Tomes for the Holidays: Every Picture Tells a Tale

So, you boasted, "I always wait until the last minute to buy gifts." Well, it's the last minute now and, jeez, the sizes you need are gone, the colors remind you of '73 Plymouths and the family portrait option hit a snag when one of you decided to get a faux-hawk. Here's our lifeline: Buy travel picture books. We've found five moderately priced ones, sure to gather a crowd around the coffee table.

-- Jerry V. Haines

* "The Lonely Planet Guide to the Middle of Nowhere" (Lonely Planet, $35, 272 pp.)

Boy, there sure is a lot of nowhere in this world. Lonely Planet has assembled 55 varieties of it: "The Loneliest National Park in America," for instance (Nevada's Great Basin National Park, "near to nothing and close to nobody"), or the North Pole (where one can be "the only human being in an area 1 1/2 times the size of North America").

But "nowhere" doesn't mean there's nothing to see -- or photograph. We see ice-frosted saplings poking through snowbanks, multicolored rice terraces in Yunnan, Kazakh falconers, a Nepalese yak and remnants of an ancient Bolivian lake surrounded by the driest desert in the world. There are some compelling first-person stories here, too, often from people at the mercy of "nowhere," trying to remember where things started to go so wrong.

* "Dreaming of Tuscany" (Rizzoli, $45, 224 pp.)

Barbara Milo Ohrbach has prepared a wish book as compelling as a child's first holiday toy catalogue: "Oh, I want to go there, and there, and there . . . " It is essentially a combination picture book (photos by Simon Upton) and guidebook, although its practicality as the latter is in doubt, given its hard cover and large pages. But the photographs capture the landscapes, stylish home interiors and gardens (with elegantly decaying statuary emphasizing the life growing there) that make people who have been there turn wistful as they pronounce the very word: "Ah . . . Tuscany. "

Another section betrays the photographer's fascination with regional food: prosciutto and salame toscano glisten on a painted plate; a baker tends an ovenful of traditional Tuscan unsalted bread (at one time salt was taxable) -- and who knew that radishes could look so voluptuous? The photos are augmented with recipes, shopping lists and restaurant recommendations.

* "Big Sky: Wild West Panorama" (Firefly Books, $45, 160 pp.)

The publishers should market this book with a stepladder, the better to appreciate its double-truck, 9-by-27-inch panoramas. Viewed up close, they overwhelm -- just like a visit to the real thing. Tim Fitzharris displays open spaces from all over the North American West. We get canyon-scapes, fields of desert wildflowers, the chill of the Rockies and Sierra Nevada, the geological clown show of the Badlands.

The "sky" doesn't figure in all of the photos, but when it does, it's like the drone of a bagpipe, a dominant, unifying presence linking the foreground variations. Each panorama consists of three to five overlapping digital photographs, carefully spliced. Every turn of a page seems to reveal a secret -- ironic, considering that the characteristic they all share is openness.

* "Cairo Cats: Egypt's Enduring Legacy" (Camel Caravan Press, $18.95, 96 pp.)

Lorraine Chittock's photographs could convert the most hardhearted cat hater. Consider the kitten in the first picture inside, all wide-eyed innocence, cradled by someone we do not see -- except for the hands, gnarled and bruised. Chittock doesn't pose the cats at tourist sites or in luxurious settings, but goes where the cats are: lolling on the rugs of a mosque; entertaining merchants at a fruit stand; acting aloof as children play in an alleyway. They nurse and preen like cats everywhere, except that Chittock also frames them up to reveal much about everyday life in Cairo.

The pictures are paired with Middle Eastern proverbs and poems. A 9th-century story tells of two men who claimed the same cat. A judge ordered that it should be set free to choose between their houses. "But then the cat didn't go to either house!" Cats.

* "¡Viva Colores!" (PowerHouse Books, $39.95, 151 pp.)

Paola Gianturco and David Hill gave their book an appropriately exuberant title, but they easily could have named it also for the most compelling aspect of Gianturco's vivid photos, the smiles. Nearly every human face depicted is shown smiling: proudly, shyly, coyly or confidently. As to the "colors" of the title, they are unsubtle, with few pastels or nuanced shades. Rather, they are vivid, primary colors, their boldness matching the positive attitudes of the people the authors selected as Guatemalan everyday heroes.

Gianturco focuses a lot on fabrics: blankets on a clothesline, a tasseled hammock, a striped tablecloth. And the bright clothing of those smiling, positive people: A beaming woman pedals a discarded bicycle rigged to power the village pump; an infant peers over her mother's shoulder. It's impossible not to smile back.