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MYTHS by Alexander Eliot. 320 pages. McGraw-Hill. $39.95. This dizzying book hurls the reader around the world and across the centuries in pursuit of the common roots of mankind's myths. Here is Himbui the Hummingbird, the fire bringer of Peru's Jivaro Indians, cheek by jowl with Prometheus. Here is Polynesian Forest God Tanemahuta forcibly separating Father Sky from Mother Earth. Visions of heavens and hells are shared by Aztec and Hindu, Algonquin and Buddhist. This sweeping survey of human imagination is buttressed by 1,300 illustrations, excellent maps, and essays by Scholars Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade.
HERALDRY by Ottfried Neubecker. 288pages. McGraw-Hill. $39.95. The author confirms a suspicion probably held by most people: to understand even a tiny blot on the elaborate escutcheon of heraldry, one must be a herald. The author, director of the German General Roll of Arms, explains the code of identification that was already fiendishly complex in the 12th century. It is no use. Even introductory definitions flutter toward mystification ("Fountain. A roundel barry wavy argent and azure"). Fortunately, the book's 1,700 illustrations fill this simple information gap with a tournament of griffins rampant and bends sinister. They may be best perused couchant (lying down but with head erect).
TREASURY OF STAMPS by David Lidman. 303 pages. Abrams. $37.50. The current state of the U.S. mails is nothing to write home about. But if electronics or private services ever totally take over the business of correspondence, something will have been lost. Stamps, as this volume demonstrates, have often achieved a rare combination of function and beauty. David Lidman, a former stamps editor for the New York Times, offers a crisp history of franking, from ancient stone tablets to contemporary air mail. The 1,200 color illustrations convey a representative sampling of the good, the odd and the exceptional. Committed collectors may find nothing new here, but the book is ready-made for the Johnny-come-philately.
$17.95 TO $25.00
PEOPLE OF KAU by Leni Riefenstahl. 224 pages. Harper & Row. $25. "It was a time of almost intolerable hardship and exertion ... But for my deep-seated urge to pursue the strange and the beautiful, heedless of time, danger and discomfort, these pictures would never have been taken." So trumpets Leni Riefenstahl, whose previous pursuits of the strange included making effective propaganda films for Hitler's Third Reich (Triumph of the Will). Now 74 and a photographer of the black African people of the Sudan, Riefenstahl still prefers to surround herself and her subjects with clouds of Sturm und Drang. Last year's volume, The Last of the Nuba, photographically displayed Mesakin tribesmen as statuary reminiscent of the heroic Mussolini-modern style of the 1930s. People of Kau is as technically dazzling as the Nuba book, though once again Riefenstahl succumbs to the bizarre and the theatrical.