BEST OF GIFT BOOKS

FROM HIGHWAYS TO TRAIN STATIONS, FROM THE KLONDIKE TO THE RIVER NILE

Author: By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, December 7, 1997

Page: G1

Section: Books

On the other hand, the finest gift books are for use. Here are a few of the best that have appeared in time for the gift-giving season.

One of the places we are most interested in, naturally, is America. There are several significant new books about our country. ``Eyes of the Nation'' (Knopf, $75), by Vincent Virga with the curators of the Library of Congress and historian Alan Brinkley, is a visual history of the United States that reproduces many enthralling historical documents, illustrations, maps, paintings, posters, and photographs. Some of them make the past seem distant and quaint; others make long-ago events almost alarmingly immediate.

``Chronicle of America'' (DK Publishing, $59.95), edited by Clifton Daniel, traces America's history year by year, the frivolous alongside the serious, all of it written and illustrated in the vigorous printed-sound-bite style popularized by USA Today.

Pierre Berton's ``The Klondike Quest'' (Stoddart, $34.95) celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Alaska gold rush with photographs taken between 1897 and 1899. The book tells us that the gold rush was probably the most photographed event of the 19th century. Thousands of images survive in various collections and archives. Berton has collected 300 particularly memorable ones, and provided a text of photographic vividness.

Perhaps the best book in this category, however, is ``The Shaker World: Art, Life and Belief'' (Abrams, $60) by John T. Kirk, formerly a professor of art history at Boston University and a commentator for WGBH-Ch. 2. It provides a thorough and sympathetic documentation of buildings and objects both beautiful and functional, a visual manifestation of a larger and profoundly spiritual culture in which miracles were a part of everyday life.

``Station to Station'' (Phaidon, $59.95) by Steven Parissien is about the beauty, function, and mystique of the railroad station -- not just in America but in Europe as well. There is a chilling photograph of Hitler seeing Mussolini off at the station; the Italian beams down from his compartment window.

A very different book about locomotion is ``Highway: America's Endless Dream'' (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $29.95 paperback), with photographs by Jeff Brouws and text by Bernd Polster and Phil Patton. The pictures of American roads and roadside culture are entrancing, and the text brings in some outside help from Robert Penn Warren, Simone de Beauvoir, Robert Bly (``Driving around I will waste more time''), Henry Ford, and other luminaries of the auto age.

Maybe the most gorgeous book about other places is ``Greece from the Air'' (Abrams, $45), with photographs by Yann Arthus-Bertrand and text by Janine Trotereau. Some of these images illustrate a timeless and never-surpassed harmony between buildings and land- and seascape. Some of them show the opposite -- as when we see the Acropolis rising above the urban squalor of modern Athens.

``100 Years of Adventure and Discovery'' (Abrams, $49.50) by C. D. B. Bryan is a revised and updated edition of a book originally published a decade ago, when it sold more than 1 million copies. The book is an official but candid history of the National Geographic Society and its changing role in a changing, and unchanging, world; the illustrations come from the unparalleled archives of the National Geographic Magazine.

The Nile is both a river on the map and a great cultural and religious myth. Discovering the river's sources was a great adventure that played out over centuries of inquiry, which are documented in the lively text and exotic images of ``The Discovery of the Nile'' (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $60) by Gianni Guadalupi.

For most of us, the harem is a fantasy rather than a physical reality; our ideas of the harem come from opera, literature, and movies starring Tony Curtis and Piper Laurie. ``Secrets of the Harem'' (Vendome Press, $39.50) by Carla Coco sets forth and illustrates the Turkish facts, as well as providing European paintings of the fantasy. ``Jealousy in the Seraglio'' by Fernand Cormon is a particularly decadent image of a blonde concubine who has been stabbed by a triumphant raven-haired rival.

Friedrich Nietzsche was a writer intimately tied to the landscapes of his life, which have been affectionately documented in ``The Good European: Nietzsche's Work Sites in Word and Image'' (University of Chicago Press, $55). The text is by David Farrell Krell and Donald L. Bates, with frequent and illuminating quotation from Nietzsche himself.

Moviegoers who have seen ``Seven Years in Tibet'' will be particularly interested in the paperback reprint of ``Lost Lhasa: Heinrich Harrer's Tibet'' (Abrams, $24.95), the 1992 collection of photographs Harrer took in Tibet in 1946-53. They provide a unique visual record of a culture ruthlessly suppressed, but not destroyed, by the Chinese. Harrer was not a professional photographer, and he was working with some old movie film that he cut into rolls for his borrowed Leica, but many of the images are surpassingly beautiful representations of a civilization suffused with earthy spirituality.

Gordon Parks's ``Half Past Autumn'' (Little, Brown, $65) provides a retrospective look at the life achievement of the celebrated 84-year-old photographer. It is a book for people who like to look at other people and understand them. Parks's pictures unfailingly bring out what is uncommon in the seemingly ordinary; even his glamour photographs never lose a common touch. There is an essay by Philip Brookman, but most of the text, rich in insight and anecdote, is by Parks himself.

``About Glamour'' (Simon & Schuster, $40) by Len Prince, with an introduction by Dominick Dunne, invites us to think about illusion and reality, then and now. In the 1990s, Prince began to photograph contemporary performers in the style of Hollywood's George Hurrell, whose photographs did as much to create the image of such performers as Marlene Dietrich as their moving pictures did. It is startling and fun to see Drew Barrymore pictured in ostrich feathers, pearls, and blondined curls. The problem with the book is that Prince has not gained access to many of today's most iconographic faces -- Cruise, De Niro, Streisand, etc.

``Rolling Stone Images of Rock and Roll'' (Little, Brown, $24.95 paperback), edited and designed by Fred Woodward, with text by Anthony DeCurtis, opens with a picture of the young Elvis Presley, who has been out for a bicycle ride in his cowboy boots. Standing over his bike, he signs an autograph for two young girls, using a towheaded tyke's head as a table. The book ends with a 1992 picture of Kurt Cobain making an obscene gesture. In between there are pictures of individuals and groups who collectively represent a complex culture that is at once innocent and calculatedly corrupt, exuberant, angry, outside the system, yet as richly rewarded and safely self-indulgent as anything inside. The pictures contribute to the outlaw fantasy that the music perpetuates and keeps forever young.

Recent years have seen a vogue for such formerly arcane subjects as angels and goddesses -- the interest is not simply spiritual but social and political as well. ``Goddess: A Celebration in Art and Literature'' (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $50), edited by Jalaja Bonheim, surveys the goddess myths of many cultures (Native American, Nigerian, Afro-Caribbean, Aztec, Celtic, Egyptian etc.). The writers are an eclectic lot, ranging from Homer and Robert Musil to Maya Deren and Joseph Campbell. There is some New Agey prose, too, but the best contemporary writer on the goddess cults of India and the Orient, Andrew Harvey, is unrepresented.

Two gift books may prove of particular interest and value to gay and lesbian readers. ``Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers'' (MIT Press, $45) by Robert Giard pairs his probing photographs of 182 contemporary gay and lesbian writers, many of them working productively in the ghetto of ``gay literature,'' some of them reaching the wider reading public. Most of the photographs are accompanied by brief passages from the work, chosen in consultation with the writer; the image of poet Frank Bidart, caught in a mirror, for example, is accompanied by the famous passage about Maria Callas in his poem ``The Book of the Body.'' ``The Shared Heart'' (William Morrow, $25) by Adam Mastoon collects Mastoon's photographs of gay, lesbian, and bisexual young people and makes them resonate with the written or oral-history statements of the subjects. The book is resolutely affirmative in tone (too much so to be entirely convincing), but the subjects are beautiful and full of promise, as all young people are. You like them, and want to protect them.

Some gift books don't fall into any category -- except, maybe, ``How did this get published?'' The answer is sometimes obvious. ``Support and Seduction: A History of Corsets and Bras'' (Abrams, $39.95) by Beatrice Fontanel is historically informed, politically correct, and unafraid to be amusing about a subject that everyone is interested in but few of us discuss in mixed company. ``The bra,'' we learn, ``is the most complex item of dress there is and cannot be made by a machine. . . . The assembly for a moderately sophisticated style may require thirty separate steps, performed by thirty different workers.'' And did you know that the development of the oral contraceptive in 1960 ``was to have unexpected repercussions in the field of lingerie, since the bust measurements of young girls would increase almost an inch over the next two decades, a windfall for bra manufacturers''?

``The Sacred Heart'' (Little, Brown, $50) by Max Aguilera-Hellweg, is ``an atlas of the body seen through invasive surgery.'' The images here represent everyday sights to surgeons and nurses, but things most people don't want to see or think about -- and once you have seen these photographs, you will be unable to forget them. The afterword speaks, quite literally and accurately, of ``holy terror.''