Costa Rica, Immediate and True

COSTA RICA: The Last Country the Gods Made, photography by Kimberly Parsons, text by Adrian Colesberry and Brass McLean (SkyHouse Publishers, $35 hardcover) and COSTA RICA: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, edited by Barbara Ras (Whereabouts Press, $12.95 paper).

Countries come in and out of fashion. At any given time, certain destinations, just like certain actors or certain restaurants, are “hot” and certain ones are not. Costa Rica has been simmering for some time now. Guidebooks to the place, often emphasizing the richness of its flora and fauna and suitability for so-called “eco-tourism,” have been showing up regularly in the United States for the past few years, helping to introduce Americans to this attractive little country down near the tail of Central America. Now, with the appearance of a slim but handsome hardcover collection of photographs and a stout little paperback filled with good writing about the place, Costa Rica ought to have arrived officially in this country’s consciousness as an Important Destination. It certainly isn’t the fault of these books if it hasn’t.

With her stylish, moody images, landscapes, waterscapes, portraits both eerie and engaging, shots of fruit and birds and street scenes, Kimberly Parsons evokes a lovely if apparently difficult land. Science writer Adrian Colesberry and journalist Brass McLean provide not the usual picture-book fluff but rather a straightforward description of the Costa Rican ecosystem, liberally accented with notes on history, politics, archeology, etc. The result is more illumination than whitewash.

The “Traveler’s Literary Companion” devoted to Costa Rica, the first offering from a new Bay Area publishing house, is not the usual collection of sketches of a place by famous international writers (P.J. O’Rourke on the local plumbing, Ernest Hemingway on getting drunk in San Jose, that sort of thing). Instead, it is a digest of 20th-Century Costa Rican fiction, stories of peasants and jet-setters, lovers and fighters and fools. For the potential traveler to Costa Rica, it offers an approach to the country and its people and its spirit that is perhaps oblique, but that seems immediate and true.

WILD FRANCE, edited by Douglas Botting, and WILD ENGLAND by Douglas Botting (Sierra Club Books, each $16 paper).

According to Douglas Botting, the new Sierra Club Natural Traveler Series--of which these are the debut volumes--is devoted to “embattled refuges of wildness and wet: the wild places of Europe.” Botting, who is both the series editor and the principal author of one of these first two volumes (and who is the author of a well-received biography of the German naturalist and explorer Alexander Von Humboldt), admits that he has not tried to construct comprehensive guidebooks here, nor books addressed to the specialist--the diver, the orchid-hunter, the cross-country skier. Instead, he says, the books are intended for “the general outdoor traveller including the expert outside his field of expertise (the orchid-hunter in a cave, the diver on a mountain top).” With that intention, they seem to do a good job. They cover national parks, mountain fastnesses, out-of-the-way beaches and more. They are clearly, almost crisply written, handsomely designed and illustrated and offer at least bare-bones practical information for the traveler.

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