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What: “WNBA: A Celebration.”

Author: Kelly Whiteside.

Publisher: HarperHorizon.

Price: $20.

It’s called a celebration and it’s meant to celebrate the WNBA’s first season, but this coffee table book is really a celebration of the basketball photographers’ art.

The excellence is in the photographers’ eyes, whether it is New York’s airborne Vickie Johnson caught in mid-wraparound pass, the Sparks’ Penny Toler trying to drive up and over New York’s Rebecca Lobo, or a quiet moment in a hotel room, with Phoenix’s Nancy Lieberman-Cline reading a bedtime story to her 3-year-old son, T.J.

The chronicler, Newsday’s Kelly Whiteside, takes the reader from the Oct. 10, 1996 New York news conference when Commissioner David Stern announced that the NBA was going into the women’s basketball business, through the inaugural season, finishing with the championship game, Houston’s 65-51 victory over New York last Aug. 30.

Throughout, the camera focuses on athletic performance. At the finish, Lieberman-Cline, now coach/general manager of the Detroit Shock, speculates on a 2047 book, one to celebrate the WNBA’s golden anniversary, when she’s 89.

“I don’t know where I’ll be, but I’ll be somewhere in a wheelchair playing wheelchair basketball,” she tells Whiteside.