Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, December 12, 1994                   TAG: 9412140013
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MIKE MAYO BOOK PAGE EDITOR
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

LOOK WHAT'S GOING ON THE COFFEE TABLE

"Shenandoah: Daughter of the Stars" (LSU Press. $39.95) is an examination of this valley through Lucian Niemeyer's pictures and Julia Davis' text. For their purposes, the Shenandoah Valley is bordered by the Allegheny Mountains on the west, the Blue Ridge on the east, Harpers Ferry, W.Va., at the northern end and Roanoke at the south. As the subtitle "daughter of the stars" suggests, this is not a cold, realistic look at the area. The photographs are flattering, even romantic at times - red bud, mountain laurel and dogwood in bloom; weathered wood; farmhouses; churches; and the familiar receding mountain ridges textured by haze.

Julia Davis, who died last year at 92, first wrote this text and published it in a longer form in 1945. Her prose tends toward the florid at times, but that's not a problem. In telling the history of the valley, she does not shrink from the unpleasant. Yes, she deifies Confederate military leaders. At the same time, she sees the war's terrible destruction and the economic consequences that lasted for generations after. Interestingly, she also touches on environmental and political concerns that have been raised by Joan Schroeder and Sharyn McCrumb in their new novels.

Though "Shenandoah" meets all the definitions of a "coffee table book," it's got substance, too. LSU is one of the most innovative university presses in the country, and this one is up to its high standards.

"National Geographic: The Photographs" (National Geographic Society. $50) takes a similar serious approach to a much larger subject. Editor Leah Bendavid-Val is attempting to hit all the high spots of the magazine's remarkable pictures from a 1920 hand-tinted landscape of Maui to the final shot of a contemporary cowboy drinking beer in a lonely bar.

Whether the subjects come from the other side of the world, deep under water or next door, they're presented with a sense of wonder. The best of them stress our common humanity. A time exposure of pilgrims at "the sacred kaaba" in Mecca looks like a variation on Van Gogh's "Starry Night." A still shot of a plane crashing in Guatemala captures the event with more drama and excitement than any videotape or film could. Don't miss the underwater hippo (p. 194), the waterspout and lightning strike (p. 232), the high school football stadium in Artesia, N.M. (p. 316),or the ghostly carriage in New York city snow (p. 324). A selection of these memorable pictures is on exhibit at the Society's Explorers Hall Museum in Washington through Jan. 8.

With more than 3 million copies in print, the "Day in the Life" series has been one of the success stories in publishing. The format is simple: a group of photographers is turned loose at different locations in a specific country or place, and given 24 hours to shoot what they see.

The newest book is "A Day in the Life of Israel" (Collins. $45). As it happened, the photographers were there at a historic moment: May 5, 1994, the day after the peace agreement was signed in Washington. Those familiar with Israel only through the news probably have simple, stark images of it. Of course, there's a lot more - prisons, groves, beach resorts, factories, schools - and the real focus here is on human faces. The complex politics of the country are not at the center of the book, but they're never far away either. The two lasting images that appear in so many of the pictures are automatic weapons and cigarettes.

Elliott Erwitt's "Between the Sexes" (Norton. $29.95) is my own favorite of this quintet. The book began as an assignment from a Japanese magazine to photograph couples. After he'd finished it, Erwitt went back to his files - he's been taking pictures since the 1940s - and found these. From the opening quote by Erica Jong, "Men and women, women and men. It will never work," it's obvious that Erwitt's view of the human condition is essentially comic, not tragic. That's the tone of his black-and-white photographs, too.

His subjects are everyday people with a couple of celebrities and a few animals and vegetables thrown in. They're very young, very old and in between; naked and clothed (and many of the naked ones ought to be clothed); European, Asian, American. Like all of us, these men and women are funny, erotic, hopeful, experienced, uncomfortable, embarrassed, self-conscious and sometimes even happy.

"Happy" is the last word anyone would use to describe "In and Out of Fashion" (Random House. $65). William Klein's look back at his fashion and serious photography is a bleak piece of work. It begins with Paris in 1956 and ends backstage at a 1992 fashion show. Most of the book is black-and-white with a few color sections. The chapters devoted to his experimental film work do capture the spirit of '60s avant garde. The rest seems to me to epitomize the worst of fashion photography; brittle, humorless, self-loathing and hipper-than-thou.