Curation #102 from my Kerouac bookshelf: Blaming Japhy Ryder: Memoir of a Dharma Bum Who Survived by Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D.

Item #102 in my Kerouac bookshelf curation project is this paperback 2012 Balboa Press (no printing number) edition of Blaming Japhy Ryder: Memoir of a Dharma Bum Who Survived by Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D. 248 pages, it measures about 6" x 9" and is in very good condition. The provenance, if memory serves, is that it was sent to me as a review copy by either the publisher or the author.

Here is the blurb about this book from Google Books:

Inspired by and responding to Jack Kerouacs [sic] Dharma Bums [sic], this memoir details the psychological and spiritual triumph over severe psychological difficulties caused by a series of traumas endured in the Peace Corps in West Africa in 1978. Surveying the spiritual landscape of America through the seventies to the present in Zen, Tibetan Buddhist, New Age and Christian movements, this memoir describes the journey of author Philip A. Bralichs [sic] life, beginning as a twenty-something, leftist, married, seventies idealist in the Peace Corps in West Africa, through an accident in the bush that cost his wife her life and himself much of the use of he left leg, and through the growing and debilitating psychological difficulties that were finally resolved through wide reading and personal experience of many of the spiritual and psychological movements of those four decades. The book commences in West Africa in 1978 but also goes back to as early as 1973, just four years after Jack Kerouac died.

You can read some reviews of the book by clicking here.

I did read this book but decided to heed Thumper's advice and thus never posted a review on The Daily Beat.







Below is a picture of Shelf #3 of my Kerouac bookshelf showing the placement of this book (22nd from the left) on the day I started curating my collection. Next up: Naked Lens: Beat Cinema by Jack Sargeant.

Shelf #3 of my Kerouac bookshelf