Nonstudio photographers concentrate either, like Ansel Adams and Elliot Porter, on the nonhuman world or, like the globe-trotting photographers of these books, on people where they live. An introduction to Maraini's selection from 56 years' work says that he considers himself primarily an ethnologist. Practicing that pursuit, he made the most extensive documentation of Tibet before the Chinese invasion; he opened windows on post^-World War II Japan in the international best-seller Meeting with Japan (1959); and, because he learned so much about mountain people's cultures, he organized major climbing expeditions in the Himalayas. Wherever his occupation brought him, he brought his camera. His photos are monumental, even when their subjects are rather intimate, and this book's 13-by-11-inch pages present them near perfectly. Maraini likes panorama and drama. His images, though they may contain much to notice, are strongly centrally anchored by a single figure or by light, which gives them an expectant tension. He very often looks up at a subject, so that even the fingers of a little boy on his first day at school look as massively vital as those of a Michelangelo marble, and a keen sculptural sense especially distinguishes his pictures of the young women who, nearly naked, dive for abalone from Hekura Island in Japan. These are astonishingly impressive pictures. For decades the UN has called on Swiss photographer Mohr to document its public health projects, and he embraces additional opportunities to travel, photograph, and report. Photographing ordinary people, he has obtained such indelible images as three Orthodox priests dining at the water's edge in Piraeus, Greece; a young man eyeing a self-conscious young woman at a Saturday-night social in 1950s Lapland; and the little boy in Nicaragua who briefly stopped shining Mohr's shoes to look up for his portrait. These are largehearted pictures, but sentimentality and patronization are foreign to them. When Mohr turns to landscape, as in a recent sequence taken while recovering from surgery, he produces sensuous, even sexual visions of tree-bark formations and smoothly weathered stones, and also a ghostly portrayal of leafless trees seemingly leaping in fright from a riverside. Like Maraini's work, Mohr's is full of the love of life, but whereas Maraini's vision is epical, Mohr's is intimate. National Geographic photographs, even the ones it deems "milestones," seldom seem as artful as those of Maraini or Mohr. But then, they are intended to reflect not a personal response to their subjects but the corporate perspective of National Geographic. Until recently, the magazine aimed to bring exotic, far-flung places into common living-rooms but damp down any sickness, deprivation, and violence haunting those places' denizens; one essay in this century-spanning showcase admits as much. Still, granted their escapist agenda and the distancing, reductive effect of the explanatory captions tacked onto them, these are wonderfully gaze-worthy images, and some are artful and individual, too, such as the painting-influenced frames from early in the century and a 1996 shot of a lion in a windstorm. --Ray Olson

National Geographic has a trusted place in American life. Its photographs have always been its strength, yet gathering many of the best or most dazzling, as has been done here, could easily result in a collection of fragments--photos that try to explain cultures, peoples, and places without doing so. To get around this problem, the editors have come up with an interesting hook: showing us the tricks and techniques that are used to get startling images in remote locales. Not quite a photographic how-to, this is instead an appreciation of the effort it takes to achieve visual results under nearly impossible circumstances. In National Geographic, every village, market, mountain, and harbor can seem like a diorama in the cautious hands of gifted but not analytically daring photographers--an impression this book counters by giving its visuals context and risk. Libraries will buy this book because so many readers trust National Geographic, but it is less a means of exploring this incredibly fascinating globe than of taking a peek at the adventures and intelligence necessary to capture its nature, places, and people.--David Bryant, New Canaan P.L., CT (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.