Pitt Books

Dirk Pitt and his lifelong friend, Al Giordano, get out of unbelievably dangerous situations regularly. While it's impossible to believe most of their close escapes, suspension of disbelief makes these Dirk Pitt novels quite entertaining.

Every character maintains his traits throughout all of Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt. Admiral James Sandecker, Rudi Gunn, and the rest of the NUMA crew are steady characters that are often the last and only chance the U.S.A. to stop a madman's plot to take over or destroy the world. He is a straight man of honor that will not stand still while a human being gets hurt, but has no problem crushing those who do the hurting.

Cussler's books are filled with excitement in parts of the world from one solar cap to the other...and all points inbetween. His books are hard to put down! i've read most all of his 19 books. they're ALL good! enjoy Dirk Pitt, Admiral Sandecker, and Al Giordano, along with the NUMA crew. I know I did. --john g

This is a very nice story about a slave boy growing up on a Virginia plantation. It is taken from a true story, and a little about the person is written at the end. It is well written and enjoyable for children, and gives them a peak at what life must have been like as a slave without be morose. It is also well illustrated. My 7 year old requests it be read to her on a regular basis.

It book helped me to write my thesis on the topic Marketing in Banking. It was very good

Kenneth Pitt was David Bowie's manager from 1967 (the year of David's debut album) to 1969 (the year of David's first hit single, "Space Oddity"). In this book he describes in detail the events that took place in that short but pivotal period of David's career. By now, of course, Pitt's accounts have been exhaustingly recycled in other Bowie books. If you're a casual fan who just wants a good, comprehensive biography, you're better off with the recently released "Strange Fascination", by David Buckley (available only in Britain at the time of writing). But if you're a bona fide "Bowiephile", this book is mandatory. And it will never be outdated, since it covers a time span in the past which will always be history and can never be changed.

The author does a great job of previewing Brad Pitts' life and career. The book is informative and a fun read! For all the Brad Pitt fans out there, this book is for you! Enjoy!

THIS IS A FUN CALENDAR IF YOU LOVE CATS.
IT HAS A LOT OF PERSONALITY. I WOULD
ORDER IT AGAIN.

I am an admirer of Ms. Song's poetry. I have read all of her published poetry and I am always pleased when a new volume comes out. Though this volume is more uneven than her previous work, there is some great verse here.

"My Beautiful Daughter Calls to Tell Me It's Snowing" is one of the best of this collection and belongs with the best of what Ms. Song has written. It is the type of poem at which she excels: a exploration of the mother/daughter relationship through (what I assume is) a real memory, grounded in reality as a link to something true. Song compares her experience as a mother with a daughter in college--the same college she went to--to that of her mother sending her to college. The differences between her experience as the poor immigrant student to her daughter's as a solidly middle class student are profound and yet, a common thread runs through. It is a beautiful piece of work.

In fact, it is whenever Ms. Song stays grounded in the real that she comes up with great images. For example, in "The Man Moves Earth" she describes using work to combat grief and gives us this: "Trees that have lived/out their lives,/he cuts and stacks/like loaves of bread/which he will feed the fire."--a great image of death feeding life. Or "The Land of Good Intentions" which describes children keeping their mother alive on life support where "Tubes infiltrate her body, keep her/pinned to the wreakage./They do not hear her screaming..."

On the other hand, when she gets more abstract, her poetry suffers. The only poem of this type that really succeeds is "The Temple of Our Dilemma" which is a moving poem of children lost (most likely through abortion, though perhaps miscarriage). It, too, belongs with the best of Ms. Song's poetry. There are "water stone children" who are lost and "bone flesh children" who live. Women gather together to care for all their children and, by sharing their grief and work, heal each other. I love this poem.

The rest of the abstractions work less well for me. Many of these poems are poems with the loss of her mother as the theme. It almost seems like her own grief is too raw for her to confront it directly so she hides in ungrounded images. Unfortunately, this hiding from the emotion hurts her poetry. Only "One Who Hears" and the title poem, "Cloud Moving Hands," come close to succeeding.

Still, two great poems and a half dozen more really good ones are more than you find in most collections. I look forward to following what Ms. Song does in the future.

Schneider conducts statistical analysis that puts Paul Peterson's "city limits" theory -- which casts its shadows over the entire field of urban politics -- to empirical tests. I found his research thorough and compelling. Less persuasive are the conclusions he draws regarding the power of inter-jurisdictional market forces to restrain the ability to self-aggrandizing bureaucrats to pad their budgets. All in all, a good book for anyone interested in urban politics or state and local public finance.

This is a book of cowboy photography, produced by John McQuarrie, who tells us in his introduction that his book is the result of traveling all around New Mexico talking to ranchers and photographing them and their cowboys at work. Though McQuarrie is not a westerner, he clearly loves his subject matter and speaks glowingly of the men whose images he's captured on film.

His 240+ color photographs cover a wide range of subjects besides working with cattle, including snow and frost, children, cowboy gear, Spanish colonial churches, pickup trucks and trailers, rodeo, landscapes, a cowboy wedding, and bringing in a Christmas tree cowboy-style. The photographs are organized according to the seasons, starting with winter, and they range in size up to full double-page spreads.

Interspersed are short essays by cowboy humorist Lee Pitts, praising cowboy values in his down-home way, and other writers. The most interesting is a reprint of an article from High Country News about rancher Sid Goodloe, who over a period of 41 years restored a broken down ranch using principles of sound ecology. There's also a foreword by the late cowboy actor and stunt man, Richard Farnsworth.

This book easily belongs on any shelf of Southwestern photography. Readers interested in rehabilitating land will also appreciate Texas writer John Graves' "Hard Scrabble." For more photographs of New Mexico ranchers, look for Arnold Vigil's "Enduring Cowboys."

This is a well-researched account of the Cuban Embargo. In detail through the 45+ years of the embargo, the authors review each presidential adminstration, and the ebb and flow of the embargo. They illustrate how the embargo has moved from being mostly influenced by the president to how currently Congress and political interest groups rule the day.
They can be somewhat repetitious in making their points, but all in all I found it to be highly informative. The the same time the message of the book is frustrating to see just how little influence average American voices have on the continuing foreign policy against our neighbor, Cuba.