Gift books: The best of the season’s coffee-table fare

last updated 8 January 2015

Humans of New York

by Brandon Stanton (St. Martin’s, $30)

“It takes a special soul” to create a book like this, said Lalé Shafaghi in Juxtapoz. Brandon Stanton, now 29, was a recent arrival to New York City in 2010 when he began photographing people he met on the streets. Many opened up to him, and the blog Stanton created to chronicle the encounters—HumansofNewYork.com—gained a huge audience well before this marvelous volume appeared. A New York Times best-seller, the book collects 400 photographs that “run the gamut from gallery-ready images to down-and-dirty shots captured only with luck,” said John Winters in the Quincy, Mass., Patriot Ledger. All smartly captioned, the images turn New York into “a human drama unfurling one individual at a time.”

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Sebastião Salgado’s pictures “double as environmental memory banks,” said Richard Lacayo in Time.com. Nine years ago, the Brazilian photographer undertook a mission to find and document places in the world where life exists in a primeval state. During 32 subsequent trips—to Siberia, Patagonia, the Sahara, and various other remote locales—he captured shimmering black-and-white images of landscapes few people ever see. “Salgado’s particular gift is to hint, in an instantaneous exposure, at the vastness of geological time,” said The Wall Street Journal. We see teeming life elsewhere, but amid the icebergs of Antarctica or the canyons of Utah, what’s most striking is how differently time passes in the corners of the globe that humans barely touch.

“Discoveries that shed light on Emily Dickinson’s work—rather than her -persona—are rare,” said Bookforum. But here’s a chance to make some discoveries of your own—a book that lets readers study reproductions of all the surviving poems and fragments that the great poet scribbled on envelopes. “An engrossing visual treat,” the book also proves to be an affecting work of literature. “The star of the show is the handwriting,” said Brenda Shaughnessy in the Los Angeles Times. The opportunity to see how Dickinson’s pencil pressed lightly here and boldly there “is surely one of the geekier things to delight in.” But it’s a way to glimpse her doubts—“a chance to encounter Dickinson not in her art, but in her artlessness.”

Isabel Greenberg’s graphic novel “already feels like a classic,” said Rachel Cooke in The Observer (U.K.). A fantasy-filled ode to the power of storytelling, this “exquisite” work “will be loved by children and adults alike.” The two protagonists, a man and woman from opposite ends of the earth, meet and fall for each other, but because of strange forces cannot make physical contact. So the man settles for telling his beloved of his journeys across mythical lands. Greenberg’s illustrations “evoke the imagery of Inuit art” and medieval tapestries, said Glen Weldon in NPR.org. Yet the beauty of this book isn’t found just in its images; its central love story “lands with an emotional impact you likely won’t see coming.”

David Thomson clearly wants to start some fights, said Jeff Simon in The Buffalo News. In this beautifully illustrated book, the revered critic makes dozens of arguable nominations for the scenes that have defined movie history. In Thomson’s view, for example, the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is less important than Janet Leigh’s arrival at the Bates Motel. But as mystifying as some of Thomson’s picks seem at first, he explains each of his choices with satisfying clarity, said Carrie Rickey in the San Francisco Chronicle. Unafraid to stump for lesser-known and lowbrow movies, “this most offbeat of cinephiles and spot-on of writers” may inspire you to look at the entire medium anew.

This book “will, like, totally blow your mind,” said Alissa Walker in Gizmodo.com. Filmmaker Michael Galinsky was a 20-year-old photography student in 1989 when he took a road trip to document life inside the nation’s malls, and he captured many giggle-worthy fashion choices along the way. More surprising, though, is that we all blindly shared in virtually the same experience of those years. Whether in Kansas, New York, or North Carolina, each of these tiered, tiled retail havens looks the same as all the others, said Sara Distin in Time.com. No one in Galinsky’s photos knew, of course, that new worlds to explore would soon be opened up to them by the Internet. Clearly, though, “we wanted so much more than this.”