(5 of 7)
Larousse Encyclopedia of Music. Edited by Geoffrey Hindley. 576 pages. World. $19.95. A potpourri of minstrels and melody that manages to make the songs of old Provence seem as delectable as poulet a la proven∧ale. So too with musical greats from Palestrina and Purcell to Wagner and Webern, in a handsome treatise that is informed and comfortably free of jargon. This is primarily history, not a quick alphabetical reference aid (readers wanting that should try the Oxford Companion to Music). The knowing may regret the cursory treatment of American music and wonder, say, why Stravinsky and Berlioz are given chapter headings, but not Mozart or Debussy.
The Hours of Et'ienne Chevalier, from the Musee Conde, Chantilly. Preface by Charles Sterling. 128 pages. Brazil ler. $17.50. Facsimile re-creation of a Book of Hours painted for an arriviste French nobleman about 1450. The artist, Jean Fouquet, was one of the 15th century's finest miniaturists, whose handling of celestial blues and golds as well as the soft pastels of spring landscape made him as much at home depicting heaven as earth. Fouquet's Descent of the Holy Ghost upon the Faithful includes squadrons of foiled devils in flight and cloaked elders in prayer. Beyond them the luminous Seine flows past the small green trees, dusty walls and spires of the He de la Cite, where Notre Dame Cathedral, its facade laced in gold, makes medieval Paris seem more than ever worth a Mass.
My Lite and Times by Henry Miller. 204 pages. Playboy Press. $15.50. Long before Hugh Hefner there was Henry Miller. Now at 79, the Dada of the sex revolution apparently keeps his own bunnies and when not chatting or nuzzling the cleavage of some visiting beauty, plays a steady defense game of Zen Ping Pong. This is a good example of coffee-table autobiography. It offers reproductions of Miller's corrected manuscript pages, and eight full-page color plates of the master's own sentimental paintings.
The White Nile by Alan Moorehead. 368 pages. Harper & Row. $15. Handsomely and intelligently illustrated in this reissue, this decade-old chronicle of the river, its sources and explorers stands up as fine travel history. The heroes, of course, are the eccentric British explorers of the last century: Burton, Speke, Baker, Livingstone. Through primitive lands, fierce populations and climates, and frequent pestilence, they hunted the Nile to its source in Lake Victoria—as Moorehead puts it, "a sunburst of Victorian courage."
The Compleat Naturalist: A Life of Linnaeus by Wilfrid Blunt. 256 pages. Viking. $14.95. The study of 18th century science can be an ennobling exercise. Outstanding men rose to survey and catalogue Nature's radiant data into logical systems. In Sweden, Carl Linne —Linnaeus to the world—collected, named and scientifically organized plants for the first time in history. Wilfrid Blunt's richly decorated biography admirably illustrates how Linnaeus' single mindedness and plodding devotion to stamens and pistils laid the foundation of modern botany.