Brian O’Neill is a wonderful writer.  He analyzes perfectly Pittsburgh’s unerring habit of screwing itself.  He loves all the right stuff.  I loved this book.

--Annie Dillard, Pulitzer Prize winner and Pittsburgh native

Brian O’Neill truly appreciates what this city is, scars and all.  This is a terrific book.  This guy gets it.

--Michael Keaton, actor and Pittsburgh native

Every city needs a loving interpreter who tells the stories that go to its heart and soul and shape its identity.  Pittsburgh is lucky to have Brian O’Neill who revels in city life and is alert to the city’s maddening insecurities.  All of us who love Pittsburgh and think it should shape up immediately will enjoy and identify with this wonderful book.

--Peter Leo, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist

I began this book years ago, before Americans became familiar with phrases like “toxic assets” and “foreclosure tsunami.’’ As the cataclysmic financial events of 2008 and 2009 unfolded, as the nation’s wealth vaporized, we in Pittsburgh found ourselves in the unfamiliar position of holding fairly steady.

Don’t get that wrong. We will suffer, too. There have been layoffs. Our pension funds imploded with everyone else’s. But because Pittsburgh didn’t have the population pressure in the past few decades to goose home prices skyward, we didn’t have the real estate crash that so many other American places endured. As the joke here went, “you can’t get the hangover if you were never at the party.’’

So even as we prepare for hard times and read of the troubles in Sun Belt communities and in Michigan and Ohio, there has been a bit of a “been there, done that’’ feeling hereabouts. With the rest of the country, in effect, falling back to meet us, people may be reading this book in a different way than I expected when I began.

We are now in such uncertain times, I can’t know how the nation will look a week from now. But I know Pittsburgh has come through tougher times. There’s comfort in that, and, odd as it sounds, it’s possible the rest of the country can learn something from us. If this book isn’t a hopeful story, I’ve done something wrong.

“Pitt View” by Ron Donoughe