The Pitt Book Center to Feature Author John Hoerr at Sept. 8 Meet and Speak and Book Signing

PITTSBURGH-The University of Pittsburgh Press and The Book Center will host a Meet and Speak and book signing with John Hoerr, author of Harry, Tom, and Father Rice: Accusation and Betrayal in America's Cold War (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), from 6 to 8 p.m. Sept. 8 in The Book Center, 4000 Fifth Ave., Oakland.

Hoerr, who has written for UPI, The Daily Tribune, and Business Week, also is the author of And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel Industry (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988). In his new book, Hoerr relates the previously untold story of three Pittsburgh leaders-his uncle, Congressman Harry Davenport, union leader Tom Quinn, and the Rev. Charles Owen Rice, Pittsburgh's "Labor Priest"-whose lives became intertwined during the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the McCarthy Era.

According to labor historian David Montgomery of Yale University, "John Hoerr has done a splendid job of recreating the atmosphere of the Red Scare, the damage it inflicted on many people's lives, the ruthless battles that divided the CIO in Allegheny County, and the profound and enduring impact of that epoch on the labor movement and on the nation's political life. Few other studies of the tumultuous early years of the Cold War provide the reader with such rich insights into the period's political and social changes as those offered by Harry, Tom, and Father Rice."

This free public event is sponsored by the University Book Center and the University of Pittsburgh Press. For more information, contact Melissa Grube in The Book Center at 412-648-1453.

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8/29/05/tmw