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Buffs who watch Vic Braden's televised Tennis Tips often come away saying, "He ought to write a book." Well, he has. His Tennis for the Future, written with Bill Bruns (Little, Brown; 274 pages; $12.95), is the Wimbledon of the wildly proliferating genre of tennis instruction books, clearly outclassing all the others. With humor, psychology, basic physics, clear diagrams and multiple-exposure pictures by John G. Zimmerman, Braden demolishes many long-cherished (and totally wrong) notions about tennis strokes and strategy. Readers are left with what is probably their first clear insight into why that elusive, fuzzy ball, and the opponent on the other side of the net, behave as they do. Braden's inspiring message to the 99.9% of the population who are not superjocks: "If you can walk to the drinking fountain without falling over, you have the physical ability to play this game pretty well."
Murder Ink: The Mystery Reader's Companion. "Perpetrated" by Dilys Winn (Workman Publishing; 522 pages; $14.95 hardcover, $7.95 paper). For devotees of mysteries, thrillers and spy stories, this is the unputdownable reference work and ultimate argument settler. How many of those "little gray cells" did Hercule Poirot have? (One trillion.) Nero Wolfe's actual weight? (One-seventh of a ton.) Which British poet laureate and which U.S. President wrote murder stories? (C. Day Lewis and Abraham Lincoln.) With 150 contributions about crime writers, cops, critics, scientists, ex-spies, a stoolie, a butler who didn't do it and many others, Winn's concordance is elegant, entertaining and encyclopedic.
The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady by Edith Holden (Holt, Rinehart & Winston; 186 pages; $14.95). In the England of 1906, when there was less leisure time and no television, Naturalist Edith Holden made almost daily entries in a diary and interspersed among them watercolor paintings of the birds, flowers and grasses she saw on her walks. The result, never before published, was a delicately assembled chronicle of a year in the Midlands that included the diarist's favorite poems and aphorisms. It is published here in a fine facsimile edition that pleases the mind and the eye.
Life Goes to War: A Picture History of World War II. Edited by David E. Scherman (a Time-Life Television Book/Little, Brown; 304 pages; $19.95). World War II was the longest-running story in the history of LIFE, the magazine that practically invented photojournalism. From the war's prelude in Spain to the Japanese surrender nine years later, the magazine's photographers provided the images that alerted and moved a nation. Many of the pictures have been permanently filed in our imaginations: Robert Capa's famous "moment of death" of a Spanish Republican soldier; the dead Chinese child being carried to a mass grave like a sack of laundry; Mussolini flapping his arms like a prize rooster; MacArthur sloshing ashore in the Philippines; the pinups of the '40s—Betty Grable, Dorothy Lamour, Rita Hayworth and that trivia-test stumper, Chili Williams, "the Polka-Dot Girl." A perfect gift for the old Sarge & Co.