documentation. While this book was designed for a wide audience, it provides data broken out to suit many specific interests and needs as well. Available from Venture Publishing, Inc.

Between Work and Leisure: A Study of the Common Ground of Two Separate Worlds, by Robert A. Stebbins. Occupational devotion, as defined by Robert A. Stebbins, is a strong and positive attachment to a form of self-enhancing work, where the sense of achievement is high and the core activity, or set of tasks, is endowed with such intense appeal that the line between work and leisure is virtually erased. This volume examines conditions that attract people to their work in this profound way, and the many exceptional values and intrinsic rewards they realize there. Between Work and Leisure aims to debunk the prevailing myth that work and leisure are wholly separate and, often as not, mutually antagonistic spheres of life. Stebbins shows that a close relationship between leisure and work offers the opportunity for people to find joy in work just as they do in leisure.

Inclusive Leisure Services: Responding to the Rights of People with Disabilities, Second Edition, by John Dattilo. This book encourages leisure services providers to promote inclusion of people with disabilities in their programs. The information provided in the text is supplemented by a CD-ROM of interactive learning activities. This text will educate future and current leisure services professionals about attitude development and actions that promote positive attitudes about people who have experienced discrimination and segregation. It provides strategies that will facilitate meaningful leisure participation by all participants, while respecting the rights of people with disabilities. The first section is devoted to awareness of important concepts. The second section presents readers with the Americans with Disabilities Act and specific strategies to facilitate participation within the spirit of the act. The final section introduces readers to people with disabilities, their characteristics, and methods for including them in community leisure services. The CD-ROM contains 19 interactive learning activities designed to be completed after a corresponding chapter in the book has been read. The activities place students in the roles of leisure services providers who must make decisions about providing inclusive leisure services. Learners apply information obtained from reading the book and they receive immediate feedback regarding their decisions. The activities encourage application of knowledge acquired from the book in an interactive and interesting format. Available from Venture Publishing, Inc.

The Pivotal Role of Leisure Education: Finding Personal Fulfillment in This Century. Edited by Elie Cohen-Gewerc and Robert A. Stebbins

Although it is presently true that the amounts of free time available to people in the West are not equally distributed, in general, there is more leisure time than ever before. However, for those who have it, a comparatively large amount of free time does not always result in leisure or in quality leisure. Boredom, which may occur in free time, is not leisure, and some leisure activities—even if they are not boring—are much less interesting, exciting, and personally enriching than they could be. Thus, a major challenge facing those who hope to better the lot of humankind, both Western and non-Western, is to find a way to acquaint people with the many interesting, exciting, and enriching leisure activities that are realistically available to them and to help those people define their own criteria for taking up some of the ones they find appealing. For the authors, that way is leisure education, conceived of broadly as counselling, volunteering, and instructing in classrooms and elsewhere on such matters as the nature, types, and costs and rewards of various leisure activities possibly open to those receiving this kind of knowledge.