Pitt Books

This book is a must for anyone who is interested in Slavic epic poetry. Unfortunately, I am unable to read these works in the Serbian. However, the editors have translated beautifully. There is no awkward attempt to catch the rhyme or meter, which so often ruins poetry in translation. Of all the translations of the Serbian epics which I have encountered (and I look for them diligently. . .), this one is the best. The translators' sensitivity to nuance and meaning allows you, the English reader, to experience these works as best as you possibly can without reading Serbian. Highly recommended.

I haven't read this edition, but I have grown up reading these poems in my and their native language. The poems were collected from the oral tradition by a great Serbian ethnographer and linguist Vuk Karadzic who also reformed Serbian spelling system and grammar and wrote first big Serbian Dictionary in 1818. Hence, the expert has chosen the best from the oral tradition that withstood through centuries. Since Karadzic new German, these poems made their way into a German translation first, and many German authors, including Goethe, admired their precise 10-syllable metric, emotions, and vivid depiction of characters. One of the specific literary techniques, persistently used at the beginning of many poems, has a special name --- Slavic Antithesis.

The poems can be compared to big national epic poems as Beowulf taken in their entirety. However, all are independent, and as a boy I used to think of them as good fairy tales. The characters are sometimes capable to do improbable things, and some of the poems have a fairy in them, but good always wins over evil.

I still remember the achievements of Marko Kraljevic (his surname means The Prince) who was able to do amazing things due to his strength, and how he drinks half of his wine and gives the other half to his horse. But he also asks God to forgive him for killing better knight than himself in "Marko Kraljevic and Musa the Robber". The other characters are more earthly, just as their destiny. I remember the courage of Old Vujadin who after being tortured with broken legs and arms refuses to tell where his friends are hidden, even if the torturers take out his eyes. He says: "I didn't say for my arms that were able to break any lance, I didn't say for my legs faster than any horse, I won't say for my lying eyes that forced me to my deeds, watching from the highest mountain on your caravans, full of treasure." Some of the heroes are driven by their love that is utterly unselfish as in "Banovic Strahinja".

These poems w! ere giving me a completely new world when I was a boy. A world of heroes and pride. A world of honesty and truthfullnes. Of course, a world of exaggeration, created by a nation that was suffering four centuries of occupation and desperately needed heroes from the past like Marko Kraljevic. And of course, the world of reality, created by a nation proud enough to resist all these four centuries through rebells like Vujadin, who died for their ideals. Finally, some of the poems are lyric poems and they show us that a folk poet was able to create highly emotional poetry.

Children can find in this book an amazing set of characters similar to the best fairy and hero tales in the world. Scholars can find in this book a lot just as Vuk Karadzic and Goethe did. This book reminds us on almost forgotten values. I hope the translation is good. Highly recommended.

Mekeel McBride is a wonderful poet. Her works are lyrical and generous and immediate. She speaks to the complexity and mystery of life but never ever ponderously. This work, as the title says, is a selection from her previous collections as well as new material, and she just gets better and better. Who else can write a poem about a man who wants to be a redbird -- and have that poem be the best love poem I've seen in a long time.

Praising Mekeel McBride on the New Hampshire Seacoast, especially among poets, is entirely unnecessary. Rarely has a human being been more appropriately attached to a craft. She is famous here as a strong poet and -- such an unbelievably extraordinary thing -- a teacher of strong poets. Here is lean poetry, focussed poetry, powerful narratives well told in shimmering language. And here is the unexpecteed twist, the final flourish that makes short lyrics unfogettable and eludes most of their authors. If McBride ever had the gift of gab that might be deduced from her name, it is clearly bleached out of her by the winter sun and the summer sea. And what is left is truly beautiful, truly human. Most amazing to me: the presence of the ghost of her father in "I Don't Know How," the evocation of her aunt Romaine on driving past "The Foxy Romaine Produce Box," the truly magical story of the mailman who is forbidden to read Westerns between deliveries in "Dreaming Space Awake," and the 80-year-old who finally achieves her unsuccessful childhood attempts to turn herself blue by glutting herself on blueberries in "How Spring Appears This Time of Year in New England." But don't let my taste prejudice you. Here is a well practiced artisan. You are likely to be equally passionate about four very different poems here. But you'll have to read the book first.

The poems in this collection are outstanding. They tackle subjects that many readers, we white ones especially, too often avoid because they are so painful. Derricotte's poetry handles racism in a complex and truthful way, without softening any blows. For me, the poems are less "about racism" than they evoke and inhabit the context of racism in which all people of color must move. This is a powerful and important work by a truly first rate poet.

Bravo to Toi Derricotte on this collection of poems. No other poet I can think of writes so beautifully and movingly on the subject of race. There's a lot of pain beneath the surface of racial relations, but Toi Derricote's words make something of beauty from that pain. Highly recommended.

This is book discusses the foundations of Explanations in ridiculous detail. Virtually all the possible explanation types are documented from E-Type Explanations to Pragmatic Explanations. The 1948 essay by Carl G. Hempel and Paul Oppenheim, "Studies in the Logic of Explanation", which introduced the Deductive-Nomological (D-N) Model on which most work on scientific explanation was based for the following four decades is found in this anthology and is itself worth the money for the book. This essay laid a good foundation for investigation of explanations. The explanations here are used by scientists and also non scientists alike so people who think that scientific explanations are different from common types of explanations will be astounded to find that they too used these types of explanations everyday.

Here's all the essay titles with their respective authors with a few points that they discuss.

1. Introduction - Joseph Pitt

Success of the sciences, the role of explanations is science

2. Studies in the Logic of Explanation - Carl G. Hempel and Paul Oppenheim

Elementary survey of scientific explanations, basic pattern of scientific explanations, logical and empirical conditions for adequacy, explanations in non-physical sciences and motivational and teleological approaches, levels of explanation and Emergence, problems of the concepts of general laws, logical analysis of laws and explanations, definition of law and explanation for a model language, power of systematic theories, explanation for the power of systematic theories, and a Postscript (1964) by Carl G. Hempel

3. Explanations, Predictions, and Laws - Michael Scriven

Explanations as answers to "why" questions, explanations as "more than" descriptions and "essentially similar" to predictions and as sets of true statements and as involving descriptions of what is to be explained, two conditions and summary of problems, distinction between grounds for explanations and explanations themselves, completeness in explanations.

4. Statistical Explanation and Causality - Wesley C. Salmon

Nature of statistical explanation, problems of causal connections, processes, the 'At-At' Theory of Causal Propagation, causal forks and common causes, conjunctive forks, interactive forks, perfect forks, causal structure of the world

5. A Deductive-Nomological Model of Probabilistic Explanation - Peter Railton

Hempel's Inductive-Statistical Model, Richard C. Jeffrey's critique of Hempel's Inductive-Statistical Model, Deductive-Nomological Model of Probabilistic Explanation and objections to it, epistemic relativity and maximal specificity disowned

6. The Pragmatic Theory of Explanation - Bas C. Van Fraassen

Examples and model, contexts and propositions, logic of questions, a Theory of Why Questions, evaluation of answers, presuppositions and relevance

7. Theoretical Explanations - Wilfred Sellars

Simply the focus here is to talk about explanations of "unobservable" and non-empirical evidence like how many atoms decayed in certain amount of time or how many atoms have reacted in a given non-equilibria reaction.

8. Explanatory Unification - Philip Kitcher

Rise and fall of the Covering Law Model, pragmatic issues, Newtonian Theories, reception of Darwinian Evolutionary Theory, asymmetry, irrelevance, and accidental generalizations, spurious unification

9. Explanation and Scientific Understanding - Michael Friedman

Unification of explanation and understanding

10. The Illocutionary Theory of Explanation - Peter Achinstein

Conditions for the act of explaining, what is an explanation, problem of emphasis, the argument view of explanation, propositions construed as explanatory, Ordered Pair View, No Product View, implications for standard theories of explanation

This book is not that long, but the material is very dense. This book will make you think about the foundations of logic and the efficiency of explanations.

For a complete view of the nature of science and theories please read The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation (2nd edition) and The Structure of Scientific Theories.

Theories of Explanation is a fascinating book about the philosophy of science and technology ( S & T), and methodologies for building knowledge and explaining the knowledge building process. While the subject itself is absolutely interesting, the reading is tough, in fact very tough. First, part of the reason is that the book is a collection of papers by different authors, each with a distinct writing. Second, the topical discussions are highly specialized - very deep I should say. Even so, the persistent reader will benefit from the book.

With S & T having become so much a part of everyday life, it is hard to believe that philosophers of S & T still have jobs. Even harder is that scientific knowledge needs an explanation, but that is precisely the point of the book. The central part of the point is that people study science because of the success of science and its technological impact on human life. Yet it is not so clear how to explain what happens. Does technological change lead to scientific change, change in knowledge determine change in science, or are the interactions non-causal? Questions like this one are questions about "the role of explanation" (Chapter 1).

Positivists would assume a strong condition by which knowledge is verifiable explanations. A weak condition has it that knowledge requires only confirmable explanations. Both conditions leave open questions about the truthfulness of verifiable or confirmable explanations. Some philosophers have stepped into this vacuum to define knowledge as simply "true beliefs".

The ten chapters of the book focus on explanation, where explanation, according to the editor of the book, is the "Answer" to the question "Why". Different theories of explanation emerge from this focus: logical explanations, statistical explanations, pragmatic explanations, theoretical explanations, probabilistic explanations, explanations as unifying aids, and the act of explanation. A general agreement is explanation is not the same thing as description. Description = theory + fact, and implies a question. Explanation = description + context, and implies a relative answer. A description is like a formula; two different formulae can give one "answer" as in 2 + 2 = 4 and 8 - 4 = 4, but no matter how vivid the description, without an explanation, the question "Why" has not been answered. In other words all successful explanations are descriptive, but not all successful descriptions are explanatory. This is because the "content" and the "act" of explanation matter.

This is a nice book; reading it requires the reader to hunker down. I had several false starts myself before I read it all. I also decided to keep my copy, just in case.

Amavilah, Author
Modeling Determinants of Income in Embedded Economies
ISBN: 1600210465

A lovely and troubling collection of stories. Kirkus seems bothered by the fact that in many of the stories, there is no tidy resolution -- but isn't that a lot more like real life? (Kirkus probably reads too many books...) In this collection you can really get to know some of the people who you might recognize on the street, or who you already know in passing -- and thus for anyone who is a genuine student of human nature and the human condition, this is a deeply satisfying collection. I had the pleasure of reading Honig's novel Picking Up so was pleased to see that she had published another book and won another prize -- Picking Up, also a prizewinner, is worthy of much wider dissemination and maybe now it will get a second chance.

What a pleasure it is to read the stories that make up Lucy Honig's superb collection. The Truly Needy is the work of a serious, gifted writer who pulls no punches as she takes us into the lives of difficult people driven to define themselves in the American urban landscape. The prose is luminous, the structure tight, and the characters compelling. Check out this book for a provocative and satisfying read.

A remarkable analysis of the links between liberalism and empire. Beautifully-written, it combines erudition and style to investigate a vexed issue.

Burke, Smith, Bentham, Mill, and the Enlightenment play a critical role in how we conceive of the American political predicament, which is why the names still grace undergraduate syllabi. Five to seven page papers are written by eager nineteen-year-olds, and then arguments are forgotten en masse, even as the issues with which these thinkers wrestle remain in play in the form of immigration reform, Haliburton regulation, South American agri-businesses, the task of making moral judgments across profoundly diverse societies, and the American idea of a just war.

Pitts' political project is to show how imperialism and colonialism, while inextricably tied to the Western 19th century political legacy, was a fashion that came into vogue, a system of oppression borne of contingent circumstance rather than a logical, necessary outgrowth of economic and political liberalism.

She shows how Adam Smith's work, while serving as a foundation of economic and political thought, inveighs unambiguously against colonization. Smith decried colonization as an inefficient practice that exists not for profit, generally diffused, but for the vulgar pride of the home-world masses and the material interests of a select group of private company men. Pitts details Smith's nuanced, practical arguments concerning how maintaining colonies serves as an unnecessary drain on the national economy by shunting tax dollars towards colonial military protection. In addition, Smith points out how much easier it is to countenance the immoderate abuses of oppressed laborers, from a distance. Pitts' arguments bring to mind the great shame of how Smith's "invisible hand" has gained so much esteem over the years, but his warnings against imbalanced, rapacious private interests have been lost. Thankfully, Pitts rescues these arguments and places them in the forefront.

She proceeds to discuss Edmund Burke, a fascinating figure and champion of political conservative institutions, who witnessed Indian labor degradation at the hands of the East India Company and went on to try Governor-General Warren Hastings for this malfeasance. Pitts uses the Hastings trial as a metaphor to flesh out Burke's thoughts concerning the confused array of responsibilities that belonged to the violent oppression of foreign labor with the aid of English Government arms; who is at fault/complicit? The trial splays Burke's evolving views on English Imperialism and the limits of government moral responsibility for private international acts.

Pitts then traces the trajectory of imperialism through Bentham, James Mill, and J.S. Mill. All three are attached to the term utilitarianism, but Pitts keys in on how differing accounts of the concept of progress and the ability of individuals to determine their own path to happiness, rather than violent government paternalism as a civilizing force, manifests in their three radically different approaches to the colonial enterprise.

Pitts fiercely blazes through Constant, with energy and aplomb and keen moral sense, aided, of course, by Constant's energy, aplomb and keen moral sense, and ends her treatment of Imperialism with what at first seems a loosely tethered discussion of Tocqueville. At first, I did not believe that her scholarship remained as focused during the beginning of the Tocqueville section, but then Pitts' anecdotal approach to Tocqueville gestalts in her final strokes, allowing a frightening portrait of Tocqueville to emerge. Tocqueville is portrayed as an outstanding scholar, insightful and aware of all of the degradation and oppression required to maintain French colonization of Algeria. He was sympathetic to the plight of the natives and without delusions that colonization civilizes barbarians. Still, Tocqueville baldly argues for colonization for the greater glory of France in this new world where other esteemed powers have colonies, in what amounts to a grand and awful rendition of keeping up with the Jones. Pitts ends this section successfully portraying Tocqueville as deeply humane, perceptive, artistic, and yet still, with both eyes open, severe man, advocating for imperialism. It's haunting.

I have long been a student of the Spanish language, and in my classes time and time again the reading assignments have been all but limited to pieces written by men. Last semester, a group of women at my college undertook an independent study project focusing on short stories written by Latin American women, and we used Voces Femininas as one of our primary texts for the study.

I was very pleased with this book, because it gave a variety of works - poems, short stories, and theatrical pieces. These varied widely in style and content. Further, the authors are not all from the same time period. Perhaps the only common thread is that they are Latin American women authors.

The editor provides historical backgrounds which give some insight into the time frame and life history of the authors, and although these do vary in detail and objectivity, they were useful.

I highly reccomend this book to anyone who is interested in Latin American literature, feminist literature, or both.

This is a great collection of writing by Latin- American women from Spanish-speaking countries. It includes poetry, theater, and one essay (by well-known Chilean writer Isabel Allende), from the earliest colonial period through the most recent outstanding writers. The best-known, to American readers, are doubtless Allende, Angeles Mastretta, and Cristina Peri Rossi. But you will also discover the great 17th-century Mexican nun, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, 19th-cent. Cuban poet Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda; modern Chilean Gabriela Mistral, and stories by Maria Luisa Bom bal, Rosario Castellanos, Luisa Valenzuela, Rosario Ferre (known here for "House on the Lagoon " and "Eccentric Neighborhoods"), and two theater pieces, by Argentine Griselda Gambaro and Lucia Quintero. The editor has prefaced each piece with interesting biographical and literary intros for the author, as well as a bibliography of critical works. >This book is a must for general readers who love Latin American writing, and would also be a good selection for an advanced Spanish lit college class. I'm really enjoying it.

Mackowski's poetry is alive with creative description and detail. She shows nature in a completely different light. Her poems are both surreal and imaginative.

Joanie Mackowski's "The Zoo" has to be one of the best books of poetry I have ever read. She has a unique talent for describing the little things in life in incredably interesting, and different ways. This book will give you an entirly different perspective on things like ants, aquariums, moles, and cafes. This is a beautifully descriptive book, and I would reccomend it to any poetry fan out there.

Very good. Not pseudo-academic/intellectual or pretensious. I think this one may have won some awards; I know the poet has.