New Readings of the Season

In praise of nature and art

UNDER $20

Poet, demon, prophet, artist--all the labels apply, but none will adhere to William Blake (1757-1827). The wild-eyed precursor of romanticism disdained organized religion and mocked rigid science. He was his own martyr, church and congregation, his own teacher, pupil and school. Blake's art and poetry only seem naive; in fact they are so dense with nuance and implication that each generation must interpret them anew. The modern reader can have no better introduction to the oeuvre than Milton Klonsky's William Blake: The Seer and His Visions (Harmony Books; 142 pages; $12 hardcover, $6.95 paper). Excerpts of poetry and prophecy mingle with hundreds of illustrations, including 32 plates in the colors of Blake's inimitable palette. Klonsky provides a text informed with psychological insight and charged with emotion. It fully ratifies the master's celebrated dictum: "Energy is Eternal Delight."

Cartoons are the laughingstock of journalism; they are not a long-term investment. Put between covers, the illustrations and captions seem prematurely aged and irrelevant. This year three exceptions prove that rule. George Price's angular eccentrics have been celebrated for 45 years; his latest work, Browse at Your Own Risk (Simon & Schuster; 128 pages; $7.95), is aptly titled. The risk is seizures of mirth that render the reader helpless. Price's pen and punch line are, as always, off the wall: "My mother doesn't even bother to come to the games," complains one halfback as he watches an old lady buck the line. Explains a widow to friends: "He didn't really die of anything. He was a hypochondriac." Nonsense. He probably died of laughter looking at Price's lunatic -fringework.

Charles Saxon's One Man's Fancy (Dodd, Mead; unpaged; $10.95) is a collage of upwardly mobile Americana. "Is it Manet or Monet who isn't as good as the other?" asks a culture-hungry matron. A father holds his little girl's hand: "What did you learn in school today?" She shows him: an over-the-shoulder judo throw.

The man who chooses such work is Lee Lorenz, cartoon editor of The New Yorker. In Now Look What You've Done (Pantheon; unpaged; $7.95), Lorenz employs little of Saxon's architectural draftsmanship or Price's mirth-shaking slapstick. But in the right mood, he can quote anything out of context for hilarious effect. Outside the witch's gingerbread house a sign reads: THIS STRUCTURE WILL BE TORN DOWN AND REPLACED BY A NEW 44-STORY COOKIE. The back of Santa Claus' sleigh bears the bumper stickers REGISTER COMMUNISTS, NOT FIREARMS! and LET'S GET THE U.S. OUT OF THE U.N. "That's funny," observes a lady as he goads his reindeer skyward. "For some reason, I always thought of him as a liberal."

Buffs who watch Vic Braden's televised Tennis Tips often come away saying, "He ought to write a book." Well, he has. His Tennis for the Future, written with Bill Bruns (Little, Brown; 274 pages; $12.95), is the Wimbledon of the wildly proliferating genre of tennis instruction books, clearly outclassing all the others. With humor, psychology, basic physics, clear diagrams and multiple-exposure pictures by John G. Zimmerman, Braden demolishes many long-cherished (and totally wrong) notions about tennis strokes and strategy. Readers are left with what is probably their first clear insight into why that elusive, fuzzy ball, and the opponent on the other side of the net, behave as they do. Braden's inspiring message to the 99.9% of the population who are not superjocks: "If you can walk to the drinking fountain without falling over, you have the physical ability to play this game pretty well."

Murder Ink: The Mystery Reader's Companion. "Perpetrated" by Dilys Winn (Workman Publishing; 522 pages; $14.95 hardcover, $7.95 paper). For devotees of mysteries, thrillers and spy stories, this is the unputdownable reference work and ultimate argument settler. How many of those "little gray cells" did Hercule Poirot have? (One trillion.) Nero Wolfe's actual weight? (One-seventh of a ton.) Which British poet laureate and which U.S. President wrote murder stories? (C. Day Lewis and Abraham Lincoln.) With 150 contributions about crime writers, cops, critics, scientists, ex-spies, a stoolie, a butler who didn't do it and many others, Winn's concordance is elegant, entertaining and encyclopedic.

The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady by Edith Holden (Holt, Rinehart & Winston; 186 pages; $14.95). In the England of 1906, when there was less leisure time and no television, Naturalist Edith Holden made almost daily entries in a diary and interspersed among them watercolor paintings of the birds, flowers and grasses she saw on her walks. The result, never before published, was a delicately assembled chronicle of a year in the Midlands that included the diarist's favorite poems and aphorisms. It is published here in a fine facsimile edition that pleases the mind and the eye.

Life Goes to War: A Picture History of World War II. Edited by David E. Scherman (a Time-Life Television Book/Little, Brown; 304 pages; $19.95). World War II was the longest-running story in the history of LIFE, the magazine that practically invented photojournalism. From the war's prelude in Spain to the Japanese surrender nine years later, the magazine's photographers provided the images that alerted and moved a nation. Many of the pictures have been permanently filed in our imaginations: Robert Capa's famous "moment of death" of a Spanish Republican soldier; the dead Chinese child being carried to a mass grave like a sack of laundry; Mussolini flapping his arms like a prize rooster; MacArthur sloshing ashore in the Philippines; the pinups of the '40s--Betty Grable, Dorothy Lamour, Rita Hayworth and that trivia-test stumper, Chili Williams, "the Polka-Dot Girl." A perfect gift for the old Sarge & Co.

Although he is probably best known for the images he captured during the Civil War, Mathew Brady's range as a photographer was vast. Just how vast is shown in Mathew Brady and His World by Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt and Philip B. Kunhardt Jr. (Time-Life Books; 304 pages; $19.95). Using the massive collection of Brady material gathered by the late Frederick Hill Meserve, the editors assemble Brady's portraits of the great (including several haunting shots of a careworn Lincoln), of luminaries from the worlds of politics, literature and the theater, and of such strange creatures as Tom Thumb (an enchanting series documents the famous midget's wedding) and Siamese Twins Chang and Eng. Brady's crystalline landscape shots capture the building of monuments in Washington and New York. The introduction and running commentaries not only chronicle Brady's techniques and career--they also illustrate the rise of photography in America and its growth in the hands of a genius.

From the 7th through 12th centuries, medieval Spain, isolated on the Iberian peninsula, developed an artistic tradition distinct from the rest of Europe's. Visigoth and Muslim influences brought a pagan exoticism to Spain's Christian art, particularly in illuminated manuscripts. Early Spanish Manuscript Illumination by John Williams (Braziller; 119 pages; $19.95 hardcover, $9.95 paper) provides illuminations of its own, offering plates from such works as the Beatus Commentary on the Book of Revelation that dazzle the reader with apocalyptic visions of weeping angels and rapacious beasts, saints and sinners, heaven and hell.

Winston Churchill was to say later: "The only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril." With good reason. Under Karl Doenitz, one of the most brilliant strategists of World War II, Nazi wolf packs came horrifyingly close to severing Britain's lifelines in 1940 and again in 1943. The Battle of the Atlantic (Dial/James Wade; 342 pages; $14.95) is based largely on newly released documents from British, U.S. and German archives, as well as on eyewitness accounts. The fascinating history exhumes and examines the political squabbles and secret deals on land--and the herculean U.S. shipbuilding program that eventually scuttled Doenitz's undersea fleet. With more than 400 action photos.

OVER $20

King Tut was an exception to the rule. He did take it with him. All of it. When the tomb was unsealed in 1922 after about 3,000 years, it disgorged a funerary trove unrivaled in history or the imagination: golden chairs and chests, pearly alabaster statuary and polychromatic bursts of gold, lapis lazuli, carnelian, jasper and obsidian jewelry: some of the most beautiful body ornaments ever designed. And, of course, there was also the famous quartzite sarcophagus with its nesting of golden inner coffins that protected the mummified remains of the frail king who died about 1325 B.C., before his 20th birthday.

With its 100 full-color plates, Tutankhamun: His Tomb and Its Treasures by I.E.S. Edwards, with photographs by Harry Burton and Lee Boltin (Metropolitan Museum of Art/Knopf; 256 pages; $35), is the finest popular book on the subject. It depicts objects that were not included in the Metropolitan Museum-Egyptian government exhibition now touring several U.S. cities, as well as black-and-white photos from the 1922-28 excavation under Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon. These old pictures reflect the excitement of the unsealing when Tutankhamun's treasures lay in disarray, as if at some pharaonic garage sale.

The Spanish who reached Peru in the 16th century were primarily interested in gold. But later visitors have been even more impressed with the Inca highway system, stretching from the ancient capital at Cuzco north into Colombia and south well into Chile. Paved with massive, hand-hewn blocks of stone, the roads have survived the centuries all but intact. The Route of the Incas by Jacques Soustelle (Viking; unpaged; $35) evokes the grandeur of the vanished Inca empire and explains why a people who never used the wheel built such a road network. Hans Silvester's striking photographs capture the haunting beauty of sites like the ruined city of Machu Picchu, the sculptured faces of present-day Andeans and the ageless wonder of the paved Inca roads. Between them, Soustelle and Silvester manage to show why even the Spanish, who conquered the land of the haughty llama and high-soaring condor, were unable to change it.

Stormy surf on a rocky Maine headland. Sunrise through the mangroves on a Florida key. Sunset on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. Everyone has his own favorite image of the beaches that border most of the U.S. In The Wild Shores of North America (Knopf; 240 pages; $35), Ann and Myron Sutton manage to capture nearly all of them. Beginning in the icebound Arctic, they take the armchair beachcomber on a scenic tour down the East Coast, past Cape Cod and the islands, along the perilous shoals of the Carolinas, through the lost waterways of the Everglades and Louisiana bayous, then up the West Coast from the desert sands of Baja California, past the cypresses of Monterey and the great coastal forests of the Pacific Northwest to the fog-shrouded Aleutians. Readers may not finish the tour with sand in their shoes, but most will close this lyrical volume yearning for the smell of salt air.

The Miraculous Journey of Mahomet with introduction and commentaries by Marie-Rose Seguy (Braziller; 158 pages; $40). Known in the Muslim world as the Miraj Nameh, this legend describes the mystical visions of Muhammad as he ascended one night to the Seventh Heaven and the Throne of God. With the Angel Gabriel as his guide, the Prophet meets with Adam, Noah, Abraham and Moses. He visits paradise, with its eternally blooming gardens, and hell, where sinners suffer endless agony at the hands of demons. The 15th century illuminations that accompany the text of this holy adventure are masterworks of Middle Eastern art. Produced in Herat, capital of ancient Khurasan, the paintings flood the eye with blues, golds, reds and greens. The effect is similar to that made by classic carpets and tapestries. One of the most attractively produced art books of the season.

Gentleman and scholar, diplomat and master painter, Peter Paul Rubens was that rare artist, at home with himself and his society. His orchestrations of the Christian, the mythic and the historical have endured as voluptuous celebrations of human passion and faith. Marking the 400th anniversary of his birth, Rubens by Frans Baudouin (Abrams; 405 pages; $60) pays rich tribute to the Flemish master with a gallery of 278 illustrations and a meticulous text tracing his stylistic development and the temper of his times.

"Playful physics" was the way Rene Magritte somewhat disdainfully characterized the trompe 1'oeil style of painting. But the term could apply to his own oblique surrealism. Rings plunging through pianos, airborne castles, flaming keys and animated bottles are all part of the artist's whimsical, gravity-free universe. Magritte: Ideas and Images by Harry Torczyner (Abrams; 277 pages; $45) provides an opulent but ambiguous visual festival. The artist, half magician, half charlatan, paints with paperback Freud insights and melodramatic compositions so calculating that he sometimes makes Norman Rockwell appear primitive. Yet in the midst of a darkened landscape, Magritte can mysteriously illuminate the sky: on an ominous day he makes it rain identical men in bowler hats, as impassive and relentless as Kafka's bureaucrats. In such works the conjurer celebrates and mourns the human condition and shows why, despite his shortcomings and the shiftings of fashion, he remains a perennial favorite of connoisseurs as well as crowds.

The only thing that will turn a man's head faster than a passing pretty girl is an antique car moving majestically down the slow lane on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Duesenberg, Auburn, Cord, Marmon, Stutz, Fierce-Arrow and Franklin have the glamour of old movie stars--and are usually better preserved. The value of these classics now runs into six figures. American Classic Cars by Henry Rasmussen (Picturama/Schocken; unpaged; $24.50) allows the subcompact set to relive the golden age of the luxury automobile. A look at masterpieces as rare as a glimpse of Garbo.

Train buffs may rush out to buy Rails of the World (David R. Godine; 406 pages; $75) only to find that its subject is not choochoos but birds--members of the family Rallidae, including rails, coots and gallinules. No matter. It is impossible to be disappointed by this handsome book. Smithsonian Institution Secretary S. Dillon Ripley has brought his ornithological expertise and years of patient watching to bear on these elusive creatures. The 41 color paintings by J. Fenwick Lansdowne are reproduced so sharply that light seems to glance off eyes and feathers. Ripley furnishes all the required taxonomy for experts--and some doleful news for everyone. Because they fly poorly, these birds are easy prey for predators. Their preferred nesting sites--marshes and coastal wetlands--are being drained by progress. Some recently extinct species can now only be seen in places like Rails of the World.

Art appreciation was once a gut course--a simple matter of getting to know the styles and spellings of old masters. Modernism changed all that. Surrealism, Dada, cubism and, later, abstract expressionism, Pop, Op, minimalism and Happenings were too complex for simple appreciation. Edward Lucie-Smith, an English critic, attempts to pave a smooth, orderly path through this jungle of schools, styles, waves and blips. In Art Now (Morrow; 504 pages; $29.95) he efficiently gets the reader from abstract expressionism to superrealism. Like a package-tour guide, he hits the peaks and some of the troughs. The visual impact of the more than 350 color plates is vigorous. But the pace of the survey is so brisk that the reader may find himself thinking, "If this is Thursday, it must be Lichtenstein."

Wim Swaan is an impeccable photographer, a lucid writer and a dedicated medievalist. In The Late Middle Ages (Cornell University Press; 232 pages; $27.50) he proposes that the period from 1350 to the Renaissance in Northern Europe and the Iberian peninsula produced a "pyrotechnic blaze of glory" in art and architecture. The illustrations of Gothic spires and gargoyles, flying buttresses and Books of Hours, tombs and tapestries and town halls make the point spectacularly; the text puts it all into historical perspective. There are only 16 color plates, including a breathtaking interior of King's College Chapel in Cambridge, but what surprises and captures the reader is the hundreds of black-and-white photographs that demonstrate anew how glorious the medium can be.

Magnified 615 times with the scanning electron microscope, the body of a carpenter bee resembles a forest in a nightmare. At 13,818 times, a crack in an eggshell is a mysterious view of a devastating earthquake. In Magnifications (Schocken; 119 pages; $24.95), Photographer David Scharf takes the reader on a visual adventure into microspace. The images are beyond normal senses, but through the microscope Scharf puts the reader eyeball to eyeball with tiny insects like the Feathery Midge (in life about 2 mm. long) and allows us to make contact with beautiful, intriguing, minute parts of plants and minerals. He has combined scientific knowledge and photographic talent. With this book, we now have an Ansel Adams of inner space.

The first step in selling is stopping the eye. No one has mastered that rule of advertising as well as Adman George Lois. For more than two decades he has married the outrageous to the fantastic. The Art of Advertising (Abrams; 325 pages; $45) is a portfolio of his campaigns and some of the 92 covers he did for Esquire. Improbably enough, Lois has made advertising interesting; impossibly enough, he has made it fun.

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