Books: Gifts Between Covers

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT, by Stefan Lorant (640 pp.; Doubleday; $15), will seem as essential to admirers of Teddy Roosevelt as Lorant’s Lincoln is to worshipers of Honest Abe. The text is painstaking rather than incisive, but the 750 pictures have the cumulative effect of a cradle-to-grave biography that hardly requires words to give it significance.

THE SECOND WORLD WAR, by Winston S. Churchill and the Editors of LIFE (615 pp., 2 vols.; TIME Inc.; regular edition, $25; deluxe edition, $27.50), combines the best of Churchill’s sonorous prose from his six-volume history of World War II with some of the greatest war pictures and paintings ever brought between covers. The result, an excellent piece of bookmaking, anatomizes and dramatizes the greatest of wars. Included in the deluxe edition is an evocative recording of some of Churchill’s wartime speeches.

AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF Music, by Marc Pincherle (220 pp.; Reynal; $18), is a bold undertaking by a noted French musicologist: a history of Western music from early Christian chants to the present. Like any authoritative book that covers so vast a field, it seems perfunctory at times. But the basic information is there, and great taste has gone into the selection of 240 illustrations, ranging from a loth century B.C. harpist to Jazzman Sydney Bechet.

AFRICA, by Emil Schulthess (Simon & Schuster; $20), grew out of a trip to “Rocher Noir,” between Libya and French Equatorial Africa, to photograph an eclipse of the sun. Photographer Schulthess got his sun pictures, but he also took hundreds of others throughout Africa (a desert woman nuzzling her child, a Masai herdsman and his flock), which together seem to say more about the Dark Continent than many prose books.

POPES THROUGH THE AGES, by Joseph Brasher, S.J. (530 pp.; Van Nostrand; $14.95), brings together in a single volume pictures of 259 popes and accompanies each one with a brief biography. The effect is that of a permanent time of troubles in which the church has again and again found the men and the means to defend the faith.

MARCEL DUCHAMP, by Robert Lebel (191 pp.; Grove; $15), is billed as the “first full-scale study” of the Daddy of Dadaists. The scrappy text suggests that the author followed a method once used by Duchamp for writing music—he drew notes and musical markings out of a bag at random. But the volume makes up for the grab-bag text by reproducing almost every known work of Expressionist Cubist-Surrealist Duchamp, from his mustachioed Mona Lisa and famed Nude Descending a Staircase to the catalogue cover he decorated with a foam-rubber breast and the caption: “Please touch.”

THE CIVIL WAR DICTIONARY, by Mark M. Boatner III (974 pp.; Mckay; $15), suggests that arguments about the Civil War may never cease but that a lot of them are going to be settled by this book. Lieut. Colonel Boatner, onetime instructor of military history at West Point, has arranged 4,000 items in alphabetical order, among them 2,000 brief biographies of notable Civil War figures and scores of succinct action accounts from Gettysburg to mere skirmishes.

PORTRAITS OF GREATNESS, by Yousuf Karsh (207 pp.; Nelson; $ 1 7.50), is a gallery of 96 superior photographs by one of the best of all portrait cameramen. On facing pages Karsh tells a bit about the sittings (he got the famous one of Churchill by removing the cigar from his subject’s mouth, unintentionally bringing on the scowl and the hand placed angrily on hip), but the pictures are the thing: Ernest Hemingway oddly vacant-eyed and troubled; Composer Sibelius, eyes shut, looking like a man whose musical vision is more than he can bear; Princess Grace and her Rainier as slickly ready for the camera as soap-ad professionals.

EMAKIMONO (238 pp.; Pantheon; $35), is one of the most beautiful art books of the year. These brilliant examples of Japanese storytelling scrolls (11th to 14th century) are virtually unknown to all but specialists. Apart from beauty, they have the effect of unreeling incidents of a distant civilization in a kind of dreamlike, almost hypnotic, flow.

THE WEST POINT ATLAS OF AMERICAN WARS, Colonel Vincent J. Esposito, editor (Praeger; $39.95), was conceived as a textbook for a course on the history of the military art. Now non-West Point readers, too, can find out how the nation’s wars are presented to the army’s future leaders. The book’s outstanding maps—more than 400 of them in color—detail every important battle in U.S. history from before the French and Indian War to Korea. The 250,000 words of accompanying text add up to a remarkably taut official history. This is no book about skirmishes (a World War II veteran will find his division pinpointed, not his platoon or battalion); it is a work anchored in strategy, and as such it has no peer.

VICTORIA R, by Helmut and Alison Gernsheim (307 pp.; Putnam; $10). The last recognizable word spoken by Britain’s Queen Victoria was “Bertie.” Her Prince Albert is seen often in this appealing and truly Victorian book—in a popular lithograph of 1839, sny but smugly pleased, as an importunate Victoria asks, “Will you marry me?”; gazing sternly into the eyes of the queen who looks as if he had just been criticizing her housekeeping. The Queen had more than 100,000 photographs in her personal albums, including pictures of her servants, dogs, cats, prize bulls and pigs. The 400 illustrations used here from all sources highlight a time when a homely little woman could be thought of as the grandmother of Europe.

GREEK PAINTING, by Martin Robertson (193 pp.; Skira; $25), is the latest in a fine series of art books on the comparative history of painting. Here the reach is only to the 3rd century B.C.—no canvases, no murals, but mostly vase painting taken from ancient pottery. The utensils have a dignity beyond utility; the designs and pictures are of uncommon grace.

LAROUSSE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ASTRONOMY, by Lucien Rudaux and G. de Vaulcouleurs (506 pp.; Prometheus; $12.50), is a huge, carefully organized introduction to what goes on in the heavens. Few beginners’ questions will be left unanswered by the book, but its liveliest quality is the feeling it projects that the reader ought to know more. This encyclopedia does not tell how to build a Sputnik or a Lunik, but it is a firm pad from which any part of the universe may eventually become accessible to a student.

THE SEARCH FOR THE TASSILI FRESCOES, by Henri Lhote (236 pp.; Dutton; $6.95), vividly describes the French expedition of 1956 that led to a rich find of prehistoric painting in mid-Sahara. The author believes that this fearsomely beautiful, arid country—a once-fertile land—is the graveyard of a great civilization. What is certain is the beauty of his team’s findings, some of them, Lhote believes, going back 8,000 years. Were an unknown contemporary artist to paint the beautiful Negroes called The ‘Peul’ Girls or the daintily macabre Bird-Headed Goddesses, he would become famous overnight.

GEORGE CATLIN, EPISODES FROM LIFE AMONG THE INDIANS AND LAST RAMBLES (357 pp.; University of Oklahoma; $12.50), is probably the year’s prize piece of Americana. Lawyer Catlin’s fame as a painter of the American Indian is secure. But in the 18505 he traveled west of the Rockies and down into South America, kept a diary and came back with scores of vastly interesting paintings, brought together here for the first time. Catlin’s sense of space makes plains and pampas seem never-never lands of bold adventure, while his paintings of Indian families and their way of life tell an anthropologist much that he needs to know.

MASTER DRAWINGS, 19TH AND 20TH CENTURIES (218 pp.; Abrams; $25), consists of 94 drawings (reproduced in their original colors) in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. Most U.S. art lovers have not seen the exciting originals—by Daumier, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Picasso, among others.