The look books

From glamour-pusses to global warming, criminal mug shots to art stars, Salon's seasonal guide to coffee-table books has something to enchant just about everyone.

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Dec. 14, 2007 | They're big, they're bodacious and they look great with a big bow wrapped around them. We're talking about coffee-table books, marvelous tomes that fill bibliophiles with glee yet are densely visual enough to win over even the most reading-averse friend. Here are our suggestions for the perfect last-minute gift.

-- Joy Press

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Melanie Dunea's "My Last Supper," in which she has asked 50 of the world's most famous chefs to describe the menu, setting and company they'd wish to savor for their last meal, seems like a gimmick too cutesy, too navel-gazing to be enjoyed. But the lavishly photographed volume turns out to be more moving than expected. In page after page, cuisiniers from El Bulli's Ferran Adrià to Jean-Georges Vongerichten describe how they would like to experience their final earthbound hours. Their vivid tableaux of laden tables and bucolic repasts remind readers of the electric bonds between life and food, satiety and death. Some of their fantasies are overblown, quite obviously designed to postpone through excess what they believe will be the deprivations of death. Masa Takayama's menu includes "grilled shirako risotto with white truffle, clear blowfish soup with temomi somen noodle; and blowfish testicle pudding with thousand-year-old balsamic vinegar." But many of Takayama's schmanciest colleagues choose the sturdiest of snacks. Eric Ripert opts for "a slice of toasted country bread, some olive oil, shaved black truffle, rock salt, and black pepper," to be consumed under an oak or banyan tree with the people that he loves. This is more than a coffee-table book, it's a mirror: In the final moments, do we want solitude or company? Simplicity or luxuriance? Do we gulp or do we sip?

"My Last Supper" captures the quick fade of what it means to live and to kill. It's clear that recent extinguishment of life is key to the enjoyment of several chosen dishes: Anita Lo imagines a scallop that is still moving, and Dan Barber would like his final nosh to include "rack of Boris." He is photographed with a large and noble piggy we can only assume is Boris himself. Happily, for those who would like to partake in some of the hedonism, the book includes recipes that instruct on how to simply roast a chicken and how to make buttered noodles with Perigord black truffles (should we be lucky enough to get them). But what makes this such a stealthily compelling document is that it's here, on the imagined edges of our lives, that we can revel in the limitless possibilities not only of what we might eat, but of who we might be, if there were not to be a tomorrow.

-- Rebecca Traister

"The Here and Now" by Sam Jones (HarperEntertainment)

"Alison Jackson: Confidential" by Alison Jackson (Taschen)

Sam Jones' photography in "The Here And Now" offers an earnest, more thoughtful version of the high-glazed celebrity shots of Annie Leibovitz. He conspires with his subjects for big gimmicks (David Duchovny with a face-full of acupuncture needles; Will Ferrell with a Santa Claus beard of soapsuds) to create a good-natured if staged spontaneity. But there's an unpretentious warmth to Jones' photographs, and when he gets his best subjects to light up, the photos glitter with their stardust: George Clooney, Joan and John Cusack, Renée Zellweger and Heath Ledger -- all stars with an ineffable sparkle -- seem even more fascinating after we look at them here. (In fact, this is a great book for the Clooney obsessive -- he's in eight uniformly great shots, and contributes a cheeky foreward.) And Jones shows he really gets Tom Cruise when he lights up that beautiful, maniac smile of his with carnival freak-show lights. Others (Damon, Paris, Keanu, Jessica Biel) look lovely ... and that's about it. Sometimes, after all, a pretty face really is just a pretty face.

That's definitely not the case in "Alison Jackson: Confidential," where we see candid shots of George W. Bush and Tony Blair lolling in a sauna, Britney Spears inhaling a Twinkie while on a treadmill, and the queen daintily reading a magazine while on the loo. They're all fakes; Jackson employs look-alikes for her gotcha shots, which do a lovely job playing with our expectations of celebrity and photography. Jackson's intentions are highfalutin -- "I'm trying to break down the image as a false God," she has said -- and that's well and good, but her comedy has a pretty broad appeal. Not all the look-alikes are successful -- a shirtless "Brad Pitt" is immediately not well-toned enough, "Jennifer Lopez" is too squat -- and when that happens, this big book can feel a little silly. But when the likeness is there, the ideas really hit home. The extended Bush-Blair photos have a wry comedy to them that's a far cry from the usual treatment (typically obvious and vaguely homophobic) of their high-profile partnership. And sometimes the models' imperfections even aid Jackson's cause; a soft-chinned, too fragile "Eminem," dolled up in red fuck-me pumps, frilly pink knickers and a blasé expression, somehow seems just right.

-- Kerry Lauerman

"© Murakami" edited by Paul Schimmel and Lisa Gabrielle Mark (Rizzoli)

You probably know contemporary artist Takashi Murakami, even if you think you don't. Murakami's adorable, cartoony designs adorn the permanent collections of plenty of major modern art museums, not to mention the arms of scrawny Hollywood starlets who pay good money for his colorful take on the Louis Vuitton monogram. "(c) Murakami," published in connection with the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art retrospective, catalogs his work from the early 1990s to the present. This hefty tome -- weighing in at 327 pages -- displays the vertiginous span of Murakami's work: images of his paintings, sculptures, toys, prints and monograms, paired with critical essays by Dick Hebdige, Paul Schimmel, Midori Matsui, Mika Yoshitake and Scott Rothkopf, help explain why Murakami, long compared to Andy Warhol for his savvy mix of high and low, has become a true art-market rock star. (Or is that pop star?)

-- Megan Doll

"Mafia: The Government's Secret File on Organized Crime" by the United States Treasury Department, Bureau of Narcotics (Collins/HarperCollins)

"Mafia" might be the ultimate anti-coffee-table book. It is, at least, the anti-Establishment coffee-table book, a facsimile of 1960s secret government files on the criminal underworld. Thick as a phone book, with a similar aesthetic (and narrative arc), "Mafia" is 800-plus pages of joyless mug shots and typewritten pages that practically come with their own stale cigar smell and blinking fluorescent lights. Good luck keeping focus for 800 case files typed out on a clunky Smith-Corona, featuring such details as "Criminal History: FBI #672564." But for mobheads and true crime fanatics, it is the equivalent of a hijacked truck of unmarked bills. It's also a quirky little slice of the American dream. As crime writer (and nephew of the Chicago crime boss of the same name) Sam Giancana says in the introduction, these are "true American legends who are as much a part of the fabric of this nation as the hallowed threads of the red, white, and blue." Hey, some people decorate their homes with West Elm furniture and glossy dog books; some people give you the middle finger at the door.

-- Sarah Hepola

"Stylist: The Interpreters of Fashion" by Sarah Mower (Rizzoli)

Most of us think of photographers as lone geniuses, but on fashion shoots, stylists leave their aesthetic fingerprints on every frame, often dreaming up a visual tableau and seeing it through from conception to final cut. Between its pristine white covers, "Stylist" pays homage to 16 of the most influential stylists, who play such a large role in the images we absorb via magazines and ads but are rarely themselves glimpsed (except for an occasional appearance in the contributor pages of Vogue or Elle, looking windswept but glamorous). Although the profiles in this book will be a bonus for any budding fashionista in your life, the real treat is the selection of photos that accompany each stylist's bio. Polly Mellen's work with Helmut Newton and Richard Avedon in the '60s and '70s does, as the text by Sarah Mower suggests, "still radiate a radical charge" -- just look at the Newton photo of a woman rubbing raw meat over her glittery eyelid, or the splayed-legged model oozing tough sexuality. On the other hand, the images in the section on London stylist Venetia Scott are more like ragged, brazen anti-fashion. Working with arty photographers such as Juergen Teller and David Sims, she conjured a rampant, vintage look that resulted in her becoming Marc Jacobs' muse (and a member of his design team). This is a fascinating peek at these gorgeous, terrifyingly fashionable creatures.

-- Joy Press

Video: Rebecca Traister on "My Last Supper"

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