Pensive Pauses is the fourth volume of Joseph Mileck's poems and epigrams. It encompasses culture, religion, philosophy, psychology, politics, and personal recollections, and offers its readers a feast of wisdom, wit, beauty, and biting social commentary. The some 3000 epigrams and some 85 poems of Pensive Pauses are both attractive and thought-provoking, and both timely and timeless.

These essayistic ventures, like the traditional American essay, are uninhibited in their range of interests. The general condition humaine, life and death and peace and war, attracts its fair share of attention, as does the political world, democracy, autocracy and imperialism. Matters philosophical, psychological, religious, scientific and economic provide plentiful fodder for discussion, and America's cultural/social world-its government and sundry institutions, its medical care, education and prisons, and its age of electronics-is ready matter for chronic studied comment. And current...