Barrett Books

Late Harvest provides excellent background into the goings-on at a winery, and combines rich, evocative narrative with lively dialogue and characterization that heighten the reader's sense of expectation. Ms. Barrett delivers an intense, sexy, delicious love story. Put this one at the top of your to-be-read pile.

WOW! I will never look at the typing test "The quick brown fox" the same way again. Or more correctly, I will never overlook the lazy dog in that sentence again. What a complicated life flashes before his eyes in this excellent short story!

My 6-month-old boy has loved this book for 2 months now. It depicts a baby's day in the park with Grandpa & Old Dog, playing in the leaves and on the swings, and ending with a cuddle & nap with Daddy. I used to get it from the library, but now I'm buying it because he likes it so much. The simple, repetitive rhyming (each page starts with "Leaf Baby, Leaf Baby" and describes a child's activity in the park) and large blocky pictures of a baby having fun seem to entrance him. If your baby likes "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" and "Goodnight Moon", he or she will probably like this one.

I work in the Mental Health field and have used this book to help survivors cope,and understand WHY their loved one suicided.
A comment I've heard over and over: "It's like he lived in our house.If only we'd known what to watch for."
Unfortunately this book is OUT OF PRINT, and it's a very important little book. I'd like to see it reissued.

This book is a dryly comic account of the predicament of a state bureaucrat, Julius Zihal who, upon his retirement, has to find ways of filling his life. He discovers that mild voyeurism seems to fill the bill, letting him live an emotional life at a remove. Otherwise, Zihal tries to conduct his life according to the procedures and language of the official Handbook of Administrative Practices of the Austro-Hungarian empire, assigning categories and numbers to all feelings and incidents, however unsuited they are to being categorized. Indeed, the handbook is Zihal's lifeblood. When he discovers that a subsection of the Handbook regulations is exactly applicable to his case, he finds it invigorating: "He felt himself summarized and substantiated in the most exacting way." Subsections taken directly from the Handbook are dotted through the handbook that used to administer an empire, and its dense and achingly opaque prose plays against von Doderer's own ironically poetic, simile-filled, narration. It becomes clear that the bureaucrats who wrote the Handbook envisioned a text that could anticipate and regulate every conceivable contingency that might ever arise. These official excerpts reveal the lurking sublimity of their ultimate task, which is to imagine a bureaucratic code that would exist in a 1:1 relationship with absolutely everthing that has ever or might ever happen.

This book is ultimately charming and heartwarming, and is a little modern classic that ought to be better known. Von Doderer's rich descriptions of things and the world, meant to convey the bureaucrat's all encompassing eye, is beautifully translated here.

I have heard of this book for along time, perhaps more about the movie. I was shocked how short the book was. I was expecting some long book. It is about 129 pages and I read it in one afternoon.

It is about a black man leaving the army or other service and buying himself a station wagon. He lives out of his station wagon and stops whenever he needs some money then picks up again. He stops at this house out in the country where some nuns are living off the land. They do the physical labor too such as building fences. This man stops to help them and they believe he is sent by God. He is not a religious man but does not argue with them. He is a very even tempered man that doesn't expect much of life or of his fellow man.

He works for these strange women who originated in Germany and speak very little English. It is very heart warming to see how he related to them. The nearest town is predominantly of people from Mexico so there are all kinds of language barriers.

The nuns want to build this little church so that they can help the poor Mexican children in the area that are troubled children. They want him to build the church for them. He has some building talent but does not think at first that he can build this church without some kind of help. At any rate he doesn't want to stay long enough to do it. Somehow he gets involved in their dreams. You have to read the rest of it to know the ending.

It left me feeling very uplifted and kindly towards my fellow humans. A great book!

Carl Sandburg revels in the Lincolnia of his contemporaries and provides insight into the world of the Lincoln Collector of the late 1940s and 1950s. Much more than the story of Oliver Barrett (although this is very interesting), this book presents many obscure letters and speeches with their historical context and is an excellent complement to the Sandburg biography of Lincoln. If you can find it, read it!

This book is so full of ideas for helping me get to those kids that are so hard to reach. I am in awe at the variety of inovative ideas Ms Dragan uses to encourage her students to treasure the literary experience. I am planning on using this book extensively and am looking foreward to any further publications from this creative teacher.

This book shows how far we have slipped from living a "Pill Free" life. It gives us the information we need to start living healthy. Everything from fast food to a quick fix has us speeding our way to an early grave.

One of the last and biggest log roads in Washington State was Weyerhaueser's Chehalis Western. Having taken over the Milwaukee Road's branches south of Tacoma in 1980, this line ran large log trains from Chehalis to the port of Tacoma -- behind the last GP38-2's built by EMD -- until 1992. With the publication of this lengthily titled book, there is finally a work that tells the story of this line, and its adjacent feeders, the Vail branch, and the Curtis Milburn & Eastern, starting in 1924 and running through to 1995. One could wish for a more up-to-date final chapter from a book so freshly published, but as well researched and lavishly illustrated as the book is, this hardly is a critical flaw. Today, what remains of the line is primarily operated by Tacoma Rail, and plays host to tourist railroads Mount Rainier Scenic, and Chehalis-Centralia, and this book has become a must have for many of their employees. Fans of the Chehalis Western, the Milwaukee Road, or today's shortlines south of Puget Sound would also enjoy this book.