Gift Books 1987: Nature : A Compass for the Armchair Explorer

For a brief moment, nature gift books foundered. After a generous decade, publishers retrenched in 1986. This year, they are back in force with a brave and handsome array of titles begging to be wrapped in decorative paper and placed under the tree of your choice.

The most striking offering is not a nature book, per se. The National Geographic Society: 100 Years of Adventure and Discovery by C. D. B. Bryan (Abrams: $45; 484 pp., indexed, 425 illustrations) is a friendly retrospective. Lavishly illustrated, elegantly bound, and wrapped in an image of the society’s famous magazine, one might presume this to be a paean to an organization about as tightly linked to American culture as the phone company (particularly since Alexander Graham Bell was one of its founding fathers). Not quite. The society’s great historical photographic archive is utterly arresting--particularly its early days when so much of the world was poorly known and photography itself a novelty. Then, as now, the society sponsored exploration and research and made history as well as reported it. But the National Geographic Society’s style for much of its existence--conservative to the point of stodginess, bland, cornball--is also baldly reviewed by author Bryan. The comings and goings of the various Grosvenors, aging dynasties and political struggles--thanks to Bryan’s excellent journalism--are nearly as colorful as the Geographic’s subject planet. More than a coffeetable book, this tome is a natural for armchair geographers.

Kudos for the best nature photography of 1987 must go to Tracks in the Sky: Wildlife and Wetlands of the Pacific Flyway, photography by Tupper Ansel Blake, text by Peter Steinhart (Chronicle Books: $35; 176 pp., indexed, 120 color photographs). That’s no small feat, as the standards for nature photography have gone stratospheric. Two years ago, Blake produced “Wild California,” with renowned wildlife biologist A. Starker Leopold doing the writing: It was a smash. Leopold, ardent lover of waterfowl, is gone. But in Peter Steinhart, Blake has found a graceful and informed voice for his powerful images. And once again, printing and binding are impeccable. . . . California is the midpoint of a migratory path that extends from Alaska to Central America. Its riches are marshes, swamps and little strings of riparian woodland that we Californians have been most successful at eliminating. Along with the wet places have gone millions of ducks, geese, swans and other denizens of these richest of habitats. So take a gander at what is left. It will take your breath away.

Unsurprisingly, the Sierra Club has published two notable contributions to the holiday list: Portraits of the Earth by Freeman Patterson ($35; 180 pp., 115 color photographs) and The Edge of Fire: Volcano and Earthquake Country in Western North America and Hawaii by Robert Wenkam ($35; 176 pp., 110 color photographs). Patterson uses photography as his canvas to reveal a deep, personal relationship with the natural world. His subjects are as exotic as Angola’s Namib desert and as homely as the local creek at his home in New Brunswick, Canada. Often they are highly abstracted--the play of light on a desert dune or an ice floe; or sometimes as formal as an array of bare winter alders; occasionally floral and sentimental. Patterson has published several books about photography and includes substantial detail about the making of his pictures that will prove of interest to hopeful photographers. But it is his vision of nature and his intimate relationship with his subjects that give this book something extra.

Earthquakes are timely for Californians. They will be for the next several million years, at least. And there are undoubtedly volcanoes in the forecast as well. So must it be for dwellers of the Pacific Rim, our side of which includes the West Coast from Alaska to Central America, and the Hawaiian Islands--places where the great Pacific and Continental plates forever collide in a kind of slow-motion Armageddon. Robert Wenkam’s flamboyant photographs and prose link this unstable earthly platform with the kinds of societies we Westerners have built, from Mayan to Angeleno. Nothing technical, but quite literate, Wenkam’s narrative thread weaves exciting, sometimes catastrophic images of roiling lava and rended landscapes with others seemingly more bucolic: the Sierra Nevada, Baja California’s rugged coast, Crater Lake . . . but in fact equal testament to this land’s tempestuous nature.

The Arctic has been hot grist for the publishers’ mill in recent years. Arctic Animals: A Celebration of Survival by Fred Bruemmer (NorthWord: $24.95; 160 pp., 50 color, 40 monochrome photographs) and Alaskan Wildlife, photographs by Tom Walker, text by Marydith Beeman (Graphic Arts Center Publishing: $32.50; 160 pp., 132 color photographs), compete for much the same niche. Walker’s bigger, glossier book gets the nod for photography. His Arctic--the sea, the forest, the mountains and the tundra--is a seductive place of ethereal landscapes and fabulous animals. It is a fairy-tale kingdom; it beckons you to head north. Beeman’s narrative is strangely disconnected from the plates, both physically and emotionally. The photographs show sea otters and tufted puffins; one reads of radiation levels and fur trapping techniques. Fred Bruemmer, longtime Arctic denizen who did his own “big book,” “Arctic World,” a few years ago, has created a more personal statement this time. While Bruemmer’s excellent pictures are of the Arctic’s animals--bears, whales, sea birds, walrus, musk ox, caribou--his reflective words meld in the strange life cycle imposed at the top of the world; the cultures of Eskimos and whites; the development that now threatens this delicate ecosystem. Bruemmer is an informed and eloquent spokesman for the land he loves, and a forceful conservationist; his book is a well-balanced and enjoyable treatment.

Not only has photography of wildlife seen its finest hour in recent years, but painting has as well. The resurgence of interest in this long-neglected art form has left dealers nonplussed, while delighting its lonely practitioners. From the Wild, edited by Christopher Hume (NorthWord: $45; 192 pp., 128 color plates), is a sumptuous sampler of 12 distinguished wildlife painters. What you get are artists who have gone beyond mere illustration, however detailed and proficient. Robert Bateman, the Canadian whose work sells more than any other wildlife artist, packs drama into a portrait of a gray squirrel on a winter stump. Fenwick Lansdown, another Canadian, harkens back to the great bird portraitists of the 19th Century; while Roger Tory Peterson is, as some wag put it, “to feathers what Julia Child is to egg whites.” Claudio D’Angelo, Owen Gromme, George McLean, John Schoenherr and the others provide a full spectrum of exposure. Hume’s annotation is just enough.

Along a different line entirely, The International Encyclopedia of Astronomy, edited by Patrick Moore (Orion: $40; 448 pp., illustrated), is a book with 2,500 entries, 600 photographs and diagrams and seven essays of 1,200 words or more each. If you didn’t know that appulse means “a close approach in apparent position, i.e., line of sight, between two astronomical bodies,” or that Aristarchus of Samos attempted to measure the distances to the sun and moon in 200 BC (he got it wrong), you’ll learn it here. Well done, on a rather elevated plane.

Almost pure Geographic-style picture book is Baja California, edited by Lisa and Sven-Olof Lindblad (Rizzoli: $40, cloth; $25, paper; 184 pp., 140 color photographs). Our next-door neighbor has been remarkably underreported. This book, with brief dashes of good writing and excellent--if excessively romantic--illustrations, helps correct the deficit. A nice gift for Baja lovers.

Slickrock, text by Edward Abbey, photographs by Philip Hyde (Gibbs M. Smith: $24.95, paper; 114 pp., 70 color photographs), is a republication of a Sierra Club classic from the early 1970s. This ode to the high desert canyon country features color work that stands up to the best of today. Abbey here is a well behaved, informative sort of fellow with only occasional passionate outbursts and plenty of information to impart. The prose and the pictures do it well and good.

Candace Savage does a nice job of assembling an attractive little book called Eagles of North America (NorthWord: $19.95; 128 pp., 90 color photographs). There are a few dozen pages of solid natural history text, a nice set of references to the literature, and then picture after picture of golden eagles and bald eagles doing most all the things that eagles do. Despite some rather awful abuses inflicted upon them, these heroic birds have hung on in North America, and may even be recovering in places.

Last, something for kids, at least the older ones. Remarkable Animals by David Christie, Robin Dunbar Wheeler and Berenice Brewster (Sterling: $19.95; 239 pp., illustrated) is a kind of color encyclopedia of animals with unusual attributes: mountain beaver, “host to the world’s largest flea”; black-throated honeyguide, “the bird that leads the way”; marine iguana, “the only lizard to feed at the bottom of the sea,” and so on. Rather better than Ripley, the biology of these 200-plus creatures is pretty good. Animal-loving teens should adore it.