Books: Notable

FIFTY AMERICAN FACES

by Margaret C.S. Christman

Smithsonian Institution Press

256 pages; $25

Christman, research historian at Washington's National Portrait Gallery, has introduced an eclectic choice of portraits, accompanied by masterly biographies in miniature. Here is the fervent "Stonewall" Jackson and the loquacious Henry James; here, too, is Charles Pinckney, the Revolutionary War officer remembered for his "incredibly bad military advice." The works themselves are undistinguished, apart from the self-portraits by Mary Cassatt and Edward Hopper; but these busts, etchings, daguerreotypes, oils and sketches constitute a museum of the human physiognomy—and of our civilization over the past two centuries.

WALKER EVANS: FIRST AND LAST

Harper & Row; 199 pages; $29.95

Photographer Walker Evans (1903-75) is best remembered for Depression photos of Southern dirt farmers published in the celebrated Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Text for that book was written by the late James Agee, whose eager eyes peer out from a 1937 portrait that is one of the 219 remarkable photographs in this long overdue retrospective volume. No captions are needed to display the range and depth of Evans' artistry. He knew the truth that lay in the luminous surfaces of things, whether they were the grim visages of farmers, the abstracted faces of New York subway riders, the pocked brick of a city tenement or the burnished beauty revealed in a pair of pliers and a wrench. Evans' compositions have a classical austerity, though at heart he was a great American romantic—an artist who celebrated the nobility of ordinary objects and people.

STOP TRYING TO CHEER ME UP!

by Frank Modell

Dodd, Mead; unpaged; $8.95

THE BOOK OF TERNS

by Peter Delacorte and Michael C. Witte

Penguin; unpaged; $3.95

HAMBURGER MADNESS

by Jack Ziegler

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

unpaged; $7.95

A good cartoon book is an oblong entirely surrounded by laughter. Among the merriest: Stop Trying to Cheer Me Up! by Frank Modell. One of the most versatile of The New Yorker's cartoonists, Modell is equally at home with animal gags (Pan using a unicorn horn for a corkscrew) and domestic explosions (father to a small boy who has nailed his Christmas stocking upside down: "You call that hung by the chimney with care?"). The Book of Terns by Peter Delacorte and Michael C. Witte is something else again. Every conceivable pun on the bird-word tern is illustrated, from tern of the screw to Comintern. A single-joke book, but a funny one, deserving of a big ternout. If the bird book rises from the dictionary, Hamburger Madness by Jack Ziegler bounces off the wall. The New Yorker's resident screwball, Ziegler is famous for muses that beckon the writer away from his work and toward a bar, and a bank with a sign that reads TIME: 4:32. TODAY'S WEATHER: SHOES.

MILTON

178 pages; $17.95 hardcover,

$9.95 paper

THE BOOK OF URIZEN

102 pages; $15 hardcover, $6.95 paper

by William Blake

Edited by Kay Parkhurst Easson and Roger R. Easson

Shambhala/ Random House