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This volume is apparently designed to feed the fantasies of split-level people who yearn to wake up one morning in a Palladian villa, a Roman palazzo or a great Georgian house in County Wicklow. The sumptuous interiors on display evoke the spacious days when every European princeling was building his own little Versailles and architects like Nash, Vanbrugh, Inigo Jones and Wyatt were adapting Italian magnificence for English country gentlemen. The modern eye can only goggle in awe at heroic staircases, ceilings bulging with putti, acres of marble floors reflecting miles of gilded plaster. Magnificence had become largely a semi-public affair, as in Queen Victoria's railway carriage (sapphire satin and tasseled draperies with a white quilted ceiling) and not merely ostentatious, as in the dining room at London's Ritz Hotel ("the most beautiful Edwardian restaurant in existence").
WILDERNESS KINGDOM: THE JOURNALS AND PAINTINGS OF NICOLAS POINT, S.J. translated and introduced by Joseph P. Donnelly, S.J. 274 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $21.95.
Published for the first time are the journal and 285 paintings, sketches and maps in which Father Point made impressively authentic records of the customs, family life, garb, dances and ceremonies of Indian tribes with whom he lived from 1841 to 1847.
THE SEARCH FOR SPEED UNDER SAIL, 1700-1855 by Howard I. Chapelle. 453 pages. Norton. $20.
This is clearly a technical book, but amateur sailors—the most passionate kind—should be fascinated by the meticulous design plans of some of the finest American sailing ships ever to draw a breeze. Only a bold sense of beauty could have given birth to these craft, but the ingenuity that made them functional is the author's real subject.
THE WORLD OF ANCIENT ROME edited byGiulioGiannelli. 300 pages. Putnam. $20.
The title is somewhat misleading. This book, the work of more than a dozen experts, tells and shows how Romans of all classes actually lived. Starting with the town plan of Augustus, it proceeds to the kitchen, the bath, the school, the soldier's bivouac, and on to the theater, the doctor's office, what people wore, and the brutal pleasures of the amphitheater. A substantial, workmanlike job of real interest.
$15 to $20
THE IMPERIAL COLLECTION OF AUDUBON ANIMALS edited with new text by Victor E. Cuhalane. 307 pages. Hammond. $19.95.
Audubon was interested in beasts as well as birds. He and his two sons contributed the illustrations of this volume, now reissued after 119 years; they are lively, formal, detailed and at the same time natural. Unlike his great
Birds of America, which he claimed (somewhat extravagantly) to have done entirely from life, the animals were nature morte. Since his subjects included the grizzly bear and the grey, or timber, wolf, this is easy to understand. Like all other naturalists, Audubon loved the things he killed. His views are reflected in this remark: "If a wolf passes your tent in the wilderness, he is likely to be less unpleasant than your next-door neighbor back home."
CONSTRUCTIVISM: ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION by George Rickey. 305 pages. Braziller. $1 5.