First Light:
Sojourns with People of the Outer Hebrides, the Sierra Madre, the Himalayas, and Other Remote Places
Ethan Hubbard
(Chelsea Green)
If you ever entertained thoughts that the photograph is non-judgmental --- free of editorializing --- let this volume be a lesson to you. Never has there been a more complete collection of happy, smiling, friendly, laughing, winsome, thoughtful, strong-backed natives: not a booger or egg-eye in the bunch.

A Chair for Elija
Menke Katz
(The Smith)
Like I. B. Singer, Menke Katz has a whole zoo of beasts, birds, sea monsters, and Old Testament figures that crawl, swim, fly, and rage through his verse.

A Collection of Classic Southern Humor, II
George W. Koon, Editor
(Peachtree)
Goering said that when he heard the word "culture," he reached for his gun. We have the same response to those books labelled "humor" and "classic." With this one, our instincts are right.

End of Empire
Brian Lapping
(St. Martins)
End of Empire, which came out of the television series on Granada Television, in England. is the best substitute for a lousy education we could imagine. Ten British colonies are dealt with --- their history, their independence, their present and future --- described with care and good writing.

Sound-Shadows of the New World
Ved Mehta
(Norton)
This is chronicle of his life at the Arkansas School for the Blind forty-five years ago; and if you think you have culture shock when you go to, say, Cleveland --- imagine what it would be like journeying from the Hindu town of Simi, India, to Little Rock in 1949.

The Golden Donors:
A New Anatony of The Great Foundations
Waldemar Nielsen
(Dutton)
Nielsen is a lucid writer, and his descriptions of founding and operation of the thirty-six organizations listed here (all of them with assets of more than $250,000,000) is enough to make a grown man cry.

An Illustrated Price Guide To Non-Paper Sports Collectibles
Ted Hake and Roger Steckler
(Hake's Press)
Our favorites are the "Wheaties Beavers Knot Hole Gang" from the 30s, Ali's "Float Like A Butterfly/Sting Like a Bee," "Phooey to Boston" (with an Indian lad holding his nose), and an ancient one from three-quarters of a century ago that says First Base: I am at the bat for the Dispatch & Pioneer Press.

World Poetry
"Four poems in Urdu, two in Marathi, three in Hindi, three in Bengali, one in Tamil, among others. Whew."

The Strange Life of Sumner Welles
"He was once described by Washington columnists Alsop and Kintner as a tall, powerfully-built, beautifully tailored man with the glacial manner, and an expression which suggests that a morsel of bad fish has somehow or other lodged itself in his moustache."

Lust in the Library Stacks
"His Dewey Decimal Classification system had little or nothing to do with classification, decimals, or deweys, but rather came about because of his interest in Victorian Ladies and their bustles."

Picture Mexico City
"Ten kids with ten cameras, strolling everywhere, taking pictures of their families, and the local drunks, and the local iglesia, and the dogs, and the gangs, and the graffiti-filled walls, and the street clowns."

Donkeys and Dead Worlds
"All these dead suns...fragments of dead worlds, shattered and exploded, old moons, flawed and cankered, crusts, sores, blotches, cold lupus, devouring leprosy, sanies, and that last drop of pearl-like light, the purest of all, sweating at the highest point of the firmament and about to fall...is not a tear nor a dewdrop, but a drop of pus."

Kiss My (Left) Foot
"When a Celestial takes into his hand a woman's foot, especially if it is very small, the effect upon him is precisely the same as is provoked in a European by a young and firm bosom."

The Day Friedrich Nietsche Went Crazy
"Friedrich was singing --- enunciating clearly, though when he talked he used to stutter --- he was singing a poem which was unknown to us, and it was his latest poem, Venice. I don't like Friedrich's compositions. They're mediocre. But this song...well, by God, it was sublime."

The New World in 1787
"The seed ticks made life miserable in summer, and the bedbugs which Virginia called chinches. With Southerners the drinking of spirituous liquors was a delightful --- and frequent --- ceremony which involved extraordinary mixtures: mint sling, pumpkin flip, bumbo, apple toddy."

The Year They Tried to Censor The Deputy
"Hell's fire, I figured, another, longer telegram might further set astir the journalistic duck ponds of Manhattan. (I am a firm believer in telegrams; Deliver, do not phone, is a most effective creed; few among us are jaded enough not to take notice of the flat-chested yellow carrier pigeon from Western Union.)"

The Dying of a Child
"Little children seem to age in a few hours. One sees a heedless, careless, child become all at once wide-awake, high-strung, alert to the matter in hand, and this is, breathing."

Three from World Poetry
"Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy:
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day."

Two By Marlene Joyce Pearson
"I remember the toad the preacher cast out of that sixteen-year old girl. There was a picture of it in a jar and for six dollars you could send for a record of its cries and an eight by ten glossy."

A Sonnet to Helen
"And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face among a crowd of stars."

What Lord Keynes called Woodrow Wilson
And --- a reviewer tell us what kind of books he is looking for: "Don't send anything about UFOs or Angels."

Lip Service
M. J. Rose
(Lady Chatterley's Library)
If you are one of those people who are goes gaga over anonymous voices on the telephone, let your fingers do the walking to the nearest Sex line, which will give you --- we suspect --- a bit bigger bang for the buck than Lip Service.

Reflections
Carol E Parrish-Harra
Edited by Maggie Webb-Adams
(Sparrow Hawk)
Sometimes, we think if we have to read yet another neo-Buddhist "let-me-comfort-you on-your-journey" tome we'll scream. Reflections is an excellent example --- an overweening mix of Lao T'se, the I Ching, Dr. Joyce Brothers, and Baba Boo Bubby.

A Fine Day For A Middle-Class Marriage
Marlene Joyce Pearson
(Red Hen)
Her words reflect a childhood filled with the harsh world of Bible and poverty and beatings and love-hunger --- but all leavened (as it always must be) with a wry sense of the ridiculousness. She defines life as "a bowling alley."

Writing in Disguise
Academic Life in Subordination
Terry Caesar
(Ohio)
Writing in Disguise comes across as no more nor less than an extended whine. It's very ivy-league, all very elevated --- with appropriate detail, structure, and language --- but it's a whine, just the same.

The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture
Daniel Harris
(Hyperion)
His thesis is that, with the business world recognizing the immense spending power of gays, the old customs and rituals are disappearing, "...our involvement with the arts and camp, our highly mannered style of humor..." is threatened with extinction.

Chaplin: His Life And Art
David Robinson
(McGraw-Hill)
According to "Variety," Chaplin is a "labor of love" --- but it is also a labor to read. Chaplin's life, like the lives of all of us, was complex and tangled --- more so, because he was The First Beatle, a man who was projected, by the media, into the hearts and minds of millions of people.

Classics Revisited
Kenneth Rexroth
(New Directions)
Sixty of the classics, from Gilgamesh to the plays of Chekhov. And it's a humdinger. For example, this on "The Canterbury Tales:" Like a dream told to a psychoanalyst, each Tale reveals the deepest complexities of character. The Tales judge the narrators...

The Eternal Legacy
An Introduction to The Canonical Literature Of Buddhism
Maha Sthavira Sangharakshita
(Tharpa)
It's rough seas here for those who are interested in Buddhism of a lower level. Many obscure tracts with names like Patisambhida-magga and Sariputra- abhidharma-sastra bend the eye and bother the ear.

Kane
Robert Peters
(Unicorn)
Peters wants us to see, taste, and smell, say, the chopping off of blackened feet, the smell of gangrene...We'd suggest there are probably more pleasant ways to idle away a summer's eve than performing (or reading about) such chill capers.

In The Orchard
Charles W. Pratt
(Tidal)
Pratt is one of those country poets who tells us more than we would want to know about stars, and apples, and wild blueberries; there are daisies in such profusion that those of us who abjure country living wonder "Why Bother?"

Reaching Up, Reaching Out For What You Want
Leland Pulley
(Stewardship)
Pulley wants us to REACH FOR THE BETTER THINGS IN LIFE, but he keeps dragging in the old saws, shouting them in capital letters, like USE YOUR MIND MORE FULLY, or GUARD YOUR HEALTH, or MAKE GOOD DECISIONS.