Glowing Celebrations of Nature, History and Art 21 Volumes Make a Shelf of Season's Readings

MORE THAN $60

This monumental survey deserves to be published to the strains of the triumphal march from Aida. The Art of Ancient Egypt by Kazimierz Michalowski (Abrams; 600 pages; $125) embraces some 5,000 years and 30-odd dynasties. Cheops, Tutankhamen, eleven Ramseses, a dozen Ptolemys and Cleopatra enliven a history that contains the seeds of the Western imagination. Polish Professor Michalowski links chapters on anthropology, language, society and craft with more than 100 pages of diagrams and maps. Some 900 pictures, including 145 in color, illustrate masterpieces of sculpture and painting seldom seen in print. Here, scholarship and grandeur are inseparable.

With his lively autobiography, Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571) ensured his lasting fame. Yet that book has convinced many that the Renaissance man was more inspired as a boaster and self-promoter than as an artist. In Cellini (Abbeville; 324 pages; $85), Sir John Pope-Hennessy corrects this impression. Although much of Cellini's early work in precious metals vanished, enough sculpture survives (and is photographed here in careful detail) to convince anyone of its creator's genius. From the exquisite gold and enamel of The Saltcellar of Francis I to the muscular bronze of Perseus, the impression grows: Cellini was better than even he had the nerve to maintain.

This is a book with bite. Dentistry: an Illustrated History by Malvin E. Ring, D.D.S. (Abrams; 320 pages; $75) ranges through time and twinges from the Maya Indians, who used tooth implants almost 1,400 years ago, to the latest microelectric techniques. What might have been a waiting-room time killer becomes instead a lively parade of names and incidents: Muhammad using an early version of the toothbrush; Henry VIII granting a charter for dental surgery to barbers; Paul Revere providing dental fillings before proceeding to larger items of silverware; Charles Lindbergh posing with his grandfather, the inventor of the porcelain jacket crown. Seldom has dentistry been so educational. Never has it been so painless.

$30-$60

The Renaissance in Northern Europe was different from the more celebrated period in Italy. Its humanism was tempered by a deep and chillier current of < piety, and its themes still reflected the medieval preoccupation with death and judgment. In Northern Renaissance Art (Abrams; 560 pages; $45), Art Historian James Snyder examines the intertwining paths of faith and art with erudition and style, aided by nearly 700 illustrations, from anonymous 14th century sculptures to the eloquent engravings and paintings of Albrecht Durer, Hans Holbein and Lucas Cranach. Most of the art dwells on religious themes, including some of Europe's most arresting Nativity scenes.

As they prance and canter across the page, Gericault's Horses (Vendome; 183 pages; $60) assume a life of their own. French Artist Theodore Gericault brilliantly portrayed stallions and draft horses, Arabians and English racers in settings that vary from battlegrounds to stables. In his equestrian oeuvre, created over a span of some ten years, Gericault even depicted, with an unflinching naturalism, horses being devoured by lions. As Art Historian Philippe Grunchec notes, the painter's devotion to the animals had its tragic side, foreshadowed by some of these works: he died in 1824 at age 32 of complications from a riding accident.

Most movie tie-ins are quickie paperbacks. But the current release of Out of Africa (see CINEMA) has led to Isak Dinesen's Africa (Sierra Club; 142 pages; $35), an enticing blend of passages from the memoirs that inspired the film and photographs that powerfully evoke the countryside. Baroness Karen Blixen lived from 1913 to 1931 in the highlands of what is now Kenya, then returned to Denmark, where under the pen name Isak Dinesen she recalled her former home in prose as direct and luminous as the land: "Mombasa has all the look of a picture of Paradise, painted by a small child . . . Once as we turned a corner in the forest, we saw a leopard sitting on the road, a tapestry animal."

Ever struggling for the perfect angle, Neil Leifer has made sports photography something of a sport itself. So it may be a spirit of fraternity that lends dash to his portrait gallery of athletes in Neil Leifer's Sports Stars (Doubleday; 256 pages; $35). The longtime photographer for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED and TIME does justice both to basketball's Nate Archibald airborne and to baseball's Casey Stengel in repose. He gets deep inside the tangles of the football field. And when he photographs Mary Lou Retton, he catches her in mid-bounce, all flags flying. Athletics were always like this, but before Leifer, athletic photojournalism was not.

"You must get your eyes accustomed first and gradually to the different light," Vincent Van Gogh told his brother Theo in 1889. The different light that shines from a Van Gogh painting has been astonishing the world ever since. It does so once more in Bernard Zurcher's sensitive picture biography, Vincent Van Gogh: Art, Life, and Letters (Rizzoli; 325 pages; $60). In the ten years before his suicide, Van Gogh turned out more than 2,000 drawings and paintings, progressing from somber browns and greens to the bright hues of his last months. Nearly a century later, they still radiate with the beauty and the terror of the noonday sun.

When Venetian troops ransacked Constantinople early in the 13th century, they brought home religious ornaments created by the world's finest craftsmen: goldsmiths, jewelers, wizards who worked in enamel. The Treasury of San Marco Venice (Abrams; 337 pages; $60) displays the loot, and poring over the glittering pictures is like wandering in a celestial gem shop. Among the glories here are a lyrical alabaster-and-pearl paten, which may have come from St. Sophia, and an opulent, dappled sardonyx chalice decorated with enamel figures that resemble mini-mosaics. There are treasuries or reliquaries in important churches all over Europe, but very few gladden the worldly connoisseur's eye like this one.

It had several incarnations in many languages, but Art Historian Jean-Paul Bouillon presents the movement under its best-known name in Art Nouveau (Rizzoli; 247 pages; $60). Some 350 illustrations, 125 of them in color, trace its genealogy from the 1870s to the outbreak of World War I, a journey that manages to bridge 19th century formalism and Bauhaus severity. Although Tiffany's lamps and Gaudi's facades are archetypal examples of art nouveau, the author widens artistic horizons, and readers' eyes, by demonstrating that fine artists from Whistler to Picasso were influenced by its rhythmic, serpentine style.

In Scottish Symphony (Little, Brown; 158 pages; $50), Photographer Michael Ruetz borrows some incisive observations from two highly literate travelers, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell; his photographs complement them. He has used his panoramic camera to record sweeping visions of the lonely land- and seascapes of the Scottish Highlands and the Hebrides: the cloudswept skies, the brooding waters, the lowering hills. On the Isle of Staffa, rocks rise like a forest of broken columns out of the sea; on the Isle of Lewis, the standing stones of Callanish loom up from the green turf, an untrammeled Stonehenge; on the edge of Loch Duich, the black walls of Eilean Donan Castle pierce the fog and glisten in the still water below. Irish Traditions (Abrams; 192 pages; $35), edited by Kathleen Jo Ryan and Bernard Share, with photographs by Ryan, is a different portrait of a similar Celtic stronghold. Here too are tall cliffs and ancient megaliths, ruined castles and beached fishing boats. But Ryan focuses on people as well, the Irish energetically at work and play: driving a horse or showing one, thatching a roof, vigorously competing in a hurling match. In 17 essays, Irish authors, critics and scholars probe their culture in richly lyric prose.

The Cadillac may have reached some sort of apex as an icon of American affluence in the 1950s, when it sprouted tail fins worthy of Buck Rogers. Portrait Photographer Stephen Salmieri sought out examples of the Cadillac (Rizzoli; 143 pages; $50) in automobile graveyards from rural New York to the Utah desert, as well as on the palatial driveways of Southern California. Models from 1908 to the present are caught in repose. The old autos are imbued with dignity, but at the heart of this pictorial survey are the luxurious gas guzzlers shaped by General Motors' chief designer, Harley Earl, during the '30s, '40s and especially the '50s.

By joining a passionate temperament to a scrupulous eye, W. Eugene Smith became the recording angel of photojournalism. Let Truth Be the Prejudice (Aperture; 240 pages; $50) assembles his best work, from the galvanizing World War II combat pictures through the ground-breaking photo essays for LIFE, including his famous sequences of village life in Spain and the twisted victims of industrial pollution in Minamata, Japan. This superbly produced collection, with biographical text by Ben Maddow, is a worthy monument to the brilliant but sometimes exasperating man who once taught a course called "Photography Made Difficult."

In June 1985, 100 photographers fanned out to record the events in an average 24 hours of a single country. The result is A Day in the Life of Japan (Collins; 240 pages; $39.95), the best Day book so far (others include Australia, Canada and Hawaii). From dawn among vapor-shrouded fish carcasses in a Tokyo market's "tuna hell" to night at a Japanese "love hotel," where most of the patrons are married couples, the cameras catch a nation that many of its citizens never see.

! Stumped for a Christmas gift? Give a loved one a chapel, as Marylou Whitney gave her husband Sonny, so he might worship without leaving their Saratoga Springs, N.Y., estate. Or do as Washington Contractor Samuel Gessford did when he built five Philadelphia row houses for his homesick wife to look at. Mansions, yachts, planes--they are all among the grand gifts in Only the Best by Stuart E. Jacobson (Abrams; 216 pages; $35). In this celebration of the sumptuous, it is the odd items that twinkle brightest: a money clip from Jack Benny to George Burns ("I want the dollar bill back!"); an Indian war bonnet from Gary Cooper to Pablo Picasso; Henry Fonda's painting of Stewart's favorite horse to Old Friend Jimmy; and from Stan Laurel to young Roddy McDowall, his famous hat, autographed.

It offers neither warmth nor light. But cold as it may be, jewelry has been delighting women since women were around to be delighted. Though the great days of jewelry design have come and mostly gone, they have not disappeared entirely, as Barbara Cartlidge's Twentieth-Century Jewelry (Abrams; 238 pages; $60) very handsomely makes clear. In the early part of the century, designers like the Spaniard Luis Masriera were turning out lovely art nouveau brooches--golden angels balancing gleaming pearls--and as late as 1949 Salvador Dali transformed one of his famous surrealistic eyes into a diamond, ruby and enamel watch. The gold and the jewels still shine in the '80s, but too many designers, alas, seem to specialize in the weird and bizarre.

"I didn't realize I did all that stuff." The speaker is Fred Astaire, and the stuff is five decades of dazzling solos and duets. Astaire Dancing by John Mueller (Knopf; 440 pages; $45) gives those performances a step-by-step analysis tinctured with autobiography: "What's all this talk about me being teamed with Ginger Rogers?" the star asks his agent in 1934. "I will not have it." There is no substitute for seeing the fabulous originals, but this fond retrospective is an invaluable guidebook to the heights of Hollywood musicals. "I always need a lot of convincing about the acceptance of my work," Astaire once said. This should do it.

LESS THAN $30

When Chaucer's travel-weary pilgrims needed refreshment on their way to Canterbury, they stopped at the Tabard Inn. Much has changed in the past 600 years: local breweries are giving way, and contemporary wanderers are faced with more plastic and fewer local brews. Yet, as The English Pub by Rob Anderson (Viking; 111 pages; $25) makes intoxicatingly clear, a good deal of old English charm remains. More than 30,000 public houses continue to offer wayfarers in England an inimitable hospitality, glowingly captured in Photographer Andy Whipple's color pictures. Pub exteriors may go from Tudor austerity to Victorian baroque, and the signs swing from the Cat and Custard Pot Inn to the Parson's Nose. But the good ones all offer similar pleasures indoors: a friendly host, welcoming bar and foamy pints that are still worth sampling. This book slakes nearly every sense except thirst.

What do birds do, and why do they do it? Not all the answers can be found in Bird Behavior (Knopf; 224 pages; $18.95), but that is because the subjects are so colorfully diverse. Zoologist Robert Burton writes informatively on the breeding, flying, feeding and migrating habits of some of the world's 8,600- plus avian species. His introduction is inarguable: "Birds are, perhaps, the most popular group of animals and they give pleasure to thousands of people around the world." Nearly 600 photographs brilliantly feather the text. Birds are observed blushing, using tools and eating everything from insects to other birds. To sample such variety is to enjoy, ornithologically, a lifetime of happy field days.

No human face appears in Wild California: Vanishing Lands, Vanishing Wildlife by A. Starker Leopold and Raymond F. Dasmann (University of California; 144 pages; $29.95). A different breed of actors, seldom seen on Rodeo Drive, populates this sumptuous bargain of a book. San Joaquin kit foxes, yellow- bellied marmots, California bighorn sheep and mountain lions patrol the high mountains and hidden valleys; bald eagles and hawks, herons and condors find their lonesome rookeries. Some of Tupper Ansel Blake's photographs--a grove of bishop pines at Point Reyes, the promontories of Santa Cruz Island fading into the mist--evoke Japanese prints. All eloquently plead the book's cause: save the wilderness.