GIFT BOOKS 1985 : Travel

Is it fallout from television’s “The Jewel in the Crown”? Or, perhaps, “A Passage to India”? Following a spate of China volumes and a deluge of big books on Africa, this is the year in which India is probed, praised and photographed.

But the Indian subcontinent is not every armchair traveler’s cup of Darjeeling, and for other adventurers, there is an eclectic selection exploring such delights as the Japanese bath and the gardens of Versailles.

China by Hiroji Kubota, foreword by Jonathan D. Spence (Norton: $65; 204 pp.) is a book that makes you want to clap. Between 1978 and 1984 Kubota spent 1,000 days in China, visiting 21 provinces and taking 200,000 pictures from which he chose this extraordinary collection. Living in communes, traveling perilously narrow roads clogged with trucks, ox carts, ducks and pigs, Kubota recorded everyday life in this land of a billion people just recovering from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and embarked on a new journey.

This is, essentially, a picture book, but what pictures! Kubota, fascinated with the changes he saw taking place even as many Chinese cling to tradition, summed it up in his portrait of three youths, with soft drinks and a radio-cassette player, standing before an ages-old Buddha. In Kashgar on the old Silk Road, he noted, a carpet factory he photographed has closed, “probably because people want . . . televisions and refrigerators more than carpets.” And a camels-for-hire station has become an auto repair shop.

There are a few obligatory shots of the Great Wall, but this is no standard tour. The photographs, all in color, sometimes spill across two extra-wide pages. Some, taken from a biplane, are like scroll paintings--mist-shrouded mountains and rice paddies.

The finale is an appropriate dazzler: a burst of 182,000 fireworks in Peking in celebration of the 35th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic.

Now, for the India books:

Benares by Henry Wilson (Thames & Hudson: $29.95; 121 pp.) is serendipity, a beautiful and absorbing portrait of the city that is to the Hindus what Mecca is to Muslims. Wilson was bewitched when he first saw Benares as a teen-ager and has returned three times. It is, he acknowledges, his “obsession,” the city he sees as “the essence of India”--harsh, spiritual, cramped, dusty, dirty and totally beguiling. Such is Wilson’s artistry that one can all but smell the cow dung and incense and the coming of the monsoon rains. Memorable are the color photographs of a widow, shrouded in white and sitting in contemplation on one of the great ghats; of a sacred cow lounging under a ghat priest’s umbrella, and an elderly rickshaw driver dozing between fares.

Village India by Stephen Huyler (Abrams: $37.50; 272 pp., indexed) is a guided tour to the India most travelers don’t see, some of the 500,000 villages (places with less than 5,000 population) that are home to 615 million Indians--one-seventh of the world’s population. For the most part rural, this is where, Huyler notes, “clocks serve no purpose” as villagers simply rise before dawn and go to bed at dark. In these villages entertainment is provided by the rituals of religion, seasonal festivals, singing, storytelling and gossip. Huyler, who has traveled extensively in India in the last 14 years, has a degree in Indian history and art history, and his focus is on village arts, crafts and architecture, but his prose--much like that of a very readable textbook--delves too much into legal and social customs. The book includes a history of India and 300 photographs in color and black and white.

The Imperial Way by Paul Theroux, with photographs by Steve McCurry (Houghton Mifflin: $19.95; 143 pp.), in which Theroux explains that this journey by train through Pakistan, India and Bangladesh was conceived as “neither a vacation nor an ordeal, but rather a kind of sedentary adventuring.” Perhaps, but it comes across as a bit of an ordeal; Theroux seems more obsessed with dirt, rats, heat, rain and beggars than besotted with the beauties of the land. Never mind, photographer McCurry more than compensates with a profusion of absolutely marvelous color photographs.

Railway Country: Across Canada by Train, photographs by Dudley Witney and text by Brian D. Johnson (Norton: $39.95 until Dec. 31; $45 thereafter; 200 pp.) is a train trip of quite a different kind. Canada’s trains are famed and if “the Golden Age of passenger travel is over, replaced by airlines,” as Canadian Johnson notes unhappily, the 4,000-mile journey across five provinces and 4,000 miles aboard the Canadian is still a pretty spectacular five-day ride. Photographer Witney’s still lifes include laundry flapping on backyard lines, a train’s-eye view of a county fair in New Brunswick, a mobile snack truck in Moosonee with its menu written in both English and Cree.

Arizona Landmarks (Arizona Highways: $35; 159 pp.) celebrates not railroads but highways, specifically the 60th anniversary of publication of Arizona Highways magazine. The state has grown up with the magazine, which started life as a journal reporting conditions of Arizona’s then-primitive highway system; editors filled the holes between advertisements for asphalt and cement with file photos of state landmarks. Despite the postwar boom, Arizona remains a place with “an incomprehensible supply of space,” in the words of James Cook, an Arizona Republic editor who has written the text. Contributing photographers, among them David Muench, prove the point handsomely with glorious color photographs of coppery sunsets, blooming wildflowers, purple mountains and, of course, the Grand Canyon.

The Hudson River and the Highlands by Robert Glenn Ketchum (Aperture: $30; 87 pp.) is another book one would like to like more but that will likely find a readership among serious photographers. Ketchum, a native Californian whose photography is represented in the LACMA collection, creates oil paintings with his camera, for the most part gentle images lending credence to his observation that “this matron of all American rivers is seldom given to hyperbolic displays; her style is demure.” Ah, the Hudson, land of James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving. Ah, the Hudson, victim of industrial waste and sewage dumping. But the crusade against pollution must continue, Ketchum warns.

Versailles Gardens: Sculpture and Mythology by Jacques Girard (Vendome: $50; 304 pp.). Girard, official photographer of the Chateau of Versailles, has walked every path of the Sun King’s playground and photographed in color at all seasons, all times of day, its pools and groves, its gilt and marble and bronze sculptures by Bernini and Da Vinci and other masters. But this is more than a magnificent picture book. Here is a peek into the psyche of King Louis XIV, who wished to endow his reign with a legendary dimension.

Furo: The Japanese Bath by Peter Grilli with photographs by Dana Levy (Kodansha International: $35; 190 pp., indexed). Lest anyone get the wrong idea, this volume is about as erotic as a bath sponge. No voyeur, Levy stripped down and took his camera into the sentos (public baths) of Tokyo and the onsens (the mineral hot springs) where Japanese go not just to get clean (soaping and rinsing is only a preliminary) but to, as Grilli states, “delight in soaking in waters so hot as to seem beyond human tolerance”--the ultimate hot tubs. The Japanese bath is where young and old find companionship and lively conversation, much as Europeans do in their coffeehouses. Except in some of the 2,000 hot springs offering tourist accommodations, public baths are no longer mixed (the Japanese have yielded to European-American concepts of morality). And, we learn in Grilli’s captivating text, the bath house itself has declined in numbers from 20,000 only 40 years ago to 12,000 today--a victim of changing life styles (70% of all Japanese homes now have hot water), rising fuel and energy costs and escalating real estate values. The book, with its color and black-and-white photos, is almost as therapeutic as a soak in a hot bath.

Kilimanjaro: The White Roof of Africa by Harald Lange (Mountaineers: $24.95; 175 pp., indexed) might be dismissed at first glance as strictly for dedicated climbers. That would be too bad. The volume, originally published in East Germany and translated from the German, is the riveting story of Africa’s highest mountain (19,340 feet), its discovery in 1848 by a pair of German missionaries and the first successful ascent to its ice-covered dome in 1889, by a German, Hans Meyer, and an Austrian, Ludwig Purtscheller. Today, 1,000 climbers attempt the ascent each year and 500 make it. Others have jumped into its volcanic crater by parachute, floated over it in a hot-air balloon and assaulted its slopes on motorcycles. Lange’s text is both a political and social history of the people who live on Kilimanjaro’s slopes, growing coffee and bananas, and a guide to the region’s flora and fauna.

Iceland by Pamela Sanders with photographs by Roloff Beny (Salem House: $40; 208 pp., indexed) is a sleeper. Two hundred pages on Iceland? Indeed, and this collaboration by Sanders, wife of American Ambassador Marshall Brement and a former journalist, and Beny, the celebrated Canadian-born photographer who died before he was able to keep a return date in Iceland, is immensely readable. Sanders shares the horrors of Icelandic cuisine, which includes seal flippers, pickled whale blubber and putrefied shark meat, but also her affection for the people who insist on living in “a kind of national park of Nordic culture,” clinging to their language and customs, discouraging immigration, even banning television outside the NATO base. Sanders’ chatty narrative is interwoven with history and lore and Viking sagas. Beny’s photographs, in color and black and white, show huge contrasts: landscape so bleak it was chosen by NASA as practice grounds for the first moon landing, lava flows and treeless fields, but also wildflowers and sheep grazing over Irish-green pasture.

No holiday book season is complete without a plethora of books on Great Britain. English Country Churches by Derry Brabbs (Viking: $25; 160 pp., indexed) is “a purely personal selection” by the photographer who illustrated “James Herriot’s Yorkshire.” The color photos accompany a lively narrative by former Member of Parliament Nigel Nicholson, who observes that in most villages today the church is not only the largest structure but “the only one free of a television aerial.” We learn that about half of the 46,000 churches existing at the time of the Reformation still stand, more or less as they first were. Nicholson points out that this generation’s contributions to its village churches is little more than “tatty children’s corners and carpets of too gorgeous a blue.”

Blenheim Revisited by Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd (Beaufort: $16.95; 256 pp., indexed) is a sort of Upstairs-Downstairs at Blenheim Castle, of which Sir Winston Churchill once said, “At Blenheim I took two very important decisions, to be born and to marry (Clementine Hozier, whom he courted there).” This volume by the former editor of Burke’s Peerage publications is a frequently titillating look at the history, scandals, squabbles and financial woes of the titled folk who have called Blenheim home. Noel Coward, a house guest, complained of “a loo like an icebox.” Montgomery-Massingberd writes of the economic plight of many of the castle’s residents, and of a dinner at which a guest grumbled about only “half a snipe” on his dinner plate. Things took a turn for the better when, in 1896, the ninth duke married a Vanderbilt whose mother had social aspirations and a $2.5-million dowry to back them up. Today, paying guests tour the castle. Nevertheless, the present duke remarks, he is fighting his own “never-ending Battle of Blenheim.”