REVIEWS
Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music
"I have just recently bought a toy cellular phone which plays the big theme
from the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth when you press the # key.
Pressing other keys generate rings, dings, beeps, assorted tones, and even
a little gremlin voice which says G'bye and hangs up.
I use my toy cellphone on the bus when all the other passengers receive calls
on their real cellphones, probably from each other."

Singing Lessons
"If you want to give yourself some Judy Collins overload,
you can put Amazing Grace on your player,
and get down on your knees, in the Oval Office,
with The Prez. (Hillary's out of town.)"

Great Reviews of the Past
A Field Guide to American Windmills
"We have names like The Dandy, Everlasting, Favorite,
Boss Vaneless, Sandwich-Perkins, Fouk's Accelerating Air Motor,
Parson's Colorado Wind Engine, The Iron Screw,
and Aquarius the Water Bearer."

BRIEF REVIEWS
RALPH'S Top Ten Books of the Season,
Warm Smiles from Cold Mountain, and
The Art of Bill Traylor

THE WEEKLY RALPH
Beautiful Summer at Camp Alton
"In my five years at Camp Alton, I grappled with the question
as to how Hitler could have exterminated the Jews of Europe,
when Jews in America could outdo the Hitler jüngen
with Camp Alton. "

READINGS
Free Fall
"Philip was from outside, from the villas.
He was pale, physically an extreme coward
and he seemed to us to have a mind
like a damp box of matches."

Joseph Stalin and the New Russian Monarchy
Part I
"In many ways Stalin, tiny, cautious, insecure, cruel,
nocturnal and endlessly suspicious, seems a figure out of
Suctonius' Lives of the Caesars rather than out of modern politics. "
Part II
"The U.S.S.R. ceased to be a society which
imprisoned and killed its citizens on a uniquely massive scale.
Indeed, by the 1980s it had a distinctly smaller proportion of its inhabitants
in jail than the U.S.A. (268 prisoners per 100,000 population against 426 per 100,000, in the U.S.A.)."