PIT BULL.

By Stephen Geller '62. NewYork: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1967.183 pp. $3.95.

Peter Ledge ran away from his problem in Boston in an attempt honestly to understand himself. In Vermont he became involved with a traitorous waitress and the illegal sport of dog fighting. He learned that pit bulls were superior to their handlers. Relative newcomers, pit bulls, bred to fill the demand for a savage dog able to take punishment and without fear to give it in return, are straightforward, honest, and loyal.

Living with them and training them for the pit, Peter learns to admire their strength, skill, and character. He tries to avoid the traps laid for him by crooked gamblers and to fight his dog honestly.

Vermont and a town named Foley, which suggests that Mr. Geller had drawn on his Dartmouth days, are one thing, but Connecticut is another. There, on estates, rigged games may be played with relative safety and enormously high stakes. Helped by the unfaithfulness of the waitress who is used by his boss to doublecross Peter, he understands clearly that gambling, quick money, cheating are repugnant, and after a manipulated fight where the admirable dog he has trained from a puppy is killed, he repudiates such a life. In losing his pit bull and his money, he gains his own soul.

Though the book is interesting as a character study in a pit world filled with coarse language, violent animals, and vicious human beings, the author attempts to expand his understanding of them and employ the book as a symbolic commentary upon the present-day United States. "The dog-fight," he writes, "is, of course, a metaphor for the inherent violence of America, which is not only manifested in the rapacious relationship we have with the land itself, but also in the odd ethnic-class structure. It is a peculiarly American fascism with Starkey [Peter's boss] as its prototype."

A Baker Library catalogue entry specialistMiss McKee has been the owner of akennel in Canaan, N. H., for 38 years.