Pitt Books

Oh, everyone can bash Penn State so I figured I would bash pitt. This book along with the I hate Penn State book gets anyone fired up. Just make sure you do not get stabbed at pitt while reading this book.

In IN EVERY SEAM Allison Joseph conveys a narrative voice that is distinct. Her poems give the reader the sense of experience as it happened. IN EVERY SEAM is one of those rare volumes that make readers feel better in tune with the world around them, a world that, though possibly far different from their own, becomes more and more their own as each poem is digested.

This is a wonderful book. The author has read the testimonies of Allied soldiers, who had liberated the concentration camps in Europe in WWII. Based on these testimonies, she created a set of vignettes in narrative poem form. Each mini-poem (all less than twenty lines long, with but a few words on each line) captures a thought or an experience. Since the author is recreating the experiences of others, I was worried that the poems would be derivative or schmaltzy. But such is not the case. The poems sound authentic and the voice of the soldiers comes through clearly. The poems are simple, but the ideas behind them quite sophisticated. These poems convey the confusing and painful experiences that the young men felt when confronted with the horrific suffering of Holocaust survivors. The poems deal with revulsion and pity, with fear and guilt, with beauty and horrifying ugliness.

I highly recommend this book both to the general reader and to teachers of classes about the Holocaust. Sections of the book would make good sources for discussion.

In this skillfully-written and heartfelt collection of short stories, Adria Bernardi allows us to follow members of an Italian (and Italian-American) family through several generations. The connections between the characters of these stories are not always direct, and, in some cases, are more implied than stated. The stories could be read individually, or as a whole, as presented in this volume.

Spanning time from roughly post-middle ages to the present, the pieces in this collection allow us not only to observe, but, in some cases, inhabit these characters. One of the most compelling aspects of Bernardi's prose is her obvious love of and fascination with the mechanics of language itself. At times, the characters are depicted ruminating over words and their relationships to one another -- and rather than smothering the story itself in dry semantics, Bernardi accomplishes this with a gentle touch, leaving the reader with a very natural feeling of following these thought processes so that we might know these people better.

In the second story of the collection, 'Waiting for Giotto', a simple shepherd's son dreams of becoming a great artist, of being an apprentice to the great Giotto, for whom he patiently waits to return to his mountain village, as if by some miracle the great artist would recognize the man's talent and take him away to the city with him. The man knows in his heart that this will not happen, but he follows his muse ever forward, refusing to give up his calling. He sees and hears his world going by and going on around him -- people in his small mountain village live their lives as they have for centuries. Some take it upon themselves to leave and seek their fortunes -- to him, it is a duty and an honor to wait for his calling.

One of the most breathtaking passages in this book is contained in this story, when the would-be artist hears a traveller describing the horrors of the wars that are fought on the other side of the mountains: 'They say that Peace, herself, is revolted, and that she holds her stomach and retches; she has hidden her face under a hood and has started to walk away from the battlefields, following along in the ruts made by the wheels of carts, dragging herself along a muddy road that is lined with corpses, not even bothering to lift the hem of her cloak.'

The mountain-dwelling artist goes on collecting tiny bits of colored glass to be used in his masterpiece, a mosaic that may never be completed -- or seen by anyone.

The mosaic itself is another apt metaphor for the thread that connects these tales. Up close, it's hard to see -- upon reading the stories in this volume, and viewing them from a distance as a whole, the pattern is clearer.

The stories that touched me most deeply are the ones set further away in time and place -- perhaps as the characters in the indivdual stories became more 'Americanized' they appealed less to me. The pieces follow a roughly chronological order, the last being tied in nicely with the early ones -- in a way that you'll have to read the book to discover for yourself.

Bernardi is a very skillful writer -- she has managed to lay bare the soul and psyche of the Italian-American immigrants portrayed here, as well as that of ancestors who never left their village. Without reciting daily routines in a boring, travelogue-like manner, she has allowed us an intimate glimpse of her characters' daily lives -- and has allowed us to watch them become more acquainted with themselves in the process.

I look forward to reading her novel, THE DAY LAID ON THE ALTAR.

Ingrid Pitt has starred in Hammer Films as one of the most alluring vampires to ever glide across the screen! Who better to write a book on vampires and vampire movies? This is a highly entertaining book, full of humour, but that's not all---you can tell Ingrid has done a lot of thoughtful research. If you are an Ingrid Pitt fan, or you just want to enjoy a fun, intriguing take on vampires, real or on screen, you will want this book!

This review is very simple. If you're looking at this page, BUY THIS BOOK!!! I am a steel historian and I've had this book for about 7 years. I refer to it at least 2-3 times per month. Even if you're just curious about Carnegie, Frick, Schwab or the other personalities, this is the book for you. If you're interested in the business building aspects, this is the book for you. If you're interested in history at all, buy this book. Without a doubt this is the best book on the Carnegie Steel Company. If you read any book about the steel industry, make sure this is the one.

In New England, there is a week or so every January when the weather warms up, the skies brighten, and the snow all but melts away. The squirrels even come out of their nests and we're all teased with an array of false harbingers of spring. That's the January thaw. As a poet, I've always thought it the perfect metaphor for life, nestled uncomfortably between our "two sleeps." Of course, immediately after, we plunge into round two of snow and cold, usually ending with a heavy, wet snowstorm around the "first day" of spring, just to remind us what's really in control here. So goes this book: a collection of snapshots in which we often forget the presence of the cameraman. They're polaroids, not posters--there's never too much, always just enough to pique the interest of the reader and throw him back into his own, tangential memories. Guernsey loves the 'double subject' lyric, the central focus of the poem thrown into high relief by something that seems incongruent at first, like that little girl with a chicken in Rembrandt's Night Watch. And then there's the shadow behind most of his poems, love and death: a high school shop teacher living with the transplanted heart of a boy his students' age, the poet's grandfather's funeral and grapefruit, escaped cons on the TV news reflected in the steam covered bathroom mirror after his daughter's shower, the primal horror of killing and gutting chickens, discovering "a half-formed egg. / No shell, / just a soft, damp sack, / like what I felt between / my boy's legs, / and as warm." and, my favorites, fathers and sons, and brothers. Here's a snippet from "June 21," midsummer night. In this late evening photo we see his parents chatting up the neighbors on the porch, his mother smoking, drinks all around. "On his hour's reprieve from sleep, / my little brother dances / in the sprinkler's circle of water. // At fourteen, I'm too old / to run naked with my brother, / too young to laugh with my father." In toto, fifteen lines divided into three-line stanzas that race the narrative along like Dante's terza rima. But the narrative is the only thing racing here, "The sun refuses to set," and the actor in the poem has this (terrible?) sense of being suspended between something wonderful (boyhood) and something wonderful in a radically different way (adulthood), on the longest day of the year. I'm going to suggest that the reason Guernsey writes poetry is related to the reason his neighbor, a physician, had a human skull on his desk: "My neighbor smiled one of those weird, / faraway surgeon's smiles and handed / me the head, saying, "Hold it to your ear / and you can hear the ocean." It's simple and dark, but true.

If there is, it suits this book. An absolute must read, eye opener for anyone entering the profession of teaching. For those of us who have been there and done that, who have felt the craziness creeping closer everyday as we viewed one failed plan after another trumpeted in and wheeled out, for those of us who believed we were the only ones who saw what was happening, who were disparagingly called "Old School", who sometimes felt totally alone wondering if we were the ones who were crazy, treat yourself to this book and enjoy a wonderful balm and tonic as you immerse yourself in some long needed support.

This book should have been dedicated to all of us who ever wondered what happened to the joy of teaching, and who have hung in there hoping someone would listen to us as we fought to bring it back. Judging School Discipline should be required reading for every administrator, school board member, policy maker, and politician, as well as everyone in our legal system.

To the authors I can only say "Thank you, Thank you, Thank you. Perhaps your book will help decision makers finally realize they have been dancing us around a camp fire of futility, and also enlighten them to the fact they can not avoid the real problem by trying to reinvent the wheel of education.

TEACHERS, GRAB THIS BOOK.

The Last Neanderthal traces the life of the poet from childhood to anticipations of death. Van Walleghen has met the monster and knows that death and pain and suffering are always waiting, just around the corner, or underneath an innocent pier. He no longer has "trouble with the obvious." The innocence of some of his earlier work is less palpable here, and some of the humor and joyful surprise of the past are submerged by confrontations with chaos. Yet--along the way, the poet has been saved by the creative act which has the capacity to transform and to redeem. He writes about all of life in his poem, "Beauty":

". . .it could have been a jail cell/a room where prisoners were tortured/the last place on God's grim earth/where poetry might happen. And yet/now and then, rising up from nowhere/on slowly beating wings, something---/I knew there was something, born/ perhaps of the heart's pure yearning/that would save my life: Beauty./The name for those birds was Beauty."

work is based. In the latter case, Victor Harold Vroom largely failed in making The New Leadership: Managing Participation in Organizations relevant to today's managers and leaders. Hence the original 1976 book is still the more valuable work. Leadership and Decision-Making is a must read for those following the Department of Justice antitrust cases and other maters related to modern business leadership.

It is also a recommended book for anyone who aspires to a leadership position because it is thought provoking and avoids, as much as possible, the mathematics which overwhelm his 1988 work. Many students of leadership will find the concepts presented familiar.

The main message conveyed is that leadership behavior should be dependent on certain characteristics of the general situation in which a decision is to be made. By understanding the situations, readers are able to influence leaders they may work with or judge the appropriateness of decisions made by others.

In 1988 Vroom and Jago attempted to expand this classic work with a mathematical computerized approach that could be used by decision makers in daily practice. This mathematical "expert system" was to correct the discrete nature of the 1976 work's decision trees.

Expert systems, however, are not based in mathematics, but on something that has nothing to do with mathematics called certainty theory. This partially explains deficiencies in the latter work. Leadership and Decision-Making remains the best presentation and in paperback it is an exceptional value.