Mark Sternum, a professor who teaches spelling and grammar at Boston's McClintock College, is full of droll observations about the rules that govern our language, but he leads a diligent if somewhat detached life. Friends and family try to coax him into deeper involvement, yet he keeps even his lover at arm's length. He screens all incoming calls, including his eccentric sister's "word pictures" about the waning days of their comatose mother. One day, an African–American single mother who has failed the college's basic skills test for the last time accuses Mark of "prejudgism," and Mark is fired. Blown off course, he monitors the ensuing academic skirmish from a distance as his case makes national headlines, and turns his attention instead to the graceful rhythms of a small Shaker community. As the scrambled pieces of Mark's life and the simple ways of the Shakers begin to merge, Mark finds new beauty in his own maddening, blissful dependency on the people in his life. Funny and generous, Downing's seemingly effortless prose juxtaposes cunning portraits of academic functionaries weathering the age of political correctness with the people and values of the last Shaker families in America.

Mark Sternum's meticulously constructed world is nearly destroyed when he fails a woman in one of his college classes and is accused of "prejudism". When his case makes national headlines, Mark receives an unexpected visit from his father, Thomas--long believed dead. Mark falls under his spell, casting aside doubt and a perfectly orchestrated life in favor of a joy he never thought possible.

The book will provide a comprehensive treatment of statistical inference using permutation techniques. Its purpose is to make available to practitioners a variety of useful and powerful data analytic tools that rely on very few distributional assumptions. Although many of these procedures have appeared in journal articles, they are not readily available to practitioners.