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LA BELLE FRANCE. 300 pages. Golden Press. $19.95. Where do cookbooks go? Into the kitchen, behind a cabinet door, to collect smears of bacon fat and to be consulted only at moments of cu linary need. This cookbook, prepared by the editors of Réaltiés magazine in Paris, breaks all the rules. La Belle France divides Gaul into ten.regions, each with its own spécialtiés—Normandy for cheeses, Alsace-Lorraine for the richest pâté—and brings the tour to life with a host of savory photographs of the locale, many in color, that should keep the book out of the kitchen and in the living room, where it belongs. Its 400 recipes, tested by Alfred Guérot, late president of the World Federation of Culinary Societies, and other Gallic gastronomes, plot delectable journeys to specific gourmet delights, which invariably taste better in French (Potée à la Bourguignonne, for instance, is nothing but humble pork stew).
FAMILY by Margaret Mead. 208 pages. Macmillan. $10. The strength of this book is its simplicity. Under such broad headings as Mothers, Fathers, The Child Alone, Friends and Adolescents, Anthropologist Margaret Mead has distilled a lifetime's wisdom about that most enduring of human institutions, the family. She cannot resist pontificating a bit, but the photographs by Photographer Ken Heyman make up for it. Taken over seven years in many countries for just this book, they say more, and say it better, than the text.
AUTOMOBILES AND AUTOMOBILING by Pierre Dumont, Ronald Barker and Douglas B. Tubbs. 204 pages. Viking. $28.50. By the authors' reckoning, the Golden Age of automobiling began with the century in France, and ended 25 years ago. That period embraces a time when the finest cars were designed, fueled and driven with love and care—the same emotions that produced this book. The most youthful entry in Illustrator Dumont's four-color catalogue of conveyances is the Packard 180, a rakish coupé de ville last manufactured in 1940. Otherwise, the handcrafted bodies on display here are now preserved only in automobile museums and the hearts of car buffs: a 1913 Alfa with a perfect teardrop chassis and porthole windows, an all-tulipwood, copper-riveted 1924 Hispano-Suiza. Accompanying vintage photographs recapture the era when all motorists looked like Mr. Toad, streamlining was called "wind-cheating," and a determined cyclist could overtake a racing car in the Bois de Boulogne.
THE FIFTY-THREE STAGES OF THE TOKAIDO by Hiroshige. 123 pages. East-West Center Press. $10.50. Hiroshige, a fireman's son who died in 1858, spent years carving in cherrywood the 53 stages or stops along the Tokaido, the Emperor's Road that winds 250 sea-clinging miles from Kyoto to Tokyo. These incomparable woodblock prints, here reproduced in Hiroshige's own bold colors and almost to the original size (about 9 in. by 14 in.) make a significant and sometimes neglected point: what the artist deliberately omits the enchanted viewer will supply.