Pitt Books

I received my brand spanking new copy of the (black) Morocco Leather NKJV Pitt Minion Bible today. As usual, Amazon's excellent delivery record upheld.

I actually intended to order the Goatskin leather edition (just $9 dearer) but somehow I ordered this one instead. However, I am hardly disappointed; the quality of Cambridge Bibles is unsurpassed in my considerable experience.

The main difference between the two formats (I own the NASB in Goatskin) is the Morocco one is stiffer and so less flexible (and a tad heavier). The paper stock seems to be a bit weightier but the printing appears crisper and cleaner. Of course, the Goatskin edition has art-gilt edging (red under gold). Morocco has gold edging.

If you're used to reading NKJV in verse format, you should be aware that Pitt Minion editions (both pocket styles and the wide-margin styles) place text in paragraph format. One should become accustomed to it.

I think I'll order the Goatskin and give this Morocco leather Pitt Minion as a gift. It IS magnificent and I have no regrets.

Mr. Noguchi's first book still startles me. I read it when it first came out and I return to it regularly. Here is a book of lyrics that tells the story of Kenji Takezo and his overwhelming passion for the deep blue sea. An American coming-of-age story, a surfer's story,it gracefully chronicles a young man's tricky relations with the force of gravity and the thrill of speed. Noguchi's Pacific is like Twain's Mississippi--an elemental, allegorical presence. The poems are tightly wound and often very funny, and yet there is something understated and deft that is beguiling. A kind of poignance and dignity permeates the wildest adventure of the hero. I love the stillness at the center of what roils and moves these poems, and I love the clarity of this book like I love to breathe the spring air. If you don't buy this book, go to the library. Or steal it. A seriously dazzling thing.

Only On Loan is Yvonne Pitts' first book. Using notes from her journal over a number of years, Pitts allows her readers to enter into that oft times private world of inner thoughts and feelings. It takes a brave woman to put her journal pages out in front for others to read. But it took an even braver woman to face the challenges of dealing with the life and death situations she faced with her son Jason.

Readers will experience the highs and lows, the joys and the heartbreaks of being a mother in commonplace situations with less than common circumstances. Birthdays, Christmases, first day at school... All are landmarks for every child and for the mother who nurtures that child. But, for Yvonne, each milestone was overshadowed by the knowledge that it might be the last. She was praying each time with all the faith she could muster that she would be allowed to watch many more milestone achievements in Jason's life. In all, Pitts was blessed with ten years of milestones and countless opportunities to share her love with Jason. Ten years where each day was both borrowed time and a blessing. Ten years where each day would never be enough but had to be just that--enough. Ten years to shower her son with all the love a mother's heart can provide in a lifetime. Pitts does so with grace and humility. Likewise, she shares her path with an uncommon measure of that same grace and humility.

Born with an often fatal heart abnormality, Jason lived a life that was measured in days--each one more precious than the last. Pitts' journal is rich with the tears of a mother's heart. It is steadfast in the faith to which she clung as she worked her way through this rocky terrain called life. Pitts' family included two other sons, Brent and Eric, one older and one younger than Jason. The challenges of raising three small boys are great enough under normal circumstances. The challenges of dealing with the far from normal circumstances surrounding Jason's health issues were sometimes insurmountable.

By her own admission, her efforts to deal with her grief over the loss of her middle son prevented her from being the mother she wanted to be to her two other sons. But the completion of Only On Loan has allowed her to put the past and the loss in perspective and move forward. Far more importantly, the completion of Only On Loan has presented the reading public with a testament to faith and the enduring human spirit. Pitts' candid journal entries are priceless bits of love in action, faith in action, joy and pain.

by Lee Ambrose
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

Brereton's work is a must read for all master's and doctoral students, since it gives the historical background of the scholarly field of composition studies and rhetoric. Knowing this history is crucial for scholars, foundational as it is to composition theory, and to teacher-practitioners if we are to continue to make writing meaningful for out students.

Unfortunately, it seems to have gone out of print. Perhaps Brereton is preparing a second edition. This book is important as public perceptions of the teaching of rhetoric and of writing in the United States continues to be linked with the competency (or lack thereof) of students emerging form our high schools and universities.

Cynthia Mahaffey
Instructor of English and Ph.D. student (ABD) in Rhetoric and Writing
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green, OH 43403

It's easy to see why Bin Ramke says of Reginald Shepherd that "no poet of his generation brings more intelligence, passion, wit, and necessary madness to poetry." For my money, Shepherd is really the finest poet of his generation. In Otherhood, his fourth book in nine years, one encounters an extraordinary intellect, and a nearly flawless ear: a master of free verse whose epistemological and formal rigor enables him to write some of the most ambitious and erudite poetry I've read in years. The deep knowledge of classical literature that has informed his work since Some Are Drowning enables Shepherd to encompass the complexities of history, language and the self, leading the reader into the deeper strata of conflicting narratives that script, if invisibly, our lives.

Shepherd is also a remarkably gifted observer of the natural world and of the intricate patterns of history inscribed on it over generations, as in lines like these from "Lighthouse Wreckage" (a poem that subtly alludes to, but is more complex, finally, than Arnold's "Dover Beach"):

1.

"Tanker run aground on shoals of disbelief,
pieces of tanker everywhere, oil
overturned on television, filming white walls
with blue clouds, strangled cormorants. Off-white,

2.

stained archipelago, glyph inked across salt
water stilled to stone, a myth of maps. A fragment

3.

of the Roman lighthouse at Dover
survives, shudder of sedimentary rock
a bluff, promise unkept...

In other poems such as "Occurrences across the Chromatic Scale," Shepherd creates a paradoxical poetics, a belated and elegiac carpe diem that requires us to confront our own histories of desire. Along the way, he writes a poem worthy of Hopkins in which metrical skill allows us to see through the veil of language to the natural world:

"Birds, for example, remembered
fluttering torn terms, congregations

shimmer of hummingbirds
but when does one see more than one

tumbling bright flesh (sky
at hand) pleating afternoon, banking

on mere atmosphere, primary
colors dividing white into

three clean halves (red, green,
blue-bitter berries rasp, crabapples

crush underfoot), the spectrum
says don't stop there

(smudged light a lapse of attention)
there's never enough world for you"

Otherhood gives us enough world.

Passages like "nothing comes and goes without a trace," and "But what hurts is knowing you do it, and knowing you know, and knowing you haven't learned," poignantly and yet, cogently cajole us to reckon with life's intangible beauties, travesties, and uncertainties. They exigently whisper in our ear-urging us to divest ourselves of the trivial, temporal, transient nonsense with which we concern ourselves, and over which we lose sleep and sweat and blood and tears everyday-to focus on what matters, learn from our mistakes, and never give up hope. "Paradise Road" is a place everyone should journey through, truly, at least once, to really taste what it means to live, and know who you really ought to be...

Jamnack, Lynne, editor. "Periphery: Erotic Lesbian Futures", Lethe Press, 2008.

Diverse and Speculative

Amos Lassen

"Periphery" is a wonderful anthology of Lesbian fiction which contains thirteen stories that deal with the future. Attraction and infatuation as well as desire are looked at from the feminine view. The book fits into three different genres--science fiction, erotica, and Lesbian literature and there is something here for everyone. I found it especially interesting in that I had to switch back to "reading as a woman", a regimen I learned in a graduate course of feminist fiction. I found the collection to be exciting; each story was a pleasure unto itself and taken as a whole the book covers so many topics that it is truly a well rounded anthology.
Looking to the future, the women included here take on a variety of issues that will surely be important. Aside from the usual ideas of coupling, love and lust, memory and possibility, freedom and sacrifice, we also have themes of religion, rock and roll, dystopia, aliens and politics.
I suppose that some may label this collection as science fiction since the subtitle speaks of the future but these stories cross all kinds of lines and boundaries and they are bound by the fact that they are so diverse and contain human emotion. For this alone, this is a book worth reading.

"The Phantom Church" is an excellent book for introducing the American reader to the rich Romanian folklore and literature. The book offers great insights into the Romanian society from the second World War up to the present times.

Nice squarebound graphic novel from Marvel about the accidental destruction of Pittsburgh and its aftermath. Part of Marvel's New Universe series. Written by the great John Byrne with Mark Gruenwald.

This is an outstanding volume from one of the most important thinkers of Western civilization. This is a bridge linking the two major classics from Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding and the Two Treatises of Government. In this volume, we see Locke's dependence on Stoic philosophy (especially that of Seneca) and the effect that Aristotelian philosophy had on him.

"As the Strength of the Body lies chiefly in being able to endure Hardships, so also does that of the Mind. And the great Principle and Foundation of all Vertue and Worth, is . . . That a Man is able to deny himself his own Desires, cross his own Inclinations, and purely follow what Reason directs as best, tho' that appetite lean the other way." And how does one do this? Locke's answer is through education (i.e., through habit).

Anyone wishing to understand the thought and philosophy of Locke, can not afford to ignore this volume in the corpus of Lockean writings. This edition is a very scholarly edition, there is another modern edition available as well. To bad the editors of the Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke are not very organized, at the rate these volumes are being produced, the complete writings will not be available during my lifetime.

The world needs a modern edition of the writings of Locke, he is too important a thinker not to have this - if nothing else, for us inspiring Lockean scholars. :o)