Plenty for your thoughts

Coffee table books feature intriguing people and places

REVIEWS BY LYNN HAMILTON

This holiday season, while searching for gifts for the thinking person on your list, consider these large-format books with powerful images that interpret and document the world around us, from the gemlike beauties of the tropical rainforest to the harsh refuse of 9/11.

The elder statesman

Nelson Mandela, one of the most interesting men of the 20th century, also has one of the most interesting faces. That makes Mandela: The Authorized Portrait one of the most exciting books to come out this year. The book is a detailed narrative of Mandela's life, heavily dosed with images that capture his evolution from young man-about-town to honored South African president. Mike Nicol, whose arching narrative unifies the often sprawling effort to hitch photos and captions to story, follows the South African leader closely as he departs to school, the first in his family to do so. Later, Nicol chronicles Mandela's career in law, his first failed marriage, followed quickly by his wedding to Winnie Mandela, his underground war on apartheid as the "Black Pimpernel," his 27 years in prison and so on.

Punctuating this riveting narrative are brilliantly assembled photos that capture important moments in Mandela's rise, fall and resurrection. The book also features first-person commentaries from celebrities like former President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Muhammad Ali, as well as friends and fellow revolutionaries who knew and worked alongside Mandela in the struggle for South African freedom.


Art meets science

Thomas Marent has been capturing the beauties of the rainforest with his Nikon for 16 years, and now the best of his life's work has been collected in a new coffee table book, titled simply Rainforest, written with Ben Morgan. Marent's book steers clear of rainforest politics in favor of gorgeous full-page, full-color photos of its wonders. Perhaps the book's most remarkable achievement is the minutia: close-up photos of stick insects, leaf hoppers, grasshoppers, beetles, caterpillars and other creatures that might escape the attention of other rainforest travelers. Marent's astonishing photos of the rare walking leaf—an insect that has evolved to mimic a fallen autumn leaf nearly to perfection—are accompanied by a single paragraph explaining that the photographer had been looking for such an insect for 10 years. Most thinking people already know that the dwindling rainforests of the world are treasure troves of biological diversity, but somehow the photos of six different varieties of strawberry frog make that more real for those who live outside the canopy. The book comes with a CD of rainforest sounds.


Art history professor Martin Kemp (The Oxford History of Art) previously examined Leonardo da Vinci's life in 2004's Leonardo; now he concentrates on the artist's notebooks in Leonardo Da Vinci: Experience, Experiment, and Design. Kemp speculates that da Vinci brainstormed and doodled as a way of thinking out loud; remarkably, his seemingly three-dimensional drawings are so complex, they continue to intrigue and baffle even today's most scientific minds. Particularly interesting is Kemp's documentation of recent scientific efforts to build Leonardo's fantastic flying machines. In 2000, Adrian Nicholas successfully launched himself from a 3,000-foot height using a parachute modeled after a da Vinci drawing. Earlier, James Wink of Tetra Associates and Kemp collaborated on an ornithopter which mimicked another, more birdlike da Vinci flying machine.


In memory and tribute

Can beauty be found in rubble? The answer is yes—if you are street photographer Joel Meyerowitz. Meyerowitz wormed his way past hostile border police and fire chiefs to document, on a nearly daily basis, the Ground Zero cleanup after the World Trade Center attacks. In Aftermath, Meyerowitz not only documents the arduous task of removing dangerous rubble from the site, he also honors the grindingly difficult work of the crews who steadily labored at the task—though they were often emotionally overcome in the process. Among Meyerowitz's photographs is one of Pia Hoffman, a crane operator who insisted that all recovered bodies be treated with the same honor and ceremony awarded to police and fire department personnel. When the body of a civilian woman was uncovered, Hoffman lowered her crane's claw over the victim until officials agreed that she would be removed under a U.S. flag, accompanied by an honor guard.

While our consciousness is permanently engraved with select network media images of 9/11—falling towers and sobbing family members—the intense security surrounding Ground Zero during its cleanup has, for the most part, prevented the public from seeing other, grittier images such as the slurry wall underlying the trade centers, bent and flayed construction beams, and the workers who participated in cleanup. Meyerowitz's nine-month photo journal may be the only detailed photo archive of the damage aftermath. As such, his Aftermath, a large-format photography book, with four-page pull-out panoramic photos, exists as an important historical artifact as well as an emotional journey back to the terrorist attacks of 2001.


Stories in pictures

Reuters news agency has captured the first six years of the 21st century in Reuters: The State of the World, a series of captioned photos that span modern life from the new millennium celebrations through the terrorist attacks and on to recent Academy Awards ceremonies. The section that documents our century's most formidable tragedies—the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the destruction of New Orleans, fanatical attacks on New York and Madrid—will be, for many readers, the book's most important contribution as those events seem largely to shape the new era. The State of the World also spotlights world religions, emerging technologies, recent political conflicts and popular culture. For some, the book's most powerful images may be those that ultimately need no interpretation: Pope John Paul II releasing a dove; a Bavarian church surrounded by satellite dishes nearly as high as its onion dome; a rabbi looking at a Hebrew memorial defaced by a swastika; a sneakered foot running down a street chased by a frothing bull; Julia Roberts smiling. A related website (www.stateoftheworld.reuters.com) features slideshows of the book's images and profiles of the 227 photojournalists who took them.


All over the maps

For American history buffs, Derek Hayes' The Historical Atlas of the United States is a dream come true: It's a detailed pictorial history of America's ever-evolving political and cultural byways and boundaries. This curious and, at the same time, amazingly ambitious narrative starts out with reproductions of early American maps in which the Eastern states are well delineated, while the West is uncharted desert. It marches on through America's growth spurts, reproducing early road and interstate maps, Cold War maps and the graphics used to represent Hurricane Katrina. Hayes knows this medium well, having previously written atlases of the Pacific Northwest, Canada and the Artic. Here he draws on more than 500 maps so even readers who found their minds wandering during history classes will find this book of interest, though they might get sidetracked by some of the more whimsical features. For example, one map, reproduced from the Internet shortly after the 2004 presidential election, divides North America into "The United States of Canada" (i.e. Canada and those states that voted for John Kerry) and "Jesusland," those states that went to George W. Bush.


Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

© 2006 ProMotion, inc.