Books That Speak Volumes
Our editors pick an array of glorious books to suit every reader's taste.

By Gift Books
Sunday, December 3, 2006

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Like Dickens, but With Spinach

In his introduction to Popeye: "I Yam What I Yam" (Fantagraphics, $29.95), Bill Blackbeard compares E.C. Segar -- the creator of the one-eyed, spinach-chomping sailor with the bowling-pin forearms -- to Charles Dickens. Another example of pop-culture hyperinflation? Not necessarily. Just as Dickens took advantage of the serial publication of his early novels to introduce new characters and change directions, so also did Segar add, subtract and tinker until he had his comic strip working at its peak -- and a brilliant, witty peak it was.

Then, too, some of Segar's characters are Dickensian by virtue of their id-indulging idiosyncracies and memorable turns of phrase -- especially that rotund, hamburger-craving knave, J. Wellington Wimpy ("I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today"). Elsewhere, Blackbeard -- perhaps our best historian of the comic strip -- has compared Wimpy to the persona of W.C. Fields, and it turns out that Fields played Mr. Micawber in the movie version of David Copperfield. Five more volumes are projected in this series, which will give us The Compleat Segar Popeye.

-- Dennis Drabelle

Grape Expectations

The eagerly anticipated third edition of The Oxford Companion to Wine (Oxford Univ., $65) has something most other wine tomes lack: a bit of attitude. The editor, Jancis Robinson, knows her stuff: She's the wine columnist for the Financial Times and "the first person outside the wine trade to have passed the notoriously tough Master of Wine exams." That erudition gleams throughout this gorgeous, massive volume, which adorns its almost 4,000 entries with charts of drinking goblets, maps of world wine regions and handsome photographs, such as a melancholy shot of the frozen Ontario grapes that will make a delicious icewine. But unlike some more pompous wine guides, this encyclopedic volume is laced with welcome sass: Portugal's Bastardo grapes are "serviceable but unexciting"; in Britain, "wine by the glass" often means "the dregs from a badly kept bottle of very ordinary wine served in a pub"; and to some oenophiles, ABC stands for "Anything But Chardonnay." You'll sprain your wrists lifting it, but this is a stunning book.

-- Warren Bass

Taking His Shots

We tend to think of photojournalists as intrepid folk who cover wars, coups, hostage-taking and related upheavals. But Nature can be as restless as any army, and a photographer in the backcountry must be ready to capture its light changes and animal entries as alertly as anyone wearing a flak jacket. Galen Rowell, who climbed mountains and traveled to remote habitats all over the world for art's sake, was a photojournalist with a keen sense of the moment, and Galen Rowell: A Retrospective (Sierra Club, $50) chronicles his life's work.

His "Sunset Over Machu Picchu, Peru, 1995" catches a roiling, fire-lit cloud bank that appears to be resting on peaks above and behind the famous high-altitude ruins. As for "Lynx in Alpine Flowers," an anecdote on the facing page tells how Rowell's daughter Nicole overcame a rare case of her dad's inertia. Traveling with her parents in Alaska in 1974, she claimed to have seen a lynx along the highway. Her father scoffed. But when she said she saw another one, he stopped the car and went immediately into action, "reaching with his camera all the way across my mom's lap and out the passenger side window [to capture] this amazing image."

-- Dennis Drabelle

Artistry of the Americas

An exquisite ballot box of lacquered wood from Mexico. A skeletal archer sculpted for a Peruvian monastery. A silver reliquary bust holding the bones of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary in a Colombian cathedral. These are just a few of the treasures featured in The Arts in Latin America: 1492-1820 (Yale Univ., $75), the catalogue of an exhibition currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The many peoples thrown together by the Spanish conquest created vibrant art, rich in religious imagery and indigenous influences, but for a long time, writes curator Joseph J. Rishel in his introduction, "dominant opinions based on northern American and European values won out against the perceived excesses and brilliance of the images themselves." That brilliant excess is on dazzling display in this book, which covers everything from furniture to textiles to painting, including essays on the colonial city and the Asian influence on Latin American art.

-- Rachel Hartigan Shea

The World of Work

To various degrees, work is something we all do, a human experience of infinite variety. The images gathered in Work: The World in Photographs (National Geographic, $35) help tell "work's global story," according to Ferdinand Protzman, who wrote the text accompanying the work of more than 80 photographers focused on human effort around the world and through more than 150 years. In eye-arresting fashion, among those pictured earning their keep are stilt-fishermen in Sri Lanka, a Paris street musician, South African women picking apples, a Syrian broom-seller, a West Virginia coal miner and a Cuban barber. The photos confirm Helen Keller's notion that "The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker."

-- Evelyn Small

The Life of Reading

Leafing through Reading Women, by Stefan Bollman (Merrell, $24.95), made me want to find a comfy chaise lounge, put up my feet and pick up a book. Reproduced beautifully here are artists' works through the ages -- paintings, drawings, prints and a few photographs -- depicting women in various states of reading. Here are the well-known (Rembrandt's "The Prophetess Anna," Whistler's "Reading by Lamplight," Fragonard's "A Young Girl Reading"), the lesser-known (Franz Eybl's "Girl Reading," Aleksandr Deineka's "Young Woman with Book," James Tissot's "Stillness") and the eye-popping (Eve Arnold's 1952 photo of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses). Your own reading pleasure is also informed by Karen Joy Fowler's foreword, in which she elaborates on her notion that "the woman who reads has a complicated history." Put yourself in good company with this lovely collection.

-- Evelyn Small

For the Birds

Two new books by the ornithologist and bird biologist Les Beletsky, Bird Songs: 250 North American Birds in Song (Chronicle, $45) and Birds of the World (Johns Hopkins Univ., $50), are likely to be on the wish lists of bird-lovers everywhere. The former is a kind of alternative play station for adults: A "push and listen" digital audio display features audio from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and listeners can hear warbling, wup and caow notes, as well as a multitude of other screeches and trills, "sometimes rendered as pump-er-lunk or dunk-a-doo." Tune in to hear, as the foreword notes, "the wailing laugh of a Common Loon, the bugling of a flock of swans . . . the honking of a flock of Canada Geese." Four different artists render illustrations of the birds, and Beletsky's expertise and lively writing provide clear and insightful accounts of each bird's ecology, behavior and "vocalizations," from the Eared Grebe to the Ruddy Duck to the Worm-Eating Warbler to the Indigo Bunting (whose songs would actually make for a nice CD).

The latter book is a 500-page collection of Beletsky's authoritative descriptions of birds and their families, along with more than 1,600 paintings and illustrations. These volumes are for birders everywhere, but also for those of us who just like to know -- and wonder -- about these beauties.

-- Evelyn Small

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