University of Akron Press Publications

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  Redefining Efficiency: Pollution Concerns, Regulatory Mechanis

  Hugh S. Gorman

  This book is a fascinating, well-researched examination of how the oil industry, government regulators, and the public as a whole have dealt with the pollution problems associated with the production of petroleum in the U.S. over the past one hundred years. Gorman's thoughtful analysis dispels the myth that the oil industry did nothing to abate its pollution prior to the enactment of tough federal pollution regulations in the 1970s, while providing insight into the complex web of technological, economic, and political factors that constrained these early, largely voluntary efforts. —Christine Rosen, University of California, Berkeley

  Gorman's work is the first to treat systematically a single industry's environmental endeavors and it will stand as a landmark in that respect. But it is not just an environmental history. By infusing business and technological concerns throughout the narrative, Professor Gorman offers a exceptionally well-rounded view of an industry. —Craig Colten, Louisiana State University

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  Superintending Democracy: The Courts and the Political Process

  Christopher P. Banks and John C. Green

  This timely book is a diverse collection of essays by nationally recognized scholars, politicians, and lawyers that challenges the popular myth that the U.S. Supreme Court is an apolitical institution. It analyzes the manner in which the U.S. Supreme Court superintends the electoral process through its judicial decision-making. As a provocative study of the intersection between law and politics, it considers whether the nation's highest court, as an inherently undemocratic and 'counter-majoritarian' political institution, should enter the so-called "political thicket" and decide legal disputes concerning political corruption, campaign finance, political parties, patronage, and redistricting.

  Because there are few books on the U.S. Supreme Court and its impact on American electoral politics, Superintending Democracy is a welcome addition to social science and legal scholarship. It is a book for political scientists, legal scholars, and students who are interested in learning about American politics, constitutional law, or the political nexus between law and courts.

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  Lake Erie Rehabilitated: Controlling Cultural Eutrophication, 1960s-1990s

  William McGucken

  During the 1960s, inland bodies of water in North America and Europe experienced a dangerous transformation. Nutrients were dumped into the lakes, causing chain reactions which severely impacted on lake environments. The excessive increase of nutrients into inland waters through human activity, known as cultural eutrophication, emerged as a dominant problem. Massive algae blooms drifted in overnourished lakes, depleting oxygen, damaging fish stocks, and transforming the water's ecosystem.

  In Lake Erie Rehabilitated, historian William McGucken presents a comprehensive account of the most notorious international incident of cultural eutrophication—Lake Erie. With the assistance of the International Joint Commission, Canada and the United States diagnosed phosphorus as the primary cause of the problem and, in a unique cooperative effort, reduced input to the lake from municipal and industrial wastewater plants and agricultural lands. Public pressure and government regulation encouraged the reluctant detergent industry to produce alternative detergents and, finally, reduced the input of phosphorus to targeted levels.

  Lake Erie is now rehabilitated, but its history over the last three decades demonstrates the importance of maintaining an environmental balance. Meticulously researched and documented, this book will appeal to environmentalists, historians, and readers who seek to understand the Great Lakes ecosystem, environmental issues, and environmental regulation.

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  Murder, Culture, and Injustice: Four Sensational Cases in American History

  Walter L. Hixson

  Walter Hixson's pithy narrative account of four sensational national murder cases - the Lizzie Borden, Lindbergh baby, Sam Sheppard, and O. J. Simpson trials offers interesting observations into the greater cultural and political forces that shaped their verdicts. His step-by-step analysis of the details of each case provides not only insight by skillful synthesis of the existing literature but also a solid overview of the events surrounding these four cases, each of which became a national obsession as well as a miscarriage of justice. Taking a fresh look at the criminal justice system and the role of the media in the larger American milieu, Hixson delves into sociocultural impacts of crime that are both thought-provoking and fascinating reading.

  "Murder, Culture, and Injustice is a fascinating book. Walter L. Hixson combines an engaging, fast-paced writing style with a thoughtful, well-informed analysis that debunks enduring myths about four of the most celebrated murder cases (and trials) in American history. At the same time, Hixson effectively uses these high-profile cases to explain how social and cultural tensions have sometimes distorted the operation of the legal system, resulting in grotesque miscarriages of justice. Simply put, Murder, Culture, and Injustice is a joy to read." -Jeffrey S. Adler, University of Florida

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  Mysteries of the Hopewell: Astronomers, Geometers, and Magicians of the Eastern Woodlands

  William F. Romain

  Buried beneath today's Midwestern towns, under several layers of earth and the accumulated debris of two thousand years, are the clues to an ancient mystery. A Native American people, now known as the Hopewell, lived and worked these lands, building earthworks which in some instances dwarf the ruins at Stonehenge. More significantly, these mammoth earthworks were built in different geometric shapes, using a standard unit of measure and aligned to the cycles of the sun and the moon.

  Using the foundation of existing scholarship, Mysteries of the Hopewell presents new discoveries showing the accomplishments of the Mound Builders in astronomy, geometry, measurement, and counting. William Romain then goes one step further to theorize why generations of people toiled to move millions of tons of earth to form these precise structures, joining the ranks of the Egyptians, Mayans, Greeks, Chinese, and other advanced ancient cultures.

  William Romain's Mysteries of the Hopewell will appeal to many readers, including anthropologists, mathematicians, and historians, but perhaps especially to readers curious about ancient cultures and seeking explanations for these magnificent earthen structures.

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  Pale Bird, Spouting Fire

  Susan Yuzna

  Susan Yuzna's new collection of poetry builds on the success of her 1995 Akron Poetry Prize winner, Her Slender Dress, which won the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. The new poems speak in a voice recognizably Yuzna's, though now deepened and darkened with a quickening twist of mordant humor. Feisty or contemplative, in Eden or on the mean streets, these poems look at the long tradition of women struggling towards fulfillment.

  Using figures mythical and real, from Venus to Billie Holiday, Yuzna explores the links that exist between the physical transformations unique to female experience and their spiritual and emotional epiphanies.

  Encompassing these themes is the paradox of poetry: though a small thing, a "pale bird," it is also a source of passion and power, "spouting fire," strong enough to lift us beyond the commonplace, to change daily experience into moments when we recognize the presence of the extraordinary.

  "Susan Yuzna's poems have attitude, they refuse to look away from the exigencies of contemporary womanhood: 'This is a mother speaking', she tells us, straight out, or 'I'm getting old and I'm going to play cards with Venus and cheat. Got a problem with that?' Her voice is honest, direct, passionate, forged by the need to break into utterance. Poems like 'Golden Gate,' 'The Telephonist,' and 'Her Name Was Becky' are among the finely wrought poems here, her delicate tracery of image joined to a fiery vision, like Blake's, of savage intensity." -Dorianne Laux

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  Rich in Good Works: Art Collector and Philnathropist - Mary M. Emery of Cincinnati

  Millard F. Rogers Jr.

  At the death of her husband in 1906, Mary Muhlenberg Emery (1844-1927) became one of the richest women in the United States. Recognizing her "vast responsibility," as she wrote in a letter to the American author, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, she embarked on a philanthropic program that endowed or initiated children's programs, hospitals and medical institutions, orphanages, colleges and universities, an art museum, a zoological park, various cultural agencies, and other causes that benefited humankind.

  Mary Emery's most costly benefactions were directed to the founding of Mariemont, Ohio, a planned community near Cincinnati, and to the formation of a major collection of paintings. Her paintings by such old masters as Titian, Mantegna, Van Dyck, Gainsborough, and Hals were bequeathed to the Cincinnati Art Museum. Although she was a member of Newport, Rhode Island, and Cincinnati society during the nineteenth century's "Gilded Age," she lived apart from the conspicuous consumption so characteristic of her times.

  This well-illustrated biography explores her gifts and life from its beginnings in New York City through family tragedies to the legacy she left behind.

  "Rogers has used an impressive array of primary sources, including Mary Emery's unpublished papers, records of the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the correspondence of Mary Emery's advisor, Charles Livingood." -M. Christine Anderson, Xavier University

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  Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens

  Ian Adams, Barney Taxel, and Steve Love

  Stan Hywet is Akron’s first and largest National Historic Landmark, and is also the nation’s 6th largest historic home open to the public. It is an accredited museum of the American Alliance of Museums, one of only 26 in Ohio and one of only 776 in all of the United States. The Estate includes five historic buildings and eight historic gardens on 70 acres. The collections and furnishings in the Manor House are all original.

  Built between 1912 and 1915, Stan Hywet Hall is one of the finest examples of the American Country Estate movement, which flourished during the Industrial Age. Unlike European country houses that were created by generations of title and wealth, the American Country Estates were built by the wealth of self-made industry giants. Vanderbilt’s Biltmore, Rockefeller’s Kykuit, and Hearst’s San Simeon, are well-known examples. Stan Hywet was built by rubber baron, F.A. Seiberling.

  This work capture the splendor of the estate and its prominent gardens through the photographs of Ian Adams and Barney Taxel.

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  When Giants Roamed the Sky: Karl Arnstein and the Rise of Airships from Zeppelin to Goodyear

  Dale Topping

  Karl Arnstein's life was defined by the world wars which shattered Europe. But for these cataclysmic events, his life's work might have been far different. From Zeppelin in Germany to Goodyear in Akron, Ohio, Arnstein participated in the design and development of more airships than any other engineer. He could have been a philosopher or mathematician, but a desire to be practical attracted Arnstein to civil engineering. This knowledge spared him from the horrors of trench warfare, and a favorable impression he made on airship pioneer Count Zeppelin unexpectedly took him from the front to an aircraft factory in Friedrichshafen, Germany. Here Arnstein adapted his analysis of utilitarian structures fixed firmly to the ground to examination of flying structures, the Zeppelins. And it is not just for his contributions to Zeppelin design that Arnstein should be remembered.

  His story is in many ways the story of airship building in the early decades of the twentieth century. And his legacy endures in the Goodyear blimps which are the tire company's corporate icons and symbols of Akron's important airship heritage. Appendices include a listing of Karl Arnstein's patents, a list of selected writings by Karl Arnstein, and statistics on Luftschiffbau-Zeppelin airships and U.S. Navy rigid airships.

  "The author combined the information gathered during the course of his own long conversations with Karl Arnstein with a deep knowledge of rigid airship history. The result is a study of key engineering career that will certainly be of interest to scholars of Lighter-Than-Air flight, and will also be of value to students of the broader history of technology, business, and government relations in the 20th century." -Thomas Crouch, Ph.D., Smithsonian Institution, National Air and Space Museum

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  A Childhood in the Milky Way: Becoming a Poet in Ohio

  David Brendan Hopes

  How does a young boy discover his vocation as a poet in what is seemingly the least poetical of environments, the industrial Midwest of the 1950s and 1960s? By turns comic and dramatic, at once down to earth and otherworldly in its homegrown mysticism, A Childhood in the Milky Way answers that question, lighting up a special boyhood in one small corner of the galaxy. Part memoir, part meditation on what it means to be a poet in America at the end of the millennium, this book follows the early life of David Brendan Hopes in Akron, Ohio, where the going was sometimes rough and the people rougher, though they could also be fanciful, naive, driven by inarticulate desire, and, on occasion, haunted by the voices of angels and bards. In his growing up, the author found in the mysteries of childhood a way to enter the mysteries of religious and artistic vision.

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  Life, Liberty, and Property: A Story of Conflict and a Measurement of Conflicting Rights

  Alfred W. Jones

  In the fall of 1938, Alfred Winslow Jones, a Columbia University graduate student, interviewed 1,705 Akron, Ohio, residents in order to gauge attitudes toward large corporations. Jones selected Akron because it was "crucial," a hotbed of labor unrest and conflict between large manufacturing firms and their employees, where the sit-down strike in particular had polarized the community. If rigid class lines existed anywhere, they ought to be evident in Akron. Jones discovered, however, that the polarization so evident in the workplace and in local politics had had only a minimal effect on underlying attitudes and values, even on controversial subjects such as the rights of corporations. One reviewer described his findings as "a most heartening testimonial to the vitality of our democracy."

  Life, Liberty, and Property reports the actual comments of a broad range of Akron interviewees. Their statements provide a compelling and often colorful commentary on life in a divided and anxious midwestern city. By 1938, the worst of the Depression was over, but jobs remained uncertain. The international turmoil that would lead to World War II was beginning to be a source of concern. Most of all, the appropriate roles for government and big business in a democratic society troubled Akron residents. Jones's interviews illuminate the whole range of public issues at a critical juncture in American history. Life, Liberty, and Propertyis an invaluable source on Akron, on Ohio, and on American society.

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  Never Be the Horse

  Beckian Fritz Goldberg

  Never Be the Horse depicts the world of a postmodern Dark Dorothy whose attempts to return home are foiled when she falls into the Garden of Eden, into the underworld with Walt Whitman, into mysterious versions of her own childhood. The poems evoke this nighttime within the self haunted by mythic and shadow-paradises--of home, homeland, the original garden--where "every story is made to hide / the others." Here, Adam slips on a piece of Eve's clothing, a child falls in love with the bomb, and a mourner watching the whores chased from the cemetery laments. It is also a world of erotic disguises. Still, it remains recognizably this world. The parent lies to the child about death, and the child lies to the parent about death. In the journey between those lies, as in the journey taken by the horse of the title, language becomes the place of refuge. It is there that "one world is always beginning." From "willingness . . . speaking its motherese," to the devil's "gossamer gibber," the voices in these poems discover that to be human is, as Heidegger said, "to be a conversation."

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  Notes for a Late-Blooming Martyr: Poems by Marlys West

  Martys West

  In Notes for a Late-Blooming Martyr, Marlys West takes a coolly amused look at what we create of ourselves: our habits of home and mind, the prosthetics and courtesies, the small timid gestures and screaming leaps that make up our lives and deaths. Influenced by such diverse things as summer vacations, the plight of Satan and the saints, and a love of American speech, these poems suggest a loose narrative within a stream of wry images and wayward mythologies. Father smokes, mother rolls her eyes, the devil goes for a swim: all in a world of odd rituals, dangerous waters, lucky charms, and the spasmodic braveries of the everyday.

  From the desertions of the past comes a recitation of longings gratified or unheard, an accompaniment to the martyrdom and beauty of each life. Tragedy never rises to the level of transcendence, but neither is it the only truth. West dismantles old answers (religion, love, family, the comfort and security of objects) and offers them again as skewed solutions, the wary possibilities of transformation, in a book that ends as we all do, with the ceremonies of dying and the frightened hope of another life.

  Marlys West's poems do jazz with our brains. What a refreshing wonder she is! We thank her for the stunning dazzle-dance of her lines and these spiky twists of wit. —Naomi Shihab Nye

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  Ohio Blue Tips: Poems by Jeanne E. Clark

  Jeanne E. Clark

  Jeanne E. Clark heeds Dickinson's advice to tell all the truth and tell it slant. Rather than settling for the preening gush or anecdotal flatness of much contemporary poetry, her work travels down roads named Bluelick and Slabtown to retrieve a rich sense of place and a sinewy American language. Like the best blues songs, these poems create an oblique music of leaps and gaps; they let reticence reverberate and sing.

  The world of Ohio Blue Tips is a place of Marlowe beds and Coniber traps, bluegills and yellow rutabaga, pronating arches and charcoal briquets. It is an interior furnished with Moo-Cow Creamers, eyelet tableskirts, and Mae West cats. Clark's implied narratives confront class and aspiration in the unfamed lives of Joe Silver, a retarded prisoner "whose eyes are the blue tips of kitchen matches," and Quinn Margaret who is "Backslidden and given over / To a reprobate mind."

  Though the poems have their own gritty freshness, the sensibility is kin, perhaps, to that of Robert Creeley, Forrest Gander, Lorine Neidecker, William Carlos Williams, and C. D. Wright. In this tradition, Jeanne E. Clark recreates incendiary moments that strike like "wood against wood, Ohio Blue Tips," and transform us forever. She "hears music, / Which is / Its own skin." —Alice Fulton

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  The Biggest City in America: A Fifties Boyhood in Ohio

  Richard B. Schwartz

  In a series of stories drawn from his own experience coming of age during the 1950s, Richard B. Schwartz revisits his boyhood in southern Ohio. His memories of adolescence bring back the birth of rock and roll, the rigors and absurdities of religion and parochial schools, trials of little league baseball, grueling summer construction work and caddying jobs, the thin pleasures of 3.2% beer, drag racing lore, and, of course, the youthful discovery of sex.

  By turns hilarious and poignant, satiric and nostalgic, the book focuses on a period and place through a perspective somehow both engaged and withdrawn—engaged through its feeling of innocent immediacy, and distanced because of the awareness developed in the intervening decades. If the memoir expresses a sense of loss at the passing of good times, it also exhibits a sense of relief at the end of those awkward years

  Richard B. Schwartz has written a book that will appeal to many readers, whatever their age, but perhaps especially to those who remember the fifties as they were and as they might have been, when we grew up yearning for slow dances and fast cars, and every little town seemed like the biggest city in America.

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  Unearthing the Land: The Story of Ohio's Scioto Marsh

  Thomas Rumer

  The Scioto Marsh in Hardin County, Ohio, was once an immense swamp, teeming with vegetation and wildlife. It was drained in the 1880s to grow vegetables, most notably onions. For decades, hundreds of workers crawled across the fields, hunched over half-mile rows of onions, potatoes, and other crops grown on the tabletop-flat fields of black muck in the 18,000-acre basin.

  A much-publicized labor strike erupted during the broiling, violent summer of 1934, breaking the monotony of field work for that season. But the marsh had already begun showing the signs of exploitation—the rich organic soil was evaporating in astounding, incalculable tonnage. Once as deep as a tall pioneer, the muck was now little more than a foot thick.

  Unearthing the Land is a century's view of former natural diversity altered by the "progress" of agriculture. Here, in typically American fashion, are the people who migrated to this place to work, many seeking a better life than offered by the Kentucky coal mines; here, too, are the few who prospered. And here, within the modern context of environmental concerns, is the story of nature's will to retain primal tendencies which still haunt today's fields of carrots and grain crops.

  Modern themes of national importance play throughout the story of the Scioto Marsh. From prehistory to the present, the marsh is a compelling backdrop for considering today's essential concerns about land use and environmental responsibility.

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  Simmer Dim

  William Greenway

  Simmer Dim is a book of roots and epiphanies, of travels that become an inward journey as the poet searches for origins familial and literary, finally discovering what Eliot found in his Four Quartets: "And the end of all our exploration / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time." Though the poems take us to many landscapes (in France, Greece, Italy, Ireland, England, Scotland, and along the swamps and shores of Florida and Louisiana) none is more important than Wales, with its coal pits and stony hills and resonant ghosts. William Greenway, during a year's stay there, meets his own history. Wales (the home of Dylan Thomas, whose influence made Greenway a poet, and the birthplace of his Methodist minister grandfather, whose coming to the America South led to Greenway's constricted upbringing as the son of a Baptist preacher) provokes a radical reconsideration of a life and love he thought he knew. It also reconfirms his hunger for language that will reveal the world and preserve it. In poems formal and free, Greenway speaks to us in a voice that has its own distinctive idiom, warm and wise and hard-won, showing us what he learned from his journeys: "who he was / and where he belonged."

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  The Sunday Game: At the Dawn of Professional Football

  Keith McClellan

  In the most complete and compelling account of the origins of professional football, The Sunday Game tells the stories of all the teams that played independent football in the small towns and industrial cities of the Midwest, from early in the twentieth century to the beginning of the National Football League shortly after the end of World War I. The foundations of what is now the most popular professional sport in America were laid by such teams as the Canton Bulldogs and the Massillon Tigers, the Columbus Panhandles and the Youngstown Patricians, teams born out of civic pride and the enthusiasm of the blue-collar crowds who found, in the rough pleasure of the football field, the gritty equivalent of their own lives, a game they could cheer on Sunday afternoons, their only day free from work.

  McClellan's team-by-team study of pre-NFL professional football-his tank-town chronicles, as it were-is the most detailed account to date of pro football's lively and fascinating early years. Focusing on the crucial period of 1915–1917, when independent semiprofessional football developed into a fully professional game, this book tells the story of the teams and players, seasons and games of an era when pro football was not a billion-dollar entertainment industry but an intimate part of community life in factory towns throughout the upper Midwest. This is the mother lode of trivia for diehard football fans, and a rich resource for serious students of the game. —Michael Oriard, author of Reading Football

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  The Thames Embankment: Environment, Technology, and Society in Victorian London

  Dale H. Porter

  The Thames Embankment is one of those books like Asa Briggs' Victorian Cities that provides a kind of imaginative archaeology, permitting modern students of Victorian literature, art, and culture to gain a sense of an age that simultaneously had so much and so little in common with our own. . . . [It] is a treasure trove for any one wanting to understand and experience more of Victorian England. —George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University

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  Wheels of Fortune: The Story of Rubber in Akron

  Steve Love and David Giffels

  Wheels of Fortune is a tale of two cities—both of them Akron. One city, built on rubber, turned itself into a model for Middle America industrial success. The other city has had to learn to live on in rubber's wake, to remake itself, to come to terms with its remade self. To tell this tale of two cities is to tell the tale of America's rubber industry. The stories interlock like tire and wheel. From its earliest days, Akron has been a city of multiple incarnations: canal boat stopover, farm machinery manufacturer, cereal maker. But for more than a century after Dr. Benjamin Franklin Goodrich came to town in 1870, Akron was the Rubber Capital of the World. Its people worked in the rubber shops of Goodrich, Goodyear, Firestone, General, Seiberling, Mohawk, and Sun. They lived in Goodyear Heights and Firestone Park, the neighborhoods fostered by their employers. Even the air they breathed was heavy with the odor of rubber. To some, it stank. To others, it smelled like money.

  By the 1980s, much of the rubber industry and, thus, Akron had disappeared. Not into the night. Not overnight. Everyone had seen it coming for years. Union and rubber companies management squared off against each other as if the city were a boxing ring. There were no winners. Akron was the loser. First, the plants closed, the production moving south. Then the company headquarters, with the exception of Goodyear, followed. The people rubber left behind discovered they had not only their memories but also the ability to remake Akron into a center for polymer knowledge, a remnant of rubber research and a bridge between the two cities. Wheels of Fortune is their story, these people who made more than rubber. They made lives—and a city.

  [Wheels of Fortune] is a narrative of daring and determination, greed and compassion, triumphs wrested from adversity, and generosity borne from injustices righted. In the course of this journey, you will see how Akron became what it undeniably still is today: a unique American city built with vision and grit and love, a monument to the resilience of the human spirit and its capacity to create, to explore, and to persevere.—Rita Dove, Foreword, Wheels of Fortune

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  Black Leaf: Poems by Barry Seiler

  Barry Seiler

  From the genuine horror of Sam Peckinpah to the tragic lyricism of Sam Cooke, Barry Seiler's Black Leaf explores Americana with a poetic that announces to the reader that the mantra of what we know ourselves to be is all there is. Seiler takes Auden's origin of poetry in language and makes the subject happen. Black Leaf is exquisite poetry of subtle and ironic commitment, steeped in a love and respect for language. —Afaa M. Weaver

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  Lichfield: The U. S. Army on Trial

  Jack Gieck

  Lichfield: The U.S. Army on Trial chronicles a series of courts-martial held at the end of World War II, precipitated by events at an infamous U.S. Army replacement depot near Lichfield, England, which the Army newspaper The Stars and Stripes characterized as "a concentration camp run by Americans for American soldiers." The book details the trials, with witnesses voluntarily returning to the stand to purge themselves of perjury, and with a conspiracy brewing to create a mistrial. In its vivid portrayal of these events, the book becomes a study of the moral obligation of military personnel in time of war, an examination of the Nürnberg defense, and an inquiry into a soldier's right to refuse an unlawful order.

  Gieck presents chilling testimony (including blatant perjury, some of it later recanted) and quotes transcripts of the proceedings sufficient to make one wonder if the term ""military justice"" might be an oxymoron. —Stone and Stone Second World War Books

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  Winter Morning with Crow

  Clare Rossini

  What a bright, engaging, lively intelligence is at play here! In these days of noisy promotion, the quietly self-assured poems of Winter Morning with Crow would seem familiar only if they were louder and more demonstrative, if they had some sort of platform to run on, if they cultivated the grotesque or the fashionably bizarre. But Clare Rossini seems mostly to love the world without sounding particularly foolish about it. Her best poems may be the ones in which she addresses trees and birds as friendly equals, but it is hard to forget "Elegy in Four Parts," a sadly beautiful set of poems having to do with the stillbirth of a child. These poems are, finally, models of that sort of eloquence which comes mainly from a steady precision of language and observation. Which is never easy. —Donald Justice

  Winter Morning with Crow, Clare Rossini's painterly title for this impressive debut collection, suggests how much more pleasure it gives the poet to look than to know. Her intelligence thrives by a wary distrust of itself. Her brain and heart share, rather than contend for, the feast her eye provides for them. —William Matthews

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  Her Slender Dress

  Susan Yuzna

  There is no let-up in the linguistic intensity, imagistic intensity, or narrative intensity. The spirit of the word-warrior is in this writer. Its aura surrounds each one of these poems, creating a mesmerizing and disturbing book out of a deep and iron-bound necessity. —Charles Wright

  Susan Yuzna's Her Slender Dress is a breathtaking and memorable debut. These are poems of such clarity, such harrowing self-reckoning, that the reader--like the poet herself--emerges bruised but triumphant. Beautifully and powerfully written, Her Slender Dress instantly places Susan Yuzna among the finest poets of her generation. —David St. John

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  The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective

  Joel A. Tarr

  The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective stands alone in its scholarly depth and scope. Tarr’s essays explore not only the technical solutions to waste disposal, but also the policy issues involved in the trade-offs among public health, environmental quality, and the difficulties and costs of pollution control, and all this against the broader background of changes in civic and professional values.

  Any reader concerned with the interactive history of technology, the environment, and the American city will find in The Search for the Ultimate Sink an informative and compelling account of pollution problems from the past and a serious guide to urban policies for the future.

  “Over the years Joel Tarr's work has earned him the place as the dean of urban environmental historians. His research and writings are what we all turn to when we begin our own studies.” —Sam Bass Warner Jr.

  “Tarr has prepared one of the premier books on environmental history, a relatively new discipline.” —Choice