Books

Steven Reed takes on the task of demystifying Japanese culture and behavior. Through examples that are familiar to an American audience and his own personal encounters, he argues that the apparent oddity of Japanese behavior flows quite naturally from certain objective conditions that are different from those in the United States. Two aspects of the Japanese economy have particularly baffled Americans: that Japanese workers have “permanent employment” and that the Japanese government cooperates with big business. Reed explains these phenomena in common sense terms. He shows how they developed historically, why they continue, and why they helped produce economic growth. He concludes that these practices are in fact, not very different from the United States.

The first in a trilogy of books by one of the leading figures in American dance, Dance and the Specific Image includes more than 100 improvisational structures that Daniel Nagrin created with his company, the Workgroup, and taught in dance classes and workshops throughout the United States. Robby Barnett of the Pilobolus Dance Theater called the book “a vivid and fascinating document of his thinking—more movement and performance and, of course, on his own extraordinary life in dance.”

Winner of the 1992 Associated Writing Programs’ Award Series in Poetry

A book of poems about “children” in the widest sense—from children of the Nazi-torn Warsaw ghettos to the American poor, as well as poems of domesticity, love and daily life.

Savoie examines the war of bureaucratic reform waged by the leaders of theree major industrial countries. Reagan, 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, and new management techniques had been introduced. 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.

A Meditation on Fall’s Fiery Beauty in the Appalachian Mountains

Crisis in Bethlehem provides an insider’s look at Bethlehem Steel’s bonanza years, its collapse, how it coped (and did not cope) with crisis, and the human costs involved.

Inspired by an incident during a field trip in 1989, David Schaafsma has written a powerful and compelling book about the struggle of teaching literacy in a racially divided society and the importance of stories and storytelling in the educational process.

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.

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.

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.”

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. Keeping House: Women’s 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.

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.

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.

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.