University of Pittsburgh Press
The University of Pittsburgh Press is a publisher with distinguished lists in a wide range of scholarly and cultural fields. They publish books for general readers, scholars, and students. The Press focuses on selected academic areas: Latin American studies, Russian and East European studies, Central Asian studies, composition and literacy studies, environmental studies, urban studies, the history of architecture and the built environment, and the history and philosophy of science, technology, and medicine. Their books about Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania include history, art, architecture, photography, biography, fiction, and guidebooks.
Their renowned Pitt Poetry Series represents many of the finest poets active today, as reflected in the many prestigious awards their work has garnered over the past four decades. In addition, the Press is home to the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and, in rotation with other university presses, the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. They sponsor the prestigious Drue Heinz Literature Prize, which recognises the finest collective works of short fiction available in an international competition.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 304
ISBN: 9780822961949
Pub Date: 17 Nov 2002
Description:
Selectivity and Discord addresses the fundamental question of whether there are grounds for belief in experimental results. Specifically, Allan Franklin is concerned with two problems in the use of experimental results in science: selectivity of data or analysis procedures and the resolution of discordant results.By means of detailed case studies of episodes from the history of modern physics, Franklin shows how these problems can be—and are—solved in the normal practice of science and, therefore, that experimental results may be legitimately used as a basis for scientific knowledge.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 192
ISBN: 9780822962441
Pub Date: 03 Nov 2002
Series: Drue Heinz Literature Prize
Description:
Winner of the 2002 Drue Heinz Literature PrizeSelected by Elizabeth HardwickIt is difficult to see what lurks beneath the surface of a muddy river, an alligator-infested lake, or a John Blair short story. The deep currents that drive a demure, devout, church-going woman to shoot her husband; the ripple effect of a midnight rendezvous at church youth camp that goes slightly—then horribly—askew; the sinkholes that can swallow Porsche dealerships—or marriages; what is dredged up in American Standard cannot easily be forgotten.Set mostly in central Florida, Blair’s stories are filled with people living lives of disquieting longing and stubborn isolation.
For them, this is the American standard, as ubiquitous and undistinguished as vitreous china bathroom fixtures.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 192
ISBN: 9780822957928
Pub Date: 20 Oct 2002
Description:
Singing the City is an eloquent tribute to a way of life largely disappearing in America, using Pittsburgh as a lens. Graham is not blind to the damage industry has done—both to people and to the environment, but she shows us that there is also a rich human story that has gone largely untold, one that reveals, in all its ambiguities, the place of the industrial landscape in the heart. Singing the City is a celebration of a landscape that through most of its history has been unabashedly industrial.
Convinced that industrial landscapes are too little understood and appreciated, Graham set out to investigate the city\u2019s landscape, past and present, and to learn the lessons she sensed were there about living a good life. The result, told in both her voice and the distinctive voices of the people she meets, is a powerful contribution to the literature of place. Graham begins by showing the city as an outgrowth of its geography and its geology—the factors that led to its becoming an industrial place. She describes the human investment in the area: the floods of immigrants who came to work in the mills in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their struggles within the domains of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. She evokes the superhuman aura of making steel by taking the reader to still functioning mills and uncovers for us a richness of tradition in ethnic neighborhoods that survives to this day.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 96
ISBN: 9780822957898
Pub Date: 06 Oct 2002
Description:
Rouge Pulp explores notions of body and beauty, birth and death, in a contemporary America driven by its contradictions: material plenty and spiritual lack. Dorothy Barresi writes about strippers, hair salons, cancer, good credit ratings, cockfights, childbirth, maternal love, war. Her poems take the world’s brutal vitality as their music, and they refuse to despair.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 352
ISBN: 9780822957850
Pub Date: 29 Sep 2002
Description:
Although the relationship between elected officials and appointed executives has often been viewed as a struggle between master and servant—with disagreements as to which individuals occupy which roles—Poul Erik Mouritzen\u2019s and James Svara\u2019s comparison of city governments in fourteen countries reveals more interdependence and shared influence than conflict over control.Mouritzen and Svara bring local government to the forefront, emphasizing the sophisticated level of city management in Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Their findings lead to a revision of the general view concerning the boundaries of public administration.
Leadership at the Apex illustrates in practical ways how the democratic control of government and professional administration can coexist without undermining the logic or integrity of each other.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 96
ISBN: 9780822957867
Pub Date: 25 Sep 2002
Description:
Winner of the 2001 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry PrizeRunner-up, Society of Midland Authors 2002 Poetry PrizeGabriel Gudding’s poems not only defend against the pretense and vanity of war, violence, and religion, but also against the vanity of poetry itself. These poems sometimes nestle in the lowest regions of the body, and depict invective, donnybrooks, chase scenes, and the abuse of animals, as well as the indignities and bumblings of the besotted, the lustful, the annoyed, and the stupid.In short, Gudding seeks to reclaim the lowbrow.
Dangerous, edgy, and dark, this is an innovative writer unafraid to attack the unremitting high seriousness of so much poetry, laughing with his readers as he twists the elegiac lyric "I" into a pompous little clown.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 304
ISBN: 9780822957737
Pub Date: 22 Sep 2002
Description:
Summer afternoons at Forbes Field, playoff Sundays with the Steelers, winter nights at the Igloo cheering for Mario and the Penguins: Pittsburgh Sports captures all that and more. With stories from sports fans, historians, and former athletes, Pittsburgh Sports mixes personal experiences with team histories to capture the full range of what it means to be a sports fan—in Pittsburgh, or, by extension, anywhere.A book that can be read cover-to-cover, or in bits and pieces, Pittsburgh Sports includes chapters on the ill-fated Pittsburgh Pipers, who won the American Basketball Association\u2019s first championship, then folded four years later; the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Homestead Grays, perennial Negro League powerhouses; Johnny Unitas, Joe Namath, Jim Kelly, Joe Montana, Dan Marino, and other legends of western Pennsylvania high school football; boxing\u2019s illustrious past in the Iron City; football reminiscences by a former Steelers punter; and the ups and downs of the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 384
ISBN: 9780822959502
Pub Date: 15 Sep 2002
Description:
Using firsthand, personal accounts, and focusing on the experiences of women, Katherine R. Jolluck relates and examines the experiences of thousands of civilians deported to the USSR following the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland in 1939.Upon arrival in remote areas of the Soviet Union, they were deposited in prisons, labor camps, special settlements, and collective farms, and subjected to tremendous hardships and oppressive conditions.
In 1942, some 115,000 Polish citizens—only a portion of those initially exiled from their homeland—were evacuated to Iran. There they were asked to complete extensive questionnaires about their experiences.Having read and reviewed hundreds of these documents, Jolluck reveals not only the harsh treatment these women experienced, but also how they maintained their identities as respectable women and patriotic Poles. She finds that for those exiled, the ways in which they strove to recreate home in a foreign and hostile environment became a key means of their survival.Both a harrowing account of brutality and suffering and a clear analysis of civilian experiences in wartime, Exile and Identity expands the history of war far beyond the military battlefield.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 240
ISBN: 9780822941866
Pub Date: 01 Sep 2002
Description:
While some students need more writing instruction than others, The Politics of Remediation reveals how that need also pertains to the institutions themselves. Mary Soliday argues that universities may need remedial English to alleviate their own crises in admissions standards, enrollment, mission, and curriculum, and English departments may use remedial programs to mediate their crises in enrollment, electives, and relationships to the liberal arts and professional schools. Following a brief history of remedial English and the political uses of remediation at CCNY before, during, and after the open admissions policy, Soliday questions the ways in which students' need for remedial writing instruction has become widely associated with the need to acculturate minorities to the university.
In disentangling identity politics from remediation, she challenges a powerful assumption of post-structuralist work: that a politics of language use is equivalent to the politics of access to institutions.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 88
ISBN: 9780822957881
Pub Date: 24 Jul 2002
Description:
Winner of the 2001 Associated Writing Programs’ Award in Poetry Selected by Marilyn Chin A poet with an artist’s eye, a painter with an ear for language, Gray Jacobik creates poems out of the mundane and extraordinary moments of our lives. Mirroring the structure of a Pollock painting, elegizing Larry Levis and avocados, reflecting on Johnny Depp’s "terribly surreal" life, embarking upon a seventy-two-line meditation on the color blue, exposing a lover’s—or a mother’s—secrets, Jacobik's poems are mature, elegant, and crackling with energy.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 240
ISBN: 9780822961109
Pub Date: 14 Apr 2002
Description:
The first International Women's Day was celebrated in Copenhagen in 1910 and adopted by the Bolsheviks in 1913 as a means to popularize their political program among factory women in Russia. By 1918, Women's Day had joined May Day and the anniversary of the October Revolution as the most important national holidays on the calendar.Choi Chatterjee analyzes both Bolshevik attitudes towards women and invented state rituals surrounding Women's Day in Russia and the early Soviet Union to demonstrate the ways in which these celebrations were a strategic form of cultural practice that marked the distinctiveness of Soviet civilization, legitimized the Soviet mission for women, and articulated the Soviet construction of gender.
Unlike previous scholars who have criticized the Bolsheviks\u2019 for repudiating their initial commitment to Marxist feminism, Chatterjee has discovered considerable continuity in the way that they imagined the ideal woman and her role in a communist society.Through the years, Women's Day celebrations temporarily empowered women as they sang revolutionary songs, acted as strong protagonists in plays, and marched in processions carrying slogans about gender equality. In speeches, state policies, reports, historical sketches, plays, cartoons, and short stories, the passive Russian woman was transformed into an iconic Soviet Woman, one who could survive, improvise, and prevail over the most challenging of circumstances.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 216
ISBN: 9780822957812
Pub Date: 07 Mar 2002
Series: Drue Heinz Literature Prize
Description:
These nine stories are teeming with people on the margins, where destitute New Yorkers and determined immigrants are as much at the mercy of social services, media attention, opportunistic politicians, and \u0022quality-of-life\u0022 campaigns as they are prey to grinding poverty, dangerous streets, and their own haunting memories. Delving into Lucy Honig's fiction, one is willingly drawn into an intimacy with these resilient, but flawed characters—among them, a woman who cleans a beauty salon, a high school kid who\u2019s lost a parent, a runaway Cambodian bride, an actress, and a homeless woman. Crossing paths, these difficult characters often misunderstand and sometimes demean each other, yet they also redeem and rescue one other in odd and unexpected ways.
In The Truly Needy, Lucy Honig has created a heartbreaking, imaginative world that is the American urban landscape.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 104
ISBN: 9780822957799
Pub Date: 21 Feb 2002
Description:
Hard-hitting, sophisticated, lyrical exploration of the meaning of the body. Questions icons and invokes taboos.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 304
ISBN: 9780822957744
Pub Date: 07 Feb 2002
Description:
Violence against women is one of the most insidious social ills facing the world today. Yet governmental response is inconsistent, ranging from dismissal to aggressive implementation of policies and programs to combat the problem. In her comparative study of thirty-six democratic governments, Laurel Weldon examines the root causes and consequences of the differences in public policy from Northern Europe to Latin America.
She reveals that factors that often influence the development of social policies do not determine policies on violence against women. Neither economic level, religion, region, nor the number of women in government determine governmental responsiveness to this problem. Weldon demonstrates, for example, that Nordic governments take no more action to combat violence against women than Latin American governments, even though the Swedish welfare state is often considered a leader in social policy, particularly with regard to women\u2019s issues.Instead, the presence of independently organized, active women\u2019s movements plays a greater role in placing violence against women on the public agenda. The breadth and scope of governmental response is greatly enhanced by the presence of an office dedicated to promoting women\u2019s status.Weldon closes with practical lessons and insights to improve government action on violence against women and other important issues of social justice and democracy.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 112
ISBN: 9780822957805
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2002
Description:
Dean Young is one of the premier surrealist poets writing today. In Skid, his fifth book of poems, social outrage vies with comic excess. He embraces the autobiographical urge with fury and musically lush exclamations.
Whether through the dark facts of mortality or the celebratory surprises of the imagination, these poems proclaim vitality and alertness, wasting nothing. From Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner’s "Meep! Meep!" to remembrances of lost loves and laments about the future, Young’s poems reveal his faith in the genius of calamity and the redemptive power of fun.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 432
ISBN: 9780822985310
Pub Date: 15 Dec 2001
Description:
Eighteen distinguished scholars and practicing officials address the problems of executive leadership in the United States, Britain, Canada, and Australia. Individual essays focus on cabinet government; domestic, military, and economic advisers; executive agencies; and personal staff for presidents and prime ministers. Provocative comparisons between and among systems make the discussions particularly insightful.
