Pitt Books

Here we find a man who is middle-aged ...
... and experienced with life - taking a part of his life to devote to bettering the lives of others. The altruistic Peace Corps helps him to reach that goal. In the process - he discovers bureaucracy of governments and the inefficiencies of worldwide networks of people down the smallest scale of community and survival. Some of the Peace Corp's elite do NOT (I repeat- NOT) appreciate his candor as he exposes the rather seamy side of international aid as it relates to human interaction at the most basic levels. If you are looking for a perception of the glories of the Peace Corps - this book is not it. If you would find interest in observing personal interaction with nature and communities that are totally foreign to what a successful life might hold in America - then Fred delivers with a raw and critical narrative. I think if Fred had the backing of a government grant to dress this book up with better pictures and maps - the book could attract a wider audience, but the people who get those kinds of grants are already wrapped up with professorships at elite universities and film budgets and advance fees from PBS. Fred casts a jaundiced eye at the system. For this - he is not welcomed among some of those the system favors. His observations could be helpful to anyone looking for a real flavor of volunteerism in Africa. As Fred notes - it is good to volunteer - but it is also good to do so with your eyes wide open.
Fred Pitts died of heart failure not a week after I met him in Milton, Florida in 2007. It was obvious when he spoke that his health was not good and he did note that lingering health issues followed him home from Africa.

I am recommending this book to anyone who is interested in Peace Corps. I knew the author while training in the same program, but I was stationed in a different county and experienced many similar trials and tribulations. I hope that this type of experience in the Peace Corps might not disappear even as expatriot Americans increasingly worry about security, the Equitorial rain forest increasingly comes under threat, and Peace Corps focusses on areas outside of Africa.

I think this book represents a typical white American male experience with the Peace Corps in Africa. Mr. Pitts was in rural development, which is typically based further from major cities and towns than other Peace Corps roles. He does an excellent job at displaying a range of emotions typically from culture shock and isolation in the beginning to a greater appreciation of his host culture. This seems to be an honest account without too much romanticzing, although it is often hard to not get nostalgic when volunteers look back on their service. Prospective volunteers can learn from Mr. Pitt's experience to help them make important judgement calls.

Things Are Different In Africa is the personal account of Frederick Edward Pitts life in an equatorial village located deep inside the Congo for almost a year. Pitts describes in vivid detail his dangerous encounters with animals, risky skirmishes with robbers, dealings with corrupt cops, and more. He also describes the beauty of the Congo, as well as an African culture that can evoke laughter, frustration, and anger. Pitts also describes a motorcycle crash in the jungle some 360 miles from the nearest medical care, as well as being drawn into political unrest, city violence, and eventual evacuation out of the Congo to neighboring country near the Sahara desert. Strongly recommended reading, especially for armchair travelers wanting to know something about the culture and geography of far flung countries of the world, Things Are Different In Africa is a compelling read revealing a unique, sometimes irreverent personal journey that left the author with a greater understanding of life in a vastly different culture on the other side of the world.

I don't usually like to spend nineteen dollars for a paper back, but
I'm sure glad I did. I was totally surprised at the frankness of THINGS
ARE DIFFERENT IN AFRICA, the way it told the story without any regard
for political correctness, and how nobody was spared (not even the Peace
Corps). I liked the descriptions of the villages, the people, the
contryside and the rainforests, but even more I liked the way I was taken on
an emotional ride that ranged from anger to laughter, anxiety to
relief, understanding to frustration. Anyone who wants a highly informative
view of the Congo and its culture, told with straight up language,
cannot go wrong with this book.

Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R38XNTB7NJ1HG7 Bob Hicok has a gift for taking what seems to be the average everday events--even the mundane and gritty/dirty and turns them into poetry. But he isn't just a working man's poet. He is also a very skilled craftsman of poetry who is very intellectual and aware of his world. You simply have to get this book to see his skill as in such poems as "A poem with a poem in its belly." The poem read aloud and/or scene on the page will just amaze.

And what else doesn't hurt with reading Bob Hicok? Gosh, he is often pretty darn funny! One of my favorite lines is from "My career as a director" which says: while a fire / suggests that the cylce of life is beautiful / though not energy efficient.

The Publishers Weekly review crowding the box above is really smart and wrong. Hicok's are the best poems living in magazines this month and last year, and This Clumsy Living is really pretty evidence of it. To sandwich him between Collins and Young--two poets who really can hurt you with laughter--is to mistake style for substance. Bob Hiock has said forty more important things than either of them.

It is good to know that the words you have spent money on earn their keep; to know that when you want to read something that descibes your feelings or something you'd never bring to mind, Bob Hicok has done it for you -- like he always has. There is no better poet and everybody knows it. He can take a big idea and unravel it until the room is full of debris and there's a little shiny thing sitting in the corner -- or a small idea and wind it up into a Dizzy Gillespie trumpet solo. Nothing's ever dull in Bob Hicok's imaginative world. This book has about forty poems but it feels like four hundred poems. The way Hicok writes is so original it's like a lawn made of poems you have to keep watering with the hoses of your eyes and then mow it back with the lawnmower of your mind. He writes about the bad times, the just about-almost-but-not-quite-right times, his wife, something in there about a dog, cows, trees, mother, father, working class people, the real times or just as often: I made this whole thing up but now that you think of it, it couldn't have been more real, birds, death, people you've never heard of, rivers, deer, Bob Hicok, wolves, wind, his wife. And even though Hicok is well known as being quite a humorous writer, just as often there's beauty and wistfulness
in his poetry. Like this:


Solstice: voyeur

I watched the young couple walk into the tall grass and close
the door of summer behind them, their heads floating
on the golden tips, on waves that flock and break like starlings
changing their minds in the middle of changing their minds,
I saw their hips lie down inside those birds, inside the day
of shy midnight, they kissed like waterfalls, like stones
that have traveled a million years to touch, and emerged
hybrid, some of her lips in his words, all of his fists
opened by trust like morning glories, and I smelled green
pouring out of trees into grass, grass into below, I stood
on the moment the earth changes its mind about the sun,
when hiding begins, and raised my hand from the hill
into the shadows behind the lovers, and contemplated
their going with my skin, and listened to grass
in wind call us home like our mothers before dark.



This guy can write. And anything done well looks easy. The man is brilliant. Nobody derails language like Hicok, only to put it through this prism he carries with him, to show you how he sees things on his side, which seems obvious once you go his way around. In the process, to follow his thinking, sometimes you have to fine-tune your own thinking, but that's not so hard -- that's why we read. This book of poetry is more than worth a thousand prices. I say we are lucky, because to be breathing on this planet at the same time as Bob Hicok, to be kindly flattened by his magnitude, justifies, in my mind, at least one good reason to be alive right now.

The book arrived in excellent condition within the scheduled delivery time.

Thank you,

Francine Keehnel

I agree with all the reviewers here. "Two by Two" is so worth having. "Embarazar," Duhamel's poem about Spanish mistranslations, is worth the cost of the book alone! All of Duhamel's poetry is a bonus!

I love Duhamel's work. She's fiesty, funny, and she's original. There's no one quite like her--which is really saying a lot, considering how much poetry sounds the same to me these days. She's experimental, risky, she's always trying something new in each book. There's a fantastic 911 poem in this book. It's a collage of emails, narratives, dips and twists of media, --it's just fantastic, completely original and modern--24 pages and I could not stop reading it, when I got to the end--I read it again. That poem alone is worth the price of the book. I interviewed her last spring at MiPo. Today I was looking for something 'fresh' to read and I grabbed Two and Two again, just as enjoyable with multiple readings.

Here's the link to the interview:
http://www.mipoesias.com/Volume19Issue3Gudding/duhamelinterview.html

Denise Duhamel's poetry is the kind you dive into head first, let yourself glide along the rich silty depths, see and feel in a way you never have before. Her words will deliver you back to the surface, up to the light. Fill your lungs with sharp sobering air, then take yourself back in and through again. And again. Each trip is an enchanting evocative journey.

I've been a big fan of Denise Duhamel's work for many years now. This book is simply her best and most courageous. It holds nothing back. If anyone in the world wants to know what great American poets are up to then this is the book to turn to. It's a must for poetry lovers and a wonderful selection for those of us teaching contemporary American poetry. No one else does this kind of Americana-infused poetry. Mrs. Duhamel is simply writing at the peak of her gargantuan powers! A++++

Suarez writes with great gusto, and his work is memorable and exciting. His poetry rings true with a tremendous sense of history, family, and memory. Many of the poems in this colleciton are gems. Wonderful lyricism and nuance. I am proud of his work not only because I too am Cuban, and of the author's generation, but because I have been a fan of his work for many years and I believe Suarez has consistently produced good work.

This is an inspired collection of poems. I've been a big fan of Suarez's poetry for a long time and this book is a must-have for anyone out there following contemporary American poetry. I highly recommend it.

If you've followed the work of Virgil Suarez, you'll know that he began his life as a writer publishing novels about the Cuban-American experience, novels that were extremely well received ten to fifteen years ago. And then he changed: he drew in his personna as a novelist/story writer and churned the elements of exile and longing into some of the richest poems published about the American experience in the past fifty years. His work, mostly narrative, boils down the novelist's craft to a beautiful set of images, a fluid line, a melodic, tense voice that is as filled with humor as it is with love and pain. 90 Miles is not only an amazing collection--it's an amazing revelation of a man, speaking for his lost culture, turning it into a song, and in doing so, making a new type of culture for himself.

My review from White Crane Journal - Summer 2008

The appearance of new poems by Edward Field is always a cause for celebration. The master poet begins his most recent collection, After the Fall: Poems Old & New with a series of poems that serve as gutsy ars poetica on the engagement of the poet with the world. Under the title "What Poetry Is For" Field surveys the landscape of the wartime Bush years. Some of the poetry is time-sensitive and read as a (hopefully) time capsule to the future. In "Letter on the Brink of War" Field bears witness to what the unjaundiced eye sees at the beginning of a disaster he has lived through before:

They even talk of shock and awe--
another term for blitzkrieg's sturm and drang--
and instead of Jews, the roundup of Muslims,
But you have to ask, Who's next?

"Homeland Security" extends the theme by offering an analysis of the police state tactics faced by those who raise suspicion. Field has a way of writing that delivers the punch with comic timing. It leaves you smiling and wincing at the same time.

Perhaps what I have always loved about Field's writing is its utter lack of pretense and its firm conviction in telling the truth. Beauty is not the word here. Breathtaking is. You read a marital poem like "Oedipus Schmoedipus" or the searing indictment of Jews complicit in the current administration's wrong-doing "But what are Jews doing in this government? / Wasn't civil liberties always a Jewish passion?" and you understand why Plato wanted poets banned from his Republic for their insistence on telling the truth. There is also humor. Lots of it --whether writing on aging in "Prospero, in Retirement" or celebrating his body's resiliencies in "In Praise of My Prostate":

and you still expand, your amazing flowers
bursting forth throughout my body,
pistils and stamens dancing.

Or in his apologia to his lover who must live with "the poet" in "Mrs. Wallace Stevens." When you're dealing with a great poet, the beauty of a volume of selected works like this--especially for the uninitiated--is its ability to offer up new work that captures your affections, and also present the earlier work that serves as confirmation that this genius has roots and, even better, offer a past catalogue of volumes to seek out. Here in one gem are the poems I have loved for many years. Field's "The Life of Joan Crawford" from his 1967 volume Variety Photoplays, "From Poland," and "Mae West" are here too.

As he did in his memoirs published three years ago, Field continues his clear-eye seeing and saying of the world. I believe he writes with the clear understanding that there is a beauty to be found in honesty. With After the Fall Field somehow gives courageous permission to be more honest in our lives. As if saying life is more fun and more compelling by facing the truth of oneself. In all its beauty. I truly believe it.

Edward Field is a poet of joy, anger, romance, humor,sex, the real breathing humanity we all share but rarely find in the overly intellectual, pallid poetry which is the fashion of our time. Reading "After the Fall" is to touch a warm, living , brilliant being, what some of us call a "mensch"! It's a true encounter full of joy!
Harriet Sohmers Zwerling

Ed Field is an amazing poet, and this is another fantastic collection. His new poems feel like classics, and his old poems feel refreshingly new. Read Ed Field now, while he's here-- for fifty years he's been breaking ground for poets, and he deserves to be read. His work is the glue that holds American poetry together. Nobody, before or since, has merged the personal, political, and the pop culture with so much skill and energy. Great great poems!

I've loved many of Jagger's novels (particularly A Song Twice Over) but this one is my favorite. Set during the Year of Four Emperors in A. D. 69, the story follows the fortunes of the daughter of an aristocratic family as first one, then another emperor rises briefly to power. Her wealth and patrician family background make Antonia a "prize", potentially given as a political favor, but she is not a passive victim; she is courageous, intelligent and independent, and manages to make the best of difficult situations. Jagger's Daughter of Aphrodite (about a courtesan who is in love with a charioteer, but who must depend on wealthy patrons for her livelihood) is also quite good. Although she only wrote two novels set in ancient Rome (that I know of) Jagger did an excellent job of capturing the feel of the period, and her heroines are absolutely wonderful. These novels are worth searching for - there are a few used copies around and they are great reading, particularl for people who have a special interest in fiction set in ancient Rome.

I love everything written by Brenda Jagger, but Antonia is my absolute favorite. I have read this book over and over again, and always refer to it as "My Beloved Antonia." The setting is in Ancient Rome, just after the death of the Emperor Nero. Antonia is a patrician girl, whose marriage prospects change frequently, depending upon who is the current Emperor of Rome. In the end, Antonia takes her fate into her own hands. Just Wonderful!

This is a book that changed my life. Not many books can say that. My friends and family also consider it has a lot to answer for.

When a reader approaches a historical novel he does so frequently with some knowledge about the subject. In this case, the subject was Britain's youngest Prime Minister, Pitt the Younger; and the reader, yours truly, knew very little of the subject apart from, of course, what all good little Brits like me learn in school (something vague about youth, the French Revolution, and the fact that Pitt the Elder was a DIFFERENT person). I thought that was all there was to know (or care) about.

Boy, was I surprised.

In fact I was so surprised that I wanted to read more. And when a historical novel does something like that to a reader, then the primary goal of the novelist must have been attained. Some historical novels simper. This one roared. The good ones reach out to the reader. This one positively grabbed and didn't let go, either. The portrait of Pitt was so sympat

This book is a 12-month exploration of the area around Clayoquot Sound, on Vancouver Island's west coast. Through ventures to various spots in the area, the author tells us of history, geography, wildlife, and more. He talks about the isolated life of the Lennard Island lighthouse keeper, how the coastline was shaped by glaciers, why Pacific waves are so big, how various fur traders and explorers came and went through the years, life in the town of Tofino, and how ongoing logging has created vast swaths of naked hillsides. This book has something for everybody. Part natural history, part human history, part modern day life on the coast, this is a fascinating read and a beautiful description of a lovely and scenic place. I especially recommend reading this if you plan on visiting the area.

This book is an initiation into one of the most beautiful and mysterious places on the planet. For every month of the year the author takes a journey into the forest and ocean wildernesses of Clayoquot Sound, exploring the main events of the yearly natural cycle---storms in January, herring spawning in March, salmon spawning in October, etc.---as well as the relationships between people and nature in Clayoquot Sound, both past and present. The natural history dominates, though, and the human history, though long and resulting in some deep and lasting environmental impacts, seems fleeting and insignificant when viewed against the backdrop of glacier-formed mountains and ancient forests.

I was impressed by how seamlessly the author combined scientific information with personal observations and the narrative of his travels. I felt the relentlessness of the winter rains, the hallowed beauty of wild creeks flowing through old growth, the salty sea air, and even the mosquito bites. The writing is graceful, rich, entertaining---every bit as varied and interesting as the place it describes. I can see this book standing up to multiple readings, with new nuances being discovered each time. ?Chasing Clayoquot? ought to be required reading for anyone planning a trip to Clayoquot Sound, and it makes for good armchair adventuring too. Don?t forget to pack your rain gear!

This book is a 12-month exploration of the area around Clayoquot Sound, on Vancouver Island's west coast. Through ventures to various spots in the area, the author tells us of history, geography, wildlife, and more. He talks about the isolated life of the Lennard Island lighthouse keeper, how the coastline was shaped by glaciers, why Pacific waves are so big, how various fur traders and explorers came and went through the years, life in the town of Tofino, and how ongoing logging has created vast swaths of naked hillsides. This book has something for everybody. Part natural history, part human history, part modern day life on the coast, this is a fascinating read and a beautiful description of a lovely and scenic place. I especially recommend reading this if you plan on visiting the area.

Ms Champ did a great job on this book. The blurb states that she is collecting items for Vol II. This is wrong. Volume II has been released and she is collecting for Vol III. Please contact her for more information.

An excellant work for any of those who may have descendents from early Collin County,Texas. Minnie Champ deserves great recognition for spending countless hours to insure that our ancestors and their stories are not forgotten.

As author/publisher of this book done in memory of my mother, Alice Ellison Pitts, who started the book, I'd like you to know its contents. The family stories written by descendants of Collin County early settlers are personal, varied and contain an abundance of Collin County history. The book, 9"x12," contains 548 different family stories in alpha order, has full surname index, and also has over 350 family photographs.

Volume II of this work is under production and a call for materials is out. You are invited to submit your Collin Co. related stories.

Other books available for purchase on Collin County. Email for info

Peter and Miranda are a nouveau-riche couple who move into an ancient Mission in California only to find, too late, that the Mission has a history of dark secrets and death. Towering over the Mission is a vast Tree, an ancient and alien species that begins to exert an hypnotic effect over the couple. Miranda's dreams and waking life are filled with fragments of Indian myths, the lulling sound of Gregorian chants, and the horrific wails of dying Franciscan monks. Underlying it all is the heavy musk of the 50,000 year old Tree that creeps into the very core of their dream house, disrupting the fiber of their idyllic life. When Miranda becomes pregnant, her foetus is poisoned by the toxic tree fruit and Peter almost dies in an "accident" in the Mission pool. Finally convinced, Peter pits his wits against this primordial adversary. A Deadly Shade Of Green is a compelling, suspenseful, well crafted novel of good versus evil, but in a context and in a frame that inhibits a clear-cut dichotomy or easy answers. It may be Man who is the trespasser here!

Excellent, had me riveted and horrified! Extremely well written and researched, almost as though describing true events. I doubt if I will ever look at a tree the same again without being reminded of this book. Well deserving its prize of 'novel of the year'.

A Deadly Shade of Green is a horror story in the very best sense of the word! The descriptions are great, and the story continually had me wondering, "How much of this is really true?" And as much as I would like to see the tree, I certainly never want to meet it!

The book is really good and very much worth buying, reading, and saving to read again.

I want to point out that this is not for readers of Magic Realism. This is for readers of Crude Realism. If you like books about man vs. man vs. himself vs. reality...This is the book for you...
El Chulla Romero y Flores (The Loner Romero Flores) is a great book about a young man conflicted with his racial background, social status, and financial means. He is called a Chulla, an epithet used in Ecuador for men of mixed European and Native American blood, who try to fit in and pretend they are more European than Native American. He despises his Native American ancestry because he feels it has made him weak and inadequate in a country where fair skinned people usually succeed. And, instead of loving his father for passing on his light skin to him, he despises him because he raped his mother and abused her before he died. So he is conflicted by the love/hate relationship he has with his European side. Because he loves it for all the wrong reasons. And hates the Native American side for all the wrong reasons.
The story begins with Romero Flores getting a job as an auditor for the Bureau of Economic Analyses. He discovers secrets that threaten the country's most important business men and government officials and he is forced to go on the run, while his poor girlfreind lies in bed giving birth to their son. He realizes that the people he admired, the Ecuadorians of Spaniard/European ancestry are his enemies and that the only people who help him are the same people he despised in the beginning, the Ecuadorian Native Americans.
Please read this book. It's very important. I can't stress that enough.

El chulla Romero y Flores is a young man whose extraordinary life is told to us by a master novelist and wordsmith, Jorge Icaza of Ecuador. This novel is extremely autobiographical. Romero y Flores is a complex individual, and Icaza employs all the techniques of novel-writing in order to show us, in depth, what Romero y Flores is thinking and going through. This comical-suspenseful novel, about a young man caught up in a web of lies, suspicion, money, and love, is Jorge Icaza's finest novel. His first novel, The Villagers, was great, but, as the renowned critic and personal friend of Jorge Icaza, professor Theodore Alan Sackett pointed out in his famous 1972 study of Jorge Icaza's novels, "El Arte en la Novelística de Jorge Icaza": all of Jorge Icaza's novels, beginning with The Villagers, and En Las Calles, were leading up to this one book: El Chulla Romero y Flores, his masterpiece. El Chulla Romero y Flores is complex, beautiful, and all together a wonderful novel!

El Chulla Romero y Flores, one of Jorge Icaza's last novels, is considered by many, especially by important literary critics like professor Theodore Alan Sackett, to be Jorge Icaza's greatest literary achievement as well as one of the greatest novels of this century. Icaza incorporates every technique in the art of novel-writing to tell us Romero y Flore's story. But it is the deep emotions and fantastic actions that enthrall us most of all about this book. The characters in this novel are both comical and tragic. Romero y Flores is only comparable to Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov of Nikolai Gogol's novel Dead Souls. In this novel we meet drunken poets, sadistic lovers, cunnning thiefs, brutal detectives, an Ecuadorian First Lady . . . No one is kept out of this book. Quito's people have never been portrayed with such precision. Humanity has never been portrayed like this. Until now. The novel is so complex, that no one could summarize it in one paragraph. The best thing to do is get this book, read it and love it: take it with you everywhere -- I know I do.