Books

Chuck Noll led the Pittsburgh Steelers to an unprecedented four Super Bowl victories and built the team into one of the greatest football dynasties in history. Chuck Noll: His Life’s Work presents the first full biography of the legendary Steelers coach. It paints an intimate portrait that traces his journey from a childhood in Depression-era Cleveland, where he first played football in a fully integrated neighborhood league, through his serious pursuit of the sport in high school, college, and then professionally for the Browns, before Noll discovered his true calling as a coach.

When Chuck Noll arrived in Pittsburgh, the city was in deep crisis, facing the decline of its lifeblood industry. Added to that, the Steelers had been the worst team in professional football for nearly four decades. Noll quickly remolded the team into the most accomplished in the history of the NFL, and through this Pittsburghers came to believe that winning and recovery were possible – for their city as for their team.

Michael MacCambridge reveals the family ties that built Noll’s character, his struggles with epilepsy and Alzheimer’s, the love story that shaped his life, as well as his unique skill as a coach. By understanding the man himself, we can at last clearly see Noll’s profound influence on the city, players, coaches, and game he loved.

Talking Pillow celebrates love as amazement, sustenance, and the progenitor of scarce-believable loss. The book centers around the sudden death of the author’s long-time partner and travels outward to events in the world at large. Imagining themselves into multiple times, places, and lives, the poems comically explore the possibilities of attachment between people and the absurdity of death’s sudden intrusion. Antic and often funny, these poems converse with all that we care about, fear, and fail to understand.

Winner of the 2016 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry

Lauren Clark’s poems move lucidly, depicting beautiful struggles of distrust,dream,grief,and intimacy. They show such conflicts through entrancing narrative drive and song-like abandon. In their unpredictable, unforgettable language, they make pain a tonic for pleasure, sorrow ground for revelation. This is a book that is celebratory, gentle, and queer.

A reverent jag of irreverence, tilting forward to arresting moments of beauty, astonishment, confusion, and grief, the poems in David Daniel’s Ornaments find their myths in history and pop culture; they take their truths, but just as much their doubts, from the fallibility of what we remember and the desperation with which we struggle to assemble it. Surreal, lyrical, madcap, they bring a faith, above all, in poetry. Which means in people and their bewildered hearts.

In Darwin’s Mother, curious beasts are excavated in archeological digs, Charles Darwin’s daughter describes the challenges of breeding pigeons, and a forest of trees shift and sigh in their sleep. With a keen sense of irony that rejects an anthropocentric worldview and an imagination both philosophical and playful, the poems in this collection are marked by a tireless curiosity about the intricate workings of life, consciousness, and humanity’s place in the universe.

WINNER OF THE 2016 DRUE HEINZ LITERATURE PRIZE Winner of the 2017 California Book Awards, first fiction category

Melissa Yancy’s personal experience in the milieus of hospitals, medicine, and family services infuse her narratives with a rare texture and gravity. Keenly observant, offering both sharp humor and humanity, these stories explore the ties that bind—both genetic and otherwise—and the fine line between the mundane and the maudlin. Whether the men or women that populate these pages are contending with illness, death, or parenthood, the real focus is on time and our inability to slow its progression, reminding us to revel in those moments we can control.

Books Are Weapons shows how the independent press, rooted in the long Polish tradition of well-organized resistance to foreign occupation, reshaped this tradition to embrace non-violent civil resistance while creating a network which evolved from a small group of dissidents into a broad opposition movement with cross-national ties and millions of sympathizers. It was the galvanizing force in the resistance to communism and the rebuilding of Poland’s democratic society in the 1980s.

Winner of the 2016 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

The poems in Let’s All Die Happy explore apostasy, concerned with what happens after the beliefs and institutions which promised fulfillment leave us empty instead. Darkly humorous, the collection examines a patriarchal culture in which women are defined through their relationship to others.

Polish journalist Pawel Pieniazek was among the first journalists to enter the war-torn region of eastern Ukraine and spent over two years there. Greetings from Novorossiya is his vivid firsthand account of the conflict. His fluency in both Ukrainian and Russian granted him access and the ability to move among all sides in the conflict. He was the first reporter to reach the scene when Russian troops in Ukraine accidentally shot down a civilian airliner, killing all 298 people aboard. With powerful color photos, telling interviews from the local population, and brilliant reportage, Pieniazek’s account documents these dramatic events as they transpired. Originally published in Polish, this unique view of history in the making brings to life the tragedy of Ukraine for a Western audience.

The Standard Oil Company emerged out of obscurity in the 1860s to capture 90 percent of the petroleum refining industry in the United States during the Gilded Age. Economic success masked the dark side of efficiency as Standard Oil dumped oil waste into public waterways, filled the urban atmosphere with acrid smoke, and created a consumer safety crisis by selling kerosene below Congressional standards. Organized around the four classical elements at the core of Standard Oil’s success (earth, air, fire, and water), Refining Nature provides an ecological context for the rise of one of the most important corporations in American history.

A journalist, diplomat, and writer, William Christian Bullitt was a member of the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference (1919), the first Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1933-1936) and France (1936-1940), and the Special Representative of the President of the United States in the Middle East (1940). He played a huge role in the establishment of US-USSR relations on the eve of World War II. Based on Bullitt’s unpublished papers and diplomatic documents from the Russian archives, this new biography presents Bullitt as a truly cosmopolitan American, one of the first politicians of the global era.

Winner of the 2019 CCCC Outstanding Book Award.

Lorimer Leonard shows how multilingual migrant women both succeed and struggle in their writing contexts. Based on a qualitative study of everyday multilingual writers in the United States, she shows how migrants’ literacies are revalued because they move with writers among their different languages and around the world. The book details the complicated reality of multilingual literacy, which is lived at the nexus of prejudice, prestige, and power.

How did the brewing of beer become a scientific process? James Sumner explores this question by charting the theory and practice of the trade in Britain and Ireland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This is a collection of conversations with more than thirty Latina/o authors of literature for young people. Aldama provides an introduction and serves as the interviewer for each author. The conversations revolve around the idea of Latina/o identity and what that means for authors of books for children and young adults. They also talk extensively about their experiences within the publishing industry and about their audiences. There is not a lot of scholarship in the volume, but it allows Latina/o writers of children’s and young adult literature to speak for themselves.

An innovative and original socio-cultural study of the history of electricity during the late Victorian and Edward periods.