Never Look a Gift Book in the Mouth

Books make great gifts for the holidays. It’s not just that you can find one to interest almost anybody; it’s also their practical value: They’re easy to wrap, and easy to return.

Here are some of the more notable of this season’s travel-related “gift books”:

OKAVANGO: Africa’s Last Eden by Frans Lanting (Chronicle Books, $45 hardcover).

In the hands of the merely competent, a little wildlife photography can go a very long way. Dutch-born Frans Lanting is far more than competent. He’s a real master of the genre, and in this handsome tome dedicated to the Okavango delta in Botswana, he consistently produces pictures that both illuminate his subject beasts and stand by themselves as stunning images. His chameleon trucking along a Kalahari salt pan, his wallpaper-pattern of ruddy flamingos at Makgadikgadi, his comic portrait of a bullfrog in a pool, his surrealistic shot of elephants framed in dark pink and reflected in a watering hole--these are photographs to savor and to remember.

MOROCCO, text by Paul Bowles, photographs by Barry Brukoff (Abrams, $49.50 hardcover).

On the other end of Africa from Botswana, far to the north and west, Morocco is remarkable less for its wildlife than for its ancient, complex, endlessly fascinating civilization. Our most salient contemporary chronicler of that civilization is, of course, Paul Bowles, author of “The Sheltering Sky” and ancient denizen of the nation. The present volume, a thin one considering its fat price, isn’t really new Bowles; the introduction is fresh but the six other chapters are articles originally published in the 1950s in Holiday magazine and elsewhere (a fact alluded to here only briefly and obliquely). They are, nonetheless, a delight to read, full of deft description and offhanded insight. Barry Brukoff’s photographs are very attractive, if seldom as astonishing as the country they depict.

THE SACRED EARTH by Courtney Milne, Foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama (Abrams, $49.50 hardcover).

Here’s one for the harmonic-convergence types on your gift list. Courtney Milne, a prominent Canadian photographer, has made a specialty of visiting and photographing sites around the world--from rivers and forests to religious shrines and burial grounds--that are thought to have particular spiritual significance. For Milne, we are told, this has constituted a “personal quest . . . that offers both an invitation to personal renewal and the challenge of involvement.” Some 140 sites are represented here, many by a single image. Milne also wrote the brief passages of prose that accompany the visuals, and these include lots of first-person gazing down, seeking, quivering, whispering and sharing of cosmic energy. His photographs, fortunately, are rather more sharply focused, and sometimes (a chrome-look crocodile in the Everglades, an egg in a rock pool on a Scottish island, waves more elegantly Deco-looking than Lalique, off the Kauai coast) quite extraordinary.

NEW ORLEANS: ELEGANCE AND DECADENCE, photographs by Richard Sexton, text by Randolph Delehanty (Chronicle Books, $35 hardcover).

New Orleans was America’s original capital of diversity. Spanish, French, African, West Indian, American Indian, even German and Swiss (imported as colonists by the Company of the Indies in the early 18th Century)--all these accents and bloodlines and more met and mixed in the city. Historian and lecturer Randolph Delehanty, curator of the city’s Roger Houston Ogden Collection of Southern art, tells the story of New Orleans economically and entertainingly--then, except for captions, turns the book over to photographer Richard Sexton, whose work is bright and seductive. It may or may not bother the lover of New Orleans (or the novice who wants to see more of the place) that half the book is taken up with shots of residential interiors and private gardens. Certainly, these illustrate the city’s elegance and decadence, even if you can’t always tell which is which.

PROVENCE by Peter Mayle, paintings by Margaret Loxton (Macmillan, $14 hardcover) and FRENCH DREAMS by Steven Rothfeld (Workman, $19.95 hardcover).

Depending on your attitude toward Peter (“Toujours Provence”) Mayle and his charming little apercus of the South of France, and toward charming little faux-naif paintings of plump French peasants and villagers, his little volume on his trademark subject--a perfect stocking stuffer for wide-mouthed stockings--will either make you retch or coo.

Photographer Steven Rothfeld seems at home in France, approaching his subjects--cafe tables, modest landscapes, ancient ruins, fields of flowers--gently and stylishly. And the low-key polish of his work is well-served by the Polaroid transfer process with which his prints are made, and which lends a muted, diffused character to his work. In place of conventional text, the photos are accompanied by brief passages from authors as diverse as Marcel Proust, Henry Miller, Willa Cather, Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, Honore de Balzac and that leading literary figure of our own day, Patricia Wells (whose new book on Italian trattorias, coincidentally, was photographed by Rothfeld).

Books to Go appears the second and fourth week of every month.