BOOKS IN BRIEF

The Christmas season invites us to indulge some of our quirkier interests in the publishing world, and recommend a few unconventional delights for readers on your list.

We begin with What the Dog Did: Tales From a Formerly Reluctant Dog Owner by Emily Yoffe (Bloomsbury, 256 pp., $23.95). A veteran freelancer and semi-reformed cat person, Ms. Yoffe yielded to her family's entreaties and adopted a beagle, which, in turn, has led to a fruitful association with Beagle Rescue Education and Welfare (BREW), and a succession of foster hounds whose stories compose the bulk of this splendid volume. As readers of these pages will know, it is difficult to think of a more richly comic breed than the beagle, and Emily Yoffe's dry humor, pointed insights, and infinite patience produce a riotous, and rewarding, read for anyone who has ever observed dogs in action--or inaction.

If, however, the human element is essential, may we introduce Hoover the Fishing President: Portrait of the Private Man and His Life Outdoors by Hal Elliott Wert (Stackpole, 416 pp., $29.95). Herbert Hoover is not the most popular of our presidents, but he was a man of extraordinary gifts and accomplishment, and the supreme humanitarian among commanders in chief. In the guise of an account of Hoover's career as an angler, Wert has drawn a charming portrait of the Midwestern orphan who put himself through Stanford, made a fortune as a globetrotting engineer/businessman, fed the starving Europeans, invented modern public administration, and believed (as he said) that "all men are equal in the eyes of fish."

For the inevitable Civil War buff on your list, Virginia at War: 1861, edited by William C. Davis and James I. Robertson Jr. (Kentucky, 241 pp., $35) is an essential addition to the library. The first of five projected volumes sponsored by the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies, this is a superb collection of essays, edited by two distinguished historians, on the conflict in the state that was not only the capital of the Confederacy, but also the primary battleground of the struggle.

And now on to the coffee table. Somewhere just short of that category may be found Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life by Niles Eldredge (Norton, 288 pp., $35). Using Charles Darwin's notes from his voyage to the Galapagos Islands and South America, Eldredge, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, traces the development of evolutionary theory, and describes Darwin's struggles and inner torments with uncommon skill. This is very much a book for the general reader interested in an introduction to the greatest scientific mind of the 19th century, and contains dozens of fascinating sketches, photographs, paintings, and manuscript excerpts.

Four other volumes deserve commendation. The Smaller Majority: The Hidden World of the Animals That Dominate the Tropics by Piotr Naskrecki (Belknap/Harvard, 288 pp., $35) is a hypnotic collection of intimate photographs of tiny frogs, startling reptiles, lush butterflies, and hundreds of creatures of indescribable appearance found on leaves, in sand, on water, in the air, in repose, on twigs and branches, and in combat as well as domestic tranquility. The subjects are all smaller than the human finger, but, microscopic or not, loom larger than life.

Lawrence of Arabia: The Life, The Legend by Malcolm Brown (Thames & Hudson, 208 pp., $45) may not succeed in decoding the mystery of T.E. Lawrence, but it gathers a lot of compelling photographs around an informative text, and goes some distance in explaining the lure of the Arab world to that tortured Oxford archaeologist, as well as the Arab revolt against Ottoman tyranny, and the balance of Lawrence's strange, self-mortifying life. Contemporary photographs are nicely mixed with modern scenes, all interspersed with relevant passages from letters, press accounts, and Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

True to the Letter: 800 Years of Remarkable Correspondence, Documents and Autographs by Pedro Corrêa do Lago (Thames & Hudson, 288 pp., $70) suggests that the next best thing to meeting and conversing with figures from the historic past is close proximity to their written remains. Here is a letter written by Queen Elizabeth I on the opening day of her reign (1558), in which she neglects to add the 'R' for Regina, and a receipt for services rendered (1516), endorsed by Raphael. It is both amusing and instructive to read a birthday letter from Freud to his 94-year-old mother (1929) and examine Proust's corrected proofs (1913) for Swann's Way.

Writers of the American South: Their Literary Landscapes by Hugh Howard, photographs by Roger Straus III (Rizzoli, 286 pp., $35) appeals to those of us with a certain curiosity about the way some people live. Most of the usual suspects are here--William Faulkner's Rowan Oak, Flannery O'Connor's Georgia farmhouse--as well as Eudora Welty's staid bedroom and Peter Taylor's elegant study. The photographs are spare, polished, even serene; but some of the writers (Carl Hiaasen, Ernest Hemingway) are "southern" by virtue of residence in south Florida--and, certainly in Hiaasen's case, in company well over their head.

  • Philip Terzian