FIFTEEN STARS
As we assemble our
General Index
we award stars to
books that the editors
deem of "especial merit."
From the last ten issues of RALPH
here are those we favored the most

NEW TITLES
More Ghost Towns of Texas
"Where all those people
danced their dance and sang their songs,
there are now nothing but
'ruined building foundations, and a cemetery.'
And even the railroad
that made possible for the town to die
is, too, dead."

Caliban's Shore
The Wreck of the "Grosvenor"
And the Strange Fate of Her Survivors
"She was bathed in
the contents of a cow's gall bladder,
so that her family should be blessed with cattle,
and after a feast on the rest of the animal
she was delivered by a delegation
to the umzi of her new husband."

Two from the J. Paul Getty Museum
Paul Strand
"What could you or I
ever find to say about
someone who spent sixty years
traveling about, clicking here and there,
learning his art from the likes of
Lewis W. Hine and Alfred Stieglitz,
hanging out with artists like
John Marin and Georgia O'Keefe?"
Edward Weston
"The cover is a shot of
two seashells, nesting sensually together.
If I didn't know better,
I would be thinking that Weston
was turning crustaceans into
a sex-show."

Snowstruck
"One of the worst disasters
took place in 1916:
not in the Swiss alps,
not in the Western United States, not in Alaska ---
but in the trenches of WWI. On December 12 and 13:
in just forty-eight hours,
six thousand soldiers
died in avalanches."

Pushing the Limits
"It's a clear warning:
whenever you hear a civil engineer
mouthing the not-so-civil word tame,
know that it's time to
batten the hatches and
head for the hills."