Big books of summer hit the coffee tables
Published 9:00 pm Saturday, June 24, 2006
T he sun is in your eyes and beach stones are at your feet. Nearby, waves are crashing.
And bikinis are in sight everywhere!
These are some of the sights and sounds of summer, also yours to behold in the pages of some recently published illustrated books.
The beach rocks
A little book about little objects, “Beach Stones” (Abrams, $17.95), features 85 color images of more than 200 stones gathered from beaches around the world that display a stunning variety of colors, shapes and patterns.
Photographer Josie Iselin and writer Margaret W. Caruthers contributed examples from their personal collections.
Stones are Earth’s oldest objects, and “Beach Stones” describes how nature produced them and how they acquired their size, shape and texture – smooth or rough, plain or patterned.
For such stones, the beach or, more accurately, the collector’s home, is only the latest stop on a journey that began many millions of years ago.
One photo shows an egg-shaped stone found in Devon, England, with markings that make it resemble a happy face, albeit one with only one eye.
The shore in North Haven, Maine, yielded a white stone that nature formed into an almost perfect heart shape. Meanwhile, with Iselin’s help, a “paw print” can be seen in the arrangement of five stones – one large “pad” and four “toes” – found in Evoia, Greece.
Four stones from Maine and of widely varying shapes are lined up so their common element, a thin white stripe, appears unbroken. Sand-colored stones from California feature dents and holes made over eons by the friction of sand and grit trapped in tiny cracks in the stones.
A group of banded stones against a black background eerily resemble planets swirling in some far-off universe, while a cluster of variously marked and colored specimens could be mistaken for the eggs of different species of birds and animals.
Here comes the sun
The sun is merely a medium-size ball of gas and only one of 100 billion or so stars in the universe. Yet without it, life on Earth would not exist.
In “Sun” (Abrams, $19.95), Steele Hill and Michael Carlowicz offer in text and photos a look at the sun’s intricate relationship with the Earth in both scientific and mythical terms.
The sun, they say, is the only star that can be studied up close – after all, it’s only 93 million miles away – and the one star that affects our daily lives.
Hill, a photo researcher and authority on solar images, has selected photos of the sun made by conventional photographers as well as those from observatories and satellites. The photos are arranged according to our view of the sun – images from the ground, then from the fringes of Earth’s atmosphere, from the edge of space and finally at the sun’s surface.
The text provides facts and recent discoveries about the sun, and explains solar phenomena that we can see (rainbows, auroras, eclipses) as well as those invisible to the naked eye.
Images show the sun twinkling – remember, it is a star – from the Tokyo sky through the branches of a cherry blossom. Speaking of fruit, the sun looks like a huge, rough-skinned orange in an image of the surface made by measuring sound waves emanating from within the sun.
The first-known photo of the sun is here, a daguerreotype made in 1845 in France, as well as a series of time-lapse photos that show the progression of a huge sunspot group across the surface, which produced one of the most intense magnetic storms in Earth’s history in March 1989.
And what could an aerial view of the Earth have to do with the sun? One such view shows the Bighorn Medicine Wheel, an arrangement of stones in a wagon-wheel design on the ground in Wyoming. It was constructed about 800 years ago by the Plains Indians, and is thought to have been used to plot the sun’s ascent and descent on the solstices.
Bikini backstory
The sun-worshipper’s unofficial uniform must be the bikini, the beachwear that is barely there.
To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the bikini’s birth, there’s “The Bikini Book” (Assouline, $29.95) by Kelly Killoren Bensimon, a former model and magazine editor.
This thick and chunky, 400-page flex-cover volume offers a pictorial history of the bikini, which made its debut on the beaches of France in 1946. It was named for the Bikini atoll in the South Pacific, prompting one wag to observe: “They call them bikinis for they don’t cover them atoll.”
The 300 photos, most in color, show bikinis worn in films and in fashion, in Playboy and in Sports Illustrated, on the beach and at the Bikini Car Wash, where the attendants don’t seem to mind getting wet (and the customers are in no real hurry).
Famous bikini-clad figures include a young Marilyn Monroe and young Goldie Hawn; Ursula Andress and Halle Berry on the beach in James Bond films; and Annette Funicello, who traded in her two Mouseketeer’s ears for a skimpy two-piece in 1960s beach movies.
It makes a splash among everyday people, too, including little girls, old women and even men.
Its creator, Louis Reard, described the bikini as “smaller than the world’s smallest bathing suit.” For visual proof, see the image of the first bikini, modeled in Paris by Micheline Bernardini, a strip-dancer from the Casino de Paris who donned the daring “deux-pieces” that “no respectable model would agree to wear.”
Sprinkled throughout are quotes by, among others, Michael Kors, Anna Sui, Jennifer Lopez and Elizabeth Hurley. And by Tyra Banks, who considers bikinis “an excuse to wear lingerie in public.”
Catching the waves
From beauty by the sea to the beauty of the sea, “Perfect Waves: The Endless Allure of the Ocean” (Abrams, $27.50) by Pierre Nouqueret is a large-format volume with essays and 145 color photos that celebrate the beauty of waves.
The book is divided into three sections: “A Fascinating Natural Mechanism,” “Life on the Waves” and “Mystique of the Wave.”
The photos, some two-page spreads, show waves in all their awesome blue-green splendor – exploding onto shores, carrying surfers aloft, and daring others, boards at the ready, waiting on the beach.
Essays explain the patterns and sources of waves, the science of the ocean and the natural movement of water. Topics include fear of waves, the ocean in the Bible, the origin of wave terms, and “baines,” or rips, the deadly side of waves.
Discussed, also, are the various ways waves break, how being caught in a wave is like taking a ride in a washing machine, and the wave at Teahuppo, near Tahiti, that is so powerful it’s “unnameable.”
And, fittingly for a book so generously illustrated with photographs, there’s an essay on how photography depicts “the power of a wave’s lip” and places “the sea’s violence in perspective” in ways superior to paintings.
Summer scenes
“Painting Summer in New England” (Yale University Press, $39.95) by Trevor Fairbrother shows how Edward Hopper, John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer and other American artists have captured the many aspects of a New England summer.
Its 97 color reproductions of paintings from the 19th century to the 21st take viewers to farms and fields and cities and coastlines, and depict the region’s social and cultural life.
The works are divided by theme, including “quiet retreats,” “sea and shore,” “coastal light,” “the farm” and “streets and gathering places.” Each section has a brief introductory essay, but this book is mostly about the paintings – which eloquently speak for themselves.
Four young women in long white dresses and hats enjoy the rocky coast in “Summer,” Frank W. Benson’s 1909 oil on canvas. Another small group, this one a family, enjoys the sweet outdoors under tall trees near their modest white house in Leon Kroll’s 1916 oil on canvas, “Summer Days, Camden, Maine, The Bellows Family.”
Plump sea gulls, perched on rocks and gliding aloft, are only part of the busy scene in “The Harbor at Herring Gut,” N.C. Wyeth’s 1925 oil on canvas, with sailboats and rowboats plying the harbor and clusters of small houses and trees lining the shore.
Andrew Wyeth uses a rooftop, partly seen, as the vantage point for a view of the uninhabited beach in “Northern Point,” his 1950 egg tempera on gesso panel.
The view is from the tracks as people gather to board the bright red streetcar while puffy white clouds float upon a too-blue sky in “Gloucester Trolley,” John Sloan’s 1917 oil on canvas.
And no one is in sight – not even in the glass-walled phone booth – in “Path to the Lake,” Scott Prior’s 2003 oil on linen low-light depiction of the desolate lake, its path, and the flowering shrub alongside it.
(“Painting Summer in New England” accompanies an exhibit on show at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., through Sept. 4.)
