Barbara Burghart-Perreault Bücher

This memoir, in the author's autobiographical short stories and essays, illustrated by her poetry and photographs, spans her first twenty-three years of life in mid-twentieth-century Kansas and the following five decades traveling throughout Europe and living in Northern California.The book is a tribute to the "ordinary", "little" lives that leave no trace behind other than a fleeting bit of immortality in the memory of those who outlive them; only to fade finally when the rememberers die.It is also an attempt to honor and finally come to accept the transient, illusive, quicksilver nature of all existence by describing what does not last as, in a paradoxical way, eternal . . . in the conclusion of What's Left ". . . rising out of ruin, the soul of each lost without, lilacs still growing, summer rains still falling, all the holy things", yet simultaneously accepting the final words of the poem, "None of this matters, in the end we all will be, lost libraries burned".All ends in mystery . . .

"Still Lives" is a photographic essay on the silent "lives" of shop window mannequins. The photographs are not collaged; each composition is presented as the camera found it. The reflections are an integral part of the images providing a glimpse into the world of each frozen figure. These photographs are both realistic and surrealistic and run the gamut from high-fashion New York City mannequins to those of the diametrically opposed world of East Oakland. "Still Lives" is designed to encourage the viewer to think outside the box and become aware of the worlds hiding behind the surface of the everyday .