Christmas: From Snowy Peaks to Sizzling Serves

$32.50 AND UP HIMALAYAS by Yoshikazu Shirakawa.

Unpaged. Abrams. $75. As practically every climber knows, photographs tend to increase the distance between man and mountain. Even the most spectacular peak can be reduced by the camera to an unimpressive white triangle.

The pictures of Japanese photographer Yoshikazu Shirakawa are a dramatic exception to this rule. Shirakawa actually climbed only a few of the pinnacles he photographed. (For others he pressed a helicopter into high-altitude service.) But his massive, magnificently reproduced study of the world's largest and highest mountains represents a photographic summit: Himalayas is simply the most beautiful book on mountains ever published.

DONATELLO text by Frederick Ham, photographs by David Finn. 482 pages.

Abrams. $75. This vast volume, which swings erratically between the largely splendiferous and the merely showy, illustrates all of the great Renaissance artist's known work. It is organized in sections devoted to each work, or group of figures. Photographs showing freestanding sculptures from different angles and various details of reliefs are often orchestrated to produce an almost cinematic sequence. The method works best on Donatello's highly dramatic, mature statuary: the famous Gattamelata equestrian figure, the chilling Judith and Holofernes and two works--St. John the Baptist in Venice and Mary Magdalen --which are Donatello's outcry against the diminishments of old age. In the case of more serene and introspective work, the Florentine St. Louis of Toulouse, like the overlit color photographs with their burnished gold and blue highlights look perilously like inspirational holy pictures handed out in Sunday school.

LANDSCAPE DRAWINGS edited by Curtis O. Baer. 360 pages. Abrams. $35.

There are not many good books on landscape, but this is one of them. Art Historian Baer begins with an essay that covers a great deal of historic and pictorial ground but also manages to be what art history and criticism rarely are:

wise, informative, graceful and affectionate. His captions are wide-roving and perceptive. The 160 expected and unexpected landscapes presented (most in black and white, but a few in color) offer an informal history of the genre that is hard to match, from Da Vinci to Van Gogh and beyond, from Pieter Bruegel and Jan van Goyen to Bonington and Ingres. Landscape, popular from the 16th to the 19th centuries, is now sadly out of fashion. Some people still love it--for drawing or looking --and this is their year.

GRANDMA MOSES by Otto Kallir. 357 pages. Abrams. $32.50. She began at the top with the sky, then painted in the distant purple hills and the far fields in green and brown. Then came the house and farm buildings with their big shade trees. Finally she put in the animals --mainly dogs and workhorses--and people. If the picture showed a sunny winter day, she finished off her creation by throwing a little 5-and-100-store glitter over the lot. In the 1940s after Anna Mary Robertson Moses became Grandma Moses, a famous primitive painter, she stuck serenely to her vision: the world she knew in Washington County, N.Y., after the Civil War. If that rural life is one that relatively few Americans have actually shared, it is also one adopted by the whole country as a myth of the past. The chief value of this book lies in the 135 faithful color illustrations.

Otto Kallir, the artist's dealer, has written an unpretentious text.

$19.95 TO $30 FREDERIC REMINGTON by Peter H. Hassrick. Abrams. $28.50. Remington first saw the West when he was 19: "I knew," he wrote, "that the wild riders and the vacant land were about to vanish forever." The rest of his life (he died at 48) was devoted to getting it all down. This volume, assembled from the Remington collection in the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth and the neighboring collection still privately held by the Sid W.

Richardson Foundation, has many a foldout page in full color, accompanied by a readable biography of the artist. It is not the "compleat" Remington, but it is handsomely, even lovingly done. The glosses on each picture provide sensible explications and insights about the dilemma of the cowboy's life and the dour deprivations of a cavalry troop on patrol. Overall a nostalgic but realistic backward look at the old West as it began to fade into myth.

MAXFIELD PARRISH by Coy Ludwig. 223 pages. Watson-Guptill. $25. Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966) painted and illustrated as if the world had been created by some great big magic realist in the sky. Partly as a result he became the most successful popular artist of the early 20th century and--by the time of his death at age 95--the most forgotten.

Generations have grown up with Parrish's glossy magazine covers, calendars and chocolate boxes. His sweet symmetry, jolly palette, coy eroticism and technical expertise are not to be snobbishly dismissed, as this collection of pictures (64 in color) and Author Ludwig's biography make nostalgically clear. For those who prefer more pictures and fewer words, there is Maxfield Parrish: The Early Years 1893-1930 (350 pages; Nash; $50). Of the 250 full-page reproductions, 200 are in color.

FRANCIS LEE JAQUES: ARTIST OF THE WILDERNESS WORLD Doubleday. 370 pages.

$25. Millions of visitors to New York's American Museum of Natural History have been spellbound by its dioramas, those three-dimensional displays of stuffed animals and birds set in meticulous reconstructions of their natural habitats. Many of the backgrounds--vistas of veldt and forest clearings--were painted by Francis Lee Jaques, the Illinois-born ornithologist and nature artist. Jaques, who died in 1969, at the age of 81, was also well known for his oil paintings and stark black-and-white drawings of wild life, and he cheerfully withstood Arctic cold and tropical heat to bring back such quarry on paper. To accompany many pictures (including 65 bird and animal paintings in color) Florence Page Jaques, the artist's wife, provides a fond account of her husband's enduring passion for the out-of-doors.

AMERICAN MASTERS: THE VOICE AND THE

MYTH by Brian O'Doherty. 288 pages. Random House. $25. "Between an artist and his work on the one hand, and the audience on the other," notes Critic Brian O'Doherty, "there are large areas for misunderstanding." O'Doherty, who paints (under the name Patrick Ireland) and also teaches (at Barnard), attempts to correct any such misunderstandings about eight American artists: Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Andrew Wyeth and Joseph Cornell. Despite the use of a good deal of jargon, O'Doherty is remarkably successful. His interviews and commentary, for example, throw a welcome personal light on Hopper's laconic pessimism and Davis' exuberant jazz-age Cubism. Convincingly, O'Doherty sees Pollock's drip paintings as a very American frontier quest for raw sensation--a kind of painter's version of the Great American Novel.

THE GENIUS OF AMERICAN PAINTING edited by John Wilmerding. 352 pages.

Morrow. $24.95. An ambitious attempt to survey and characterize American painting from colonial times to the present. The book is useful in that it handsomely gathers a vast amount of information as well as some 330 well-chosen illustrations. But of the six essays that make up the text, only those by Dartmouth Art Professor John Wilmerding and Dore Ashton are really good. The others range from the merely competent to the opaque. Another complaint: several abstract paintings are reproduced standing on their left sides--without indicating this curious fact to the reader.

VINCE LOMBARDI ON FOOTBALL edited by George L. Flynn. Two volumes, 448 pages. New York Graphic and Wallynn.

$19.95. Vince Lombardi's editor George L. Flynn could have tacked Lombardi's name onto a posthumous packet of old ticket stubs and made money. Instead, to his credit, Flynn has painstakingly gathered together Lombardi's notes about how to play football and organized them in a remarkable book, faithful to the simple and relentless Lombardi vision of the game. Flynn's presentation is very technical--and properly sweaty. The text is a filigree of football diagrams and terminology not intended for the casual armchair aficionado. But for anyone who is familiar with the intricate levels of the professional game and likes to see it described, the book can offer an approximation of what it might have been like to spend a week learning football from the master himself. For the dedicated fan, player or even coach, this is the gospel according to Vince. $15 TO $17.50

THE DICTIONARY OF STAMPS IN COLOR by

James A. Mackay. 296 pages. Macmillan. $17.50. The rich vagaries of stamp collecting go on and on as prices rise and the hobby cum investment spreads. In 1970, $280,000 was paid for a One-Cent Black on Magenta of British Guiana 1856: "a square inch of paper, with dogeared corners, a smudgy post mark and a badly rubbed surface." Author Mackay is the former keeper of stamps at the British Museum. He has produced a remarkably documented thumbnail history of some 3,000 stamps dating from 1840 to the present, with slightly enlarged color illustrations of all 3,000.

WINDJAMMER PARADE edited by Hans Hansen. 112 pages. Viking. $16.50. There is only a scrap of text to explain that in the Olympic year of 1972 some 65 of the world's largest windjammers closed a series of races by parading into the harbor of Kiel, West Germany. The book ends with a catalogue of boats that took part--square-riggers with skyscrapers of sail, brigantines, Dutch gaff cutters, topsail schooners. In between there is nothing but glorious pictures of tall ships, webbed traceries of cordage, acre upon acre of canvas, panoramas showing the vast fleet dotting troubled waters, symmetrical silhouettes of crews aloft on yardarms, looking like Chinese gymnasts, bringing in sail. The same great ships appear again and again, but no matter--in this case familiarity breeds content. For sailors this is the nonbook of the year.

FASANELLA'S CITY text by Patrick Watson. 148 pages. Knopf. $15. Ralph Fasanella's city is New York. As a young man he was a cio organizer among electrical workers; now he pumps gas at his brother-in-law's station under the Cross Bronx Expressway. And he paints--vast crowded canvases filled with 40-year-old billboards, saloons, cigar stores, subway entrances. It is easy to label him an urban Grandma Moses, but Fasanella's paintings are crammed with emotions that range from sentimentality to outrage at the assassination of President Kennedy. His strongest qualities as an artist are energy and a prodigal memory. One need not have known New York in the 1930s to feel nostalgia when looking at this book. Fasanella is 59, and much of his world has already disappeared without trace.

LOOKING AT PHOTOGRAPHS by John

Szarkowski. 215 pages. Museum of Modern Art. $15. One hundred representative black-and-white pictures from New York's Museum of Modern Art assembled and commented on by the director of the museum's photography department. There is, naturally, a wide choice of subject. The pictures were taken over a period extending roughly from 1850 to the present; the photographers include the likes of Pioneer Julia Margaret Cameron, Dorothea Lange, Cartier-Bresson, Brassa'i, Robert Doisneau, Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon. Szarkowski's pic-ture-by-picture text ranges from brilliant and supple observations to what can fairly be described as academic twaddle. People who take photography seriously will want the book because, even at his worst, Szarkowski takes photography very seriously indeed. $14.95 AND UNDER

TENNIS: GAME OF MOTION by Eugene Scott. 256 pages. Crown. $14.95. Anyone suffering from tennis toe or tennis elbow should not buy this book. Even a swift shuffle through it will make them want to grab the nearest racket and rush to the court. It is the pictures that do it. Whether they show Rod Laver smashing a serve, Stan Smith straining for a backhand drive, or Billie Jean King pulverizing a forehand volley, the photographs communicate the power, grace and sheer ferocity of top-level tennis, in kinetic color and black and white. The supporting text is heavy with cliches (legends are always "untarnished") as it sketchily covers the history, the famous matches and shotmakers of the game. No matter. Most tennis fans are used to the vagaries of mixed doubles.

OWLS OF THE WORLD edited by John A. Burton. 216 pages. Dutton. $14.95. Probably because their faces seem human and often take on a scholarly look of myopic wisdom, owls have enjoyed a formidable mythological reputation. Not that the more than 130 species distributed throughout the world are aware of it. As Editor Burton establishes in this remarkably illustrated survey, owls are not philosophers but predators, perfectly equipped for their occupation. They have front-set eyes that give them exceptional binocular vision. Their heads rotate 270 degrees. Their hearing is extremely acute, partially because on most nocturnal species saucer-shaped disks of feathers around their eyes also gather sound. Owl plumage is soft, which also helps: it enables them to fly silently toward their prey. The perfect Christmas gift for those who give a hoot.

LOST DISCOVERIES by Colin Ronan. 125 pages. McGraw-Hill. $10.95. Lively, lucid and well illustrated, this book describes scientific discoveries made by ancient civilizations that were later temporarily "lost"--from neglect, or simply because they were too far ahead of their time. The list is impressive and long.

Some 4,300 years ago, the Akkadians from Mesopotamia built bathrooms with elaborate sewers, for example, and the Egyptians developed an effective contraceptive jelly. Atomic theory was postulated in classical Greece; a Chinese sage invented the seismograph in A.D.

200. Obviously, writes Author Ronan, ancient man was "neither more foolish nor more intelligent than we are." Just more forgetful--perhaps.

THE INSPECTOR by Saul Steinberg. Unpaged. Viking. $10. Something less than a genius who doodles but something more than a doodler of genius, Steinberg goes on defying categories, preconceptions and occasionally--perspective. In this, his sixth book of drawings in three decades, hints of satire flicker over images of parades, masks, street corners and architecture. Is Steinberg making some point about bureaucratic conformity, say, or cultural cacophony? Perhaps. But too much interpretation spoils the fun. What interpretation is needed, anyway, of an artist who can symbolize what a dog thinks and render a woman's conversation as a series of dental charts?

THE CRAFT OF SAIL by Jan Adkins. 64 pages. Walker. $5.95. A few years back, Jan Adkins drew and wrote a book called The Art and Industry ofSandcas-tles, which cleverly combined designs for toddlers on the beach with a short history of fortification for older brothers and parents. This time, with pen, ink and wash pictures and accompanying text, he has produced a handsome small primer on sailing that is also a model of brevity, clarity and simplicity. Starting with the Bernoulli effect (which explains how sailboats move to windward), the book ends with anchoring, having passed through everything from knots to points of sail, from rigging to docking, from man-overboard drills to the rough-weather practice of heaving to. On small craftsmanship and sheer draftsmanship Adkins is hard to beat.

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