This best practice is brought to you by Development’s ND Voice Committee and their initiative to enhance communication by sharing best practices for employee recognition and appreciation.  Special thanks to Bob Quakenbush and Rudy Reyes for this month’s posting.

Looking for a way to recognize good work or express your gratitude to a colleague while enriching our department’s collective knowledge about Our Lady’s University at the same time? Consider a book about Notre Dame as a token of your appreciation.

So many books have been written about Notre Dame through the years that you can be certain to find one that is meaningful, useful, or will be treasured as a keepsake or as an addition to — or the foundation of — a personal collection of books about Our Lady’s University.

For those who might enjoy perusing old photos and illustrations of the early days of Notre Dame, there is Thomas J. Schlereth’s fascinating The University of Notre Dame: A Portrait of Its History and Campus, first published in the 1970s. For a book to uplift the spirit, the Notre Dame Book of Prayer or The Chapels of Notre Dame might be fine selections.  For the Civil War buff, options include Father William Corby’s Memoirs of Chaplain Life: 3 Years in the Irish Brigade with the Army of the Potomac, which has been described as one of the best of the numerous published diaries of Civil War participants, or Notre Dame and the Civil War by James Schmidt. For the football fan, there are many new or used books to choose from; one of the most recent additions is Coach for a Nation, a new biography of Knute Rockne by Jim LeFebvre.

Sometimes, you can unexpectedly find a great story about a Notre Dame alumnus in a book about another subject. Imagine reading James Bradley’s highly-regarded Flags of Our Fathers for the first time and discovering that a young Marine, Corporal Robert Leader, who was instrumental in the first flag raising at the top of Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima (the one that took place before the most iconic photo of World War II was taken) later became a popular professor who taught Art Traditions at Notre Dame.

This year, as the University celebrates the bicentennial of the birth of Rev. Edward Sorin, C.S.C., the founder of Notre Dame, consider the biography, Edward Sorin by Marvin R. O’Connell, or The Chronicles of Notre Dame Du Lac, attributed to the founder himself.

Many books about Notre Dame can be found at the campus bookstore, and many more can be found online at BetterWorldBooks.com, Ebay.com or Amazon.com.