University of Pittsburgh Press
The University of Pittsburgh Press is a publisher with distinguished lists in a wide range of scholarly and cultural fields. They publish books for general readers, scholars, and students. The Press focuses on selected academic areas: Latin American studies, Russian and East European studies, Central Asian studies, composition and literacy studies, environmental studies, urban studies, the history of architecture and the built environment, and the history and philosophy of science, technology, and medicine. Their books about Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania include history, art, architecture, photography, biography, fiction, and guidebooks.
Their renowned Pitt Poetry Series represents many of the finest poets active today, as reflected in the many prestigious awards their work has garnered over the past four decades. In addition, the Press is home to the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and, in rotation with other university presses, the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. They sponsor the prestigious Drue Heinz Literature Prize, which recognises the finest collective works of short fiction available in an international competition.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 432
ISBN: 9780822955191
Pub Date: 24 May 1994
Description:
Savoie considers the war of reform waged by the leaders of these major industrial countries. Reagan declared that he had come to Washington to \u201cdrain the swamp\u201d of bureaucracy, and set up the Grace Commission to investigate the operation of the U.S.
government. 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 in all three countries, and new management techniques had been introduced. In Great Britain, one observer judged that the changes were historically as important as the collapse of Keynesian economics. Is government now better in these countries, and was political leadership right in focusing on management of the bureaucracy as the villain? 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.
Children Of Paradise
Format: Paperback
Pages: 80
ISBN: 9780822955023
Pub Date: 19 Apr 1994
Description:
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.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 160
ISBN: 9780822955160
Pub Date: 08 Feb 1994
Description:
“A great poem of this end of our century. It is masterfully structured in recurring themes and voices which build on and off each other. Gardinier is above all a poet whose language and images are completely integrated so that in Keats's words, every rift is laden with ore.
I found this a thrilling poem to read.”--Adrienne Rich
Dance and the Specific Image
Improvisation
Format: Paperback
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9780822955207
Pub Date: 15 Jan 1994
Description:
After an extraordinary career in dance - as a performer, choreographer, and teacher - Daniel Nagrin has now written an extraordinary book. In it he explores the roots of his aesthetic philosophy, influenced by Stanislavski, Helen Tamiris, Joseph Chaikin and the Open Theatre, and his work on and off Broadway as an actor and dancer.Dance and the Specific Image includes over one hundred improvisational structures that Nagrin created with his new company, the Workgroup, and has taught in dance classes and workshops all over the United States.
Designed primarily for dancers, many can be adapted for actors and even musicians.In the 1960s, at a time when many modern dancers were working with movement as abstraction, Nagrin turned instead toward movement as metaphor. His passionate belief that dance must speak of people led him to found the Workgroup, a small company of dancers who, in the early 1970s, devoted themselves to the practice and performance of improvisation.Nagrin invites the reader into the mind of a dancer totally absorbed in his art, one who writes with wisdom and authority about what it means to be an artist.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9780822955108
Pub Date: 15 Oct 1993
Description:
Common misconceptions about Japan begin with the notion that it is a \u201csmall\u201d country (it's actually lager than Great Britain, Germany or Italy) and end with pronouncements that the Japanese think differently and have different values-they do things differently because that's the way they are. 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 with the Japanese, 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.
Mystical allegations about national character are less useful for understanding a foreign culture than a close look at specific situations and conditions. Two aspects of the Japanese economy have particularly baffled Americans: that Japanese workers have \u201cpermanent employment\u201d 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 not as different from what happens in the United States as they may appear.
American Mosaic
The Immigrant Experience in the Words of Those Who Lived It
Format: Paperback
Pages: 480
ISBN: 9780822954880
Pub Date: 07 Oct 1993
Description:
This extraordinary work of oral history captures the immense drama and full dimensions of the American immigrant experience. The men and women who tell their stories include such famous names as Alistair Cooke, W. Michael Blumenthal, Edward Teller, and Lynn Redgrave.
But they share these pages with 136 other people whose stories are equally compelling: a Jewish former sweatshop worker and union organizer, a Scandanavian homesteader, a Polish coal miner, an anti-Nazi refugee, a Japanese war bride, a Mexican migrant worker, a Cuban exile, a South African interracial couple, a Soviet dissident, and many more. They reveal the mingled joy and pain, hardship and triumph that were and are part of the glowing dream and fearful gamble of a new life in a new land. They offer unique understanding not only of the makeup but of the meaning of America.
Careers in City Politics
The Case for Urban Democracy
Format: Paperback
Pages: 254
ISBN: 9780822985501
Pub Date: 15 Jun 1993
Description:
Careers in City Politics provides an in-depth view of the vital aspects of local politics-access to political office, individual office holder's accountability to the public, the performance of councils as collective political bodies, and the often high turnover of personnel.Timothy Bledsoe bases his findings on the political careers of more than eight-hundred city council members representing cities with large and medium populations. Tracing how some officials' careers unfolded over five years, Bledsoe studies their reasons for seeking office and examines how successful they were in adapting to their jobs.
He evaluates office-holders whose council careers were cut short and those whose lengthy service qualified them as \u201ccareerists,\u201d paying special attention to first-term officials and to those who used their seats as stepping-stones to higher political offices. In this first-of-its-kind study, Bledsoe offers specific recommendations for restoring some of the lost vigor to local politics.
Flying Garcias, The
Format: Paperback
Pages: 88
ISBN: 9780822954996
Pub Date: 15 Jun 1993
Description:
\u201cI am reminded of the Argentinean writers Julio Cort\u00e1zar and Jorge Luis Borges, but with sunglasses and in California. The Flying Garcias is a sure voice and a fine book.\u201d—Alberto R\u00edos
Format: Paperback
Pages: 384
ISBN: 9780822954965
Pub Date: 15 Jan 1993
Description:
Contains fourteen essays that examine, through a public policy focus, the 1978 civil service reform and its aftermath. The essays view policy design, implementation, and evaluation, as well as the overall politics of administration and institutional change. An indispensible tool for students of public administration, bureaucratic politics, and personnel policy.
Contributors: Carolyn Ban; John Halligan; Kirke Harper; Mark Huddleston; J. Edward Kellough; Larry M. Lane; Chester A. Newland; James L. Perry; Beryl A. Radin; Robert Vaughn; and the editors.
Fragments of Rationality
Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition
Format: Paperback
Pages: 296
ISBN: 9780822954927
Pub Date: 22 Dec 1992
Description:
In an insightful assessment of the study and teaching of writing against the larger theoretical, political, and technological upheavals of the past thirty years, Fragments of Rationality questions why composition studies has been less affected by postmodern theory than other humanities and social science disciplines.
Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness
Format: Paperback
Pages: 304
ISBN: 9780822954859
Pub Date: 18 Dec 1992
Description:
This collection of essays traces the attempts of one writing teacher to understand theoretically - and to respond pedagogically - to what happens when students from diverse backgrounds learn to use language in college.Bizzell begins from the assumption that democratic education requires us to attempt to educate all students, including those whose social or ethnic backgrounds may have offered them little experience with academic discourse. Over the ten-year period chronicled in these essays, she has seen herself primarily as an advocate for such students, sometimes called “basic writers.
”Bizzell’s views on education for “critical consciousness,” widely discussed in the writing field, are represented in most of the essays in this volume. But in the last few chapters, and in the intellectual autobiography written as the introduction to the volume, she calls her previous work into question on the grounds that her self-appointment as an advocate for basic writers may have been presumptous, and her hopes for the politically liberating effects of academic discourse misplaced. She concludes by calling for a theory of discourse that acknowledges the need to argue for values and pedagogy that can assist these arguements to proceed more inclusively than ever before.The essays in this volume constitute the main body of work in which Bizzell developed her influential and often cited ideas. Organized chronologically, they present a picture of how she has grappled with major issues in composition studies over the past decade. In the process, she sketches a trajectory for the development of composition studies as an academic discipline.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 80
ISBN: 9780822954828
Pub Date: 19 Nov 1992
Description:
Winner of the 1991 Associated Writing Programs' Award Series in Poetry
Sleeping Preacher
Format: Paperback
Pages: 80
ISBN: 9780822954804
Pub Date: 19 Nov 1992
Description:
Winner of the 1991 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.The poems in this book deal with life in a Pennsylvania Mennonite community and the tensions and conflicts that exist for the speaker as she tries to be true to two worlds, the other being New York City.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 386
ISBN: 9780822985457
Pub Date: 15 Nov 1992
Description:
Interest and Institutions is a collection of essays written by distinguished political scientist Robert Salsibury, a leading analyst of interest group politics. He offers his theories on the workings and influence of groups, organizations, and individuals in many different areas of American politics.
Moral Dimensions of Public Policy Choice, The
Beyond the Market Paradigm
Format: Paperback
Pages: 552
ISBN: 9780822954637
Pub Date: 30 Oct 1992
Description:
Combining philosophy with practical politics, an expanding area of policy studies applies moral precepts, critical principles, and conventional values to collective decisions. This evolving new approach to policy analysis asserts that the same variety of ethical principles available to the individual are also available to make collective decisions in the public interest and should be used.Although policy analysis has long been dominated by assumptions originally developed for the examination of markets, such as efficiency, these essays by leading scholars - the best work done in the field over the past three decades - explore alternatives to the \u201cmarket paradigm\u201d and show how moral discrimination and choice can extend beyond the individual to encompass public decisions.
Chapters by John Martin Gillroy and Maurice Wade review the political philosophies of Immanuel Kant and David Hume as backgrounds for the development of modern concepts of public policy choice. They present this anthology as a first step in codifying options, arguments, and methods within this important developing area of policy studies.
History and Context in Comparative Public Policy
Format: Paperback
Pages: 376
ISBN: 9780822985372
Pub Date: 15 Aug 1992
Description:
Douglas E. Ashford joins a growing number of scholars who have questioned the behavioralist assumptions of much policy science. The essays in this volume show why policy analysis cannot be confined to prevailing methods of social science.
Policy-making behavior involves historical, contextual, and philosophical factors that also raise critical questions about the concepts and theory of the discipline. Ashford asks difficult questions about the contextual, conjunctural, and unintentional circumstances that affect actual decision-making. His bridging essays summarize opposing viewpoints and conflicting interpretations to help form a new agenda for comparative policy analysis.
