Books: GIFT BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS

THE ARTS OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC by Jean Guiart. 461 pages. Golden Press. $25. This is Volume IV of the extraordinary "museum without walls" proposed by Andre Malraux and sponsored by the French government, which will eventually run to 40 volumes encompassing the whole of man's arts. Lavish in its illustrations, the present volume catches all the expressive, primitive power of Oceanic art while detailing its surprising variety and the age-old magic, mythic and ritualistic impulses that fostered it. A reader pondering its carved canoes and implements, its funerary and fertility figures and its grotesquely surrealistic ceremonial masks will catch more than a glimmering of what astounded and enthralled the eyes of great artists as different as Paul Gauguin, Picasso, Brancusi and Matisse.

ANIMALS IN AFRICA by Peter and Philippa Scott. 166 pages. Clarkson N. Potter. $12.50, and ANIMAL WORLDS by Marston Bates. 316 pages. Random House. $15. These volumes provide the armchair naturalist with some of the year's best animal photographs and the best substitute for a safari he is likely to find anywhere. Animals in Africa brings its lens to bear on all manner of African fauna, from elephants lumbering through the bush with ears spread like spinnakers to a striped chameleon inching its way into the center of a hibiscus flower. Animal Worlds, with photographs by Ylla, Fritz Goro, Eliot Porter and others, pursues fish, bird, insect and animal life from the tropics to the Arctic, with a text that makes their various worlds admirably clear.

THE BOOK OF THE AMERICAN WEST edited by Jay Monaghan. 608 pages. Julian Messner. $22.50. On the theory that, despite the efforts of television, there are still a few Americans who would not know a waddy (cowboy) from his gelding-smacker (saddle), this volume ranges over the life of the West, devoting whole chapters to its outlaws, reptiles, guns, big game, songs and legends. The text is informative, the paintings and drawings, by Remington, Bierstadt, Russell and others, are splendidly direct and realistic, and much of what a reader might have taken for shaggy Western lore turns out surprisingly to be unvarnished truth.

BEN SHAHN: PAINTINGS and BEN SHAHN: HIS GRAPHIC ART edited by James Thrall Soby. 2 volumes; 286 pages. Braziller. $25. With 96 reproductions of Shahn's paintings and more than a hundred reproductions of his drawings, the disturbing power of Shahn's lonely visions is apparent—in wiry filaments of sparse, nervous lines, in the awkward bulk of bodies out of their element, in chalky faces whose sad eyes peer from sooty sockets. The effect, as in all Shahn's work, is of gritty reality viewed through the distorting lens of a dream.