This could be the most stunning book of horse photography available: 200 full-color illustrations, ranging from photographs taken in the wild to studio settings, of familiar breeds like the Arabian or Appaloosa to the more exotic, like the Rajasthani Marwari--known as the warrior horse, its lyre- or scimitar-shaped ears can rotate more than 180 degrees. The blond and caramel Austrian Haflinger is photographed against Tyrolean clouds and peaks, looking mythical and starkly romantic. The Norwegian Fjords, whose brush-cut silver manes are marked with a center dark streak, forage in belly-deep snow. A close-up of a French Poitou donkey grooming her shaggy, matted hair looks eerily like a dreadlocked lion. A dark Arabian colt nursing from its snowy mother, an American Paint colt emerging from its placenta, a white-lashed black Arabian eye, horses tossing Rapunzel-like manes, the white-marble sculpture of a Holstein's arched neck with braided mane--the images are powerful, delicate and mysterious.
The Last Polar Bear photographed by Steven Kazlowski (Braided River/Mountaineers, $39.95, 9781594850592/1594850593, February 2008)
The subtitle of The Last Polar Bear is Facing the Truth of a Warming World, and the message truly is urgent; scientists say that by the end of this century polar bears will be the first mammals to face extinction due to global warming: with the rapid weakening of edge ice, bears are finding themselves stranded on land or on ice floes miles out to sea. The magnificent photographs are supplemented by text from seven authors and the photographer's journal and include the Arctic panorama of a white arctic fox leaping into the air against lavender-colored snow; Iñupiak hunters on a gray sea; aqua blue pack ice forming a crystalline landscape. But the polar bears dominate, from the first shot of a cub on its back, playing in the peach-colored sunset, to a sow and her cub sliding on the ice in perfect tandem, to bears braving the wind (which "sounds as though the skin of the earth is being pulled off"), to a male guarding his meal of a bowhead whale carcass, beautifully, brutally red in the soft light of a sunrise.
Time Wearing Out Memory: Schoharie County photographed by Steve Gross and Susan Daley, foreword by Jeffrey Lent (Norton, $49.95, 9780393066449/0393066444, May 2008)
This "rediscovery of an American landscape" was, like The Last Polar Bear, published early in the year, but also deserves a place on your Fall gift book table. Haunting black-and-white photographs of Schoharie County, in central New York, depict an agrarian area that is the oldest continuously farmed community in the state. Much of the area is in decline. The Breakabeen General Store's Greek Revival porch sports an incongruous Corona banner; the 1815 Dutch reformed Church looks close to collapse; magnificent trees with wide branches seem to protect the decaying buildings; an overgrown porch window in Patchin Hollow waits for a ghostly face to pull back a curtain. The evocative black-and-white format gives each picture a stormy, brooding-sky look; even when lit by sunlight, they seem to be negative images. It's the perfect way to capture the melancholy and elegance of the place--in the eloquent words of Jeffrey Lent, "the determined yet weary lines of the houses and barns."--Marilyn Dahl
