DISCOVERIES

LOVE AND LOSS American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures By Robin Jaffee Frank; Yale University Press: 358 pp., $35

These eerie miniatures are talismans. Popular from the mid-18th century to the mid-19th, they were held close to the body, worn as jewelry or fingered in pockets, “cherished in private.” They were painted in watercolor on thin disks of ivory, sometimes by well-known portraitists like John Singleton Copley or Charles Willson Peale. Worn as jewelry, they were a “public display of private devotion.” The subjects often have very fair skin and detailed features, particularly the eyes. The women wear ornate and often revealing clothing; the men sometimes have gold dust in their eyes to imply divinity. Sometimes they resemble Native American medicine bags, locks of hair enclosed in the back of the frame. All the most valued virtues are assembled here in charming detail: devotion, beauty, gentleness and wealth. *

BACCHUS & ME Adventures in the Wine Cellar By Jay McInerney; The Lyons Press: 284 pp., $24.95

Notorious yuppie, of course Jay McInerney would eventually start fussing about wine. He started writing the wine column for his friend Dominique Browning, who became editor of House and Garden in the mid-1990s. These are his collected columns. A rank beginner, he is deferential to those who have gone before him, like “the great Robert Parker.” But I like the way he plays with wine language and his lack of reverence. For example, on California wine, he writes: “Ripe, yes. Fruity, yes. So is Baywatch.” His “Cliff Notes From the Cellar” provide a shortcut to becoming “a certified wine bore.” *

MASTER PIECES The Architecture of Chess By Gareth Williams; Viking Studio: 160 pp. $23.95

First played in the northwest of India in the 6th century, chess is chaturanga in Sanskrit, referring to the four divisions of an Indian army: rook, knight, bishop, pawn. The set most commonly used today is the neoclassical Staunton set (Howard Staunton, 1810-’74, was a Shakespearean scholar and chess champion). The pieces are simple and well balanced. If you have ever tried to play with a modern set like the Bart Simpson set, you will understand why the Staunton set is still so popular (Marge’s hair makes the queen fall over). The Russian pieces photographed for this remarkable book are particularly elegant, recalling the Russian proverb: “Chess and vodka are born brothers.” *

CALIFORNIA BOYS Photographs from the 1960s and 1970s By Mel Roberts; Fotofactory Press: 204 pp., $50

They look like Barbie dolls, almost generic, yet there is something awkward and tender about these naked boys. Mel Roberts, born in 1923, was a cameraman in the South Pacific during World War II. He came back to California, tried to break into Hollywood and met with all kinds of static for being gay. He worked as a model in La Jolla, surfing, beachcombing, getting a tan. “We always got the best-looking tricks,” he says of that time. Because frontal male nudes were considered “obscene,” Roberts had to develop his own film. This a kind of pre-AIDS testament, a visual history of one big gay love-in, California dreamin’. *

THE ACCIDENTAL INDIES By Robert Finley; McGill-Queen’s University Press: 102 pp., $19.95

Columbus marks the margin of a chart “Imago Mundi” and writes, “Standing at the reading table by the window in the house in Madeira . . . the beginnings of the Orient and of the Occident are close.” “The Accidental Indies” is an epic prose poem of exploration, a metaphor worth re-creating now and then, refreshing our stock images of sea serpents, Sargasso, St. Elmo’s fire, the compass, the north star, the anchor. In Robert Finley’s telling, one can hear the “sound of the pennant that thrums the topsail,” imagine sailors waking to “a sea of emptiness.” He marvels at the beauty of Columbus’ charts, filled with islands and arbutus. It is the “journey of an idea outward into language.” *

THE VITAL ILLUSION By Jean Baudrillard; Columbia University Press: 96 pp., $17.95

Always good for an argument, ever-fascinated by the self-destructive urges that make us human, annoying as ever, Jean Baudrillard claims that the technology of cloning, our many quests for sameness and facsimile, are symptoms of our inability to accept diversity. Copying is, in effect, using the virtual to murder the real. “Facing a world that is unintelligible and problematic, our task is clear: We must make that world even more unintelligible, even more enigmatic.” Rarely do words convey such urgency as on a page by Baudrillard. Something must be done. Now. But what?