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: 112
ISBN: 9780822955672
Pub Date: 15 Jun 1995
Description:
Over the past decade, Billy Collins has emerged as the most beloved American poet since Robert Frost, garnering critical acclaim and broad popular appeal. Gerald Stern describes his poetry as "heartbreakingly beautiful." John Updike proclaims his poems "consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.
" This special, limited edition celebrates Billy Collins's years as U.S. Poet Laureate. The Art of Drowning—one of the books that helped establish and secure his reputation and popularity during the 1990s—is distinctive in its variety of interests and the generous hospitality of its voice. Ranging from an analysis of Keats's handwriting to the art form of the calendar pinup, the subjects of his poems inspire imaginative play. Whether reading him for the first time or the fiftieth, this collector's edition is a must-have for anyone interested in the poet the New York Times calls simply "the real thing."
Reclaiming Rhetorica
Women In The Rhetorical Tradition
Format: Paperback
Pages: 376
ISBN: 9780822955535
Pub Date: 15 Jun 1995
Description:
Women's contribution to rhetoric throughout Western history, like so many other aspects of women's experience, has yet to be fully explored. In pathbreaking discussions ranging from ancient Greece, though the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, to modern times, sixteen closely coordinated essays examine how women have used language to reflect their vision of themselves and their age; how they have used traditional rhetoric and applied it to women\u2019s discourse; and how women have contributed to rhetorical theory. Language specialists, feminists, and all those interested in rhetoric, composition, and communication, will benefit from the fresh and stimulating cross-disciplinary insights they offer.
Little Girls In Church
Format: Paperback
Pages: 96
ISBN: 9780822955566
Pub Date: 25 May 1995
Description:
Although Kathleen Norris’s best-selling Dakota: A Spiritual Geography has brought her to the attention of many thousands of readers, she is first and last a poet. Like Robert Frost, another poet identified with a particular landscape, she can reveal the miraculous in the ordinary, and she writes with clarity, humor, and deep sympathy for her subjects.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 272
ISBN: 9780822960522
Pub Date: 15 May 1995
Description:
This timely and well-researched study describes for the first tim ethe astonishing acquiecence of executive agency officials, members of Congress, and federal judges to Ronald Regan's assertion of extraordinary new presidential power over the federal regulatory process--the controversial Executive Order 12291.From Harry Truman through Jimy Carter, chief executives complained that federal bureaucrats disregarded their policy preferences. presidential influence over regulatory rule making was limited: congressional committees and interest groups commanded more attention.
Then in February 1981 Ronal regan abruptly departed from tradition by ordering that regulatory agencies must submit proposed guidelines for Office of Management and Budget approval.Barry D. friedman describes how the executive agencies and Congress responded warily and with skepticism, yet allowed the changes to remain; the judiciary was also willing to retreat from time-honored precedents that had preserved agency prerogative and now accorded due respect to the revolutionary Regan reform initiatives. Institutions that competed for leverage in the system continued to exercise restraint in their mutual relations because they recognized taht all benefitted from the others' viability.This book shows that conventional political science theories and models are now obsolete because of the eruption of presidential control into bureaucratic affairs. new review procedures have restructured relations between the president and the agencies and among the government's three branches. because of Regan's radical initiative, President Bill Clinton and his successors will sit at the bargaining table when regulation policy is developed in Washington, and political theorists will have to work from a new conception of presidential prerogative.
City Of Salt
Format: Paperback
Pages: 80
ISBN: 9780822955573
Pub Date: 04 May 1995
Description:
City of Salt, Gregory Orr’s sixth book of poems, is largely autobiographical and presents moments of intense emotion which are anchored in clearly dramatized events. These are poems of elegy and celebration, and of occasions where the two modes fuse in acts of redemptive imagination.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 136
ISBN: 9780822955542
Pub Date: 15 Apr 1995
Description:
"Weaver's life studies and lyrics are imbued with a vivid sense of language, a vivid sense of the world, a vivid sense of their inseparability. And his tonal range—from unabashed passion to the subtlest velleity—is impressive indeed. This is a singular talent.
"—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 240
ISBN: 9780822955405
Pub Date: 15 Jan 1995
Description:
Examining the Marcos and Aquino administrations in the Philippines, and a number of cases in Latin Amarica, Casper discusses the legacies of authoritarianism and shows how difficult it is for popularly elected leaders to ensure that democracy will flourish. Authoritarian regimes leave an imprint on society long after their leaders have been overthrown because they transform or destroy the social institutions on which a successful democracy depends. Casper concludes that redemocratization is problematic, even in countries with strong democratic traditions.
Some Are Drowning
Format: Paperback
Pages: 88
ISBN: 9780822955474
Pub Date: 06 Jan 1995
Description:
This first collection of poems enacts the struggle of a young black gay man in his search for identity. Many voices haunt these poems: black and white, male and female, the oppressor’s voice as well as the oppressed. The poet’s aim, finally, is to rescue some portion of the drowned and the drowning.
Keeping House
Women's Lives in Western Pennsylvania, 1790–1850
Format: Paperback
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9780822955382
Pub Date: 08 Dec 1994
Description:
This book is a fascinating re-creation of the lives of women in the time of great social change that followed the end of the French and Indian War in western Pennsylvania. Many decades passed before a desolate and violent frontier was transformed into a stable region of farms and towns. Keeping House: Women\u2019s Lives in Western Pennsylvania, 1790-1850 tells how the daughters, wives, and mothers who crossed the Allegheny Mountains responded and adapted to unaccustomed physical and psychological hardships as they established lives for themselves and their families in their new homes.
Intrigued by late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century manuscript cookbooks in the collection of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, Virginia Bartlett wanted to find out more about women living in the region during that period. Quoting from journals, letters, cookbooks, travelers\u2019 accounts - approving and critical - memoirs, documents, and newspapers, she offers us voices of women and men commenting seriously and humorously on what was going on around them.The text is well-illustrated with contemporaneous art-- engravings, apaintings, drawings, and cartoons. Of special interest are color and black-and-white photographs of furnishings, housewares, clothing, and portraits from the collections of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania.This is not a sentimental account. Bartlett makes clear how little say women had about their lives and how little protection they could expect from the law, especially on matters relating to property. Their world was one of marked contrasts: life in a log cabin with bare necessities and elegant dinners in the homes of Pittsburgh\u2019s military and entrepreneurial elite; rural women in homespun and affluent Pittsburgh ladies in imported fashions. When the book begins, families are living in fear of Indian attacks; as it ends, the word \u201cshawling\u201d has come into use as the polite term for pregnancy, referring to women\u2019s attempt to hide their condition with cleverly draped shawls. The menacing frontier has given way to American-style gentility.An introduction by Jack D. Warren, University of Virginia, sets the scene with a discussion of the early peopling of the region and places the book within the context of women\u2019s studies.
School Figures
Format: Paperback
Pages: 128
ISBN: 9780822955177
Pub Date: 22 Nov 1994
Description:
In choosing Cathy Song’s first book for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Richard Hugo said that her poems are “bouquets to those moments in life that seemed minor but in retrospect count the most.”In this, Song’s third book, the poems are like the school figures an ice skater etches onto the ice - the pen moving silently and deliberately across a white expanse of paper and experience, bringing maximum pressure to bear upon the blade of language to unlock “the invisible fire beneath the ice.”
Late Empire
Format: Paperback
Pages: 88
ISBN: 9780822955306
Pub Date: 25 Oct 1994
Description:
Late Empire, David Wojahn’s most wide-ranging collection of poetry, affirms his status as one of the most compelling and original voices of his generation. In these poems, private history and public history mingle and merge in a way that is by turns deeply personal and elegiac. Centered around tow masterful elegies for the writers parents, the poems also treat an array of subjects familiar to us from news events but rarely examined by contemporary poetry.
Weather Central
Format: Paperback
Pages: 104
ISBN: 9780822955276
Pub Date: 27 Sep 1994
Description:
Ted Kooser’s third book in the Pitt Poetry Series is a selection of poems published in literary journals over a ten year period by a writer whose work has been praised for its clarity and accessiblity, its mastery of figurative language, and its warmth and charm.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9780822955467
Pub Date: 24 Aug 1994
Description:
During a field trip in Detroit on a summer day in 1989, a group of African American fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-graders talked, laughed, and ate snacks as they walked. Later, in the teacher\u2019s lounge, Jeanetta, an African American teacher chided the teachers, black and white, for not correcting poor black students for \u201ceating on the street,\u201d something she saw as stereotypical behavior that stigmatized students.These thirty children from Detroit\u2019s Cass Corridor neighborhood were enrolled in the Dewey Center Community Writing Project.
Taught by seven teachers from the University of Michigan and the Detroit public schools, the program guided students to explore, to interpret, and to write about their community.According to David Schaafsma, one of the teachers, the \u201ceating on the street\u201d controversy is emblematic of how cultural values and cultural differences affect education in American schools today. From this incident Schaafsma has written a powerful and compelling book about the struggle of teaching literacy in a racially divided society and the importance of story and storytelling in the educational process.At the core of this book is the idea of storytelling as an interactive experience for both the teller and listener. Schaafsma begins by telling his own version of the \u201ceating on the street\u201d conflict. He describes the history of the writing program and offers rich samples of the students\u2019 writing about their lives in a troubled neighborhood. After the summer program, Schaafsma interviewed all the teachers about their own version of events, their personal histories, and their work as educators. Eating on the Street presents all of these layered stories - by Schaafsma, his collegues, and the students - to illustrate how talking across multiple perspectives can enrich the learning process and the community-building process outside the classroom as well.These accounts have strong implications for multicultural education today. They will interest teachers, educational experts, administrators, and researchers. Uniting theory and practice, Eating on the Street is on the cutting edge of pioneering work in educational research.
Crisis In Bethlehem
Format: Paperback
Pages: 248
ISBN: 9780822958116
Pub Date: 16 Aug 1994
Description:
Crisis in Bethlehem: Big Steel’s Struggle to Survive is Pulitzer Prize winner Strohmeyer’s account of the collapse of Bethlehem Steel. As editor of the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Globe-Times from 1956 to 1984, Strohmeyer followed the steel industry from the height of its power through its decline. He evaluates the self-indulgence of both the unions and industry management and movingly describes the human agony caused by the failure of steel.
His account is reinforced by over one hundred interviews with steelworkers, union leaders, steel executives, and industry analysts. First issued in 1986, the book is more significant than ever. In this edition, Strohmeyer includes an update on steel today.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9780822955344
Pub Date: 28 Jul 1994
Description:
Like her popular Appalachian Spring, Marcia Bonta's new book offers a day-by-day account of the changing world of nature in the mountains of central Pennsylvania. This time she chronicles the beauties of the autumn months as she walks the familiar roads and trails of her 500-acre mountain-top farm, noting the minute transformations of the season as well as the more dramatic ones. But her quiet sojourn in the natural world is shattered by the intrusion of a lumberman who insists upon clear-cutting a neighboring property.
The massive bulldozers and skidders crush every tree and shrub, weed, and wildflower, leaving only rubble in their wake. The Bontas become involved in a lawsuit challenging this violation of the land they love and seeking to protect their own property from the effects of the logging. "Autumn is a bittersweet time," Bonta writes, "a season of good-byes, when, after the flaming leaves fall and start the inevitable process of decay, we are left with only the bare bones of nature." Fleeing from the whine of chain saws and the crash of falling trees, she roams the mountain-top, watching wild turkeys forage in the field, flocks of migrating birds feast on wild grapes, does and bucks eye each other in their mating ritual. But she can never completely evade the insistent question: What is the relationship between humans and nature? Does ownership give one the right to do as one pleases with the land and all the flora and fauna living on it? Does the natural world exists solely to satisfy mankind’s desire for profit? The answer is not simple; it cannot be drawn in winter’s black and white. But the issues must be of concern to every thoughtful person. Marcia Bonta’s Appalachian Autumn offers a new voice in the ongoing debate.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 432
ISBN: 9780822955191
Pub Date: 24 May 1994
Description:
Savoie considers the war of reform waged by the leaders of these major industrial countries. Reagan declared that he had come to Washington to \u201cdrain the swamp\u201d of bureaucracy, and set up the Grace Commission to investigate the operation of the U.S.
government. Thatcher and Mulroney were equally committed to reform and initiated wide-ranging changes. By the end of the 1990s, the changes were dramatic. Many governments operations had been privatized in all three countries, and new management techniques had been introduced. In Great Britain, one observer judged that the changes were historically as important as the collapse of Keynesian economics. Is government now better in these countries, and was political leadership right in focusing on management of the bureaucracy as the villain? Savoie suggests that the reforms overlooked problems now urgently requiring attention and, at the same time, attempted to address non-existent problems. He combines theory and research based on sixty-two interviews, nearly all with members of the executive branch of the governments of Britain, Canada and the United States.
