Gathering concepts and techniques borrowed from outstanding college professors, The Joy of Teaching provides helpful guidance for new instructors developing and teaching their first college courses.

Award-winning professor Peter Filene proposes that teaching should not be like a baseball game in which the instructor pitches ideas to students to see whether they hit or strike out. Ideally, he says, teaching should resemble a game of Frisbee in which the teacher invites students to catch ideas and pass them on.

Rather than prescribe any single model for success,...

When, if ever, is life no longer worth living? When, if ever, is it right to withdraw life-support or hasten death? These questions--which confront physicians, bioethicists, social workers, the children of aging parents, and sooner or later almost everyone--now receive increasingly urgent attention in American society. Peter Filene's In the Arms of Others is the first book to set this dilemma into broad historical and cultural context. It is, in other words, a history of the "right to die" as viewed in the United States. With the narrative skills he has displayed in his fiction, Mr. Filene...