And Away They Go
Five Coffee-Table Books for Holiday Gift-Giving

Sunday, December 11, 2005

Giving books as gifts often is the last refuge of the desperate -- something to offer when you don't know sizes; something that doesn't need assembly or batteries. But picture books are particularly nice to give, because there's little implication of "Okay, now you owe me a book report." Here from the vicarious voyage bookshelf are five offerings with striking pictures . . . and no obligations.

"Yosemite in Time" (Trinity University Press, $45, 140 pp.)

In 1872, long before the mega-pixel was invented, a man with the spellcheck-defying name of Eadweard Muybridge photographed California's Yosemite Valley only 21 years after it first was seen by white people. He recorded images on 20-by-24-inch glass plates, producing prints that even today reveal remarkably crisp detail and a sense of wild drama.

Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe recently rephotographed these scenes and those captured by other pioneers, including Ansel Adams. (Rebecca Solnit wrote the accompanying text.) New photos were shot from the same points (sometimes hard to locate) and at the same time of year and day to keep the angle of light consistent. In "Yosemite in Time," we can see the changes: old trees wither; new trees crowd in; rivers shrink, enlarge or meander. Although the Jeffrey pine in Adams's 1940 study was killed by drought, its cadaverous shell is oddly beautiful in the 2002 counterpart. Muybridge's dramatic photo of El Capitan upside-down in the mirror-like Merced River cannot be re-created -- the river just won't cooperate.

"Wide Angle" (National Geographic, $30, 504 pp.)

Consider reinforcing your coffee table if you hint for this book. The society whose name is synonymous with worldwide photography here presents 260 photographs from its archives, printing them on heavy glossy paper in sumptuous color and fine detail worthy of, well, the National Geographic. They have divided the world into 12 regions, presenting representative landscapes, seascapes and sandscapes; local animal life; and people in native dress.

It is the latter that most often draw the eye (although the twin Siberian tigers are cute -- if they don't happen to be eating your livestock). A Slovak babushka lady tends a pair of hens in their miniature, picture-frame-like coop. An aerial view of Mecca during the Hajj shows thousands of prostrate pilgrims forming a human mosaic. A Japanese man with a hoe treads deliberately along a footbridge that looks likely to collapse under his weight. But nature photography is also represented. Breezes unfurl the blossoms of torch flowers on the Minnesota prairie so that they look like art nouveau damsels; a smiling crocodile mugs close to the lens. Is he thinking it's edible?

"Iceland" (Henry M. Abrams, $40, 179 pp.)

While the text in many photo books is about as exciting as the clean parts of dirty movies, Patrick Desgraupes actually gives us something interesting to read. The history of the island nation is fascinating, from the Irish St. Brendan the Navigator who discovered it, to the Norwegian Vikings who first settled it, to the colonists whose hungry sheep caused its deforestation. Desgraupes includes this nugget of Icelandic colonial property law: A woman could own as much land as she could lead a cow around in one day.

Desgraupes worked with a 44-pound view camera and used no filters or computer enhancement. His gorgeous color photos show, ironically, little ice, but erosion-sculpted rock, tenacious wildflowers, blood red sunsets and glowing lava flows. St. Brendan's followers believed he had discovered the gates of Hell itself, and indeed, Desgraupes nearly had the shoes burned off his feet while working there. There are few people in his shots, or even many animals. What there is is exquisite desolation.

"American Waters" (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $35, 192 pp.)

Peter Kaminsky does not merely love fly fishing, he is giddy, schoolboy-crush besotted with it, still -- after 32 years. Even the font in his text is enlivened with ligatures that appear as though the "t" is fishing and got its line caught in an "s" bush on the backcast. The text-to-photo ratio almost disqualifies "American Waters" as a picture book, but Kaminsky, a New York Tmes columnist, writes mental images so vivid he barely needs the illustrations. One cheap motel on a fishing trip is "a center for the study of mildew"; a trout is not just brown but "Nestle Quik" brown.

As for the photos, the fish sometimes are reproduced so perfectly they could attract cats. Fish cruise warily under the surface, fight against the line, pose in death with the fly that fatally tempted them, fill a frying pan over a campfire. The role of camaraderie in fishing is acknowledged, too, as "the people you meet are almost as important as the fish. Mind you, I said almost."

"One People" (Lonely Planet, $40, 284 pp.)

"There is not a 'them' and an 'us'; there is really only 'us,' " says Maureen Wheeler, cofounder of the Lonely Planet guidebook empire. Unlike Desgraupes's "Iceland," people are the focus here -- people and the various ways they transit the routes and way stations of human life. We see woeful teenage prostitutes in Bangladesh; a frenzied, messy tomato fight in Spain; Argentine window washers dangling down a glass-slab Buenos Aires skyscraper. An Indian woman in a red head scarf is almost lost in the sea of red chili peppers she is sorting.

Often the photos are paired, underscoring the book's main, paradoxical invitation: See how similar we are; see how different. Australian Aborigine children roll naked in the sand; Malaysian girls float fully clothed in a Kuala Lumpur swimming pool. Peruvian nuns take a break from prayer to play soccer; cricketers take a break from play and prostrate themselves in prayer in Pakistan. And separately, we all move together down the road.

-- Jerry V. Haines