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Tome for the holidays

By MARGO HAMMOND
Published December 11, 2005

On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me . . . a book? Why not? A book would give your true love far more pleasure than six geese a-laying, and the joy will last long after the holidays are over. So for Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or even Festivus, think books. Here are more than a dozen suggestions:

DAY ONE: ALL YOUR DREAMS UP A TREE

One Man's Dream of Life Aloft

By S. Peter Lewis and T.B.R. Walsh

TMC Books, $29.95, 131 pp

Who needs a partridge in a pear tree when you can have a whole house up there? According to author S. Peter Lewis, Treehouse Chronicles is not so much a how-to as a why-to book on building a treehouse. Lewis tells the saga of his four-year journey erecting a mammoth treehouse in the woods of Maine. "Treehouse Chronicles is the story of what happens when big people decide to be kids again and they have tools and lumber," jokes Lewis. Taking copious notes and dozens of photographs during the process, and convincing his business partner, watercolor artist T.B.R. Walsh, to provide lovely detailed illustrations of his project, Lewis gives a pretty good account of how he built his treehouse. But more importantly, his book inspires us to follow our own dreams. "Dreams need feet, Peter," Lewis' mother told him. "They're not worth much stuck between your ears." Treehouse Chronicles is one man's story of how he put feet on his dreams.

DAY TWO: RHINOS (AND OTHER MAGNIFICENT CREATURES)

Photographs from East Africa

Photographs by Nick Brandt, foreword by Alice Sebold, introduction by Jane Goodall

Chronicle Books, $40, 132 pp

In colors of sepia (which at times looks like a dusty red) and icy blue, these photographs of African animals, including rhinos, hippos, lions, giraffes, chimpanzees, cheetahs, elephants, ostriches, storks, zebras and a kudu (sorry, no turtledoves) look like old tintypes. Many of the animals, in fact, look like they have posed for Brandt, and in a way, they did. Brandt did not use a telephoto lens, but approached his fellow beings as he would a friend. "You wouldn't take a portrait of a human being with a telephoto lens from a hundred feet away and expect to capture their soul; you'd move in close," he explains. The results are photographs that already seem to be of a vanished era, in a time before man and his encroaching civilization came on the scene.

DAY THREE: RUSSIAN LENS

Beyond Utopia

Photographs by Andrew Moore, foreword by Boris Fishman

Chronicle Books, $40, 120 pp

When we think of Russia, we think either of the excesses of its imperial era or the drab, dour days of Communist rule. Both are gone, leaving behind a strange mixture of decadence and dreams. In his arresting photographs - whether of an abandoned church with its onion-shaped domes, cigarette sellers on Chekhov Street in Yalta, ice fishing in Vologda, a statue of Lenin sitting undelivered in a stone-cutting yard, or a red piano with a few stuck keys - Moore captures the country's contradictions and the beauty that lies in those convergences. "There was something of a dark dream about it," Moore says of his time in Russia, "yet lit by the defiant spark of the unexpected."

DAY FOUR: CALLING BIRDS

Photographs by Gilles Martin, text by Myriam Baran

Harry N. Abrams, $40, 318 pp

THE BEDSIDE BOOK OF BIRDS:

An Avian Miscellany

By Graeme Gibson

Doubleday, $29.95, 369 pp

If the movie March of the Penguins didn't help us appreciate our winged brethren, these lavishly illustrated books surely will. Birds of the World, a coffee-table volume, features 261 color photographs of some of the world's most colorful birds, including an Indian peacock, a Peruvian toucan, a Kenyan black crown crane and Antarctica's king penguins. Martin captures these and other birds not only flying but also soaring, stalking, swimming, bathing, sunning, feeding, preening, mating, building and hatching. Gibson's avian miscellany, a compendium of our fascination with birds throughout history that is a perfect size for the night stand, offers exquisite drawings, paintings and other artworks of birds, dating to as early as 30,000 B.C. Gibson has also collected folk tales, parables, poems and prose from sources ranging from Charles Darwin to Barry Lopez.

DAY FIVE: RINGS OF THE UNIVERSE

The Definitive Visual Guide

Edited by Martin Rees

DK, $50, 512 pp

The Ring Nebula, the Pacific Ring of Fire and the rings of Saturn are only a few of the phenomena explained in detail in this encyclopedic tour of the cosmos. Beginning with an overview of astronomy and space travel, the volume covers the solar system, the Milky Way and the galaxies beyond. The final section provides an atlas of the night sky, showing each of the 88 constellations and its celestial objects as they appear from the northern and southern hemispheres, along with a monthly sky guide, pinpointing the location of the planets from 2005 to 2012.

DAY SIX: T-REX POPPING (UP)

By Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart

Candlewick Press, $26.99, 15 pp

Robert Sabuda's Winter's Tale: The Original Pop-Up Journey is all the rage for gift-giving this season, but Sabuda, the master of pop-up books, and Reinhart, another pop-up whiz, teamed up earlier this year to create what they rightly call "The Definitive Pop-Up." How can you beat more than 35 pop-ups of such deliciously oversized beasts as the car-size ankylosaurus or the sauropod, "the undisputed heavyweight champion on land." This book, thick with hidden pop-ups, also provides "up-to-the minute information about more than 50 different dinosaurs." Did you know, for example, that "two newly discovered dinosaurs have beaten out Tyrannosaurus rex in the contest for King of the Carnivores"? Of course, as the authors point out, T. rex "still wins the popularity contest, claws down." If you doubt it, check out their pop-up of the awesome creature, which lunges at you, teeth bared, from the center of pages 12 and 13.

DAY SEVEN: TOTS A SLEEPING

By Anne Geddes

Andrews McMeel, $29.95, 124 pp

Maybe it's because on Nov. 18 I became a great-aunt, but Anne Geddes' photographs of sleeping babies tucked into flower buds, which I used to find cloying, I now ooh and aah over. In this edition, the portraits of mostly slumberous tots are accompanied by quotes from Herbert Hoover ("Children are our most valuable natural resources"), Fyodor Dostoevsky ("The soul is healed by being with children"), Magic Johnson ("All kids need is a little help, a little hope and somebody who believes in them") and other baby lovers.

DAY EIGHT: DOLLS ENCHANTING

The Art of the Japanese Doll

By Alan Scott Pate

Tuttle, $75, 288 pp

At 42, Alan Pate, a native of Tampa, is too old to be playing with dolls, but the Harvard-educated Montana rancher and antiques dealer is one of the world's experts on the elaborated costumed ningyo, a Japanese doll tradition that dates to 4000 B.C. According to the New York Times, Ningyo: The Art of the Japanese Doll is "probably the first comprehensive, extensive book on the cultural role that dolls traditionally have played in Japanese society (as toys, talismanic figures, festival centerpieces, medical tools and art forms)." The book, which provides colorful examples of the expressive white-faced dolls, often robed in elaborate brocade, from the Edo period (1615-1868), is the official catalog for a current exhibition Pate has curated at the Mingei International Museum in San Diego.

DAY NINE: LADIES DANCING AND DOING THEIR OWN THING

How We See Ourselves

By Sharon Wohlmuth, Carol Saline and Dawn Sheggeby

Bulfinch Press, $35, 176 pp

Portraits of Black Women and Their Fabulous Hair

By Michael Cunningham and George Alexander

Doubleday, $29.95, 199 pp

Fifty women photographers fanned out across the country on April 8 and took pictures of women. Lots of women. Those photographed, gathered in A Day in the Life of the American Woman: How We See Ourselves, include 57-year-old Sister Kaye Stramler, a traveling minister; 57-year-old Lupe Valdez, the first woman ever elected sheriff of Dallas County, Texas; 38-year-old Lisa Woodward, who skateboards with her two daughters in Connecticut; 29-year-old Leilani Munter, an aspiring NASCAR driver who left Hollywood to go to North Carolina to pursue her dream; and Army National Guard Maj. Tammy Duckworth, who lost her legs last year in Iraq. Queens, which features portraits of black women, sharply photographed by Cunningham, and comments by black women about their hair, collected by Alexander, also shows an amazing diversity of style. You go, girl.

DAY TEN: LORDS A-FISHING and A-COOKING

Fly-Fishing Journeys of a Native Son

By Peter Kaminsky

Stewart, Tabori & Change, $35, 192 pp

A Guy's Guide to Cooking

By Rocky Fino

Stephens Press, $24.95, 174 pp

In the lushly illustrated American Waters, New York Times outdoor columnist Peter Kaminsky takes us on a tour across America to his favorite fishing holes from Yellowstone to Montauk, including a stop in the Florida Keys for shark fishing, "the NASCAR version of fly-rodding." He also includes recipes he collected along the way. Who wouldn't be attracted to a man who catches - and cooks - his own food? For the cooking part, check out Rocky Fino's Will Cook for Sex, a cookbook written in simple, straightforward language that even the most kitchen-phobic man can understand. "A cute move with beer and pizza works ONLY if you're Ben Affleck," Fino warns, while also advising men to stay away from grilling if they want to impress a date. Instead, he offers step-by-step recipes for Seahawk Pasta, Power Play Pucks and Blue Collar Souffle and even includes business card-size "cheat sheets" to slip into your pocket in case dinner is at her place.

DAY ELEVEN: PIPERS PIPING

An A to Z Collection of Jazz Portraits

By Wynton Marsalis, illustrated by Paul Rogers

Candlewick Press, $24.99, 76 pp

The Singers, the Songwriters, and the Songs

By Ken Bloom, foreword by Michael Feinstein

Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, $34.95, 336 pp

New Orleans jazz artist and composer Winton Marsalis offers alphabet riffs on 26 jazz greats, from Louis Armstrong to DiZZy Gillespie. Illustrated with eye-popping poster art, Jazz A B Z also offers biographical sketches of the musicians by Phil Schaap and a dictionary of jazz terms. Armstrong, Count Basie (B), Duke Ellington (E), Ella Fitzgerald (F), Billy Holiday (L for Lady Day), Nat "King" Cole (N) and Sarah Vaughan (V) are also profiled in The American Songbook, along with Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Bing Crosby, Kate Smith, Dean Martin and Glenn Miller. The massive volume chronicles 100 years of American popular music, offering 600 photographs of singers, band leaders and songwriters and listing hit songs from the 19th century to the '60s.

DAY TWELVE: DRUMMERS DRUMMING THE RHYTHMS OF THE YEAR

African Wisdom for Every Day

By Danielle and Oliver Follmi

Harry N. Abrams, $29.95, 752 pp

This odd-shaped book - 8.9 inches wide, 6.5 inches tall and 2.3 inches thick - collects 365 bits of wisdom for every day of the year, accompanied by dazzling photographs that reinforce the message and a built-in cloth bookmark to keep your place. The pithy quotes are mostly culled from African proverbs (Dec. 4: "In the forest, when the branches quarrel, the roots embrace."), but there are also words of wisdom from such well-known international figures as Thurgood Marshall (April 9: "None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody bent down and helped us."), Nelson Mandela (Sept. 21: "I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.") and Louis Armstrong (Dec. 31: "What we play is life."). "This book takes us back to the "roots that embrace,' " says Doudou Diene, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights, "exposing us to what we do not already know, the murmuring of deep, hidden waters."

[Last modified December 13, 2005, 13:17:02]