Perspective: More Season's readings

Books of photography, of course, head the list: Photographers, after all, are the ultimate voyeurs. One of the world's most famous culture photographers, Helmut Newton offers his extremely provocative, beautiful shots in both color and duotone in Newton's Illustrated No. 1 -- No. 4 (Thunder's Mouth Press, $34.95). Be forewarned though: Some of them are quite racy. New in paperback this season is Women: Annie Leibovitz with an essay by Susan Sontag (Random House, $45), featuring 123 portraits of women from a broad spectrum of society in Leibovitz's signature style.

Photographs by Snowdon (Abrams, $75) is the first retrospective of English photographer Lord Snowdon's nearly 50-year-long career. Starting in the 1950s and including his fashion photography, celebrity and royal portraits and still-life and landscape photography, it's a stunning collection. In conjunction with an exhibition at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Alan Siegel has published the fabulous One Man's Eye (Abrams, $49.50), with more than 100 photos from his collection. Including photography by Robert Mapplethorpe (hint: don't buy this book for Junior), Walker Evans and Edward Weston, this oversized book showcases some of the finest photography of the 20th century.

Photos that Changed the World (Prestel) is a collection of almost 200 pictures, most of them with which we are familiar. From the famous portrait of Che Guevara to shots of the Wright brothers' flight, from photos of the Nazi concentration camps to pictures of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, this book is filled with awe-inspiring pictures. A gathering of never-before-seen photographs of the civil rights leader, King: A Photobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Viking Studio, $40) details his legendary life. Text by National Book Award winner Charles Johnson accompanies this powerful collection of photographs that show King as husband, minister and leader.

Photos from the collection of the Royal Photographic Society, many old and rare, are in PhotoHistorica: Landmarks in Photography (Artisan, $60). With 350 color and duotone photographs, the subjects of this humongous book include portraiture, landscapes, nudes and architecture: Basically, everything. Century of Change: America in Pictures 1900-2000 (Bulfinch, $60) chronicles the whirlwind that was the 20th century with entertaining and amazing photographs.

For something a little lighter, try Our Peaceable Kingdom: The Photographs of John Drysdale (St. Martin's, $19.95), where animals and humans are captured in tender, hilarious, and often surprising photographs.

Magazines like Vanity Fair have counted on our voyeuristic interest in star power for years as Vanity Fair's Hollywood (Viking Studio, $60) superbly demonstrates. A century-long chronicle of power and glamour, it is the ultimate voyeuristic coffee-table book for "the little people . . . out there in the dark," as Christopher Hutchins says in his introduction.

If that's not enough for movie mavens, however, there is still more eye candy offered by Icons of Film: The 20th Century (Prestel, $29.95) with its selection of 84 movie stills, from the silent movies to the box office hits of today. And who's that holding lemons to his eyes on the cover of Abe Frajndlich's Portraits (Prestel, $39.95)? Jack Lemmon, of course. That kind of delicious goofiness prevades this collection which also includes photographs of artist Andy Warhol in front of an Avedon photograph of Andy Warhol and cartoonist Charles Addams in knight's armor.

Celebrities, you see, don't die, they just have more and more books written about them. Sarah Bradford offers one more on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: America's Queen (Viking, $29.95). Di is dissected once more, this time by her private secretary P.D. Jephson in Shadows of a Princess (HarperCollins, $26).

And for those want to be a celebrity? Be Marilyn! or Be Elvis! (Sourcebooks, $16.95 each), written by impersonators Gailyn Addis and Rick Marino, offers a guide to impersonating the actress and rock star. People of all races, ages and genders can find their inner Elvis, insists Marino.

In her memoir Natural Blonde (Hyperion, $25.95) gossip columnist Liz Smith doesn't apologize for exploiting our voyeuristic instincts (and our insatiable appetite for gossip). Au contraire. "Gossip is one of the great luxuries of a democracy," she writes. "You don't read gossip columns in dictatorships."

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