Big Ones, Out of Season

Despite the evident fact that most people have birthdays at about the same rate they have Christmases, publishers hesitate to issue expensive, elaborate books except in the jolly season, when the expense is less important than the solution of what to give Aunt Lucy. Those that do come out in other seasons must offer unusual promise. Among spring and summer's most unusual and promising:

MICHELANGELO THE PAINTER by Valeria Mariani. 151 pages, 86 color plates. Kimberly Dormann. For properly patriotic Italians, 1964 is the 400th anniversary not of the birth of Shakespeare but of the death of Michelangelo. The resulting commemorative volume, casually displayed on anyone's espresso table, is guaranteed to take the prize this summer--though perhaps only for price ($125) and awkwardness (14 in. by 11 in. by 3 in., weighing 11 Ibs.). The text is learned, dull and clumsily translated. What almost justifies the outrageous price is the color plates, which display every surviving work that Michelangelo painted, including each panel and major figure in his ceiling frescoes and Last Judgment from the Sistine Chapel. The reproduction is generally good, though a trifle hard-edged; the color, for the most part, avoids the unnatural keying-up that afflicts so many art books.

NEW YORK by Andreas Feininger and Kate Simon. 159 pages. Viking. $10; NEW YORK: PEOPLE AND PLACES by Victor Laredo and Percy Seitlin. 192 pages. Reinhold. $12.50. As if to prove that New York is not to be reduced, despite the slogan, to a mere summer festival, a clutch of recently issued picture-and-commentary books have tried to capture the year-round look and feel of the city as its passionate fans know it. These two are the best. Laredo's photos are particularly good at capturing architecture, and the accompanying essays are casual and urbane. But for many readers Feininger's camera may prove more authoritative, his selection of subjects more inclusive, and the commentary by Kate Simon a shade more knowledgeable.

A MILITARY HISTORY AND ATLAS OF THE NAPOLEONIC WARS by Brigadier General Vincent Esposito and Colonel John Robert Elting. Unpaged. Praeger. $19.95. At the heart of this volume are 169 maps, 9 in. by 12 in., originally prepared for use at West Point. The maps begin with "Europe in 1795," end at "Waterloo Campaign: Situation 29 June 1815," and cover every campaign and battle in between. They are entrancingly peppered with red and blue bars, arrows, boxes, dots, circles, cross-hatchings, and ominous notes like: "The Kamenski shown here is not the general of that name on Map 70." Facing each map is a dense page of breathless prose: "Part of the Russian first and second lines now toughly reformed and began firing wildly to the rear; Murat's leading divisions seemed hopelessly trapped. Instead, the cavalry of the Guard burst forward." Or: "On 11 October, Bernadotte halted short of Munich in a cloud of alarmist reports." If passages are inadvertently funny, the book is nonetheless a bugle blast to bring every armchair general snapping to wild-eyed attention.

SAILING FOR AMERICA'S CUP by Everett B. Morris; photographs by Morris Rosenfeld. 216 pages. Harper & Row. $10. That gimcracky old silver ewer with all the curlicues and the hole in the bottom is, to yachtsmen, the most beautiful prize the heart can yearn for, and the sailing races to win it have produced some of the loveliest pictures in sport. America's Cup is to be contested once again this September, as good an excuse as any for this book of lucid text and fine photographs, many in color. The text roams all the way back to the original two-masted America and forward to the design, handling and match tactics of the 12-meters that will be trying out all this summer.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN edited by Leonard W. Labaree. 351 pages. Yale. $12.50. Where so many fancy books are long on pictures and short on readable reading matter, this one is superbly the reverse. The type is handsome, the production pleasant, but what counts here is the text: the first thoroughly edited and adequately annotated version of Franklin's memoirs faithful in every word to Franklin's holograph. The scholarship is by the Yale editors who are also issuing Franklin's Papers, and they wear their learning lightly. They have thrown out the tamperings and heavy dignifications of previous versions to restore Franklin's natural power and breeziness of expression--one standard edition has "I was not a little surprised, and Keimer stared with astonishment." Franklin actually wrote "Keimer star'd like a Pig poison'd." The result is like cleaning away the grime and cracked varnish of generations to discover unsuspected sparkle in an old master.

IMAGES OF WAR by Robert Capa. 175 pages. Grossman. $15. "From my angle war was like an aging actress: more and more dangerous and less and less photogenic," Robert Capa once wrote. Yet War Photographer Capa pursued his hated harridan longer and more closely than anyone else. He was under fire in Spain in 1936-37, China in 1938, Britain during the blitz in 1941, North Africa in 1942, Italy in 1943. He was with the first assault wave in Normandy in 1944, with the Maquis in Paris at the liberation, with the Israelis in Palestine in 1948, with the garrison of Dienbienphu. All those battlefields, in his gritty photos (many for LIFE), are here. Also here are the people, both soldiers and noncombatants, whose faces he increasingly relied on to tell the horrors of war. Finally, on a road in North Viet Nam in 1954, the old lady turned on him; Capa was killed by a Viet Minh antipersonnel mine.

THE JAPANESE HOUSE by Heinrich Engel. 495 pages. Charles E. Tattle. $27.50. In an almost-unheard-of warning at the start of this volume, the publishers throw up their hands and admit that "at one time we urged that, in the interest of greater clarity, the manuscript be completely rewritten." The author's refusal has resulted in a book that is remarkably difficult in subject and style. It is redeemed by hundreds of photographs and drawings which add up to the most vital presentation yet made of the tradition of Japanese housing. Engel's total immersion in everything Japanese has also given him a compelling vision of the ceremonious grace of Japan's everyday living that has produced the architecture. It is this vision that he struggles to express. Often, despite his publisher's fears, he succeeds.

THE NILE by Eliot Elisofon. 292 pages. Viking. $17.50. From the cloud-capped equatorial glaciers where the headwaters gather, to the soaking flatlands of the steamy delta, from the eternal past of the Pharaohs to the eternal present of the fellahin--Elisofon has photographed the Nile complete, and accompanies his pictures with his own extensive text. Sphinxes, water buffaloes, pyramids, dhows, tombs and King Tut--the obvious subjects have rarely been better done. What stand out, though, are the more personal shots of the teeming life along the river's green thread: the herd of zebras thundering away near Lake Victoria, the camel and the little boy resting together by a campsite.

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