Gift Books

A few more prospects for last-minute shoppers.

Louise Brooks looked so relentlessly modern. Still does, in fact: Photos of the movie star in her prime show an androgynous beauty with coal-black hair cut into both forehead and sidewall bangs, along with features that diverge not a centimeter from classic lines. Her career was short (1925-38) but varied (she starred in G.W. Pabst's German silent "Pandora's Box" and an American talkie called "The Canary Murder Case"). More than anything else, she was a symbol of no-nonsense sex appeal laced with intelligence.

Peter Cowie, who knew Brooks at the end of her life (she died in 1985), has told her story and assembled hundreds of photos of her in Louise Brooks: Lulu Forever (Rizzoli, $55). "I had to run away from the world of celebrities," she explained regarding the implosion of her career. "For years it was a terrible life in limbo without friends or security or approval." But her luck turned when film historian James Card persuaded her to move to Rochester, N.Y. -- "this darling little town," she called it -- where he revived her movies and made much of her. She became a film historian herself, writing articles and memoirs and showing a facility for the well-turned phrase. Here is how she summed up Humphrey Bogart: "When a woman appealed to him, he waited for her the way the flame waits for the moth."

-- Dennis Drabelle

Imitation of Life

In the middle decades of the last century, Life magazine showed Americans what the world looked like. With its incomparable photography staff -- and unlimited expense accounts -- Life had unparalleled access to the great and the glamorous, as well as the simple and sublime.

In this Platinum Anniversary Collection: 70 Years of Extraordinary Photography (Life Books, $29.95), Margaret Bourke-White takes us into the shantytowns of Depression-era dam builders; W. Eugene Smith depicts a Spanish village of almost medieval simplicity; and Larry Burrows is so close to the front lines of Vietnam, you can almost hear the choppers.

Some of the images are so familiar -- Alfred Eisenstaedt's picture of the sailor kissing a nurse on V-J Day or John Dominis's shot of a dejected Mickey Mantle tossing his helmet -- that we almost forget where we saw them first.

From Hollywood stars (James Dean, a fetching Natalie Wood and, of course, Marilyn Monroe) to the civil rights movement to Robert Capa's moment-of-death shot from the Spanish Civil War to the destruction on Sept. 11, the Life photographers chronicled the best and worst moments of all our lives.

-- Matt Schudel

Elevation

Did you know that the classic U2 song "New Year's Day" was inspired by Lech Walesa, the brave leader of Poland's Solidarity movement? That what became "The Joshua Tree," the Irish band's 1987 masterpiece, started out as a song cycle that frontman Bono was planning to call "The Two Americas"? (John Edwards will be thrilled.) That the lyrics for "Until the End of the World" are a conversation between Jesus and Judas? That Bono stole one particularly cool line from "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)" from Raymond Carver? That one reason their dud of an album "Pop" (1997) doesn't sound half as good as 2000's soaring "All That You Can't Leave Behind" is that Bono's voice improved dramatically after he got treated for chronic allergies?

And did you care about any of the foregoing? If so, you'll be in helpless thrall to U2 by U2 (HarperCollins, $39.95), a chatty, baggy, lavishly illustrated and deeply cool recounting of the group's history, in their own words -- by turns poetic, wisecracking, boozy, swaggering and profound. (Bono in particular does not come off as exactly overburdened with modesty, but that's what happens when you're the lead singer of the world's greatest rock band.) The book traces the group's career of trying to throw their arms around the world, from their early days as Dublin youths pissed off at the IRA (hence "Sunday Bloody Sunday"), to the rattle and hum of their musical encounter with America (hence "Pride") to Bono's shrewd campaign against global poverty and AIDS (hence "One"). The stories here of how they made such hard-driving, heartfelt, passionately political, theologically driven and generally stirring music are pretty much irresistible. Achtung, baby: U2 isn't just a band, it's a worldview.

-- Warren Bass

For the Armchair Traveler

Burton Holmes (1870-1958), the man Lowell Thomas called the "greatest traveler of our time, perhaps of all time," was a photographer, filmmaker and showman who invented the very idea (and coined the word) of a "travelogue." He famously signed autographs with the epigram "To travel is to possess the world." He did, indeed, and Burton Holmes Travelogues: The Greatest Traveler of His Time, 1892-1952 (Taschen, $49.99), edited by Genoa Caldwell, ought to attract readers the same way Holmes packed huge halls everywhere for his shows. This comprehensive, lavishly illustrated guidebook to his work, life and travels gives a comprehensive visual and textual picture of how Holmes managed to roll travel, history, photography and entertainment into one. From the time he got his first camera at the age of 13 to his travels over a lifetime to nearly every country in the world, he chronicled a world no longer with us. His legacy lives on in these pages and brings his travels to a whole new audience.

-- Evelyn Small