A Colorful World On Your Shelf

CBS Sunday Morning contributor Janet Maslin of The New York Times gives praise to the colorful, informative and moving books perfect for a holiday purchase

Meet the Panamanian Golden Frog. Isn't he beautiful? But there he is in the middle of a flower, trying to disappear. Art Wolfe's "Vanishing Act" is a whole book devoted to creatures using camouflage. And that is not the spirit of the season.

At this time of year, nothing this great-looking is supposed to hide. This is high season for show-offs, at least where picture books are concerned.

Just look at the flamboyant glamour girls in "Dames," by the fashion photographer Eric Boman. It's a book in which not even Ivana Trump looks loud, and it is a festival of flouncing.

Boman's well-known women radiate confidence. They know he's made them look good. The glamour is more studied in "Hollywood at Home," the Architectural Digest anthology of movie people living in their own staged settings. Whether it's Marilyn Monroe reading, posed besides books by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky or Jayne Mansfield in a bathroom with pink shag carpeting on the ceiling, these are pictures that tell stories.

And their artifice is every bit as striking as the posturing in Richard Avedon's fashion pictures, seen in the black-and-white collection "Woman in the Mirror."

There are several civilian women to be found here. But most of these pictures are dramatic, exotic portraits of non-dame beauties.

For those whose idea of the exotic is more far-flung, this season's most colorful travel book is "India." The book looks lavish, but it pictures a wide range of human experience.

But the ultimate sense of the Earth's scope can be found in Oxford's handsome and hefty new "Atlas of the World." In addition to its attractive maps, this invaluable reference book includes statistics about the state of the planet. It's a great way to find out which is the highest mountain in Europe.

There's a lot of information in "The Complete New Yorker," too. This is an eight-disc collection for computer use, and it incorporates the contents of 4,000 New Yorker issues. Only one problem: Those of us with only middling computer skills can't use it. A lot of gift book fanciers have been finding that out the hard way.

The year's most gorgeous nature book is "Archipelago," a National Geographic visit to a remote island sanctuary in Hawaii. The shells and jelly fish are spectacular, and the photography is, too.

Two other keepers are memoirs.

"Jazz Life," a whopping and beautiful 700-page recollection of William Claxton's 1960 American road trip.

It captures the great jazz vitality and greatest jazz icons of that era.

And "Full Metal Jacket Diary" features insightful journal entries and photographs from the actor Matthew Modine. The mystique of the great Stanley Kubrick will never be quite the same for anyone who reads this. He was famously formidable, but Modine captures uncertainty, too. His Kubrick is part solitary genius, part Wizard of Oz.

Even better, despite its full metal cover, this journal has paper pages. Enjoy your real books this holiday season.