A L S O+.T O D A Y

Ithaka: A Daughter's Memoir of Being Found
Reviewed by Maud Casey
A memoir, from a young New York journalist, about being "found" by the parents who gave her up for adoption 23 years earlier

[ ENTERTAINMENT ]
A master at dangerous play
By Gary Kamiya
With his last masterpiece, "Bitches Brew," Miles Davis changed jazz history -- again

[ ENTERTAINMENT ]
Thinking inside the box
By Eric Alterman
The year's best in box sets provides obsessed fans of country, jazz, blues and rock with some treasures and some trash

T A B L E+T A L K

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R E C E N T L Y

Love Undetectable
By Andrew Sullivan
(11/30/98)

Uncle Andrew's cabin
By Peter Kurth
(11/30/98)

From he-man to holy man
By Elaine Showalter
(11/12/98)

Ted Hughes, R.I.P.
(10/30/98)

Making book on the Booker
By Sylvia Brownrigg
(10/29/98)

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Books feature archive

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From photos of naked people in Los Angeles to New York living rooms, this year's crop of big books has something for everyone.

Coffee-table books aren't for reading, exactly. They're cultural furniture, equal parts art and artifact, and most of us merely skim them, taking brief but stimulating dives into their opulent, inviting pages. This year, when Salon's writers and editors went looking for 1998's most provocative coffee-table books, they came back with a pile of volumes that may well defeat your efforts at skimming -- you'll want to read them, or gaze intently, from cover to cover. Add them to your holiday shopping list or, better yet, hint that you might like copies yourself.

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American Musicians
BY LEE FRIEDLANDER | D.A.P. | 272 PAGES
BUY IT FROM BARNES&NOBLE.COM

Lee Friedlander has the hungriest eye in American photography. Over four decades he has feasted on a wild diet of themes -- the American desert, graffiti, the female nude, trees and flowers, people and computers, the social landscape, as well as his own deadpan self -- and produced a series of books as nourishing as any in the history of the art. His latest work chronicles another abiding passion, for American popular music. This copious selection of portraits -- 519 images, no less -- features a galaxy of jazz, blues, country, gospel and pop stars. Seldom do Elvis Presley and Don Cherry, Frank Sinatra and Don Watson, Dinah Washington and Stan Kenton keep company in one photographer's sensibility. But they do in Friedlander's. Many of the color pictures were taken when he was staff photographer at Atlantic Records in the '50s and '60s, and turned up on album covers. These portraits of Ray, Aretha, Solomon Burke, Coltrane, Mingus and Ornette will spark pangs of nostalgia in aging hipsters. Less formal and more precious are Friedlander's black-and-white backstage views of, say, Jimmy Rushing at ease, his hat on his ample stomach; and of dozens of lesser-known sidemen at dozens of recording sessions. The photographer's funny retrospective interviews here with Ruth Brown and Steve Lacy are icing on the cake. A more delicious gift for fans of postwar American music -- that's all of us, isn't it? -- would be hard to imagine.
-- Richard B. Woodward

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Naked Los Angeles
BY GREG FRIEDLER | NORTON | 144 PAGES
BUY IT FROM BARNES&NOBLE.COM

Have you ever wondered what ordinary people look like without their clothes on? Of course you have, and your imagination probably affords a rosier view of breasts and protrusions than the photographs in Greg Friedler's "Naked Los Angeles," the sequel, or successor, to Friedler's earlier take on "Naked New York." In both volumes, Friedler has posed his subjects starkly, full front, first in their clothes and then out of them, in what his publisher calls "a kind of anthropological survey" and Friedler himself describes as an effort "to document and understand people." Friedler found it harder to photograph "the same broad spectrum of humanity" in California as he had in New York, partly because many Angelenos "feared for their jobs and reputations," and partly because "most considered their jobs temporary stopovers 'on their way' to stardom." Thus we have an "Unemployed Surfer," an "Imagineer," a "Porn Stud/Novelist" and a "Spiritual Advisor" to gaze at when we think that no one's looking. After a while, weirdly, the faces begin to resemble the crotches. These pictures are not erotic in any way, but you still feel you ought to keep them hidden under your bed.
-- Peter Kurth

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Reflections in a Looking Glass: A Centennial Celebration of Lewis Carroll
BY MORTON N. COHEN | APERTURE | 144 PAGES
BUY IT FROM BARNES&NOBLE.COM

Probably no author's place in the literary pantheon rests on a more slender base than Lewis Carroll's. He is reputed to be the most quoted English writer after Shakespeare, yet his essential legacy consists of a pair of children's books. His station in photographic history is more attenuated still. If not for his child portraits, especially of Alice Liddell, who inspired the wondrous fantasies, he would rate as just another Victorian amateur with a camera. Carroll's interest in naked little girls is itself, of course, now highly suspect. In the current political climate, one approaches his work through a ring of fire. This generous selection, mainly from the Gernsheim Collection at the University of Texas, includes the four extant hand-colored nudes (others have vanished) as well as a wide range of other portrait material. His foremost biographer, Morton Cohen, here scrupulously assesses Carroll's aesthetic and ethical motives, absolving him of any wrongdoing while never trying to retouch him as the picture of normalcy. Taking up photography in 1856, at the age of 24, even before Ruskin informed him that he would never cut it as a real artist, the mathematician quickly made a name for himself as a superb idealizer of childhood. Parents filed their kids into his rooms at Oxford. But he was choosy, photographing only "well-made children" who liked having their pictures taken. Solicitous of their needs and eager to converse on their level, the bachelor don often preferred their company to adults. No doubt Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (he returned unopened all letters addressed to Lewis Carroll) was deeply peculiar, for which one should say, God bless him.
-- Richard B. Woodward

N E X T+P A G E+| Pulp fiction, tasteful gossip and sunken treasure

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