The Most Egregiously Diverting Book Review Magazines On-Line

NEW TITLES
Men Without Women
"If you buy it - - - and don't confuse it
with Hemingway's book from 1927 for chrissakes - - -
start at the back and work yourself towards the front,
just like I do with The New Yorker. So I
don't have to plow through all that boring trash
at the beginning."
A Rabble of Dead Money
The Great Crash and the Global Depression:
1929 - 1939
Part I
"Between 1920 and 1933,
15,000 banks, failed, half of them
before 1930, most from wretched practices of your
friendly local banker: too little equity, foolish loans,
expanding too fast. By contrast, in Canada, during
the same period, bank failures
were very rare."
Part II
"Anyone who can dare, after all these years, to try to prove - - -
or worse, even succeed in proving - - - that Prohibition
actually worked; anyone who dares to go into that
fraught territory and survive . . . well let us be the last
to whine over a little occlusive
fiscal language."
Shadows of Survival
"As I sat there in some pain
when the gasoline scalded my scalp, I remember the feeling of
triumph that I can call up to this day looking at the jeering children around me.
'What dummies,' I thought. "Don't they realize that I could not care less
what they are saying? I have triumphed here, I saved my hair,
which is all I care about.'"
¡Manteca!
"It sports a blurb from ALA Booklist.
'¡Manteca!, like its English translation, butter,
will melt delectably in the mind, creating flavors and
nuances to ponder again and again.'
Those of us who lived hard-scrabble lives
on the former lands of the taínos,
know that manteca ain't nothing but
plain old-fashioned white-goo lard."
A Contract with God
"All day the rain poured down
on the Bronx without mercy.
The sewers overflowed and
the waters rose over the curbs
of the street."
The Brother
"Those I play with have
personally decided the game's outcome
long before they sit down at the table.
They've wrapped themselves up so tightly in the desire
to beat me by any means possible that all
I have to do is to put a few links in place,
and the chain that firmly binds them
is complete."
Toxic Exposure
"According to official records
the subjects were 'volunteers' but you know about
volunteerism in the military: he stands in front of you
and asks for volunteers for a program that will
save American lives and he looks at you
and you know you are doomed."
Brief Reviews
Samskakara
Caught
The Murderous History of
Bible Translation
Great Reviews from the Past
Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?
"Poison gas was used more extensively
after the end of WWI than during the conflict.
Examples: The British in Afghanistan (1919) and in Iraq (1920),
the Italians in Libya (1923 - 1924) and in Ethiopia (1935) and
the Spanish in Morocco (1921 - 1927).
In 1920, Winston Churchill said,
I am strongly in favor of using poison gas
against uncivilized tribes."
Hawthorn & Child
"I don't know.
The negotiating guys will arrive.
They'll send in a phone or something.
You can talk with them.
Demand a flight to Cuba. Or a pizza. Whatever ...
Come on Moss. You give me the baby and
I'll tell them you have a gun."
LETTERS
J. S. Bach & the Clinch Mountain Boys
MORE LETTERS
Cataract Operations Gone Bad

ARTICLES
Mekong Delta Blues
"For hours (indeed, days),
on either side of the highway, we pass glowing
green rice paddies; an endless plain of chartreuse neon plush
with rangy, swaying hedges of coco palms, and
raised white tombs scattered over the fields.
'The ancestors,' Tam explains, 'are buried on the property
to watch over and protect it.'"
Mythologies for Modern Times
"The 'X-Men' mythology
combines a miscomprehension of
junior highschool Biology with
the daydreams of a 12-year old."
READINGS
Genghis Khan and His Successors
"Europeans experienced a Renaissance,
literally a rebirth, but it was not
bthe ancient world of Greece and Rome being reborn:
it was the Mongol Empire, picked up, transferred,
and adapted by the Europeans to their own needs
and culture."

Great Readings from the Past
Don Quixote, Sancho Panza and the Ghosts
"In a snuffling tone, he said,
'Sancho, thou seemest to be in great fear.'
'I am so,' answered the squire, 'but, how comes
your worship to perceive my fears now, more than ever?'
'Because, at present, thou smellest more than ever ---
and that not of amber,' replied the knight."

POETRY
Road Metal
"A bricklayer's daughter, she'd grown up hard
As cement - - - never reached 100 pounds,
Lived on potatoes and tea, cut her own hair.
Husband gone, youngest child killed in the street,
She carried a ball peen hammer up her sleeve
On the daily walks she made us take all over town."

Sixties Poem
"Our Woodstock nights, half-a-million thumb-flicked
Bics coaxed to climax by God's thwapping bass,
Hissing soppy Oms against the cloudmass.
A drenched, naked hillside soulless and pure,
Zonked, mud-caked, Yanomamö, immature."

Great Poems from the Past
Visiting the Dead
"If your aunt keeps talking too much, like she
usually does, we'll tell her that we just got
back from the cemetery, & that should shut her up.
She never goes there, & it shows, because
the more you visit the dead the less you have to say."

Toes
"When I was small, I knew them well.
I counted on them up to ten
And put them in my mouth to tell
The larger from the lesser. Then
I loved them better than my ears,
My elbows, adenoids, and heart.
But with the swelling of the years
We drifted, toes and I, apart."