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New & Noteworthy Visual Books, From the Grand Canyon to the Moon
Recent visual books:
THE TALE OF GENJI: A Japanese Classic Illuminated, by John T. Carpenter and Melissa McCormick, with Monika Bincsik and Kyoko Kinoshita. (Yale University/Metropolitan Museum of Art, $65.) The world’s oldest novel, as interpreted through centuries of Japanese art.
PHOTOGRAPHS, by Eudora Welty. (University Press of Mississippi/Jackson, $50.) Thirty years after its publication, this defining monograph of the writer’s photography has been revivified, thanks to digital scans of Welty’s work. A new foreword by Natasha Trethewey joins Reynolds Price’s original.
LIVE OAK, WITH MOSS, by Walt Whitman. Illustrated by Brian Selznick. (Abrams ComicArts, $29.99.) Selznick, known for his children’s books, has dedicated his first adult project to a visual representation of Whitman’s secret gay poems, published to coincide with the poet’s 200th birthday.
FIRST ON THE MOON: The Apollo 11 50th Anniversary Experience, by Rod Pyle. (Sterling, $29.95.) A science writer commemorates America’s storied journey to the moon, with restored photographs taken by the astronauts themselves (and a foreword by Buzz Aldrin).
THE GRAND CANYON: Unseen Beauty: Running the Colorado River, by Tom Blagden Jr. (Rizzoli, $50.) Blagden, a professional nature photographer, documents one of the world’s natural wonders from a raft along the river, rapids and all.
What we’re reading:
Of all the recent books I’ve read, my favorite is THE PRODIGAL TONGUE, by Lynne Murphy, about the differences between American and British English and how Brits feel about our “corruption” of “their” language. (Hint: They don’t like it.) The author, a linguist born and raised in the United States, has now lived and worked in England for almost 20 years. She has a keen ear for the way people speak. She covers all the obvious differences between the two Englishes — “lift” versus “elevator,” “maths” versus “math,” etc. — but also lots of subtle ones. For example, Britons distinguish between “in hospital,” meaning being there for treatment, and “in the hospital,” for just visiting. Along the way she counters the frequent British complaints about American English by showing, with wit, that neither version is better, more logical or more consistent. The two things are just different. And that’s something to celebrate.
Will Shortz, Puzzles editor
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