(5 of 5)
DRAWING by Daniel M. Mendelowitz. 464 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $11.95.
This is an exception to the usual run of art books in that it is not overpriced, nor just an eclectic collection of plates designed for display, but a pertinently illustrated history of drawing that would be useful both to the artist and someone who merely likes to draw. Professor Mendelowitz of Stanford is no more pedantic than he has to be in discussing media, periods and styles. Perhaps unnecessarily he points out that "the common lead pencil is misnamed, for it is made of graphite, a crystalline form of carbon having a greasy texture." It is also a slippery instrument in the hands of those who take drawing as lightly as it is taken today. Drawing has had its great days—the Renaissance, the 18th and 19th centuries —but it is impossible to doubt that the pop art of, say, Roy Lichtenstein (b. 1923) represents anything but a descent from the anonymous caveman who drew bison and deer with a masterly hand perhaps 15,000 years ago.
THE HOUSE IN MY HEAD by Dorothy Rodgers. 254 pages. Atheneum. $10.
The wife of Composer Richard Rodgers, a former professional interior decorator, gives a step-by-step account of how she built her dream house. The story has an irresistible fairy-tale aura, and her menus are as excellent as those in her previous book (My Favorite Things), although many a gourmet will be sorely wounded by her continuing and total aversion to garlic.
THE PEOPLES OF KENYA by Joy Adamson. 400 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $9.75.
This book is by the author of Born Free, Living Free and Forever Free, but it is quite different. Before writing those animal stories, Joy Adamson had taught herself to paint and then, for more than six years, lived among the many tribes of Kenya. In hundreds of her paintings and photographs, she presents the people and their customs. Many of the ceremonies—for example, circumcision rites—have never before been observed by a white witness, and anthropologists as well as the nonspecialist reader will find much that is unusual. Among other things, the Adamson enterprise is sure to lead to some fresh thinking about the African future and the inevitable clash between Westernization and tribal contentment.
PICTORIAL GUIDE TO THE AAAAAAAALS OF NORTH AMERICA by Leonard Lee Rue ///. 299 pages. Crowe//. $7.95.
The photographs are monochrome and offset-reproduced, and the prose is conservationist and sternly isolationist, not to say jaunty in a scoutmasterly fashion. However, 65 of the 375 species of mammals in America—north of the Rio Grande—are given knowledgeable biographies by an industrious naturalist. Leonard Lee Rue III knows more than other authorities, including Larousse, will let on about the American opossum: Did anyone else know that an infant opossum is the size of a pencil eraser, while a whole litter of 16 would not fill a teaspoon? Most backward and unfortunate of all American mammals, Mother usually has only a dozen teats. What happens to the odd opossums? They are dropouts.