THE WAYWARD WEST

Mr. Barker is a humorist whose outlet is a weekly column in the Sunday magazine section of the Denver Post. The present volume is a collection of fifty of his selected columns, and it must be admitted that the level of wit and invention, while never of the highest, is consistently well above the average and makes for reasonably attractive bed-time reading. Mr. Barker's adventures and misadventures with boy-faced dogs, hospitals, marriage, the younger generation at all levels of development, and a couple of rousing parodies (one very funny one on the conquering-of-a-mountain type book) give some notion of the author's far ranging interests, likes and dislikes. The book is fairly obviously slanted at the Christmas gift trade, and ends with a Western parody of The Night Before Christmas that is one of the very few total failures in the Barker sampler.