Books

This book seeks to bring together the disciplines of linguistics, rhetoric, and literary studies through the concept of symmetry (how words mirror thought, society, and our vision of the world).

Honorable Mention, 2009 MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Award

Examines the crucial postwar period in Slovakia, following Nazi occupation and ending with the Communist coup of February 1948. Centered on the major political role of the Catholic Church and its leaders, it offers a fascinating study of the interrelationship of Slovak Catholics, Democrats, and Communists. Felak views Communist policies toward Catholics and their strategies to court Catholic voters, and he chronicles the variety of political stances Catholics maintained during Slovakia’s political turmoil.

Rescher defines an apory as a group of individually plausible but collectively incompatible theses. Citing thinkers from the pre-Socratics through Spinoza, Hegel, and Nicolai Hartmann, he builds a framework for coping with the complexities of divergent theses, and shows in detail how aporetic analysis can be applied to a variety of fields including philosophy, mathematics, linguistics, logic, and intellectual history.

A study of the Great Purge in the setting of Leningrad Communist University, seen in the rhetoric of the accused and their accusors.

Winner of the 2008 Donald Hall Prize in PoetrySelected by Lynn Emanuel

Winner of the 2010 Kate Tufts Discovery Award

The elegies in Temper interrogate the way grief leaves us confrontational, in a state of fracture.

The essays in this collection chronicle the responses of the Soviet state and society to a variety of disabled groups and disabilities.

Toker examines Pittsburgh in its historical context, in its regional setting, and from the street level (leading the reader on a personal tour through every neighborhood). Based on his 1986 classic, Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait, but with a completely revised text and lavishly illustrated with all new photos and maps, Pittsburgh: A New Portrait reveals the true colors of a great American city.

Shadow Ball gathers together in one collection the best of Charles Harper Webb’s prize-winning books, as well as a selection of his newest poems.

An original examination of legislative clashes over the singular issue of the glass house boys, who performed menial tasks, received low wages, and had little to say on their own behalf while toiling in glass bottle plants. Flannery reveals the many societal, economic, and political factors at work that allowed for the perpetuation of child labor in this industry and region.

Poems that explore the territory of advancing age—its tragicomedies, its passions, its engagement with the world.

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award

The first English-language account of the changing role of children in the Russian workforce, from the onset of industrialization until the Communist Revolution of 1917, and an examination of the laws that would establish children’s labor rights.

The first biography and study of the work of Belgian landscape architect Jean Canneel-Claes, a significant but somewhat overlooked figure in the history of European modernism. In tracing his contributions, Imbert restores Canneel as a major figure in the development of landscape architecture into a modern discipline.

Examines the negotiations over women’s rights and the politics of gender in Chile throughout the twentieth century. Centering her study on motherhood, Pieper Mooney explores dramatic changes in health policy, population paradigms, and understandings of human rights, and reveals that motherhood is hardly a private matter defined only by individual women or couples. Instead, it is intimately tied to public policies and political competitions on nation-state and international levels.

Bethlehem Steel presents an original and compelling history of a leading American company, examining the numerous factors contributing to the growth of this titan and those that eventually felled it—along with many of its competitors in the U.S. steel industry.

Nicholas Rescher outlines a general theory for the cost-effective use of intellectual resources, and discusses the requirements of cooperation, communication, cognitive importance, cognitive economy, and then applies his model to several case studies.