Photography books to get lost in

Food for thought
Few coffeetable books are as educational and as thought-provoking as Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio's "Hungry Planet: What the World Eats" (Ten Speed, $40). The married couple traveled the world talking to ordinary families about what they eat, and photographing them with a week's worth of groceries. The results are illuminating and sometimes sobering. Menzel's camera zooms around the globe, peeking into kitchens, pantries and shopping carts. Accompanying articles explain the importance of food in each family's life, where it comes from, how they prepare it, how it's consumed.

In Bhutan, a lama chugs Pepsi. In Greenland, a father shoots and kills a seal from his dog sled (yet at home, his kids watch MTV). In Beijing, meals veer between KFC and deep-fried starfish on a stick. It's thought-provoking to see how families in the most developed countries tend to rely more on packaged foods as opposed to fresh meat and produce, while a family in Mali is surrounded by mostly open sacks of corn, millet and rice. It's also surprising to see how many American products fill the diet of a Kuwaiti family.

"Hungry Planet" also features thoughtful essays on everything from fast food to fish, and the chapters on the families also offer up useful fact boxes about their homelands. This is a book that can be picked up and nibbled from occasionally, or devoured in great gulps. Either way, it both informs and satisfies.   

Toyland
Despite the kid-friendly title, Tim Walsh's "Timeless Toys"(Andrews McMeel, $30) is no book for little ones. It's serious about its topic. Walsh was curious about the real people behind our favorite playthings, and so conducted over 150 interviews, resulting in dozens of toymaker profiles. He focused only on true entrepreneurs, so you'll find Matchbox cars, but no Mattel-owned Hot Wheels. Still, there are plenty of fascinating stories.

Andrews McMeel

You'll learn fascinating toy trivia. Lincoln Logs were invented by Frank Lloyd Wright's son. The man who created Slinky left his family (and his invention) in 1960 to join a religious cult in Bolivia. Johnny Gruelle created Raggedy Ann as a tribute to a daughter who died when she was only 13.

Walsh, himself a toy creator (he invented games TriBond and Blurt!), chooses interesting toys and tells the stories well, but he's not a humor writer. Toy lovers may miss the fun facts that we all know about such toys — he doesn't mention the irresistible edibleness of Play-Doh, for example, or how everyone with a Mouse Trap game managed to lose the tiny pieces and could never quite play the game after that. His prose is a tad dry and some profiles are awfully long. But if the point of a coffeetable book is something fun and accessible that can be picked up and put down at will, "Timeless Toys" fills the bill solidly.   

Party down
The charm of "Bar Mitzvah Disco" (by Roger Bennett, Jules Shell, and Nick Kroll, Crown, $24) is similar to the giddy laughs you get while digging through that forgotten box of family photographs from the 1980s. Oh, the hair, the fashions. Did every female have to look like Farrah Fawcett, and every male like a member of Flock of Seagulls? Mullets, lace gloves with the fingers cut off, Gunne Sax gowns, bubble skirts, three-piece suits, massive shoulder pads — it's like the decade smacked us all with a giant ugly stick, and no one escaped.

Crown

The photos that the editors dragged out for this book are centered around bar and bat mitzvahs from the late 1970s through early 1990s. But you don't have to be Jewish to appreciate them. It's really a book about the awkward stage in all our lives, when you can barely eat around a mouthful of braces, your parents thought a family portrait in matching clothing was genius, and since Sarah Ferguson wore giant bows and snoods, it seemed a good idea for you as well.

The photos are accompanied by hilarious captions and personal essays that complement the oh-so-doofusy images. A.J. Jacobs got caught playing an early computer game during a pal's bar mitzvah. Ben Mittman's mom had the men match their tuxedos to the brown wallpaper and drapes at the hotel where his party was held. Jordan Carlos waxes poetic about being the only black kid at a pal's event. Shaun Sperling convinced his mom to let him have a Madonna-themed bar mitzvah, complete with airbrushed Madonna shirt. Jewish or not, "Bar Mitzvah Disco" will shoot you right back to your own gawky days, and make you grateful you don't have to stay there.

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