Issue #288
www.ralphmag.org/JK/indexJK.html
Mid-Summer 2017

Title	Author	Publisher	Subject
J. S. Bach & the Clinch Mountain Boys Cataract Operations Gone Bad	The Readers of RALPH	[Letters]	Correspondence with the Magazine Concerning Previous Reviews, Articles, Poems, Readings, and Letters to RALPH
A Marriage of Pix & Texts	The Editors of RALPH	[List]	A Dozen or So Book Reviews Absolutely Loaded with Drawings, Pictures, Cuts and Illustrations
Men Without Women Stories	Haruki Murakami	(Alfred A. Knopf)	A Collection of a Few Shaggy Dog Murakami's Getting Better & Better as We Near the End
A Rabble of Dead Money The Great Crash and the Global Depression: 1929 - 1939	Charles R. Morris	(PublicAffairs)	All the Things You Wouldn't Believe about the Big D - - - Including the Fact, gag, that Prohibition Worked
Shadows of Survival* A Child's Memoir of the Warsaw Ghetto	Kristine Keese	(Academic Studies Press)	The Trauma of Living in Warsaw During WWII - - - Ameliorated with Memories of a Child's Fantasies and Lies
¡Manteca! An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets	Melissa Castillo-Garsow Editor	(Arte Público)	400 pages, 200+ poems, 40 poets - - - bursting with the music and art and anger of those from the taíno edge
Will Eisner: A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories	Scott McCloud, Introduction	(W. W. Norton)	An astonishingly bitter graphic novel - - - one of the first - - - growing out of the desolation of the 1940s Bronx
The Brother**	Rein Raud Adam Cullen, Translator	(Open Letter)	Laila comes back to the Villa, is robbed of it and her monies . . . until Brother comes as an ancient god to save her (mysteriously)
Toxic Exposures Mustard Gas and the Health Consequences of World War II in the United States	Susan L. Smith	(Rutgers University Press)	No WWII Victims of Mustard Gas? Smith claims there were Over 60,000 soldiers damaged, physically and mentally, by Army experiments
First Stop in the New World[S] Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century	David Lida	(Riverhead Books)	A fairly tawdry visit to Mexico City two decades ago.
Samskakara[B] A Rite for a Dead Man	U. R. Ananthamurthy	(NYRB Books)	Praneschacharya is a respected village elder and has been charged with finding the way to bury the village heretic.
Caught[B]	Henry Green	(New York Review Books)	One of the writings of the aristocratic English novelist Henry Green whose real name was Henry Yorke.
The Murderous History of Bible Translation[B] Power, Conflict, and the Quest for Meaning	Harry Freedman	(Bloomsbury)	One of the first printers of The Bible, William Tyndale, was imprisoned then strangled and burned at the stake. Bible producers have it a little easier now.
Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?[G] The Transformation of Modern Europe	James J. Sheehan	(Houghton Mifflin)	The thesis is that the "military horrors of WWI and WWII were so startlingly awful" that when the United States and Russia squared off in 1947, "the Europeans were able to give up military adventurism."
Hawthorn & Child[G]	Keith Ridgway	(New Directions)	Very odd: "Child is what we might call "normal." Maybe. Hawthorn? Definitely different. Gay. Given to fits of crying. Sometimes can't seem to tell the difference between group sex and breaking up demonstrations with his nightstick."
The Mekong Delta Blues Part I	Douglas Cruickshank	[Article]	Forced to spend a month free in Vietnam several years ago, our brave traveller does what most the people around him are doing: nothing.
Mythologies for Modern Times	Dr. Phage	[Article]	"The films mostly consist of its protagonists destroying whole planets, except when they are disguising themselves as a firetruck, a Volkwagen Beatle, or a Chevrolet Silverado pickup."
Genghis Khan and His Successors	Jack Weatherford	[Reading]	"A cracker-jack biography of Temujin - - - who became known as Genghis Khan - - - his successors and the vast empire they created."
Don Quixote Sancho Panza and the Ghosts	Miguel De Cervantes Tobias Smollett, Translator	[Reading]	"About this time, whether it was owing to the coolness of the morning that approached, or to his having supped upon something that was laxative; or, which is more probable, to the operation of nature --- Sancho was seized with an inclination and desire of doing that which could not be performed by proxy."
Road Metal	Timothy McBride	[Poem]	"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, Crossing the river and the canal, circling the miles Of Eastman Kodak's smokestacks, through the invisible Hops-scented cloud of the Genesee Brewery"
Sixties Sonnet	Michael Waters	[Poem]	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. I forgive Sly and the Family Stone. I slept through Santana, dreaming future Exes who might love me despite my rage. I have grown lonesome in my afflictions.
Two Visits in One Day	Hal Sirowitz	[Poem]	"We're going to the cemetery to visit some dead relatives, Mother said, & on the way back we'll stop over at your aunt's house. It's good practice to mix the living with the dead. Otherwise, we'd end up either being bored at the cemetery, or if we stayed too long at her house, we'd wish that she was dead.
Toes	John Updike	[Poem]	I saw my toes the other day. I hadn't looked at them for months. Indeed, they might have passed away. And yet they were my best friends once. 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.