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Silence the snobs!
They may look down their noses at Oprah, but what have the literati done for books lately?
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[11/12/99]

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"Nat King Cole" by Daniel Mark Epstein
A top-notch biography celebrates the jazz piano genius who gained his greatest fame as a pop singer.
By Greg Villepique
[11/12/99]

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In the latest cash-in-on-the-Bard book, the tragic heroes of Shakespeare are just losers who failed at crisis management.
By Ron Rosenbaum
[11/11/99]

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By Andrew Long

Nov. 12, 1999 | One of the more worthwhile aspects of millennium madness may be the resurfacing of an urge to set aside the mean concerns of everyday life and reflect on who we are, what we are and what on earth -- and away from it, for that matter -- it all means. Three recent books of photography go surprisingly deep in exploring the awe-inspiring sights of our terrestrial, lunar and celestial surroundings.

Although images from National Geographic, CNN and the Discovery Channel can at times make our planet seem all too familiar, the Earth is still a source of wonder -- something that "Earth From Above," a new coffee-table book by French aerial photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, makes clear.

Earth From Above By Yann Arthus-Bertrand Harry N. Abrams, 408 pages Photography Buy this book at B&N.com Full Moon By Michael Light Alfred A. Knopf, 244 pages Photography Buy this book at B&N.com The Invisible Universe By David Malin Bulfinch Press/Callaway Editions, 133 pages Photography Buy this book at B&N.com

At 416 pages and eight pounds, this encyclopedic compendium doesn't seem to leave much out. With a team of more than two dozen assistants, Arthus-Bertrand completed a five-year project in which he flew in airplanes and helicopters over 75 countries, photographing geological formations, rural settlements, desert dwellers, sinuous coastlines, urban metropolises and much more. Most of the 195 photographs span two full pages, and thanks to an extensive legend system, each one has an informative thumbnail caption describing locations, histories and other pertinent information.

All 10 sections cover a satisfying range of land and sea, often in striking progressions. The first volley, for example, proceeds from Yellowstone National Park to the Sulu Archipelago in the Philippines to the Okavango Delta in Botswana to the Folgefonni Glacier in Norway. The sections are punctuated with thoughtful commentaries by historians, demographers, economists and geographers, the bulk of which are cautionary essays on population control, the distribution of wealth, urbanism, cultural diffusion, gender inequality and resource exploitation.

In its sheer scope and breadth of imagery, "Earth from Above" is a unique achievement. The photographer varies the altitudes from which he shoots and comes away with previously unseen perspectives on the forces, terrestrial and human, that we live with daily. His eye is strongest with design, both natural and manmade. One pair of photographs juxtaposes a close-up of the shimmering roofs of Frank Gehry's titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, all chaos and order and song, with a very high view of silvery salt deposits in Namibia's Etosha National Park, whose elongated antler forms and irregular basins look like a half-dozen whacked-out reindeer from a Tim Burton movie.

One picture quietly illuminates the sometimes invisible links between nature and "culture." At the center of an arid landscape in Tsavo National Park, Kenya, stands an acacia tree, known as the Tree of Life, that has managed to stay healthy and green, providing shade to a small patch of the ochre dirt beneath it; surrounding the tree is a crisscrossed network of narrow animal trails leading in from all directions. It's a gorgeous image of nobility and perseverance, which becomes somewhat disquieting when you realize that this Tree of Life is the image that Disney has appropriated, and re-created in living plastic, at the center of its Animal Kingdom theme park in Orlando. Art imitates commerce imitates life.

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