Issue #189
www.ralphmag.org/FO/indexFO.html
Mid-Summer 2009
Title Author Publisher Subject
Conquering Gotham
A Gilded Age Epic:
The Construction of Penn Station and Its Tunnels
Jill Jonnes (Viking) The Massive Work of
Connecting Manhattan to
the South and West
Out of Your Mind[G]
Essential Listening from the
Alan Watts Audio Workshop
Alan Watts (Sounds True) A Selection of Tapes Broadcast by
The 1950s Expert on Eastern Mysticism
Backwoods
The Bees Are Inside
Rebecca Foust [Poetry] Two Poems of the Reality of Appalachian Folk Life
Cutting the Stone Abraham Verghese (Alfred A. Knopf) On Being a Doctor in Ethiopia ---
and New York City
DADA
Alan Furst
Dynamite
Joseph McCarthy
Bipolar Forceps
Franka
Rubi Bra
Tattoo Machines
The Readers of RALPH [Letters] Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
The Pen / O. Henry
Prize Stories 2009
Laura Furman,
Editor
(Anchor Books) Twenty Short Stories
Looking for the Evental
(In an Iraqi Field Hospital)
Robert Earle [Reading] French Philosophy in Baghdad, 2004
Retreat
A Story of 1918
Charles R. Benstead (The University of South Carolina Press) The Historical Novel of an
Anglican Padre on the Front Lines in 1918
Songs of Love, Moon & Wind
Poems from the Chinese
Kenneth Rexroth,
Translator
(New Directions) Eighty Classic Chinese Poems
Legend of
A Suicide
David Vann (University of Massachusetts Press) A Boy and His Father
Moored on an Alaskan Island
Sex Work and the City
The Social Geography of
Health and Safety in Tijuana, Mexico
Yasmina Katsulis (University of Texas) 251 Case Studies of Sex
Workers on the Border
*Indicates a Book of Especial Merit
[G] = Great Reviews of the Past


Issue #190
www.ralphmag.org/FP/indexFP.html
Late Mid-Summer 2009
Title Author Publisher Subject
Top Hits
The Editors [List] The Most Popular Articles,
Reviews, and Readings on RALPH
The Attic, the House William Matthews [Poem] Poem about Memories
Birdsong by the Seasons*
A Year of Listening to Birds
Donald Kroodsma (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) An Enthusiastic Compilation of Forty-eight Birdsongs --- Complete with CDs
Lanterns on the Prairie
The Blackfeet Photographs of Walter McClintock
Steven L. Grafe, Editor (University of Oklahoma) Ninety Original Plates of the Blackfeet Indians from the 1900s
Jacob Bronowski and
"Is You Is Or
Is You Ain't My Baby?"
Jacob Bronowski [Article] The Eminent Scientist's Memories
of Visiting Nagasaki in Fall 1945
Travels with My Chicken[G]
A Man and His Companion
Take to the Road
Martin Gurdon (Lyons Press) Traveling About England with a Chicken
(and a Book About Traveling with Chickens)
Flying Across America
The Airline Passenger Experience
Daniel L. Ruse (University of Oklahoma Press) A Pictorial History of Air Travel Across America
Guanajuato, Mexico Everett Gee Jackson [Reading] Celebrations and Colors in an Old Colonial City
Category 5
The 1935 Labor Day Hurricane
Thomas Neil Knowles (University Press of Florida) Memories of the Storm that Took almost 500 Lives
Nights in the Pink Motel*
An American Strategist's
Pursuit of Peace in Iraq
Robert Earle (Naval Institute Press) Working for John Negroponte
in Iraq, in 2004
With an Iron Pen
Twenty Years of
Hebrew Protest Poetry
Tal Nitzan, Rachel Tzvia Back, Editors (Excelsior / State University of New York) Eighty-eight Protest Poems
from Jewish Writers
"Song of Praise" Tamir Greenberg [Poem] Modern Hebrew Protest Poetry
Cosmetic Opportunities at RALPH
Carl Jung
Laying on Arms
The Love of Two Queens
The Readers of RALPH [Letters] Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
"Psychic Healers" Kathy Evans [Poem] Contemporary Poetry
About Psychotherapy
Samuel Johnson
And the Life of Reading
Robert DeMaria, Jr. (Johns Hopkins) The Readings of the Great
English Writer and Essayist
My Secret Delight Mary F. K. Fisher [Reading] Overlooking the Whores
Eating Slices of Carmelized Tangerines
Don't Leave Hungry
Fifty Years of
Southern Poetry Review
James Smith, Editor (University of Arkansas Press) Over Two Hundred Poems
from the 1950s to Now
*Indicates a Book of Especial Merit
[G] = Great Reviews of the Past


Issue #191
www.ralphmag.org/FQ/indexFQ.html
Very Late Summer 2009
Title Author Publisher Subject
Problems with Cataract Operations
H. G. Wells
The Time Machine
Pets
Love Letters from Melissa
Letters We Never Finished Reading
The Readers of RALPH [Letters] Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
All-American Poem* Matthew Dickman (American Poetry Review) Over Thirty Narrative Poems
About American and America
(and Penguins)
Paris Spleen
Little Poems in Prose
Charles Baudelaire (Wesleyan) A Collection of Poems about Sordid,
Occasionally Beautiful, Paris
Circumcision[G]
A History of the World's
Most Controversial Surgery
David L. Gollaher (Basic Books) The Awful Truth
About the First Cut
Idle Thoughts on
Jerome K. Jerome
A 150th Anniversary Celebration
Jeremy Nichols, Editor (The Jerome K. Jerome Society) Essays, Biography and Readings from
the Author of Three Men in a Boat
Death by Leisure
A Cautionary Tale
Chris Ayres (Grove Press) The Worst of L.A. from the Pen
of a Fictional Newsman
Naked Sybil Lockhart [Reading] The Unsettling Sight of a Mother with Alzheimer's
The Headpots of Northeast Arkansas and
Southern Pemiscot County, Missouri
James F. Cherry (University of Arkansas) An Intensive Study of Strange Artifacts
from Missouri and Arkansas
Beyond Forgetting
Poetry and Prose about
Alzheimer's Disease
Holly J. Hughes, Editor (Kent State University Press) A Hundred Writers on
Their Memories of
the Debilitating Disease
Harker's One Room Schoolhouses
Visions of an Iowa Icon
Michael P. Harker
Photographer
(University of Iowa Press) Almost 100 Photographs of
Old Schools in Iowa
The Disabled:
Such Interesting People
Hugh Gregory Gallagher [Article] Sudden Changes in
the Disabled Experience
"Confessions of a
teenage drama queen"
D. A. Powell [Poem] Modern American Poetry
Living in the
Face of Death
The Tibetan Tradition
Glenn H. Mullen (Snow Lion) Readings on the Tibetan
Philosophy of Death
Vanishing* Candida Lawrence (Unbridled Books) Seventeen Essays and Stories on
the Art of Disappearing
"The World Is Too Huge to Grasp" Matthew Dickman [Poem] Contemporary American Poetry
A Conversation
With an Old Man
Lama Gungtang Konchok Dronme [Reading] The Tibetan View of
Getting Old
*Indicates a Book of Especial Merit
[G] = Great Reviews of the Past


Issue #192
www.ralphmag.org/FR/indexFR.html
Early Fall 2009
Title Author Publisher Subject
Waco
Vladimir Nabokov
The American Eagle
Jerome K. Jerome
Three Men in a Boat
Love Letters from the Bird Girl
Letters We Never Finished Reading
The Readers of RALPH [Letters] Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
Airborne[G]
The New Dance Photography
of Lois Greenfield
Designed by William A. Ewing (Chronicle Books) In-the-Air Photographs of Dancers
The Evening Light Anna Akhmatova [Poem] Early Twentieth Century Love Poem
Letter to D
A Love Story
André Gorz (Polity) A Love Letter to Gorz's
Wife of Fifty-Eight Years
Bonk
The Curious Coupling of
Science and Sex
Mary Roach (Norton) An Extended Study of You-Know-What
Tics, Botox Shots, and
A Broken Heart
Carlos Amantea [Article] Some Thoughts about Doctors,
Botox, and Growing Ancient
Busted
Life Inside the
Great Mortgage Meltdown
Edmund L. Andrews (Norton) A Times Reporter Takes on
America's Financial Plight
(and His Own Mortgage)
Les Cloches Guillaume Apollinaire [Poem] Love and the Village
Homer & Langley
A Novel
E. L. Doctorow (Random House) A New Take on the
Two Brothers Who Died in
Their Castle of Junk in New York City
Crow Planet*
Essential Wisdom from
The Urban Wilderness
Lyanda Lynn Haupt (Little, Brown) The Smart Black Birds
Who Will Probably Outlive Us
Deaf American Poetry
An Anthology
John Lee Clark, Editor (Gallaudet University) A Hundred Poems from Two Hundred Years
Ghosts* César Aira (New Directions) Strange Doings in an Argentine Condo (Under Construction)
Soul Survivor
The Reincarnation of a World
War II Fighter Pilot
Bruce and Andrea Leininger (Grand Central) A Two-Year-Old Wakes Up with
Nightmares from Sixty-Five Years Ago
Rimbaud
The Double Life of a Rebel
Edmund White (Atlas & Co.) Poetic Histrionics from the
Depths of 1860s Montmartre
The Suicide Index
Putting My Father's Death in Order
Joan Wickersham (Mariner) A Disquisition on the
Suffering of Survivors of Suicide
Grilled Cheese Sandwiches
(And Existentialism)
Frank McCourt [Reading] An Immigrant Student at NYU
Taking Care
Of the Very Old
Candida Lawrence [Reading] Her Father and Mother in their Eighties
*Indicates a Book of Especial Merit
[G] = Great Reviews of the Past


Issue #193
www.ralphmag.org/FS/indexFS.html
Mid-Fall 2009
Title Author Publisher Subject
Michelangelo
Cottage Water Systems
Mutation of the Microcondrya Genetic Order
Fashion Belts
Water Closets
Letters We Never Finished Reading
The Readers of RALPH [Letters] Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
Thirteen Stars The Editors of RALPH [List] The Best Books from
The First Half of 2009
Codes of Misconduct
Prostitution in Colonial Bombay
Ashwini Tambe (University of Minnesota) A study of prostitution in
Bombay a hundred years ago
Desert and Forest
The Exploration of Abyssinian Danaskil
L. M. Nesbitt [Reading] Across the Danakils
by Foot and by Donkey
Eleven Minutes Late
A Train Journey to the Soul of Britain
Matthew Engel (Macmillan) In Love (and en Route)
With the Trains of England
The Waitress Was New Dominique Fabre (Archipelago Books) The Day-to-Day of a
French Café Waiter
Beg, Borrow, Steal
A Writer's Life
Michael Greenberg (Other Books) A Collection of Essays from the TLS
Madness
A Bipolar Life
Marya Hornbacher (Mariner) Going Bonkers (Repeatedly) ---
by the Author of Wasted
Does She Have a Plan? Marya Hornbacher [Reading] A Typical Visit to the ER
by the Author of the Above
First Stop in the New World
Mexico City, the Capital
of the 21st Century
David Lida (Riverhead Books) A Jaded Picture of
Modern-Day Mexico City
In Other Rooms,
Other Wonders
Daniyal Mueenuddin (Norton) Eight Stories from Contemporary Pakistan
The People's Pugilist:
Carl Sandburg
Matthias Regan (Charles H. Kerr) Essays from Sandburg's
Radical Chicago Days
Chronicle of the
Time of Troubles
Dr. Phage [Article] The Result of Three Successive Nights of
Watching Film Epics about
Russia in the 1600s.
Conquest of the Useless*
Reflections from the Making of "Fitzcarraldo"
Werner Herzog (Ecco) Going into the Peruvian Rain Forest
to Make a Back-Breaking Movie about
Moving a Boat
Why They Do It Cheryl Savageau [Poem] Poem about Certain Habits
The American People
In World War II[G]
David M. Kennedy (Oxford) A Lively, Startling Reprise of America
in the Second World War
*Indicates a Book of Especial Merit
[G] = Great Reviews of the Past


Issue #194
www.ralphmag.org/FT/indexFT.html
Late Fall 2009
Title Author Publisher Subject
Dada
Sarbola
The Dung Beetle
Life from Many Sides
The Ice Cream Cart
Godwill
Letters We Never Finished Reading
The Readers of RALPH [Letters] Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
At the Ends of the Earth[G]
A History of the Polar Regions
Kieran Mulvaney (Island/Shearwater) Exploration of those Far-Off Lands
As Named by Aristotle
Art
Over 2,500 Works from
Cave to Contemporary
Foreword by Ross King (DK) Dali, Picasso, Soutine,
Cave Painting, the Renaissance, et al.
Calvin Littlejohn
Portrait of a Community
In Black and White
Bob Ray Sanders (TCU) The Ft. Worth Photographer Remembered
Delta Flight 659 Denise Duhamel [Poem] A Tribute to Sean Penn
Children in Stone e. e. cummings [Poem] "children singing in stone"
The Elephant Keeper Christopher Nicholson (Morrow) A Boy and his Elephant in
18th Century England
The Unlikely Disciple
A Sinner's Semester at
America's Holiest University
Kevin Roose (Grand Central) The Thrill of Going from
Brown U. to Liberty U. ---
for a Semester
The Forsaken
An American Tragedy
in Stalin's Russia
Tim Tzouliadis (Penguin) The Fate of Thousands of
Idealistic Americans in Depression-Era
Soviet Russia
The Beauty (and Wonder)
(And Fatality) of Motorcycles
Paul Nickel [Article] On Being Told that a Friend's Son
(Aged Thirty-Nine) Is Going to
Buy His First Motorcycle
Notes from
No Man's Land
American Essays
Eula Biss (Graywolf Press) Essays on Racial Prejudice,
the Legacy of Slavery,
Gringos in Mexico,
and Fears about Fear
Nobody Move
A Novel
Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Murder and Mayhem in Bakersfield
Stumbling Toward
Enlightenment
Geri Larkin (Celestial Arts) A New Edition of the
Classic Book of Zen for the Masses
The Twin* Gerbrand Bakker (Archipelago Books) A Strange and Wonderful Novel
about Twins and Love
The Ulitskaya-
Khodorkovsky
Correspondence
Lyudmila Ulitskaya [Reading] Correspondence between
Lyudmila Ulitskaya and
Mikhail Khodorkovsky
Water, Inc.
Notes for a new
campaign, WATER
Mei Chin [Reading] Deciding if Water is
Good for You (or Not)
Water* John Knechtel, Editor (MIT Press) Various Eccentric Essays on Aitch-Two-Owe
*Indicates a Book of Especial Merit
[G] = Great Reviews of the Past


Issue #195
www.ralphmag.org/FU/indexFU.html
Very Late Fall 2009
Title Author Publisher Subject
Ram Dass' Still Here
Pictures of Christ
Pet Supplies
Miss Josephine
Letters We Never Finished Reading:
Immunity Agent
The Readers of RALPH [Letters] Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
The Why of Whys
The Editors [List] The Most Popular
Paradoxes-of-the-Month
The Ice Palace That Melted Away:[G]
How Good Design Enhances Our Lives
Bill Stumpf (Minnesota) Creative Planning for Cities
(and People, and Food)
Ninety-Six-Year-Old Estonian Jim Harrison [Poem] A Flight of Poetic Fantasy
Ichetucknee: Sacred Waters Steven Earl (University Press of Florida) The Life (and Death) of a River
in Photographs
In Search of Small Gods Jim Harrison (Copper Canyon) Poems of Love and Passion and
Bare Bottoms on Television
Fried Frogs and
Burnt-Out Telex Machines
Werner Herzog [Reading] Notes Kept by
the Director of Fitzcarraldo
The Humbling Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) Another Rare Tale
of the Very Old in Love
Ginko Tree[G] Tom Crawford Poems Love in Korea
My Little War Louis Paul Boon (Dalkey Archive) Snippets of Recollections of
WWII in Belgium
Sarbola[G] John Beowulf (Trafford Publishing) Passion over the Petri Plates
Essays Wallace Shawn (Haymarket Books) Fifteen Narratives on "Reality"
and on the "Dream-World."
Siamese Stig Sæterbakken (Dalkey Archive) An Old Couple Enmeshed in Each Other
All That Work and
Still No Boys*
Kathryn Ma (University of Iowa Press) Ten Stories about the
Chinese-American Experience
Early Stone Houses
of Kentucky
Carolyn Murray-Wooley (University Press of Kentucky) Pictures (and Histories) of
455 Stone Houses
Everyday
Survival:
Why Smart People
Do Stupid Things
Laurence Gonzales (Norton) Fractals, Entropy, "the Heat Ladder,"
Odysseus and the Mexican Revolution
Vice Versa Dr. Phage [Article] Adventures in Used-Car Land
The Last Resort
A Memoir of Zimbabwe
Douglas Rogers (Harmony) Survival of a Post-Colonial Family
in Former Rhodesia
*Indicates a Book of Especial Merit
[G] = Great Reviews of the Past


Issue #196
www.ralphmag.org/FV/indexFV.html
Early Winter 2009
Our Fifteenth Year
Title Author Publisher Subject
Boo Napoleon
San Diego
Profane Pix
Warmly Huggs
Ice Cream Carts
Non-Stick Bipolar
Forceps and Bi-Clams
The Readers of RALPH [Letters] Correspondence with the Magazine
Concerning Previous
Reviews, Articles,
Poems, Readings, and
Letters to RALPH
The Day We Found the Universe Marcia Bartusiak (Pantheon) The Heroes (and Unheroes) of the World of Physics, Astronomy, and Astrophysics
Dorothea Lange
A Life Beyond Limits
Linda Gordon (W. W. Norton) The Life and Times of the Master Photographer at
The New Deal Farm Security Administration
Bonsai Alejandro Zambra (Melville House) A Postmodernist Novel of Love (Sort Of)
Some Different Kinds
Of Obamanation
Dr. Phage [Article] The Search for the New (or Next) Obama
Media Violence and Its Effect on Aggression
The Life and Works of Frank Lloyd Wright
Trekking through the Moroccan Sahara
Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression
Wind & Sand: The Wright Brothers
Derrida's Right of Inspection
Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy
Johann Sebastian Bach
The Crucifixion in American Art
World War One's Kaiserschlact
Bugs, Bites and Bowels
Shipwreck and Survival
In Shackleton's Wake
On S. J. Perelman
Being Dead
The Editors [Reviews] Fifteen Great Reviews
Resurrected for
Our Special
15th Year
Anniversary
Issue
Billy Wong
The Happy Years
My Brilliant Career
Hugh Gallagher
Pier-Luigi Zucchini
Chacun a Son Gout
The Øresund Fixed Link
Disability Rights And Russia
Doing the Tarantella at the Barnes Foundation
Nudism, Multiple Personality Disorder and The Hi-Rise Novel
The Editors [Articles] Ten Great Articles
Brought Back to Life for
Our Special
15th Year
Anniversary
Issue
Credo
January 1940
Circumcision
Hurricane Fred
Why They Do It
Song of Welcome
Hitler's First Photograph
To A Former Mistress, Now Dead
Acupuncture and Cleansing at Forty-Eight
A Cricket in the Telephone (at Sunset)
The Editors [Poems] Ten Wonderful Poems
Remembered as a
Tribute to
Our 15th
Anniversary
A Red-Haired Valkyrie Philip Roth [Reading] A Woman Caught Lurking at His Window
Flat Mate Carolyn Bird [Poem] A Shadowy Figure in Her Apartment


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