GIFT BOOKS IN BRIEF : A YEAR IN CENTRAL PARK, <i> By Laurie A. Watters, introduction by Paul Goldberger (Rizzoli: $45; 208 pp.)</i>

If anyone you know still misses New York, you might give them this book, not because it will cure them but because it preserves a fond memory in amber. Author Laurie Watters, a former public-relations executive, spent three years observing Central Park, and I don’t mean the body bags, Post headlines or pest exterminators. This is an Upper-East-Sider’s view, which is fine, it’s just that the park never really looked this clean and postcard-worthy, except maybe in 1858 when Frederick Law Olmsted and Calbert Vaux first designed it.

Still, if there are things to miss about New York, Central Park must be one of them. The impeccably, humanistically designed 843-acre universe is an oasis in the memory, even when it lies three blocks away, rats busily cleaning up after the day’s use. As Henry James wrote of the park: “It has to have something for everybody, since everybody arrives famished.”