Books

Examines a half-century epoch when planners, public officials, and civic leaders engaged in a dialogue about the meaning of planning and its application for improving life in Pittsburgh. Defines Pittsburgh’s key role in the national urban planning movement.

Winner of the 2006 Drue Heinz Literature Prize.

The stories explore America’s obsession with news and entertainment culture. In the title story, a theme park has attractions where visitors relive actual news events such as “OJ’s Bronco: The Ride”, and “Seige at Waco”.

Winner of the 2005 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.

Winner of the 2008 Whiting Writer’s Award.

Winner of the 2007 Poetry Book of the Year Award from ForeWord Magazine.

The poems are heartrending and incisive. Through the poet’s eloquent craft, painful histories and images (such as the Holocaust) are beautifully and luminously preserved.

Winner of the 2005 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry.

Winner of the 2009 Chad Walsh Prize

Hodgen’s third book of poetry. The poems roam through history, religion, man-made disasters, baseball, pop culture, and Wal-Marts, with remarkable completeness, maturity, and dexterity.

Examines Alberto Fujimori’s corrupt presidency, and the thin line between democracy and dictatorship, demonstrating how closely they can resemble one another. Analyzes how public institutions can empower dictators and also bring them down.

Robin Becker explores the conditions under which we experience and resist pleasure: in beauty salon, summer camp, beach, backyard or museum; New York, or New Mexico. These poems offer sharp pleasures as they argue, elegize, mourn, praise, and sing.

Examines American attitudes on issues of national and international security. Based on over 13,000 in-depth interviews conducted over a ten-year period. Provides surprising insights into public opinion on nuclear deterrence, terrorism, and other security issues.

Mayan rebels killed an American plantation manager in 1875, but no one has ever unravelled why this murder took place. Paul Sullivan’s fascinating and skillful telling of this story reads like a mystery novel.

The book examines the complex and sophisticated efforts of American Indian writers and orators to constructively engage an often hostile and resistant white audience through language and other symbol systems.

A compelling account of the life of Pennsylvanian writer Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958). Through the examination of the tension between her seemingly contradictory domestic and professional identities, Jan Cohn illuminates precisely why Rinehart’s accomplishments are so remarkable.

First published in 1989, this book presents and analyzes the dramatic changes in philosophical conceptions of scientific explanation after the landmark 1948 essayStudies in the Logic of Explanation by Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim.

Examines the dramatic changes within Mexican society, politics, and journalism that transformed an authoritarian media institution into many conflicting styles of journalism with very different implications for deepening democracy in the country.

The book assesses how Pittsburgh deindustrialization over the past decades has posed both opportunities and challenges for the city and surrounding tri-state area.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the crisis of relations between state and society in five Andean countries from the 1980s to the present.

Distinguished scholars detail the extent to which the US Congress has influenced democractic legislatures around the world, and the myriad factors involved in the diffusion of influence. Includes the governments of Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, the European Parliament, plus new democracies in Latin America and Eastern Europe.