Books

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.

The Story of Louise McNeill’s Growing Years on Her Family Farm, Told through the Circadian Rhythms of Rural Life

Thomas Remington views the methods used by the Communist Party in official communications to Soviet society during the 1970s and 1980s.

Now back in print, this heralded second collection by the award-winning poet centers around the Greek myth of Niobe and the theme of endurance.

Jeffrey E. Cohen presents a detailed, quantitative study of the characteristics of presidential cabinets from the days of George Washington through the first Reagan administration.

How close to reality was the official U.S. image of Libya through the Nixon-Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations? ElWahrfally concludes that it was very far from accurate. Using personal interviews as well as scholarly research, ElWarfally demonstrates that U.S. relations with Libya, regardless of rhetoric, have been primarily determined by whether or not Libya serves U.S. interests in the region: maintaining access to Middle Eastern oil, protecting Israel, and limiting Soviet expansionism.

This classic book is a practical and philosophical exploration of dance improvisation, providing hundreds of ideas.

One of the major voices in Latin American poetry confronts the political realities of contemporary Central America. The poems are richly human documents rooted in Alegria’s knowledge of and love for her subjects.

“The work would be of great value to philosophers engaged in the conceptual analysis of coercion, to political scientists studying the state or other coercive institutions, and to advanced readers interested in the field of peace research.”—Choice

The speaker in Irene McKinney’s poems is most often alone, sitting at the side of a stream, or standing at her own chosen gravesite in the Appalachian mountains, and the meditations spoken out of this essential solitude are powerfully clear, witty, and wide-ranging in content and tone. The center sequence of poems in the Emily Dickinson persona explores and magnifies that great and enigmatic figure. The poems are firmly grounded in concern for the ways in which the elemental powers are at work in the earth and in us: on the surface of our lives, and deeper in the underworld of the coalmines. In McKinney’s poems, the human world is never seen as separate from the natural one.

During the 1970s, Canada, Great Britain, and the United States witnessed unprecedented inflation, unemployment, and sluggish growth. This book examines government changes in economic policymaking and the public’s response to such changes, and sheds light on the political economy of three of the world’s oldest democracies.

The variety of subjects in Green Age is characteristic of Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s writing: from the opening poem, “Fifty,” funny, courageous, and defiant, to a set of birthday poems for a grown daughter; from emulations of the Persian mystic Rumi, to the provactive “Meditation in Seven Days,” whose central assumption is that we may find in the Bible traces of a Canaanite goddess whose worship was forbidden with the advent of patriarchal monotheism.

This definitive biography of Ida Tarbell, one of America’s great journalists, is highly readably and widely acclaimed.