Yosemite Wildlife: The Wonder of Animal Life in California’s Sierra Nevada by Beth Pratt; photographs by Robb Hirsch

Posted on November 28, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Environmental leader and lifelong Yosemite lover Beth Pratt partners with biologist and wildlife photographer Robb Hirsch to offer Yosemite Wildlife: The Wonder of Animal Life in California’s Sierra Nevada, the first book in 100 years to address this national gem’s diverse animal wildlife. With more than 300 images, Yosemite Wildlife is also rich in Pratt’s accessible prose; this thorough survey of observations and storytelling is designed to update a 1924 publication for the historical record. As a beautifully produced, large-format, glossy presentation, it also exhibits Pratt’s and Hirsch’s expertise and passion for a place that is much more than just its famous geology and dramatic scenery. With plentiful archival records, historical images, and personal stories from park staff and naturalists, it’s an informative document as well as a stunning visual feast.

Conservation success stories and profiles of Yosemite’s human defenders over the years accompany Hirsch’s sumptuous images of the iconic black bear and mule deer, the Sierra green sulphur butterfly, the northwestern pond turtle, raptors and songbirds, dragonflies and butterflies, charismatic predators, shy shrews, quirky herptiles, and more. Exquisite.

This review originally ran in the November 4, 2025 gift issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

Rating: 8 push-ups.

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The Women Who Changed Photography: And How To Master Their Techniques by Gemma Padley

Posted on November 8, 2024 by pagesofjulia

Gemma Padley’s The Women Who Changed Photography: And How to Master Their Techniques delivers brief, punchy profiles and incisive assessments of what is revolutionary about these underappreciated photographers. In short chapters, Padley presents 50 women–some well-known, some all but unknown–from all over the world, born from 1799 through 1992. Profiles and portraits are followed by photographs, with Padley’s instruction on how to mimic what is special about the work. This includes technical advice (how to combine and blend portraits; hand-tint a photo; play with angles, color, and flash) and the conceptual (how to use photo stories to raise awareness on an issue). Photographers include Anna Atkins, who “privately published the first book to be illustrated using photography,” and Anne Wardrope, the “first woman in America to photograph her own nude body.” They work in documentary, portraiture, art, photojournalism, and cover war, fashion, conservation, and more. Wide ranging and diverse, with fascinating storytelling, these contents are visually stunning and technically detailed, and will please readers with a variety of interests.

This review originally ran in the November 5, 2024 gift issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

Rating: 7 apertures.

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Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now

Posted on December 18, 2023 by pagesofjulia


Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now expands on Phaidon’s iconic The Art Book with a collection of images created by 308 artists from 20 countries and territories, accompanied by brief but serious supplementary text. With a thorough introduction by academic art historian and curator Raphael Fonseca, this large-format book is an art object in itself. Each artist is represented by a single important work and brief biographical and artistic context, written in an academic tone. These enormously diverse artists, who span a broad range of media, are organized not chronologically, conceptually, or regionally; instead, an alphabetical presentation results in surprising and thought-provoking juxtapositions. Perfect for art lovers or scholars and essential for academics, this is a simply stunning visual feast for readers at large.

This review originally ran in the October 31, 2023 gift issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

Rating: 8 corn tortillas.

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Spirits in the Sky: Northern Lights Photography by Paul Zizka

Posted on November 21, 2022 by pagesofjulia

Nature and adventure photographer Paul Zizka offers stunning images and narrative in Spirits in the Sky: Northern Lights Photography. Photos with brief, descriptive captions take center stage. They are accompanied by a few concise sections of text, which provide an overview of what the northern lights (or aurora borealis) are; some of the myths used to explain them; and the stories behind Zizka’s work in capturing these breathtaking images. Wildlife, human models, outdoor sports and self-portraits appear among the images, but it is the wildly colorful lights themselves–in the striking landscapes of Canada, Greenland, Norway, Iceland and the Faroe Islands–that make these photos unforgettable. Spectacular scenery and an elusive natural phenomenon combine in special ways in this gorgeous collection of art photography.

This review originally ran in the November 4, 2022 gift issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

Rating: 7 moments.

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1000 Perfect Weekends by National Geographic

Posted on December 6, 2021 by pagesofjulia

1000 Perfect Weekends is a beautiful, photo-packed offering from National Geographic, sure to expand anyone’s bucket list. Destinations are grouped into 18 chapters, including beaches, mountains, cities, small towns, wildlife and nature themes, family-friendliness and off-grid options. Explore “kayaks like floating La-Z-Boy recliners” on the Delaware River, coffee tours in Panama and a bee farm in the Philippines, alongside references to UNESCO sites, architecture, dining, adventures and a delightful ode to libraries in the chapter on “Historical Explorations.” Entries are short, punchy and accompanied by mouthwatering photographs and frequent, inspiring top-10 lists (sporting events, theme parks, spas). Adrenaline-fueled, enabled and accessible, pet-friendly: there is a perfect weekend for everyone in this tantalizing book, an obvious choice for the frequent flier and the armchair traveler alike.

This review originally ran in the November 2, 2021 gift issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

Rating: 6 Instagram moments.

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Barbershops of America: Then and Now by Rob Hammer

Posted on December 7, 2020 by pagesofjulia

Barbershops of America is a photographic tribute to a profession, an aesthetic and a community institution. Photographer Rob Hammer documents both “the old timers… like dinosaurs about to go extinct” and “the next generation,” in two distinct sections covering more than a thousand shops all over the United States. Images are only infrequently interrupted by quotations from barbers and their customers, so readers of this coffee-table book will revel most in the visual: elderly barbers and young, tattooed ones; beat-up barber chairs and decades of detritus; colorful signage, diverse clientele and what Hammer recognizes as the soul of these storied spaces. This collection of glossy documentary art is for lovers of culture, local color and traditions passed down across generations.

This review originally ran in the November 3, 2020 gift issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

Rating: 6 cool vintage chairs.

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Unforgettable Portraits by Rosamund Kidman Cox

Posted on December 16, 2019 by pagesofjulia

Lions, tigers and bears–and more–light up the incandescent pages of this collection of stunning wildlife photography.

Unforgettable Portraits is a beautiful, large-format collection of images from several decades of the international Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. Each stunning photo–close-ups and dioramas; elephants, leopards, ants and springtails–gets accompanying text explaining the species, the context, the photographer’s equipment and technique, with an emphasis on endangered species and climate change. Readers meet the Atlantic wolfish, the spotted-tailed quoll and the Namib Desert’s welwitschia, and learn that spirit bears have “a mutation of the same gene that gives rise to red hair in humans” and that the photographer must be part wildlife scientist to get these shots, designing blinds and lying in wait for days, weeks and longer.

These 70 stunning images, by more than 50 photographers from more than 20 countries, would make a wondrous gift for any lover of wildlife, strangeness and beauty.

This review originally ran in the November 5, 2019 gift issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

Rating: 8 whiskers illuminated.

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The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands ed. by Huw Lewis-Jones

Posted on December 12, 2018 by pagesofjulia

This delightful, engrossing exploration is for every reader who’s ever admired a book or a map, let alone both.

In The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands, historian Huw Lewis-Jones offers a collection of essays by authors, illustrators and designers as they ruminate on processes of reading, writing and creating, as well as the link between map and story. They consider maps in two and three dimensions, sketches, stories and outlines that live only in the writer’s mind, and argue that creating maps, like creating stories, is essentially an act of compression, a set of choices about what to leave out.

Contributors include Robert Macfarlane, David Mitchell, Lev Grossman, Joanne Harris, Philip Pullman and the graphic artists for the Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings movies. Literary references in this gorgeously designed, detailed coffee-table book begin with Kerouac, Tolkien, Twain and Thoreau, and visit Treasure Island, The Wind in the Willows and so many more.

This review originally ran in the November 6, 2018 gift issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 8 archipelagos.

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The Stampographer by Vincent Sardon

Posted on November 29, 2017 by pagesofjulia

This iconoclastic French artist’s work with rubber stamps is for fans of fart jokes, the f-bomb and political satire.

The Stampographer is a different kind of coffee-table book. Vincent Sardon makes rubber stamps because “the stamp is never neutral”; it generally appears as a tool of bureaucracy, but here subverts authority to play with taboo. The book’s endpapers are filled with repeating middle fingers, its pages with insults, erotic and violent images, the profane and the vulgar. In an interview (the volume’s only text), Sardon denies any such political motive: “My work simply reflects the world, which seems to have been created by an absolute moron.”

These are evocative images and complex references to art and history, showcasing Sardon’s dark, satiric, antagonistic sense of humor. He considers his stamps “both tools and works of art,” and sells them only to amateurs, not artists, from a private gallery in Paris. Readers not local to Paris are lucky to get a glimpse of his work in this unrivaled art book.

This review originally ran in the November 21, 2017 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 7 turd blossoms.

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This Book Is a Planetarium: And Other Extraordinary Pop-Up Contraptions by Kelli Anderson

Posted on November 24, 2017 by pagesofjulia

This is a work of art, teaching tool, pop-up toy and book that will delight playful lifetime learners.

This Book Is a Planetarium–as well as a musical instrument, a decoder ring, a spiralgraph and more. With a smartphone or small LED light, the galaxy comes to your living room. Graphic designer Kelli Anderson exults in the science and the art in the everyday, here playing with the powers of paper. This short but engrossing large-format book is at once an art object and a collection of teaching tools. Each page pops up and moves, dynamically demonstrating lessons from physics, geometry and astronomy. Brief explanations in small print further expand the didactic element. While the text is written for adults, not children, a little grown-up assistance (and supervision of removable parts) could make this an educational toy for all ages. Sensory play involving touch and sound as well as sight is too often left to the kids, but This Book Is a Planetarium is a physical object and absorbing interactive experience for all curious and young-at-heart readers.

This review originally ran in the November 21, 2017 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 7 strings.

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