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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Coffee, the Driving Force in History
"In someone else's hands, this would be just another a flapjaw story ---
a book concocted by an agent to sell off to a conglomerate publisher
to cater to the Feeble Travel Tale addict, nodding off in his armchair.
Instead, this has to be the cat's pajamas of all travel sagas."
From Here to Fraternity
"The world of the fraternities is a world where kids who are too different,
or not handsome enough, or who are a bit strange, get brutalised.
Their difference becomes a flag, something that allows
the Greeks to mock the Geeks."
In a boat, moving slowly down the Ganges,
Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer,
For Esmé, with love and squalor.
Nightlife in Shanghai
"Shanhaikwan, it is interesting to note,
has the smallest fleas in China;
they are much prized by collectors,
but I was fortunate enough to secure
three or four fine specimens."
Gone on the Fourth of July
or even in the history of time. He was trying to get Stephen Hawking
to talk about his feelings --- to talk about this astonishing thing
that had happened to his body, and what it did to his psyche."
"When devotees of these experiments hold forth, it is as if
the captains of the Spanish Armada, the Titanic, the Andrea Doria,
the Exxon-Valdez, and the ferry Estonia had all gotten together
to offer advice on piloting."
that the present crises grows out of a peculiar aspect
of government policy from thirty or forty years back."
Guanajuato --- 1925
"To walk through those streets on a bright,
sunny day was like hearing Chopln's music with your eyes.
More than that, it was like being in among the musical notes of Chopin,
stepping in and out between all the notes and musical patterns."
Fritz Zorn
"The shock was great enough to shake me out of my resignation
and to make me at least notice that my life was intolerable.
If it makes any sense at all to speak of cancer as an idea,
then I would have to say that getting cancer was the best idea I ever had."
From "Don Juan" by Lord Byron
The Death of Haidée
"That isle is now all desolate and bare,/
Its dwellings down, its tenants pass'd away;
None but her own and father's grave is there,/
And nothing outward tells of human clay;
Ye could not know where lies a thing so fair,/
No stone is there to show, no tongue to say
What was; no dirge, except the hollow sea's,/
Mourns o'er the beauty of the Cyclades."
"The horses sleep upstairs./
And you can see their ears. Ears win-
k, funny stable. In the morning they go out in pairs:/
amazingly, one pair is white
(but you know that) they look at each other. Nudge."
On The Priests of the Apocalypse
and Hustling
"If the author is not worried about the
pollution in this big 'empty' country of ours,
clearly he does not live in Washington, D.C.
where we have been on red alert for a week
and people with lungs like mine
are not allowed to go outdoors and breathe."
This will lead you back through previous issues of RALPH
(at least as far back as Winter, 1994 - 1995.)
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The Folio
Titles, authors, and publishers
of all books reviewed in RALPH ---
arranged chronologically.
1995 1996 1997 1998
1999 (Early) 1999 (Late)
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