GIFT BOOKS IN BRIEF : THE CIRCLE OF LIFE: Rituals From the Human Family Album, <i> edited by David Cohen (Harper San Francisco: $39.95).</i>

The lead Congolese Kota boy at right looks as though he may be having second thoughts, but the deed is done: By painting his face blue, he has symbolized “the phantom of his childhood,” beginning the ancient and irreversible rite of passage into manhood. Readers of this elaborately beautiful photo anthropology will be surprised to find striking similarities in cultures as diverse as Los Angeles street gangs and Sudanese warriors, St. Louis debutantes and West African Mende girls. But strange voyages are also to be had, as when we follow a 7-year-old Indian boy on horseback leading a procession of friends and relatives to the village where he is to marry his bride, also 7. Ultimately, “The Circle of Life” is a powerful affirmation of the way tradition, by linking our ephemeral lives with the more enduring human community, grants us all a certain measure of immortality. As the writer Manuel Acuna puts it in a poem quoted here: “Out of nothingness we are not born, / and into nothingness we do not die. / Existence is a circle, and we err / when we assign to it for measurement / the limits of the cradle and the grave.”