Books

Lee McCardell’s strongly-reviewed biography of the General who disastrously led British forces—including a young George Washington—into battle against the French near the site of present day Pittsburgh.

An edited collection of seminal literature on political leadership. Essays range from ancient Greece to the twentieth century, covering pundits that include Plato, Machiavelli, and Freud.

With The Imaginary Lover, Alicia Ostriker takes her place among the most striking and original poets whose work is informed by feminist consciousness. Her characterization of the best poetry by women, in the New York Times Book Review, aptly describes this book: “intimate rather than remote, passionate rather than distant, defying divisions between emotion and intellect, private and public, life and art, writer and reader.” To read her poems is to “discover not only more of what it means to be a woman but more of what it means to be human.”

Cold Comfort is a book of poems written out of deep affection and concern for the world in a dangerous time. An urbane stylist, Anderson characteristically focuses on rural and small-town America, where the events of personal history intersect those of the larger world.

The Essential Etheridge Knight is a selection of the best work by one of the country’s most prominent and liveliest poets. It brings together poems from Knight’s previously published books and a section of new poems.

Looking back through the prism of the severe economic crisis for filmmaking in the 1980s, this book trace the development of this industry in Brazil, focusing specifically on its relationship to the state.

Night Watch on the Chesapeake is Peter Meinke’s third collection of poetry. The poems traverse a wide landscape of topics from playing baseball, the death of a friend, divorce, and even poetry itself.

Dance Improvisations is a book for teachers of dance and acting, choreographers, directors, and dance therapists. Methodical, yet inventive, this book offers highly structured techniques for developing dancers’ ability to work together.

An Indispensable Field Guide for Professional and Amateur Naturalists With a newly redesigned cover. This extensive, portable guidebook contains behavior and ecological characteristics, Pennsylvania and North American range maps, and photographs of the sixty-three different species of wild mammals that populate Pennsylvania’s hills and valleys.

Policy Analysis by Design examines the approaches to public policy taken by those who try to teach it, write about it, and influence it through major analysis. Bobrow and Dryzek systematically compare the five major contending analytical frames of reference: welfare economics, public choice, social structure, information processing, and political philosophy. The workings of each frame are illustrated by means of a common, if imaginary, policy case – air pollution in the hypothetical Smoke Valley.

The first biography of David L. Lawrence, the best of the city bosses, who became mayor of Pittsburgh, modern municipal manager, governor of Pennsylvania, and a power in national politics.

This book chronicles the formation and history of All American Aviation, an early pioneer of commercial avaition, and air mail carrier.

A veteran reporter on American labor, John P. Hoerr analyzes the spectacular and tragic collapse of the steel industry in the 1980s. And the Wolf Finally Came demonstrates how an obsolete and adversarial relationship between management and labor made it impossible for the industry to adapt to a rapidly changing global economy.

Using Ecuador as her case study, she shows how industrial growth has given birth to an exclusive, ingrown bourgeoisie that is highly dependent on the state and foreign capital and is increasingly alienated from the peasants and urban poor.

Pittsburgh author Marcia Davenport’s absorbing and complex chronicle of a family’s fortunes from the economic panic of 1873 through the dramatic rise of American industry and trade unionism, through waves of immigration, class conflict, natural disaster, World War I, to Pearl Harbor.