Seven-Days-A-Week From 9:00am to 9:00pm

The Columbia and its tributaries are rivers of conflict. Amid pitched battles over the economy, the environment, and breaching dams on the lower Snake River, the salmon that have always quickened these rivers are disappearing. On a warm day in late May, Mike Barenti entered the heart of this conflict when he slid a whitewater kayak into the headwaters of central Idaho's Salmon River and started paddling toward the Pacific Ocean. This account of his two-month, nine-hundred-mile solo journey into the world of the Columbia basin plunges us into the adventure of navigating these troubled waterways.

Please join us Sunday, June 29th from 1:00-3:00pm as we welcome Mike Barenti as he signs copies of his exciting book, detailing his journey, Kayaking Alone: Nine Hundred Miles from Idaho's Mountains to the Pacific Ocean.

"Mike Barenti's Kayaking Alone carried me like a river, but this is no passive traveler's tale. Barenti's knowledge of the Northwest makes this journey as intellectually engaging and rewarding as it is physically adventurous. In taking you down the river, this beautiful book takes you deep into narratives of humanity and nature -- and reminds you that they flow as one story."
-Jonathan Johnson, author of Hannah and the Mountain



Check Out Mike Barenti online and then stop by A Book for All Seasons to talk to him about his journey in person!

Want more information? Contact us at: info@abookforallseasons.com.



Place a SIGNED copy of Kayaking Alone:Nine Hundred Miles from Idaho's Mountains to the Pacific Ocean lovingly into your cart for $24.95

Sway, by Ori and Rom Brafman is a compelling and fast-paced, true story of why we are so influenced to irrational behavior. The couple visited with scientists and behaviorists to find out why we make rash decisions, poor financial decisions, and poor mate decisions, just to name a few. Their stories are entertaining as much as they are shocking and revealing.
At the end, the authors offer suggestions of how to apply the information they present. This makes the book the perfect gift for the June Graduate. You can provide the advice you would love to teach them in a way they will be sure to listen.

Toss Sway lovingly into your cart for $23.95

You didn't really think a Father's Day newsletter would go by without some mention of Dad on the grill, did you? It may seem like an old chestnut, sending Dad out to fire up the coals, tend the steaks, or flip the burgers, but frankly, this really is the case in a large number of homes in America today… and the tradition continues! Mom may rule the kitchen, but Dad? The grill is his and his alone.

I know my Dad has a beautiful shiny gas grill, complete with his own set of utensils and he can cook some fantastic outdoor fare. These days though, grilling has moved beyond the simple steak, chicken and burger. Wonderful, flavorful, and complete meals can be prepared on the grill that any Dad will be willing to take on and the book Good Housekeeping Grill It has excellent ideas and photographs (which in my opinion are essential). There are potatoes and veggies for the grill (the Campfire Corn with Herb-Butter is an essential side dish), appetizers, (how about Goat Cheese and Tomato Bruschetta) and rubs to make the perfect seasonings. You'll find recipes for short-ribs, halibut, salmon, shrimp, and yes burgers, but in addition to the "perfect burger" recipe, there's a Greek burger and a Tex-Mex burger to spice things up.

This book is incredibly versatile and with 150 recipes, Dad will love having so many new reasons to fire up the grill this summer! Dig in!

Place a copy of Grill It lovingly into your cart for only $14.95!

Rally in June Amity, Oregon
from the Book Approximately Paradise
by Floyd Skloot


At Third and Trade a Model A
waits to turn left. It's a hiboy
two-door from the Hoover years, gray
as the hair and old corduroy
cap its driver sports. He wears thick
goggles that sparkle in the sun.
A Nash the color of glazed brick
pulls up behind and toots its horn,
joined by a four-door Hupmobile
and Dodge touring car with a man
who looks asleep behind the wheel.
They wait for a Packard sedan
which is waiting for us to cross
the street. Here we are, all frozen
in time, the noon heat like a gloss
laid over what we have chosen
to do with a summer Sunday,
watching a past none of us knew
gather together in the shade
of a small village park in June.

Excerpt from Approximately Paradise by Floyd Skloot.
"The graceful, complex and resonant poems of Approximately Paradise make us sharply aware of life's small and large ecstasies." - John Skoyles

"No one but Floyd Skloot could imagine this far ranging poignant, compassionate, relentlessly elegant collection. After this feast, you might treat yourself further and read his essays in The Shadow of Memory as a companion volume." - John Allman.

Toss a bit of poetry lovingly into your cart! Approximately Paradise is $16.95!

What Are You Optimistic About? - Today's Leading Thinkers on Why Things are Good and Getting Better Edited by John Brockman

The nightly news and conventional wisdom tell us that things are bad and getting worse. Yet despite dire predictions, scientists see many good things on the horizon. John Brockman recently asked more than 150 high-powered scientific thinkers to answer a vital question for our frequently pessimistic times: "What are you optimistic about?"


The Decline of Violence - Steven Pinker, Psychologist, Harvard University; author of The Blank Slate - My optimism lies in the hope that the decline of violence over the centuries is a real phenomenon, that it is the product of systematic forces that will continue to operate and that we can identify those forces and perhaps concentrate and bottle them. Read more on Page 3...


The Best is Yet To Come - Nicholas Humphrey, School Professor at the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, London School of Economics; author of Seeing Red; A Study in Consciousness - If I had lived in the year 1007 and had been asked what I looked forward to for my descendants in the next millennium, I might have imagined many wonderful possibilities. but I would not - because I could not - have imagined the music of Mozart, the painting of Rothko, the sonnets of Shakespeare, the novels of Dostoyevsky. I would have failed to see one of the best reasons of all for being optimistic, which is the power of human artistic genius to astonish us again and again. I will not make the same mistake twice. Read more on Page 309...


The Evolutionary Ability of Humankind to Do the Right Things - Haim Harari, Physicist, former president of the Weizmann Institute of Science - I am optimistic about the emerging ability of the life sciences to use mathematics, computer science, physics and engineering in order to understand biological mechanisms, detect and prevent medical problems, and cure deadly diseases.
I am optimistic about the power of education to alleviate poverty and advance health and peace in the third world, and I am hopeful that the affluent world will understand that its own survival on this planet depends on its advancement of education in the rest of the world. Read more on Page 273...

Excerpts from the book, What are you Optimistic About? Today's Leading Thinkers on Why Things are Good and Getting Better Edited by John Brockman, the Editor of What is Your Dangerous Idea

Toss What Are You Optimistic About lovingly into your cart today for only $14.95!

Unbowed: A Memoir by Wangari Maathai

When Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, she began a vital poor people's environmental movement, focused on the empowerment of women, that soon spread across Africa. Persevering through run-ins with the Kenyan government and personal losses, and jailed and beaten on numerous occasions, Maathai continued to fight tirelessly to save Kenya's forests and to restore democracy to her beloved country.
In Unbowed, Nobel Prize winner Maathai recounts her extraordinary journey from her childhood in rural Kenya to the world stage.

Toss lovingly into cart - $14.95

Careless in Red by Elizabeth George

In her most eagerly anticipated novel yet, Elizabeth George brings back Scotland Yard's Thomas Lynley to investigate a ruthless crime.
After the senseless murder of his wife, Detective Superintendent Thomas Lynley retreated to Cornwall, where he has spent six solitary weeks hiking the bleak and rugged coastline. On the forty-third day of his walk, at the base of a cliff, Lynley discovers the body of a young man who appears to have fallen to his death. It soon becomes apparent that a clever killer is indeed at work, and this time Lynley is not a detective but a witness and possibly a suspect. Can Lynley let go of the past long enough to solve a most devious and carefully planned crime?

Toss lovingly into your cart - $27.95

The Shack by William P. Young

Mackenzie Allen Philips' youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his "Great Sadness," Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack's world forever. In a world where religion seems to grow increasingly irrelevant "The Shack" wrestles with the timeless question, "Where is God in a world so filled with unspeakable pain?" The answers Mack gets will astound you. You'll want everyone you know to read this book!

Toss lovingly into cart - $14.99

The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the Approach and the Experience by Wangari Maathai

The Green Belt Movement is an internationally acclaimed tree-planting movement founded by Kenyans and run by and for Kenyans. The organization, which has planted millions of trees throughout East Africa in order to provide sources of fuel, food and a way to stop soil erosion and environmental degradation, is one example of an indigenous movement working to influence Africa's future. Many of its workers are women.

In The Green Belt Movement, founder Wangari Maathai, tells its story: why it started, how it operates, and where it is going. She includes the philosophy behind it, its challenges and objectives, and the specific steps involved in starting a similar grassroots environmental and social justice organization. The Green Belt Movement is the inspiring story of people working at the grassroots level to improve their environment and their country. Their story offers ideas about a new and hopeful future for Africa and the rest of the world.

Toss a copy lovingly into cart - $16.00

Now Go Home: Wilderness, Belonging, and the Crosscut Saw by Ana Maria Spagna

Now Go Home tells the story of how a quintessential California girl ended up earning her living in the Pacific Northwest with a crosscut saw. Ana Maria Spagna came of age in southern California in the "hot-pink eighties." By the time she turned nineteen, she had visited Disneyland thirty-seven times and was ready to hit the road. In these finely edged essays, she takes her readers along.
With candor, wit, and hard-earned wisdom, Spagna reflects on the journey that took her from a childhood in the suburbs of L.A. to a trail crew in the North Cascades, where she falls in love with a place and, unexpectedly, with a woman. With days spent laboring as the only woman on a trail crew and evenings in a cabin no larger than Thoreau's, she has world enough and time to wrestle with the compromises and contradictions of making "a life in the woods." From the work she does and the people she meets, she comes to see the nuances, and occasionally the humor, of big ideas like wilderness and environmentalism. And she decides this is the place she must call home.

Toss lovingly into cart - $17.95

A Visitor for Bear by Bonny Becker

Cheery persistence wears down a curmudgeonly bear in a wry comedy of manners that ends in a most unlikely friendship.
Bear is quite sure he doesn't like visitors. He even has a sign. So when a mouse taps on his door one day, Bear tells him to leave. But when Bear goes to the cupboard to get a bowl, there is the mouse - small and gray and bright-eyed. In this slapstick tale that begs to be read aloud, all Bear wants is to eat his breakfast in peace, but the mouse - who keeps popping up in the most unexpected places - just won't go away

We still have SIGNED copies of this colorful hardcover book on hand - get yours while they last!

Toss a SIGNED copy lovingly into cart - $16.99

Atomic Farmgirl: Growing Up Right in the Wrong Place by Teri Hein

The granddaughter of German Lutheran homesteaders, Teri Hein was raised in the 1950s and 1960s in rural eastern Washington. This starkly elegant landscape serves as the poignant backdrop to her story, for one hundred miles to the south of this idyllic, all-American setting lay the toxins - both mental and physical - of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. From horseback riding to haying, Flag Day parades to Cold War duck-and-cover drills, Atomic Farmgirl chronicles a peculiar coming of age for a young girl and her community of hardworking, patriotic folk, whose way of life - and livelihood - are gradually threatened by the poisons of progress. Combining a profoundly tender story of youth with politics and an unmistakable sense of place, Teri Hein has written a memoir that is part Terry Tempest Williams, part Erin Brockovich, part Garrison Keillor. In the end, she offers a rich and ribald journey into the universal mysteries of childhood, love, community, and home, a journey that confirms humankind's infinite capacity for hope.

Toss a copy lovingly into cart $13.00

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
Translation by Anne Born

Winner of the 2007 IMPAC Dublin Award, A Time Magazine Best Book of the Year and Named one of the 10 best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review, Out Stealing Horses has been embraced across the world as a classic, a novel of universal relevance and power.
Panoramic and gripping, it tells the story of Trond Sander, a sixty-seven-year-old man who has moved from the city to a remote, riverside cabin, only to have all the turbulence, grief, and overwhelming beauty of his youth come back to him one night while he's out on a walk. From the moment Trond sees a strange figure coming out of the dark behind his home, the reader is immersed in a decades-deep story of searching and loss, and in the precise, irresistible prose of a newly crowned master of fiction.

Toss lovingly into cart - $14.00

The Big Both Ways by John Straley

It's 1935 and jobs are scarce. Yet Slippery Wilson walks off his job at a logging camp afer a gruesome accident kills a coworker. He's headed for Seattle with his savings and plans to buy a piece of farmland and be his own boss. When he stops to help a woman get her car out of a ditch, his life takes a serious detour. The woman is Ellie Hobbs, an anachist from the docks of Seattle who watches out for her young neice and dreams of flying planes.
But right now she's got a busted nose and has just stuffed a dead man's body into the trunk of her car. So begins the action that will take Slip, Ellie, her neice, and her noisy yellow bird on a heart-stopping adventure up the Inside Passage from Puget Sound to Alaska. They travel by dory to stay off the roads, and are followed not only by union men out for revenge but by a dogged Seattle police detective who recently lost his wife and is looking for a new life of his own.

An entertaining as well as gripping period mystery and crime story, The Big Both Ways incorporates actual events and real places.

Toss a SIGNED copy lovingly into cart - $16.95

Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace... One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

In 1993 Greg Mortenson was the exhausted survivor of a failed attempt to ascend K2, an American climbing bum wandering emaciated and lost through Pakistan's Karakoram Himalaya. After he was taken in and nursed back to health by the people of an impoverished Pakistani village, Mortenson promised to return one day and build them a school. From that rash, earnest promise grew one of the most incredible humanitarian campaigns of our time - Greg Mortenson's one-man mission to counteract extremism by building schools, especially for girls, throughout the breeding ground of the Taliban.

Award-winning journalist David Oliver Relin has collaborated on this spellbinding account of Mortenson's incredible accomplishments in a region where Americans are often feared and hated. In pursuit of his goal, Mortenson has survived kidnapping, fatwas issued by enraged mullahs, repeated death threats, and wrenching separations from his wife and children. But his success speaks for itself. At last count, his Central Asia Institute had built fifty-five schools. Three Cups of Tea is at once an unforgettable adventure and the inspiring true story of how one man really is changing the world - one school at a time.

Toss a copy lovingly into cart for $15.00

There's always something going on in Leavenworth! Festivals, shopping, concerts, outdoor activities, hiking, skiing, tubing, sleigh rides... An endless number of possibilites!

Click here to see what's happening in Leavenworth!

Washington's mountain passes are beautiful to behold, but when your plans include traveling through them during inclement weather it's best to check the pass reports before before setting out!
So click on the link below, be safe, and enjoy the drive!

Pass & Weather

Dad, your guiding hand on my shoulder will remain with me forever.
- Author Unknown

Happy Father's Day!