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With its 100 full-color plates, Tutankhamun: His Tomb and Its Treasures by I.E.S. Edwards, with photographs by Harry Burton and Lee Boltin (Metropolitan Museum of Art/Knopf; 256 pages; $35), is the finest popular book on the subject. It depicts objects that were not included in the Metropolitan Museum-Egyptian government exhibition now touring several U.S. cities, as well as black-and-white photos from the 1922-28 excavation under Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon. These old pictures reflect the excitement of the unsealing when Tutankhamun's treasures lay in disarray, as if at some pharaonic garage sale.
The Spanish who reached Peru in the 16th century were primarily interested in gold. But later visitors have been even more impressed with the Inca highway system, stretching from the ancient capital at Cuzco north into Colombia and south well into Chile. Paved with massive, hand-hewn blocks of stone, the roads have survived the centuries all but intact. The Route of the Incas by Jacques Soustelle (Viking; unpaged; $35) evokes the grandeur of the vanished Inca empire and explains why a people who never used the wheel built such a road network. Hans Silvester's striking photographs capture the haunting beauty of sites like the ruined city of Machu Picchu, the sculptured faces of present-day Andeans and the ageless wonder of the paved Inca roads. Between them, Soustelle and Silvester manage to show why even the Spanish, who conquered the land of the haughty llama and high-soaring condor, were unable to change it.
Stormy surf on a rocky Maine headland. Sunrise through the mangroves on a Florida key. Sunset on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. Everyone has his own favorite image of the beaches that border most of the U.S. In The Wild Shores of North America (Knopf; 240 pages; $35), Ann and Myron Sutton manage to capture nearly all of them. Beginning in the icebound Arctic, they take the armchair beachcomber on a scenic tour down the East Coast, past Cape Cod and the islands, along the perilous shoals of the Carolinas, through the lost waterways of the Everglades and Louisiana bayous, then up the West Coast from the desert sands of Baja California, past the cypresses of Monterey and the great coastal forests of the Pacific Northwest to the fog-shrouded Aleutians. Readers may not finish the tour with sand in their shoes, but most will close this lyrical volume yearning for the smell of salt air.
The Miraculous Journey of Mahomet with introduction and commentaries by Marie-Rose Séguy (Braziller; 158 pages; $40). Known in the Muslim world as the Mirâj Nâmeh, this legend describes the mystical visions of Muhammad as he ascended one night to the Seventh Heaven and the Throne of God. With the Angel Gabriel as his guide, the Prophet meets with Adam, Noah, Abraham and Moses. He visits paradise, with its eternally blooming gardens, and hell, where sinners suffer endless agony at the hands of demons. The 15th century illuminations that accompany the text of this holy adventure are masterworks of Middle Eastern art. Produced in Herât, capital of ancient Khurasan, the paintings flood the eye with blues, golds, reds and greens. The effect is similar to that made by classic carpets and tapestries. One of the most attractively produced art books of the season.