Berry Books

This is one of Joy Berry's "Survival Series for Kids" books and I have to confess that my son Devon and I like them all. I've had them in storage for years, way before Devon was a twinkle in my eye, or my gal Sara's, and I'm glad I saved them.

In this book Ms. Berry and illustrator Bartholomew, with your help, will teach your child the value of money. Your child will learn about how important it is to be responsible with it and they will get a grasp on the basics of household economics. Money isn't just for buying your child what he or she wants and it is important for them to know that. Yes this is a book for a child bigger that a toddler, however my toddler and I like it just fine. Get 'em started early, that's my motto.

Though this book was written over twenty years ago, it still stands up. The excellent comic book type illustrations will keep your child interested as you read along with him or her. And for the life of me I don't know why these books are not easier to get. Joy Berry is good for children, that's my opinion and I'm sticking to it. If you can get a hold of her books and share them with your child, you'll both be better for it.

Jack Priest, Dad in Training

Berry's incredible attention to detail shows his meticulous attention to period detail to its best advantage. His style is carefully crafted yet fluid. The story of a hunter of ghosts in ancient China is wonderful reading and beautiful viewing too. In this one, Moonlight Cutter is forced out of the capital city, but must still find a way to protect the palace from a vengeful ghost...or will he join forces with it?

I ordered mine right away, because I bet these high quality books will be collector's items soon, if they're not already.

This book has been almost eclipsed by Bettie's and daughter, Jennifer's Taste-Berries For Teens series, which are also great. Don't overlook this one, though. Written in the author's signature style of warm and down-to-earth reverie, this book is uplifting and instructing. Readers will be better for a jaunt through its pages.

Well, when the book first arrived, all I could think of were the types of books that were 'field guides to. . .' I actually considered sending it back as I thought it would be of little value--I HAVE NEVER BEEN MORE MISTAKEN! While the book gives the appearance that it is pure textbook in style and format it was at least for me VERY informational, AND put together in a very readable format. There is an absolute wealth of technical information on berries and fruits but the book is also written so that even the most berry-less person (myself) can easily use the information. The book contains a great section on the care of berries and fruits with several chapters on pruning. It also lists the berries and fruits individually with a chapter devoted to each. The chapters all contain the same type of topics: overview, selection, care, disease, suggested cultivars for your zone, and anything unique about the cultivar. It is also very well photographed AND the illustrations are very helpful. I found it to be a valuable addition to my growing gardening library with a great deal of very practical advice!

I read this in 1991 at age 12. It was perfect. These kids live in jamaica, hot and muggy and looking like the typical carribean island. But there home was once a Brittish colony. They struggle between two cultures; the relaxed west indian mannerisms, and the stiff ones the Brits left behind. A must-read for all school children in the US.

Telling it like it is. The poems are straight-forward, down-to-earth, touching, revealing, and inspirational. He shares experiences and wisdom on every angle of human growth from childhood to school, to church, to life in general. The book is perfect for parents, children, teachers, and students.

The sincerity and compassion in his writing make you believe no matter how low or how bad it can get, there's still hope. It's a book to try to bring people together. Enforcing the positive, never the negative. Mr. Berry's poems have the ability to uplift people from all backgrounds and empower those who believe that their lives are meaningless.

His poems are about making a difference in someone else's life, being just a servant and doing whatever you can with God's help. Encouraging and giving hope to all races of people.

Mr. Berry's writing is if it doesn't tell you something that makes you feel a little uncomfortable or forces you to think, then he hasn't done his job as a writer. I think that he has.

When I heard that my bestfriend had bought this book, I had to get my hands on it. For I had to work in the tobacco fields when I was younger. The hot blistery days and never-ending work never seemed to upset me. For there is a drive that keeps us Kentucky farm kids going during tough times. It is a dedication- a very sweet dedication. If you want to visit this beauty and get a glimpse of Kentucky life as I knew it, buy this book. Sit down with a cup of hot cocoa. Enjoy it all!

With a title like "Toilet Papers" and from a distinguished eco-architect like Sim Van der Ryn, I needed no intro or review to buy a copy of this little, but well researched historical over-view of effluent mitigation and current eco-friendly toilet design.

This book is filled with good line drawings and photographs to depict everything from the historical perspective to the current dry toilets and their construction.

To set the tone for this beautiful piece of scatological dissertation, there is a thought in the front to absorb for consideration of where we're going here:

"Throughout this book, you will find the word "waste" used to refer to those raw materials-feces and urine-your body passes on to make energy available to some other form of life. This is what you give back to the earth. The idea of waste, of something unusable, reveals an incomplete understanding of how things work.

Nature admits no waste. Nothing is left over; everything is joined in the spiral of life. Perhaps other cultures know this better than we, for they have no concept of, no word for, waste". And under that thought provoking consideration of resource cycles, there is:

"A sound man is good at salvage, at seeing nothing is lost"- Lao Tze, 500 B.C.

The intro is by Wendell Berry, farmer, novelist, poet. He posits that "modern" effluent mitigation is as insane as drinking right from an un-flushed toilet: "It is not inconceivable that some psychiatrist would ask me knowingly why I wanted to mess up my drinking water in the first place". Indeed.

After the fascinating human waste history lessons, we are given a short crash-course on the biology of waste, then it's on to the fruit of the book: dry composting toilet designs and their efficacy. This is in good detail and makes for a complete handbook on waterless toilet design.

Finally, there is the Epilogue and I would be amiss in my review if I did not reveal a little taste of it: [Any technology divorced from the whole of nature tends to produce a condition that poet Robert Graves calls "mechanarchy": the perfection of technological means to produce a chaotic sterile environment. The current technology of "waste disposal" (the term reveals the syndrome) is still fighting a war against nature, built on fragments of 19th century science not yet integrated into an understanding of life processes as a unified, but cyclical, whole."] True enough!

An excellent companion book to "Toilet Papers" is Joseph Jenkins' "The Humanure Handbook"- all one needs to know about how to safely compost one's excrement back to a nutrient rich plant food for a full-circle life cycle.

astonishing and super-real in everything she sang and wrote and preached, I am totally awestruck and undone and remade as a book poet or cultural critic, I here give thanks for Sister Gertrude Morgan who showed me a way forward in American poesis. Yes, the city of God is a tenement in New Orleans, chants and warns the poet-saint in the French Quarter, standing in "the headquarters of sin" and with washington under prolonged possession of Lucifer forces who think they are the brides of christ as they sell blackhawk down war missions to the young and the US mass media goes along with its neo-liberal blessing of praise and babble pretending to be critique. Well, thank the American Folk Museum for finding this God-given poet and preacher named Sister Gwertrude Morgan and bringing her back into eternal circulation here and now. "Walking on water wasn't built in a day" as Bob Kauffman put it, we need to remember this at a time when it feels like we are living inside a Rome cum Babylon-made empire of war, greed, vanity, and death. Poetry might help in the battle for the republic, the soul of the nation fallen to the sleepwalkers.

All I can do is praise her and give 10 stars of poetic honor.

This is the largest Schenkerian reference work ever published. At nearly 600 pages, it contains 3600 entries (2200 principal, 1400 secondary) representing the work of 1475 authors. It is organized according to a wide variety of topics. Fifteen broad groupings encompass seventy topical headings, many of which are divided and subdivided again, resulting in a total of 271 headings under which entries are collected. Composer and author indices further facilitate finding sources.

"The advantage of this organizational system is twofold. First, it obviously facilitates finding sources appropriate to the investigation at hand. Second, because of the topical hierarchies employed, whereby one can first find a broader heading and then gradually narrow the focus to a unit of perhaps very few entries (or do the reverse: expand from a specific to a more general focus), this bibliography is conducive to what I hold to be an indispensable component of the research process: browsing. As an analogy, consider the serendipitous discoveries many scholars have made due to their libraries' topical classification schemes. That is, while searching the stacks for a particular book, one often finds another book-previously unknown, but with a similar call number and thus only a few inches away-that is perhaps more useful than the book originally sought. I have attempted to replicate that beneficial experience, as much as possible, by organizing this bibliography not chronologically nor alphabetically, but principally by nested topical headings . . ." (p. 1).

More detailed information is available online at the author's website (search via Google, etc.); it includes Web and PDF brochures. There are also comments about the book contributed by the noted Schenkerian scholars John Rothgeb and Hedi Siegel.