Pitt Books

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.

This is an informative and delightful set that has information on Hollywood songsters that can be found no where else. Each entry has a wonderful picture accompanying. I have spent many, many happy hours pouring over the entries and learning facts about my favorite stars. This is a must have for all libraries and any scholar of musical theatre or musical film or just popular music of the 20th century. Well worth the money! It is clear that Parrish and Pitts have done their homework, but even clearer that they have a love for the subject matter and it shows on every page. As a songwriter with a love for the field, I use this book constantly.

Film historians James Robert Parish and Michael Pitts's "Hollywood Songsters" have outdone themselves with this handsomely designed three-volume set that is worth every penny. Filled with rare photos, "Hollywood Songsters" has comprehensive, accurate and fascinating entries on over 100 "singers who act and actors who sing." The lives and careers of everyone from A to Z or June Allyson to Mae West are covered in intriguing and fact-filled detail. Who would have thought that such an indespensible reference book could also be a page-turner. Once you start reading this treasure trove of information it is hard to put down because of the insider tidbits and behind-the-scenes facts that fill the well-written pages. As theater and film critic and lover of musicals, I find this a most wonderful addition to my library as well as a great read. The filmography and lp and CD bibliography on each singer is unparalled. Bravo to Mr. Parish and Mr. Pitts!!!

This project has to be a mad labor of love on the part of the authors -- how else / who else would produce a 3-volume directory of singing in the movies? We must applaud and support the authors for this massive work -- I can't imagine it not being definitive -- by urging local libraries to carry it. A database like this should be available to everyone!

This audio CD produced by Focus on the Family shares a powerful story of integrity and respect for humankind. Challenges the way you think about life and people who mistreat you.

This is an incredible abridged version of Les Miserable! Focus on the Family has out done itself by hitting all the key elements from the original story and by bring the story to life. This version left our family yearning to hear more. My children have listened to it over and over gleaming new insights about mercy, justice, and true love each time. Everyone home library should have such a moving story on its shelfs!

This is an excellent audio dramatization of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. It's very true to the theme of the book which are often missed in other mediums. It does very well in bringing out the emphasis of mercy and forgiveness. Very highly recommended.

(Alicia Ostriker read at the West Side YMCA on Friday, February 2, 2007 as part of the Writer's Voice Visiting Authors Series. This is from my introduction to the event).

Reading Alicia Suskin Ostriker's poems in No Heaven is like having someone who needs to impart something essential to you leaning in, quietly and yet with great intensity, showing you something of utmost importance, never lecturing, never condescending, the unearthing of vital information seeming to occur in the moment of telling, so when, the payoffs in the poems themselves take place, in the burst of the revealed moment, the impact is intense and profound.

The ease of the language, its casualness and conversationality might make one overlook to care with which the language here is wrought.

Alicia shows relationships as clearly the commingling of two distinct entities; whether we completely understand the person we're with or not, these poem's simple conversations mirror the familiarity of those long together, whether lover, family member or dear friend. There's that easy connection, yet always so fragile, knowing that we must make ready to part from all we love and hold dear, and yet how we must always stay in the moment, so that what we have will not become subsumed by what we have lost, or will lose. She writes, in the poem "Mid-February":

"Friend, it's a day for a walk
are we going to walk it?"

...and that becomes the challenge of these poems, to have us not waste the day, not take for granted that the beauty and pain and joy and sorrow will continue ever on.

Alicia Ostriker is a quintessential American poet in the tradition of Walt Whitman and Muriel Rukeyser. NO HEAVEN is the follow-up to Ostriker's brilliant VOLCANO SEQUENCE (lamentably left off the Pulitzer, National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award lists)--and here once again we find Ostriker writing poems about real people, crucial human experience and the spiritual essence that runs through everything. NO HEAVEN is a brilliant collection that is hard hitting ("Liking It," "Tearing the Poem Up and Eating It," "Elegy before the War,"), tender ("Brooklyn Twilight," "In the Forty-Fifth Year of Marriage"), and humorous ("When we leap, we hang in the air like Nijinsky taking a nap" from "Pickup," ". . .when/that brilliant Jew poet took/The train for the next world/American nirvana/Temporarily went with him" from "Elegy for Allen.") NO HEAVEN contains crucial poems for our misguided times from one of America's (or should I say the world's?) best, bravest, and most eloquent poets.

No Heaven is a terrific book-- just what poetry should be: at once moving, because it touches old and deep knowledge, and new because it opens heart and mind again. Death is always present as real, heightening consciousness. Every poem contains "a piercing glance into the life of things," as Marianne Moore said, a unity of soul and form. Ostriker reveals the horror and sacredness of everyday life by constantly reinventing the words believed to be ordinary, here transformed. Buy this beautiful collection and find yourself in no heaven but on incandescent eternal ephemeral earth -- the place to be human.

Its colorful writing about everyday stuff that is simply not like it used to be. Touches on many aspects of todays changing and regressing ways. Makes you think.

Lee makes you stop and reflect on what it used to be like and what we have lost in our fast pace in todays living. He makes you laugh and cry, the book is excellent

So happy to get ahold of this book. The author put you right back at the scene and brought out lost feelings. Hope to share it with others.

This covers everything you need to know about Naseem Hamed. This book is great for any fan of boxing. You will respect boxing more after you read this book

Naseem Hamed, or Prince Naz, is truely and entertaining, actionous, amazing, creative, stiff and quick figher. He is just like Ali. You're suppose to wip 'em. But for some reason, you just don't. This guy has a big surpries to show to the world!

This book is really a comprehensive semi-biogorophy about one of the world's best boxers.