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Goodman portrays the Beavers as likable young men, in contrast to their celebrity coach, Nat Holman, who was an “arrogant and aloof” former professional player who somehow developed a British accent though he was the son of a poor Jewish grocer on the Lower East Side. While players washed their dirty socks in hotel sinks during road trips and got paid $3 to fetch Cokes for reporters, coaches like Holman ate steak dinners. Some players resented that, setting up the reasons for the Beavers’ downfall.

Head coach Nat Holman diagrams a play for members of the City College Beavers. Front row, from left: Norm Mager, Joe Galiber, Irwin Dambrot, Mike Wittlin, Ed Roman. Back row, from left: Ed Warner, Al Roth, Seymour Levy, Herb Cohen. Larry Gralla

Goodman persuades readers to empathize with the players. There was the tall and quiet Eddie Roman, the son of Polish immigrants, and the former Boy Scout Floyd Layne, whose mother made him attend church every Sunday. Roman, who was white, and Layne, who was black, were close friends on an integrated team that represented a harmonious slice of the city’s diversity. The C.C.N.Y. players in 1949 — just two years after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier — were either Jewish or black. They reflected the city’s minorities, and the city cheered for them because of it. But their fame was short-lived.

All five starting players on the N.I.T. and N.C.A.A. championship team were implicated in a citywide bookmaking scandal that involved several colleges and was so big that it forced Mayor William O’Dwyer out of office. The Beavers were shaving points — not by purposely losing games, but by not winning them by as much as they could — meaning they didn’t cover the point spread.

For some players, point shaving was payback. In trying to recruit one C.C.N.Y. player, a gambler reminds him “how much money the colleges were making off them while the players weren’t getting a dime.” That rationalization didn’t matter to the public, and the C.C.N.Y. Beavers remain notorious to this day.

Decades earlier, and on another coast, Billy Garland, a real estate developer in Los Angeles, was deciding that his city should pursue hosting the Olympic Games. “It had been an outlandish notion,” Barry Siegel writes in DREAMERS AND SCHEMERS: How an Improbable Bid for the 1932 Olympics Transformed Los Angeles From Dusty Outpost to Global Metropolis (University of California, $29.95). But Garland was the kind of man who saw great possibility in even the most challenging situations.

In the 1920s, Los Angeles was a young city still looking for residents, businesses and tourists, with much more room to grow when Garland decided that it would grow more quickly if it could host the Summer Olympics. Even when the Great Depression tightened its grip in the early 1930s, Garland pushed ahead. His journey to success provides the bones to Siegel’s book, which the author, a Pulitzer Prize winner, says is about “the birth of modern Los Angeles.”

Garland, known as the Prince of Realtors, was so gutsy and farseeing that as early as 1920 he sailed to Europe to meet with Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the International Olympic Committee president and founder of the modern Olympic movement. The two men hit it off. Garland, as Siegel writes, was so charismatic that “those around him could see that he believed in himself and believed also in the future. Sensing he would always prevail, people wanted to follow him, wanted to climb on his bandwagon.” Garland even managed to persuade the residents of California to support a million-dollar bond issue to fund the Games.

Siegel’s reporting, done almost strictly through archival digging, is so meticulous and the story he tells so complex that the book, at times, gets mired in too many details. But wade through some heavy sections and you’ll be rewarded with a fascinating tale about a man with so much confidence and enthusiasm that he “literally imagined the L.A. Games into being.”

It didn’t matter that officials in the Olympic movement had no idea where California even was — so much so that Garland had to break out a world map to show them. But he wowed them with the city’s plans, which included construction of the Coliseum, which would become the largest sporting venue in the nation and would stand the test of time. The Coliseum was the Olympic Stadium for the 1932 Games and the 1984 Games, and it will be the Olympic Stadium once again in 2028, when Los Angeles hosts its third Olympics.

Even in the midst of the Great Depression, the 1932 Olympics were a success and provided the blueprint for Olympics to come. As a reward, Garland should’ve been given a gold medal. Siegel’s book will have to suffice.

History has shown that the Olympics have the ability to bring the world together. In 2018, even North Korea and South Korea were drawn together, albeit only for a brief time. In A TEAM OF THEIR OWN: How an International Sisterhood Made Olympic History (Hanover Square, $26.99), Seth Berkman offers an insider’s look at what happened when North Korea and South Korea unexpectedly combined their women’s hockey teams to play on a unified squad at the Pyeongchang Olympics.

Berkman, who contributes freelance articles to the sports section of The Times (though we are barely acquainted), followed the South Korean team for about a year before the Pyeongchang Games and was given unfettered access by South Korea’s Canadian coach, Sarah Murray. That unique behind-the-scenes opportunity shows in Berkman’s clear storytelling, but his passion for the subject is also clear. Like some of the players he interviewed, Berkman was born in South Korea, although he grew up in the United States.

Berkman weaves the players’ back stories into a larger examination of culture and identity, and of women who yearned for respect as elite athletes when their sports system made it challenging for women to succeed. On the original South Korean team, there was Han Soo-jin, who practiced piano five hours a day and was scolded by her parents for wanting to play hockey. Her mother called hockey a “foolish idea.” After all, femininity in South Korea wasn’t exemplified by a woman wearing hockey pads and standing on hockey skates.

Members of the South Korean women's hockey team huddle after a practice. via Lee Min-ji

A group of “imported” players with Korean connections was recruited to play on the South Korean team so that the Olympic host country didn’t embarrass itself. Marissa Brandt was one of them and worried about what it would be like to “represent a nation she had an unmistakable relationship with, but no emotional investment in,” because she hadn’t been back to South Korea since she was adopted as a child. Randi Griffin, whose mother was Korean, was another imported player and said she “always felt unaccepted by Koreans in the U.S.”

In time, those imported players melded with the existing South Korean team. But then the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, invited North Koreans to join the squad and nearly upended the whole project. “It felt like the government and I.O.C. wanted to hijack our team for a pointless political stunt,” Griffin said.

It is fascinating to read about the ensuing culture clash. When the North Koreans bragged about how their “great leader” allowed “three robust flavors” in their ice-cream shops, Griffin said, “We were joking that they’ll all defect if we take them to Baskin-Robbins.”

By the end of the book, it’s hard not to root for the Unified Team. It didn’t win any games at the Olympics, but it did manage to score two goals, providing sweet moments in what is a feel-good story.

For a reminder of how far girls and women have come in sports, turn to STATE: A Team, a Triumph, a Transformation (Midway, $27), by the longtime Chicago sports journalist Melissa Isaacson. She writes in the first person about playing on her high school basketball team and winning the Illinois state title in the late 1970s, not long after Title IX, which prohibited gender discrimination in public schools, became a federal law.

Before Title IX, the options for girls to play on teams were limited and Isaacson was on the outside looking in — until she played varsity basketball. She writes, “Before basketball, team unity had seemed to be the domain of boys and men, as unfamiliar to us as a pair of shoulder pads, and we had had little access to the lessons of teamwork, understanding roles and sacrificing for the good of the group.”

Her basketball team suffered in thick, scratchy uniforms shared by all the girls’ teams and marveled when they first saw their names on the scoreboard. But they weren’t just happy to be playing. They were also out to win, “deadly serious about why we were there.” Isaacson practiced dribbling with her nondominant hand by tying her other hand behind her back. One of her teammates wore away the paint on her bedroom ceiling because she had been constantly hitting it with her ball while practicing her shot follow-through. The team practiced at 4:30 a.m. because the gym was booked after school.

Post-1979 Illinois state title celebration at Assembly Hall in Champaign. L to R: Karen Wikstrom (partially visible), Judy Becker (No. 32), Melissa Isaacson, Peggy Japely (in back), Connie Erickson (holding trophy), Barb Atsaves (far right). via Connie Erickson

For their coach, Arlene Mulder, a physical education teacher, the learning curve was steep, since she had never coached the sport. Seeming stuck between the stereotypical norms of femininity and what she felt in her heart was right for girls, she did what she could to make the team competitive, reaching out to the boys’ varsity coach for tips. Yet she wouldn’t let her players drink from water bottles on the bench, as the boys did. They had to sip water out of Dixie cups. Mulder also was torn between her work and motherhood, and felt sure that she was failing at all of her vocations.

Mulder is the book’s most engaging character, and it’s too bad for the narrative that she dropped out to have a baby. Still, the team went on to win a state championship (with a male coach), and its road to success is exciting and swift, though Isaacson occasionally overloads the story with too much play-by-play.

Isaacson is at her best when recounting personal stories of herself and her teammates, and also when she lays down historical markers to put the championship into context. While her team was playing, an Ohio court ruled that girls could participate on Little League baseball teams, and a federal court ruled that female writers couldn’t be barred from clubhouses. Those parts of the book will keep readers rapt.

In FOR THE GOOD OF THE GAME: The Inside Story of the Surprising and Dramatic Transformation of Major League Baseball (Morrow/HarperCollins, $28.99), Bud Selig doesn’t write much about the X’s and O’s of baseball. But he does write plenty about himself. His book is an autobiography wrapped inside a story about how the game of baseball changed during his years as an owner and over the 22 years he was Major League Baseball’s commissioner.

Selig tells the reader that he always had the game’s best interest in mind whenever he made decisions as an owner or commissioner. And those decisions, according to him, always seemed to be right. At least that’s Selig’s take.

“Nobody loved the game more than I did,” he writes. “Nobody also understood the history of the commissioner’s office, and had studied it, the way I had. I understood the game, the culture, the history, what went wrong, what needed to be done. I knew the people on both sides, on every side.”

As commissioner, Selig inherited a nightmare of an organization, he writes, and he did his best to fix it. On his watch, the league introduced a wild card game to the playoffs, started revenue sharing among franchises and began interleague play. But he also presided over a labor strike and had to cancel a World Series. He blames President Bill Clinton for failing to end the standoff between the league and the players’ union because the administration didn’t force the union to accept a mediator’s proposed settlement. For every problem in baseball, Selig blames someone else.

Selig portrays himself as a tough guy when he had to be. Even his wife was tough. Some of the best parts of Selig’s book are its anecdotes, including the time the Yankees owner George Steinbrenner fired his assistant because she brought him egg salad instead of a tuna sandwich. When Sue Selig, Bud’s wife, saw the woman crying, she demanded that Steinbrenner hire her back. And he did.

What Selig couldn’t do, and didn’t do, though, was rule with a strong enough hand to control baseball’s steroids problem. He blames that drug problem on the union.

Selig describes his efforts to persuade the union to start drug-testing players, and how it pushed back. He also describes how much he disliked Barry Bonds, and how he felt obligated to follow Bonds around the country as he closed in on Hank Aaron’s home run record so that the league would be represented on that historic occasion. While it “wasn’t the Bataan Death March,” it was awful, he says. Did he tell you that he really dislikes Barry Bonds?

In a way, the book reads like something Selig wrote simply to counter the fact that he is known as the “Steroids Commissioner.” While his words do provide a unique and valuable look at baseball history, that label is likely to stay with him.

For a thorough, less biased history of a sport, there’s THE CAPITAL OF BASKETBALL: A History of DC Area High School Hoops (Georgetown University, $29.95). It’s an ode to a game that has long thrived in the Washington area, but it’s also a kind of love letter to John McNamara, the man who wrote most of the book. He was a longtime sports reporter for The Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Md., and he had been working on the book for 15 years when he was gunned down in his newsroom in a mass shooting in 2018. Four of his colleagues also died.

At the time of his death, McNamara had completed about 150 interviews and had nearly finished writing. His wife, Andrea Chamblee, and his friend David Elfin put the finishing touches on the project and ushered it to publication. For all three of them, the work was worth their while.

The finished product is a great basketball book, filled with details of big games, powerful high school basketball programs and insightful stories about the top players and coaches who, at least at one time, called Washington home. The chronicle begins in 1900, when a local newspaper first mentioned a high school basketball game, and continues through the 1990s, when DeMatha High School was dominant.

The legendary Boston Celtics coach Red Auerbach, winner of nine N.B.A. championships, started his coaching career in Washington, leading two high school teams before being hired by the Washington Capitols in 1946. The Capitols played in a newly formed league called the Basketball Association of America, or B.A.A., which a few years later became the N.B.A.

The star player Elgin Baylor hailed from Washington. He grew up in a neighborhood not far from the Capitol at a time when black youngsters could compete on the playground only at night, “when nobody was watching,” McNamara writes. There in the dark, Baylor says in the book, “the only thing you could do was try to shoot baskets.”

McNamara also writes that, day or night, basketball in Washington was an equalizer. Even before Brown v. Board of Education desegregated public schools, and before President Dwight Eisenhower mandated that all Washington schools integrate in 1954, the playgrounds of D.C. welcomed players of all colors. At one court, according to McNamara, they all drank from the same water fountain, “regardless of color.” Basketball in D.C., as McNamara writes, was a hub for the sport and also was ahead of its time.

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Theroux crisscrosses the country, starting with the symbiotic communities lining each side of the United States border, then heads to Mexico City, Mazatlán and on to southern regions of the country. Throughout the book, he details Mexicans’ stories of their successful journeys and failed attempts to traverse the border. These narratives are ubiquitous, suggesting that a trip to the United States is a life passage for some. For others, it is clearly a matter of survival.

The crisis at the border may be the peg for the book, but it is far from the focus. Theroux also examines barriers within Mexican society. He assails the establishment — the government, the police, the rich — for excluding indigenous people. He finds Zapotec and Mixtec communities in Oaxaca that largely subsist on artisanal crafts like basket making and mezcal brewing. “The past of a place survives in its poor,” Theroux says, citing the English writer V. S. Pritchett and repeating the phrase like a refrain.

A Day of the Dead procession in Oaxaca, Mexico. Steve McCurry

Other barriers include those imposed by the violent cartels that partner with the police to create the equivalent of a narcostate. This apparatus governs society and restricts movement, Theroux argues. He himself is stopped by the police and forced to pay bribes, which seems a fortunate fate for an elderly white American driving through terrain where rich people are kidnapped and held for ransom and gang warfare is rife.

Theroux’s instinct to imbue Mexicans with a measure of humanity is undercut by his occasional impulse to filter their culture through the prism of his own assumptions. He sees local festivals as vehicles to lift the spirits of Mexicans who live in poverty without acknowledging their deep roots in local custom. In a passage on Mexican writers, Theroux compares the rivalry of Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz to that of cartel assassins, applying a base stereotype to people he regards as out-of-touch auteurs.

He extols indigenous cultures — you can almost feel his pulse quickening when he hears Zapotec. By the end of his journey, when Theroux has made it to separatist Zapatista territory, his admiration for the group comes as no surprise. You’ll wonder if you’ve been reading a veiled recruitment vehicle for its cause. But any book that takes you to Mexico’s hinterlands, where people barter rather than use cash, reveals a part of the country that many of us do not know well enough.

The annual anthology THE BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING 2019 (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 368 pp., paper, $15.99) is similarly preoccupied with real-world concerns. Edited by Alexandra Fuller, the British-Zimbabwean memoirist whose most recent book touched on the loss she endured when her father and son died in quick succession, the anthology is best when its contents expand to themes that are larger than a place on a map.

Among the treats is “Paper Tiger,” by Brooke Jarvis, an essay notionally about the search for possibly extinct thylacines in Tasmania but really about so much more. “Is it more foolish to chase what may be a figment,” she writes, “or to assume that the planet has no secrets left?” Lucas Loredo’s “Mother Tongue” recounts a trip to his family’s native Cuba but is in fact a tale about trying to bridge a chasm. Its simple, transportive prose requires rereading, for the sheer delight of it. “How Nashville Became One Big Bachelorette Party,” by Anne Helen Petersen, is really a story about the gentrification propelled by visitors.

Not all of these essays are worth savoring, though. Some contain remnants of colonial tropes: a fixation on barefoot locals, colorful people, exotic traditions. In one on Chernobyl, the author, Cameron Hewitt, nicknames a tour guide Fidel — reducing an Eastern European who has a name, family history and identity of his own to an archetype that an American could understand.

The most striking aspect of this collection, though, is that nobody even remotely considers lazing about on a beach. These writers are examining repressive governments, ethnic tensions, the ravages of hurricanes and climate change or returning to an ancestral homeland in flux. The ratio of words detailing history and context to those dedicated to actual journeys is a touch too high in some stories. These pieces aren’t escapes, and reading them doesn’t always feel like one either.

The irony is that an unflinching look at the world’s messy past and present is a first-world approach to travel. We are escaping the peace of our homes for the wreckage of others’. The line between disaster tourism and tales that inspire empathy can be awfully thin.

Perhaps that is why the piece here that sticks with you is “Uncomfortable Silences: A Walk in Myanmar,” by David Fettling. It leaves the reader with lingering discomfort over the futility of trying to connect with a tour guide whose world is nothing like that of the well-off traveler’s.

Dan Kois largely avoids the fraught issues of the day to focus on the drama of his family’s inner life instead. HOW TO BE A FAMILY: The Year I Dragged My Kids Around the World to Find a New Way to Be Together (Little, Brown, 324 pp., $28) borrows a page from Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love”: The author takes his family of four — including two daughters, one of whom is on the cusp of adolescence — on a journey around the world to abandon the overscheduled routine they’ve fallen into in Arlington, Va. Instead of Indonesia, Italy and India, Kois chooses New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica and Kansas.

A home near Wellington, New Zealand, where Dan Kois and his family discovered jaw-dropping views and seemingly endless friends. Mark Coote for The New York Times

What could go wrong?

Apparently a lot, but none of it involves life-or-death issues unless you count a tangle with a curb in New Zealand and a minor scrape with an elderly man on a bike in Delft. Kois finds more humor than meaning, and fortunately gets most of the dad jokes out of the way early on.

In Wellington, New Zealand, the family discovers jaw-dropping views and seemingly endless friends with whom to socialize. A rotating group of neighbors pop in to drink and join the kids to jump on a nearby trampoline before a grumpy neighbor who lives within earshot sends them home. The breathtaking setting inspires Kois and his wife, Alia, to attempt to imbue their children with a bit of local culture: a love of the great outdoors. It’s a worthy goal but his methodology — taking them on very long hikes with sandflies biting them the whole way — is more labor than leisure.

Kois finds Delft much less hospitable than Wellington, though that is likely because the family chose as its base a neighborhood without a lot of children and sent their daughters to a school with limited instruction in English. The bit of local culture that he and Alia try to adopt there is the poldermodel — the Dutch art of enlisting everyone in group decisions. They take this up while withstanding the withering anger of Lyra, an 11-year-old who (understandably) is not happy about a prolonged cultural exchange that involves limited screen time and a scarcity of books. The family then go to Costa Rica — another jaw-dropping place — where they fail to penetrate local culture, and finally land in Hays, Kan., to sample the cultural conformity of a place where everybody knows everybody else’s business.

The settings are beside the point, though. The most dramatic moments of this story come in Kois’s description of his relationship with Lyra, who contributes more passages to the book than any other family member except Kois. Alia and their younger child, Harper, are consistently portrayed as helpful, productive, energetic and positive, while Lyra comes across as a complicated person who constantly challenges her father. In an endnote she says that his representation of her has been too negative, but any reader who is a parent will recognize in his depiction the grudging admiration you feel for a child who regularly outwits you.

[Read Dan Kois’s essay on sharing his manuscript with his daughter.]

The places Kois traveled seem incidental not only because of the outsize role of the dynamic with Lyra. Kois only glancingly mentions racism and the gaping chasm between ethnic and religious minorities and whites in New Zealand, for instance, a decision that seems questionable given the mass shooting by a white supremacist in Christchurch this year. Kois questions the Dutch view of its society as tolerant and similarly laments the homogeneity of Hays, but generally keeps current issues at bay. His depiction of the gentrification of Costa Rica by privileged Americans who settle there is one exception.

Kois views travel primarily as a means of transforming his own life rather than as a way to uncover the outside world; this book is an antidote to the documentarian approach that now pervades much travel writing. Unlike Theroux and others, Kois does not present a mediated view of the places he lives over the year. He fills the frame, ready for a selfie.

For a bit of a palate cleanser, a tasting menu approach to travel can be found in 1,000 PLACES TO SEE BEFORE YOU DIE: The World as You’ve Never Seen It Before (Artisan, 532 pp., $50), a new, glossy coffee-table edition of the 2003 book by Patricia Schultz. Back when the book was initially published, social media had not yet supplanted travel narratives, and the idea of a bucket list conjured images of far-flung places rather than calculations of your carbon footprint.

A sand dune in the Namib Desert. David Santiago Garcia/Cavan Images

“But does the world need another ‘1,000 Places’ book?” Schultz asks in the introduction, anticipating the question from readers. Her answer is, of course, yes, and the images on the pages that follow make her case.

The most notable feature of the book is the absence of people and current events. Oh, there are some people in the images but none are named, and none are trying to cross a border or fighting with their tween. This carefully curated collection of images invites you to dive in, not to transform your life, not to understand the world, but simply to gaze at pretty pictures away from your screen. The photography is interesting but not so interesting that it makes you rethink a place. This is the comfort food of travel books. It’s true we don’t need another spread on Paris, but, boy, the Arc de Triomphe does look wonderful in that light, and so do Santorini and the red sand dunes of the Namib Desert. There are helpful tips throughout: Each caption bears useful advice under a “Must Do” heading but this is no guidebook, and you’re not going to read all those captions. This book is meant to inspire wanderlust in anybody who needs an actual getaway. If you’re living in a bubble, this book will keep you there. If you’re not, this book will sweep you off your feet, gently.

The best travel writing doesn’t take a ham-handed look at the world, nor does it try to escape it. It’s simply intended to make you feel so lost that you gaze up in surprise that you’re still in your living room. For that, try the splendid SURFACING (Penguin, 247 pp., paper, $17), a book of essays by the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie. Her spare prose about life along the 60th parallel evokes the sound, smell and feel of the Alaskan tundra and then, in another essay, the Scottish coast. Elsewhere, she ventures to her past, to a trip to Tibet she made as a young woman.

Jamie’s crisp language places you in a near-meditative state. Expect to hear the crunch of gravel, to squint as figures emerge on a nearly blank horizon and to smell the musky air of an enclosure meant to store fish centuries ago.

Yup’ik children playing on ice in the town of Napakiak, Alaska. Mark Ralston/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Jamie starts off in an archaeological dig in Quinhagak, a Yup’ik village in Alaska, where summer means that the detritus of the people who lived there 500 years ago can be dislodged from the thawing ground. As these items surface, so do connections to the past. Words that had threatened to become obsolete are passed down as elders recognize them. The renewed focus on the past helps remove the stigma that non-European culture once held.

These objects — and Yup’ik culture — aren’t the only things that seem to surface. The land does too: “The delta was barely a landscape at all,” Jamie writes, “more like a waterscape into which some land had been released.” The water and the light — a persistent presence, nearly separate characters — constantly shift the shape of reality.

The people she meets notice, she writes, then they speak. As a writer she does the same. Jamie reaches no grand conclusions about the Yup’ik and thankfully does not attempt to force them into a thesis that she conceived before she arrived. She says that she was trying hard not to expect anything, and we are all rewarded as she steadily reveals their world. It’s one in which the land is a collective backyard, where hunting for meat and gathering berries are pastimes as well as necessities.

The Links of Noltland in Orkney, Scotland, is the site of a second grand resurfacing effort: Jamie joins Hazel Moore and Graeme Wilson, who are leading a dig of a settlement believed to be 5,000 years old. The Scottish landscape is less otherworldly than the tundra, and so are the people who accompany her. The dig exhumes the ghosts of Jamie’s Neolithic forebears, and the local settlements reveal familiar rituals. At one point as Jamie accompanies an organic farmer, she realizes that people millenniums ago were standing in the same spot, thinking similar thoughts. The spiral design on some of the recovered objects takes on new meaning, suggesting that time is a circle, not a straight line.

This passage of time and these old ghosts give Jamie the thematic impetus to shift from travel narrative to memoir. The ending is less taut than the beginning. Still, as she exhumes the memories of her mother and grandmother, the spiral continues, with a daughter leaving home, the loss of her father and then her reckoning with her own cancer diagnosis.

She leaves off in woods. And long after closing the book, you’ll linger there with her too.

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Diana Henry’s roasted eggplant and tomatoes. Laura Edwards

The award-winning British food writer Diana Henry is the most reassuring of recipe writers, offering deliciousness, comfort and ease in these twitchy times. Even the subtitle of her new book is a warm bath with a cup of tea: FROM THE OVEN TO THE TABLE: Simple Dishes That Look After Themselves (Mitchell Beazley, 240 pp., $29.99). The Brits have long been at ease incorporating international flavors into their cooking (culinary colonialism, you could say). So into the roasting pan — sheet pans are rare in the U.K., according to Henry — goes a whole cauliflower, to be served with pistachio and preserved-lemon relish and a tahini sauce. A dish of butter-roasted eggplant and tomatoes with juice-plumped freekeh is jolted by the complex Ethiopian sauce called koch-kocha. And poussins get an Indonesian marinade-cum-sauce that Henry efficiently introduces as “Sticky, messy, quick.” She even riffs on American baked beans, albeit with the addition of pork belly. For all the muss and fuss so many cookbooks require, Henry’s one-and-done approach produces food that’s comforting on multiple levels, all necessary.

No one could have described Paul Kahan’s first cookbook as simple. Even those of us who are fans of the talented Chicago chef’s many restaurants deemed it too restaurant-y, with each recipe a Russian doll of subrecipes stacking up to a weekend’s work. He’s corrected course brilliantly with COOKING FOR GOOD TIMES: Super Delicious, Super Simple (Lorena Jones/Ten Speed, 277 pp., $35), written with Rachel Holtzman and Perry Hendrix, the chef de cuisine at his Mediterranean/Midwestern restaurant, Avec. This is the kind of food Kahan and his wife serve by the platter at their Wisconsin cabin: dishes that allow them to hang out in the kitchen with guests, snacking on salumi and pouring wine. (It’s also based on the food he serves at Avec.) Each of the 13 chapters concentrates on one directive — Roast Some Roots, Braise a Pork Shoulder, Make a Simple Dessert — and offers a master recipe with inspired seasonal riffs. Said roots might team up with persimmons and a walnut-anchovy vinaigrette in winter, or be tossed with strawberries, ricotta and pistachios come summer, while that brined and braised shoulder could emerge with white beans, chorizo and cider, or braised apricots, couscous and fennel yogurt. As someone who has taken a cab from O’Hare straight to Avec for the chorizo-stuffed, bacon-wrapped dates, I was thrilled to finally have the recipe. Relaxed but still serious about good food, this book will be to Gen X entertainers what Alison Roman’s new cookbook, “Nothing Fancy,” is to millennials: a chill bible.

Amy Chaplin’s chia Bircher bowls. Anson Smart

Amy Chaplin’s first book, “At Home in the Whole Food Kitchen,” was a sneaker. It arrived quietly from a small press, then won a James Beard Award for Chaplin’s deeply thoughtful approach to vegetarian cooking, which is rooted more in macrobiotics than trendy meatless Mondays. (She was the chef at Angelica Kitchen in the East Village a decade before rice bowls and turmeric were cool.) Her gorgeous sequel, WHOLE FOOD COOKING EVERY DAY: Transform the Way You Eat With 250 Vegetarian Recipes Free of Gluten, Dairy, and Refined Sugar (Artisan, 400 pp., $40), is a different creature. More of a manual than a menu-generator, it offers a disparate range of base recipes, along with creative variations. Chaplin prefers to give readers the blueprints they need to be able to improvise in any season. So that nut or seed milk formula can become rose almond milk, black sesame milk or cardamom-pumpkin seed milk. A buckwheat hazelnut cake can incorporate berries or cacao and pears. Granola, seeded crackers, land and sea vegetables, waffles, dressings, compotes, baked marinated tempeh and other hippie-leaning delights are riffed upon to delicious, often visually lovely effect. Best of all, this is food that makes you feel invincible.

Even if you don’t have celiac disease, gluten-free baked goods are impossible to avoid — even in Parisian bakeries. They’re not bad, but they’re not … great. My GF GFs (that’s gluten-free girlfriends) have long raved about the bread and baked-good recipes Aran Goyoaga has posted on her site, Cannelle et Vanille. The Seattle-based writer, photographer and food stylist had left her job as a pastry chef at a five-star hotel before realizing she was gluten-intolerant. She has spent years developing recipes that can satisfy even naysayers. That’s why I pretty much skipped Goyoaga’s savory stuff and treated CANNELLE ET VANILLE: Nourishing, Gluten-Free Recipes for Every Meal and Mood (Sasquatch, 337 pp., $35) as a baking book, turning to its recipes for Nordic rye-style seed bread, banana bread with sunflower seed icing, caramelized apple galette, even sourdough boules. My cupboard now overflows with flours (oat, superfine brown rice) and starches (potato, tapioca), as well as psyllium husk powder, but I’ll need them as I happily return to these excellent recipes. Next I’ll try her sourdough waffles, fresh pasta and brown butter madeleines.

Maangchi is a first-name-only YouTube star. The South Korean turned New Yorker uploaded her first home-cooking video over 10 years ago — back in the days before you could find kimchi at Midwestern grocery stores — and now has almost four million subscribers. Her second book, MAANGCHI’S BIG BOOK OF KOREAN COOKING: From Everyday Meals to Celebration Cuisine (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 448 pp., $35), written with Martha Rose Shulman, is a comprehensive introduction to bringing Korean food home. The welcoming, unpretentious tone is set by the pictorial guide to produce, kitchenware and more: These aren’t stylized, hard-to-follow tableaus but snapshots of the items in the wild (in other words, at H-Mart), accompanied by their Korean names and characters. Maangchi respects tradition, but knows her audience — and therefore isn’t afraid to freestyle. The recipes range from gateway adaptations, such as bibimbap with mushrooms, vegetables and avocado and grilled beef short ribs (minus the tabletop grill), to traditional temple food like rice and nuts wrapped in a lotus leaf. And if you haven’t been introduced to spicy soft tofu stew, you’ll be glad you made the trip to H-Mart. Though if Maangchi has her way, gochugaru hot pepper flakes will soon be in Midwestern grocery stores too.

Shopping for the ingredients in THE FOOD OF SICHUAN (Norton, 495 pp., $40) proved a hair more intensive. As glad as I am that the award-winning British food writer Fuchsia Dunlop’s 2001 book, published in the United States as “Land of Plenty” in 2003, has been expanded and revised, Maangchi had gotten me hooked on the helpfulness of norm-core visuals. (Oddly, the stylized tableaus in Dunlop’s book have no numbers on the photos corresponding to the ingredients listed, so it’s hard to distinguish the “facing-heaven” chiles from the “little rice” chiles.) But it was worth the Great Chinatown Grocery Translation Comedy to be able to make the dishes in this masterful book, which has been updated to absorb the brisk changes of the last 18 years. (Many of Dunlop’s favorite dishes when she was a student in China in the mid-1990s have disappeared, replaced by new ingredients and techniques.) Mapo tofu and dandan noodles are here in their now internationally famous fiery state, but Dunlop also shows the glorious subtlety of Sichuan cuisine. Why not ease in with green beans in a gentle ginger sauce or serve deep-fried chicken strips with celery in a delicate vinegar sauce? Dunlop is a scholar with an engaging, contagious curiosity and a deft touch, as interested in when the Chinese character for chestnut first appeared as she is in teaching us that “eating vinegar” is a common Chinese phrase that means to be “cuckolded or to feel amorous jealousy.” And, thankfully, she’s an expert culinary translator.

Ivan Orkin is an obsessive’s obsessive. A Long Island native who moved to Japan almost 30 years ago and mastered ramen well enough to become a successful restaurateur, his “Ivan Ramen” cookbook was, well, for the 1 percent of food nerds. Now that he and his family live in the New York burbs, his second book is a humble, homesick reveal of what he really serves at home. THE GAIJIN COOKBOOK: Japanese Recipes From a Chef, Father, Eater, and Lifelong Outsider (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 256 pp., $30) finds him and his friend and co-author, Chris Ying, writing humorously and honestly about cookability and what kids will actually eat. There are cute things to tuck into school lunches (stuffed tofu pouches, rice balls) and family-pleasers (pork cutlets, stir-fried udon, teriyaki), sure, but it’s still Ivan. One of the book’s themes is otaku (geeking out). Orkin can’t resist hosting a tempura party, making 60 gyoza and topping them with a dramatic lattice net or pairing tuna and squid with the polarizing fermented soybeans called natto. There are excellent cookbooks about the Japanese fundamentals by Westerners who write as insiders. This is an excellent cookbook about the experience of one Western guy who, after all this time, still feels like an outsider. He’s almost O.K. with it. Check back in another decade.

Mandy Lee, however, is not O.K. with her outsider status. This New Yorker moved to Beijing for her husband’s work in 2012 and swiftly went off the rails. Cooking became the only way to cope with her alienation and dread, giving rise to her “angry food blog,” Lady and Pups. Instead of the typical posts of gorgeous food paired with gee-life’s-great text, Lee’s gorgeous food is paired with extremely crafted blasts of bile and despair; it’s like looking at a Caravaggio while listening to Rammstein. Her book, THE ART OF ESCAPISM COOKING: A Survival Story, With Intensely Good Flavors (Morrow, 392 pp., $35), pushes the edges of intensity in terms of flavor and fierce originality. (And that’s just the writing.) Lee isn’t your source for rose-scented almond milk and buckwheat banana bread. Instead, she’ll give you Chinese southern almond (apricot kernel) milk, which you can drink with your slice of ombre birthday meatcake after you’ve had a sardine-topped rice bowl she named “cat food.” (“I consider people who don’t appreciate canned sardines to be of a less evolved genome. … Not their fault — a thought that helps me not to go dark on them.”) Will you commit to the four-page recipe for Peking duck ramen? Or just her “fast and furious carbonara,” using instant ramen noodles? It depends on how much you’re hating life RN.

Cesaria making lorighittas. Emma Lee

Maybe Lee just needs to hang with the Pasta Grannies. Sometimes it takes a village-dwelling octogenarian who can make tortellini with her eyes closed to tell you what life — and cooking — is really about: It’s easy once you’ve done it for long enough. “Pasta Grannies” is a YouTube channel and Instagram account started by Vicky Bennison, who sought out elderly women to teach her a variety of pasta shapes and sauces — a lost art that’s disappearing as Italians opt for quicker meals. The recipes in her cookbook, PASTA GRANNIES: The Secrets of Italy’s Best Home Cooks (Hardie Grant, 255 pp., $29.99), are humble and strictly regional, the spirit rich and joyful. One-hundred-year-old Letizia from Sicily makes hand-cut tagliatelle with a simple purée of dried fava beans and wild fennel, a dish she could afford to feed her children during World War II. Emilia in Abruzzo makes “guitar” spaghetti with tiny meatballs. Lucia, 89, prepares thick raschiatelli to serve with a sauce of chopped salami, garlic and a can of tomatoes, finished with a grating of fresh horseradish and pecorino. The real delight (and instruction) is in watching the corresponding video for each dish. Seeing the women’s hands, as well as the twinkle in their eyes, will inspire a new generation of pasta-makers, thanks to Bennison.

Toni Tipton-Martin has brought to light generations of African-Americans’ contributions to what’s viewed as American cuisine. The award-winning author of “The Jemima Code,” a history of African-American cooking as seen through over 150 cookbooks, brings a beautiful new dimension to some of their recipes in JUBILEE: Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking (Clarkson Potter, 320 pp., $35). Tipton-Martin found black culinary history to involve far more than soul food and Southern cuisine, drawing on a wide range of skills and ingredients: the elite cooking learned in plantation houses as well as the ingenious recipes field hands cooked in their slave cabins. Tipton-Martin also folds in luxe dishes favored by the black bourgeoisie and the “sturdy but refined” cooking that fueled community activism. Her recipes are updates, amalgams and her own inventions. A recipe for fluffy sweet potato biscuits stems from one that appeared in a George Washington Carver booklet, adding ham from a recipe in a cookbook published a century later, “Well, Shut My Mouth!” Oven-baked ribs with cola barbecue sauce hail from the Black Panther Party co-founder — and avid BBQer — Bobby Seale. And spicy okra and tomatoes? That’s all her. Elsewhere she offers Senegalese-inspired braised lamb shanks with peanut sauce, Jamaican rice and peas with coconut, Louisiana barbecued shrimp, French-accented beef stew, Chinese chicken wings from a 1950s Oklahoma caterer and more, highlighting just some of the many voices that make up this delicious and essential celebration.

And now for something completely different. With “The Flavor Thesaurus,” the British food writer Niki Segnit broke new ground, creating a bible for serious cooks who want to understand how and why flavors combine. As she was testing those flavor pairings, she wondered why there wasn’t a cookbook that not only laid out but linked classic recipes, tracing the through-line from bread to batter to soups, and so on. Almost a decade later, we are fortunate to have LATERAL COOKING: One Dish Leads to Another (Bloomsbury, 609 pp., $40), hundreds of pages of pure, informative delight. Nigella Lawson deems Segnit “a one-woman Larousse.” If only Larousse had been as intrepid — and funny. Segnit not only covers continents but also makes deft, slyly humorous work of connecting their dishes. Each chapter, or “continuum,” offers basic recipes for starting points, followed by a “leeway” section for adaptations and “flavors and variations” to spark creativity. So a recipe for flatbreads and crackers can be spun into charcoal biscuits, coconut roti, matzo, millet flatbread (resulting in a “pinky-gray dough” that “looked like Iggy Pop’s tongue, circa 1972”), oatcakes (“a Methodist’s flapjack”), potato parathas and more, before Segnit segues into a mother recipe for soda bread, biscuits and cobbler. And on and on. Segnit effortlessly glides readers up and over her culinary Everest. They descend as confident, improvisational cooks, with a base knowledge of the relationship between dishes that allows them to adapt recipes from other books, make bread from memory and let the ingredients lead. “It’s a question of confidence, ultimately,” she writes. “Nail the daily loaf and brioche feels like less of a challenge.” Even if nailing the daily loaf isn’t at the top of your list of 2020 resolutions, reading the work of this culinary powerhouse most certainly should be.

Want more inspiration? Here are 20 additional recommendations:

ALPINE COOKING: Recipes and Stories From Europe’s Grand Mountaintops (Ten Speed, 352 pp., $50), by Meredith Erickson. Lavishly illustrated mile-high menus, organized by country.

AMA: A Modern Tex-Mex Kitchen (Chronicle, 272 pp., $29.95), by Josef Centeno and Betty Hallock. A fresh, stylish take on queso and more from the San Antonio-born chef of the popular Los Angeles restaurant.

AMERICAN SFOGLINO: A Master Class in Handmade Pasta (Chronicle, 272 pp., $35), by Evan Funke, with Katie Parla. Deep dough knowledge from the chef behind the award-winning restaurant Felix Trattoria in Venice, Calif., offering the shapes and sauces he learned in Emilia Romagna.

BREAD ON THE TABLE: Recipes for Making and Enjoying Europe’s Most Beloved Breads (Ten Speed, 256 pp., $35), by David Norman. Advanced recipes and advice from one of the partners in the Easy Tiger Bake Shop and Beer Garden in Austin, Tex.

BUTCHER AND BEAST: Mastering the Art of Meat (Clarkson Potter, 304 pp., $40), by Angie Mar. The award-winning chef and owner of New York’s Beatrice Inn has created a fashionably photographed book that’s as high-rolling and unapologetically carnivorous as her restaurant.

CANAL HOUSE: COOK SOMETHING: Recipes to Rely On (Voracious, 448 pp., $35), by Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton. The creators of the Canal House cooking series bring their decades of wisdom and impeccable, approachable taste to an essential volume.

JAPANESE HOME COOKING: Simple Meals, Authentic Flavors (Roost, 304 pp., $40), by Sonoko Sakai. A beautifully photographed, clearly written introduction to Japanese cuisine, from a California-based Japanese-American teacher and recipe developer.

THE JEWISH COOKBOOK (Phaidon, 432 pp., $49.95), by Leah Koenig. More than 400 recipes from Jewish communities and Jewish chefs throughout the world.

THE JOY OF COOKING (Scribner, 1,156 pp., $40), by Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, Ethan Becker, John Becker and Megan Scott. The great-grandson of the original author of this cookery bible has joined with his wife to update his family’s continuing contribution to American cuisine.

THE LAST COURSE: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern (Random House, 320 pp., $40), by Claudia Fleming, with Melissa Clark. A reissue of this seminal 2001 book was in order since out-of-print copies were fetching hundreds of dollars on Amazon. For good reason: Fleming’s seasonal recipes are still groundbreaking and influential today, from the chocolate caramel tart to the peach tartes tatin.

LIVING BREAD: Tradition and Innovation in Artisan Bread Baking (Avery, 368 pp., $40), by Daniel Leader, with Lauren Chattman. Leader’s bakery in the Catskills, Bread Alone, is a place of pilgrimage for those devoted to artisan breads. This book explains why.

MASTERING SPICE: Recipes and Techniques to Transform Your Everyday added Cooking (Clarkson Potter, 272 pp., $35), by Lior Lev Sercarz, with Genevieve Ko. Trained as a chef, the highly respected owner of the New York spice shop La Boîte offers techniques and variations for amping up a range of dishes.

THE NEW ORLEANS KITCHEN: Classic Recipes and Modern Techniques for an Unrivaled Cuisine (Lorena Jones/Ten Speed, 384 pp., $40), by Justin Devillier, with Jamie Feldmar. Step-by-step instructions for replicating the best-known dishes of Crescent City cuisine, from the chef at the French Quarter restaurant Justine.

NOTHING FANCY: Unfussy Food for Having People Over (Clarkson Potter, 320 pp., $32.50), by Alison Roman. The New York Times and Bon Appétit columnist demystifies home entertaining with elegantly approachable recipes and event-elevating tips for the post-post-Martha generation. Martini bar, anyone?

OAXACA: Home Cooking From the Heart of Mexico (Abrams, 320 pp., $40), by Bricia Lopez, with Javier Cabral. A guide to the “soul food” of Mexico, courtesy of the family that presides over the Los Angeles restaurant Guelaguetza.

PASTRY LOVE: A Baker’s Journal of Favorite Recipes (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 464 pp., $40), by Joanne Chang. She has an empire of bakeries in Boston, but in her latest cookbook Chang features recipes for some treats not found in her shops.

SALTWATER TABLE: Recipes From the Coastal South (Abrams, 288 pp., $40), by Whitney Otawka. Using her own recipes and Emily Dorio’s photographs, Otawka transports readers to the historic Greyfield Inn on Georgia’s Cumberland Island, where she serves up award-winning meals.

SEEKING THE SOUTH: Finding Inspired Regional Cuisines (Avery, 336 pp., $35), by Rob Newton, with Jamie Feldmar. A guide to the ever-evolving cuisine of an increasingly diverse section of America, from an Arkansas-born chef now based in Nashville.

SOUTH: Essential Recipes and New Inspirations (Artisan, 376 pp., $40), by Sean Brock. Another compilation of impressive dishes, old and new, from the award-winning Nashville chef.

TARTINE: A Classic Revisited (Chronicle, 328 pp., $40), by Elisabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson. Dozens of new recipes and an array of new photographs make this updated edition of a beloved baking book even more valuable than its original edition.

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"Untitled #577" (2016), from “Cindy Sherman.” From the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Cindy Sherman’s career has been devoted to exploring what happens when the photographer and the model are one, and she has managed to fruitfully renew this research again and again for nearly half a century. CINDY SHERMAN (Rizzoli Electa, 255 pp., $45), by Paul Moorhouse with contributions by Erika Balsom, Magda Keaney and Rochelle Steiner, traces Sherman’s singularly determined focus back to student work — she arrived fully formed. But while quite capable of looking glamorous in evocative settings, as in her celebrated “Untitled Film Stills” (1977-80) and “Centerfolds” (1981), she did not stop there. Instead, she employed her considerable gift for mise-en-scène (supplemented with digital skills over time) — not to mention her penchant for treating her face as a blank canvas — toward the abject, the grotesque, the synthetic. She can be very funny and quite menacing, often at the same time. Most of her best work involves compressed narratives, which we can decipher because we’ve seen the movie or read the fairy tale — or something not unlike them — or because we can interpret the facial expression in concert with the hair, the clothes, the body language and the backdrop. Somehow she combines acting, semiotics, caricature, montage, set design, cultural criticism and photography into one seamless ongoing project.

Francesca Woodman was four years younger than Sherman, and she likewise used herself as a model — along with other young women — although to very different ends. Her pictures are dramatic tableaus, impeccably high-Surrealist even in their Gothic attraction to graveyards and decay. Their central mystery is the woman’s body, which is escaping, hiding, turning into smoke thanks to long exposure times. With their rigorously plain settings and uncanny 19th-century light they have more than a little in common with certain spirit photographs, the kind involving ectoplasm and partly materialized revenants. The pictures are exceptionally sophisticated in their execution and their use of photographic language, and yet they were made when Woodman was between the ages of 13 and 22, when she killed herself. It is hard to split the difference between seeing foreshadowing everywhere and allowing for the complicated moods of a particularly driven post-adolescent, however much in control of her material she seems to be. FRANCESCA WOODMAN: Portrait of a Reputation (Rizzoli Electa, 175 pp., $55), by Nora Burnett Abrams, George Lange and Drew Sawyer, is not a collection of Woodman’s pictures so much as it is a repository of contact sheets, outtakes and postcards as well as reminiscences and essays, all of which seek to plumb her mystery.

“Night-Walking in Benares, India” (2012). Fazal Sheikh

“The question of hospitality is paramount,” write Teju Cole and Fazal Sheikh at the start of their collaboration, HUMAN ARCHIPELAGO (Steidl/D.A.P., 251 pp., $45). Everything about the book appears modest — its proportions are those of a literary work; Sheikh’s photos are illustration-sized; Cole’s texts are seldom longer than a paragraph or two. And yet its theme is overwhelming: “people who have suffered or are suffering the loss of home.” Sheikh’s subjects, who come from more than 10 countries, are posed semiformally in portraits and group pictures that are open and apparently relaxed, although all the sitters seem to vibrate from the unsayable truths they hold behind their eyes. These alternate with photos — many of them aerial, distant — of the places they have been forced to abandon. On facing pages, Cole sometimes directly addresses the images, sometimes pokes more or less elliptically at his monstrous subject. The uprooting of peoples and the brutality of the rest of the world in response is something that will not be resolved in our lifetime, and no mere book can address its scale. This effort at making introductions and suggesting emotional links is properly proportioned and worth reading slowly.

Frances Benjamin Johnston was an emancipated woman and a bohemian, to judge by the 1896 self-portrait in which she is crossing her legs, smoking a cigarette and clutching a beer stein. She was also a commercial photographer in Washington, D.C., and took on important commissions, including, in 1899-1900, that of documenting the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia. As its name indicates, the school primarily gave its students — who were about 90 percent African-American and 10 percent Native American — instruction in agricultural methods and in teaching. Johnston’s photographs show students attending lectures or practicing manual skills, and they are so deliberately posed and choreographically distributed that they appear suspended in space; the scenes resemble theater photos of the fin de siècle, or early film stills. The album was exhibited at fairs worldwide to great acclaim at the time of its making, then forgotten for decades, then found in an antiquarian bookshop by the great aesthete Lincoln Kirstein, who donated it to the Museum of Modern Art in 1965. The album has not avoided controversy — a critic in 1991 called it “a white dream for black people,” although the underlying history shows something rather more complicated. FRANCES BENJAMIN JOHNSTON: The Hampton Album (Museum of Modern Art/D.A.P., 200 pp., $50), by Sarah Hermanson Meister with a contribution by LaToya Ruby Frazier, represents the first publication of the entire work.

You may never have heard of Shunk-Kender, the combined identity of Harry Shunk and Janos Kender between 1958 and 1973, but if you have ever encountered the avant-garde art of the 1960s in a book or online you have certainly seen their work. They were responsible, most famously, for Yves Klein’s convincingly montaged “Leap Into the Void” (1960). The art of that time was made to be photographed — happenings, kinetic sculpture, dance, performance, Arman stuffing his gallery full of trash, Jacques Villeglé tearing sheaves of stuck-together posters off walls to take them home and frame them, Yayoi Kusama covering nudes with polka dots on the Brooklyn Bridge. Sometimes the art — conceptual art in particular — only truly found its meaning in being photographed, and sometimes the photos were the only surviving trace of an action. And then there was Andy Warhol, whose entire workaday existence in the ’60s was an open call for documentation. The scene was intensely social, fairly small, irrepressible, unapologetically funky and seemingly in constant motion. Shunk-Kender recorded everything in the high-contrast black-and-white that then screamed “Now.” Today, as shown in abundance in SHUNK-KENDER: Art Through the Eye of the Camera (1957-1983) (Centre Pompidou/Éditions Xavier Barral/D.A.P., 477 pp., $65), edited by Chloé Goualc’h, Julie Jones and Stéphanie Rivoire, the photos appear definitive, both historically and as records of artistic process, and they also carry an anthropological allure: documents of the strange and intricate rituals of a tribe whose habitat is gone forever and whose works often lasted only a day or a week.

An untitled 1979 photograph from “The Park.” Kohei Yoshiyuki

From 1971 to 1973, Kohei Yoshiyuki visited two Tokyo parks at night, looking for couples who went there to have sex — in an interview he notes that he could tell by how fast they walked in. He followed them into the trees and watched as they attracted peepers, sometimes a crowd of them, who would silently surround the couple. He recorded what he could barely see, using a small camera, infrared film and an infrared flash. Yoshiyuki’s enigmatic tableaus spotlight ghostly clusters of humans engaged in activities that are by no means always clear — there is only the most modest quantity of flesh on view, and sometimes the company seems to be all backs and elbows. Infrared can make skin look spectral, which does nothing to diminish the furtive aspect of the entire enterprise. The pictures share a quality with certain tripwire-activated photos of wildlife after dark: leaping deer under surveillance. The blacks are inky, although there are layers to the darkness; some pictures reward close viewing with murky outlines of yet more peepers farther back. The photos are staggeringly strange. Yoshiyuki’s THE PARK (Radius Books/Yossi Milo/D.A.P., 156 pp., $60) contains, in addition to the original series, his observations of gay cruising in another park in 1979, which have a somewhat different vibe, in large part because almost everyone is standing upright. In either case, Yoshiyuki, who once blew the photos up to life-size and exhibited them in a dark space, equipping visitors with flashlights, compels us to become another link in his chain of watchers.

“West Side Highway, New York 1977,” from “Sunshine Hotel.” Mitch Epstein

Mitch Epstein is a documentary photographer with a strong grasp of narrative, who has undertaken ambitious reportorial projects, often published as books. These include “Family Business” (2003), which chronicles the liquidation of his father’s furniture store and tenement holdings with novelistic amplitude; “American Power” (2009), a sweeping survey of the forms of energy production and the ways in which they affect individual lives; and “New York Arbor” (2013), a stunning portrait gallery of the city’s outstanding and venerable trees. Now, in SUNSHINE HOTEL (Steidl/PPP/D.A.P., 263 pp., $75), he has cut and shuffled the decks, selecting images from all across his career and back to his teenage years, sequencing them not chronologically, narratively or typologically but intuitively, each image somehow suggesting the next. This strategy, cinematic rather than textual, redirects attention to Epstein’s formal strengths. I was annoyed at having to constantly turn to the back of the very substantial volume to get dates and locations, before I realized that that was the point — to present the pictures without distraction from anything lying outside the frame. There are so many ravishing, heartbreaking photographs here, not all previously published in books, that the collection seems to generate a kind of speed as you page through, gliding along its succession of formal rhymes and clashing geographies. Mingling together photos from Epstein’s many series makes certain distinctive ones recur like drumbeats, such as the powerfully clear pictures taken at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 2018. What emerges is that Epstein’s deepest feelings are for the compromised landscape, and that he takes beautiful photographs that cannot help telling urgent stories about that compromise.

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But hearing the back story from the star’s perspective is usually fun — fans are looking for answers to questions, and a star’s book is the final puzzle piece of his or her oeuvre. Fortunately for readers and listeners, many questions about the back stories of several beloved artists are answered in a slew of new memoirs from rock and hip-hop stars — Prince’s “The Beautiful Ones,” Morris Day’s “On Time,” Elton John’s “Me,” Rick Ross’s “Hurricanes,” Debbie Harry’s “Face It,” and Flea of the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s “Acid for the Children.” These books are for you if you’ve ever wondered how Prince and Morris developed into world-class musicians in cold Minneapolis; or how Reginald Dwight became Elton John; or what was going through the rapper Rick Ross’s mind when he had two major seizures in one day.

Elton John writes about the “unstoppable momentum” that carries him. David Warner Ellis/Redferns, via Getty Images

Their subjects hail from different eras and genres, but there are similarities between these memoirs. They all dive deep into how a normal child morphed into someone with a superhuman persona onstage. In ME (Holt, $30), Elton matures musically as a pub pianist at the Northwood Hills Hotel in England. “It made me pretty fearless as a performer,” he writes. “Virtually every night there would be a fight … glasses flying, tables being pushed over. … It was terrifying, but at least it made me mentally tough when it came to playing live.” Later, as his career takes off, he finds the courage to go into a wild new clothing shop in Chelsea where he is introduced to the outré fashion that became his trademark: “I felt different, like I was expressing a side of my personality that I’d kept hidden, a desire to be outrageous and over-the-top. … The clothes … were outrageous because they were larger than life, more fun than the world around them.” Here, you can see a regular person becoming a star in real time.

In FACE IT (Dey Street, $32.50), we see Debbie Harry — who collaborated with Sylvie Simmons on this book — slowly coming alive in New York’s Lower East Side in the 1970s, amid a world where CBGB’s and Andy Warhol are major touchstones. She discovers Method acting and it transforms her ability to sing: “Being trained as a Method singer was the best thing that could’ve happened to me.” The punk scene she thrives in is wild and free, but she has to think through how to make this work: “I was playing up the idea of being a very feminine woman while fronting a male rock band in a highly macho game. … My Blondie character was an inflatable doll but with a dark, provocative, aggressive side. I was playing it up yet I was very serious.”

Debbie Harry’s “Face It” spans multiple decades of her career as a muse and a singer. Chris Stein

Throughout these memoirs, there’s a push and pull between reinvention and remaining authentic to oneself. There’s also a lot of turbulence in their childhood homes and many parents who were divorced or unhappy. Elton says of his mother, “When I was two, she’d toilet-trained me by hitting me with a wire brush until I bled if I didn’t use the potty. … I was terrified of her.” Prince also describes violence in his home in THE BEAUTIFUL ONES (Spiegel & Grau, $30). “The sound of Ur parents fighting is chilling when U’re a child. If it happens 2 become physical, it can b soul-crushing. One night I remember hearing them arguing & it got physical. At some point my mother crashed in2 my bedroom and grabbed me. She was crying but managed a smile & said, ‘Tell Ur father 2 b nice 2 me.’” They divorced when he was 7. Rick Ross’s parents divorced amicably when he was 11.

I think the desire to become a star often flows from an impulse to escape. Unsurprisingly, in each of these accounts, there’s a deep attraction to music early in life — a moment when the power of a song, an artist or a scene transfixes each artist and they’re convinced they must unlock the secret power of sound. Elton John sums up the impulse like this: “It’s hard to explain how revolutionary and shocking rock and roll seemed. Not just the music: the whole culture it represented, the clothes and the films and the attitude. It felt like the first thing that teenagers really owned, that was aimed exclusively at us, that made us feel different from our parents.” He says early rock caused a “moral panic” among the olds. “People … hated it. And no one hated it more than my father. … He hated its social impact, he thought the whole thing was morally wrong.” That makes him even more attracted to the whole thing.

Decades later Rick Ross ran into similar resistance, which he explores in HURRICANES (Hanover Square, $27.99), written with Neil Martinez-Belkin. “2 Live Crew had made me aware of hip-hop,” Ross says. “My momma wasn’t too fond of cussing, and she was even less fond of the type of foul [stuff] that Luke was talking about.” Then a friend plays him the music of thr legendary Oakland rapper Too Short. “This was the moment that hip-hop had my full attention. I needed to know everything there was to know about it.”

Another common theme: drug use. Debbie Harry describes heroin as “delicious and delightful.” Flea’s ACID FOR THE CHILDREN (Grand Central, $30) goes to a similar place: “I could spike up coke all night long until my arm was a bruised and swollen mess and I’d become a shivering psycho, but the idea of doing one shot of heroin and mellowing out terrified me.” (On the next page, he conquers his fear: “It gathered momentum and a warmth began to rise through my system, this purring pleasure, this lightness of being.”)

But Elton John’s cocaine consumption takes the cake. He writes, “Doing it was like becoming a member of an elite little clique, that secretly indulged in something edgy, dangerous and illicit. … I’d become successful and popular, but I never felt cool. … And cocaine felt cool.” Once he started, he couldn’t stop: “My appetite for the stuff was unbelievable — enough to attract comment in the circles I was moving in. Given that I was a rock star spending a lot of time in ’70s L.A., this was a not inconsiderable feat.”

In ON TIME (Da Capo, $27), written with David Ritz, Morris Day admits that he was a stoner, saying, “Weed provided a filter that mellowed me out while intensifying the music.” He also notes that Prince was sober: “He didn’t need that extra creative boost. … He could get to that higher plateau without stimulants. … I also think Prince feared drugs. … Prince needed control at all times. He didn’t want his vision clouded or his mind altered.”

Prince’s is by far the most eagerly anticipated of this crop of books. When news broke that he was writing his autobiography, there was an audible gasp from the culture: Finally! But, tragically, Prince died shortly after starting the process, so we see his reflections on his preteens and little else; Dan Piepenbring continued the project and writes about the experience in his introduction. It’s typical of Prince that this book gives us a glimpse of the real artist — but only a glimpse. He describes having epileptic seizures as a small boy, starting at age 3: “One day the clouds started violently spinning and I just remember being carried by my father in2 the living room where I came 2 on the couch. A trip 2 the hospital revealed I was epileptic & prone to seizures at any time.” But, in the first example of his superhuman control of himself and his life, Prince magically cures himself, almost by force of will. After a frightening seizure with “violent convulsions,” he goes to his mom. “I approached Her & told her that an angel came & told me that I’m not gona b sick anymore. I never had another seizure.”

Prince’s book is so short, I read it in about 20 minutes. If he were not such a massive star, the publishing house surely would’ve rejected the manuscript for being far too small to do anything with. Instead, they filled the book with archival photos and handwritten pages, but it’s all too pithy for anyone but superfans to care about.

Prince’s memoir includes report cards, comics sketched by the artist and also his original handwritten treatment for “Purple Rain.” Associated Press

Fortunately, Morris Day’s memoir arrives in the same month as his old friend’s. Day grew up a few blocks from Prince and played drums in his first band, Grand Central. The two remained close for decades. Day’s book has him in conversation with Prince’s ghost, arguing about how to tell the story, and gives us details about Prince that he never got to tell his memoirist. When the two were teenagers, Day had a four-track recorder, and he says there was no telling when Prince would swing by demanding to use it. “He’d show up at all hours, banging on the door, saying he had to get in to record a song that had just flown into his head. Sometimes we let him, and sometimes — like the night he wanted to barge in at 3 a.m.— we’d try to ignore him. But damn if he wouldn’t stop banging. Rather than let him bust down the door, I’d get out of bed, let the brotha in and help him lay down the track.” Day has a front-row seat for the life of one of the greatest musicians of all time and his book is a worshipful telling of what Prince’s rise looked like from his vantage.

Elton John’s book will be very satisfying for his fans — it’s a classic autobiography that starts in his youth, narrates his rise to superfame and tells the raucous tale of a rich, often joyful, artiste who loves to party. He’s great at explaining his development as a musician, including his effort to figure out how to truly entertain a crowd while sitting behind a piano.

There’s a lot about Elton wrestling with his sexuality — it takes him a while to realize who he really is. In his early 20s, he gets engaged to a woman who reads their total lack of sex as him being chivalrous. As the wedding grows closer, he decides to kill himself. He writes, “Someone who really wants to kill themselves will commit the act in solitude. I, on the other hand, did it in the middle of the afternoon in a flat full of people: Bernie [Taupin, his longtime collaborator] was in his bedroom, Linda [his fiancée] was having a nap. I’d not only put a pillow in the bottom of the oven to rest my head on, I’d taken the precaution of turning the gas to low and opening all the windows in the kitchen. It momentarily seemed quite dramatic when Bernie hauled me out of the oven, but there wasn’t enough carbon monoxide in the room to kill a wasp.” His fiancée thinks he’s depressed because his latest song has failed. They continue their march to the altar until a friend grabs him and says, “Wake up and smell the roses. You’re gay.” But even then he’s still unsure.

Rick Ross’s book starts with armed federal marshals swarming into his house, rounding up him and his friends on charges of assault with a deadly weapon. Ross’s street cred has been doubted at times — a career-threatening problem in hip-hop, but this book should put those whispers to rest. As a teenager he’s introduced to drug dealing and dives in. Ross writes, “It’s one thing to tell a couple jits that selling drugs is wrong. But when you show them what a million dollars looks like … that message goes in one ear and out the other. … ‘Only one out of a thousand hustlers make it,’ [his friend] Mike would always say. ‘When you get older you’re either going to be broke, dead, or serving a life sentence.’ … It was too late though. I had already seen too much. I was infatuated with wealth. I was infected with greed.” Only Ross’s ability and desire to make music gives him an exit from the drug game.

Meanwhile, Debbie Harry’s book tells us how she grappled with being a woman in a male-dominated scene and also how she survived the wild downtown New York of the ‘70s. She talks about a boyfriend who becomes a stalker and having her apartment broken into by a robber who rapes her. She’s an artistic person whose book flows almost like a tone poem by someone who’s thinking through how they want to present their art and themselves to the world: “We felt that we were bohemians and performance artists, avant-garde. And when you add to the mix this very New York DIY street-rock attitude that we had, you got punk. Nobody was called punk yet. There was no one at CBGB’s wearing T-shirts that said ‘punk.’ But I was a punk. I still am.”

Flea writes, “All my life has been a search for my highest self and a journey to the depths of the spirit.” Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times

None of the books in this crop are more artistic and poetic than Flea’s, which reads like a stoner’s reflections on a beloved childhood. The chapters are short, some just a few lines, and over all it doesn’t add up to much more than a memory dump. He takes over 300 pages to get to the Red Hot Chili Peppers making a demo tape — so, rest assured, this is not a basic story of “how I became a recording artist.” Flea’s book feels as if it includes every idea and reflection that has ever crossed his brilliant mind, and reading it is not unlike the experience of paging through someone’s journal. The days pass and the stories accumulate — he smokes weed, he worships music, he does coke, he shoplifts, he does LSD, he does crazy-boy stuff with his best friend, Anthony Kiedis, who would later become the lead singer of the Chili Peppers. Perhaps this one needed an editor to get it all under control; as is, the book feels like a babbling brook with no direction.

When Flea gets to the Chili Peppers, he mainly focuses on the basis for his lifelong bond with Kiedis: “When I say I loved Anthony, I don’t mean this beautifully pleasant, supportive togetherness, laughing and being there for each other, helping each other through all the hardships of life like in the movies. I mean love the way two dysfunctional street kids running amok in Hollywood loved. Inseparable, down to party, ultimately having each other’s backs, but hurtful to each other. Betrayal, fear, passive-aggressive emotional blackmail. I have never felt more hurt by anybody than Anthony, and we have spent huge swaths of our friendship in states of distrust and anger. Is that what having a brother is like? It’s what I know.”

When the rock star memoir works well, it can be among the most exciting rides in literature because you’re reading about people who are living out a fantasy. But when it doesn’t work, you end up dropping the book in boredom and going back to the music you love. A lot of music stars are too risk-averse to write about their lives; they live in constant fear of losing their audiences. But these books are like playing in front of a home-court crowd — in most cases the people who buy the book already love you and if they don’t love the book, nothing can take away the love that was born when they swooned at your concert or had the time of their lives listening to your music. I hope more stars are willing to be open and tell their true story to the fans who are dying to hear it.

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The book contains a helpful chart of cloud types, with such surprises as “mammas” (breasty indeed), walls of “murus,” roll clouds and advection fog, which forms “when moist air is cooled as it drifts gently over a cold surface.” (We call that “Sakonnet smoke” in my neck of the woods.) Another chart surveys optical effects caused by ice crystals or electrical events. My favorite might be the beautiful, braided Von Kármán vortexes that form off an island in the South Indian Ocean. Or maybe the “pile d’assiettes” — a stack of lenticular clouds that trigger escapist fantasies of picnic baskets and cozy blankets in meadows. Does a new generation need to learn that clouds aren’t just places where data live? Take a few moments every now and then, Pretor-Pinney advises, to contemplate the clouds; it’s good for your health. His charming little volume reminds us that self-care is as available as a glance out the window, no matter your age or infirmities.

We need more on Earth care, as well. All of us should be heartsick over a recent report from the journal Science on the staggering losses among the citizens of our skies: birds. There are nearly three billion fewer swooping under the clouds over North America today than there were in 1970. Common or rare, birds are suffering the effects of our destruction of habitat — the frequent mowing of grasslands, especially before baby birds fledge; the filling in of marshlands for housing and highway development; the profligate use of pesticides; our skyscrapers brightly lit at night, throwing off migratory signals; our irresponsibility in letting cats out of the house, where they wantonly kill birds, just for the heck of it. To help us better appreciate our feathered friends, Ted Floyd, the editor of Birding magazine, has written HOW TO KNOW THE BIRDS: The Art & Adventure of Birding (National Geographic, 303 pp., $28), which documents a year of spotting, identifying and marveling. “We share spaces, simultaneously natural and artificial, with wildlife,” Floyd writes. “The bird lover of today proclaims the great truth that we’re all in this together.”

Those of us who might feel intimidated by the competitiveness of many bird watchers couldn’t ask for a warmer, kinder, more helpful companion out in the field — carrying binoculars and a mobile phone. Floyd is an avid Wi-Fi birder, with a helpful “urge to eBird”; his is “a manifesto for the modern bird lover.” Floyd advocates understanding the behavior and ecology of birds — the better to spot them without binoculars. He corrects a misperception that female birds don’t sing; they do, beautifully. And he invites us to attend events like the astonishing magpie funeral: One by one, the birds lay blades of grass around their fallen mate, then nod to tap the corpse with their beaks in silent farewell. If we awaken our minds to a “revised conception of the avian soul and spirit” perhaps we will be more protective. To know birds is to love them — and to protect them.

A Chinese blue magpie, from “Birds.” Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London

For those who want their birds to stand still, Jonathan Elphick offers the bountiful BIRDS: The Art of Ornithology (Skira Rizzoli, 224 pp., $45). The book comes in a boxed set with 36 frameable prints that capture the astonishing range of artistry in this field. Of course, the redoubtable John James Audubon is featured, but I found myself captivated by the anonymous lithographs of a Dusky Eagle Owl and a Blue Magpie. Equally pleasurable are encounters with several modern artists: The feathers of Angela Gladwell’s Brown Kiwi mother and chick gleam silkily off the page. Charles F. Tunnicliffe, one of Britain’s greatest bird artists, is represented by the dusky wonder of a Kingfisher.

“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul,” wrote Emily Dickinson, of the creatures that caught her gimlet eye. A revised edition of Marta McDowell’s EMILY DICKINSON’S GARDENING LIFE: The Plants and Places That Inspired the Iconic Poet (Timber, 267 pp., $24.95) offers an excuse (if one is necessary) to linger yet again over the observations of a poet who, as Dickinson herself proclaimed, “was always attached to Mud.” This is biography told through house and garden. Dickinson’s family shared her love of plants, welcoming friends like Frances Hodgson Burnett and Frederick Law Olmsted to their table at bloom time. As in one of her previous books, “Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life,” McDowell highlights the plants that sent Dickinson into ecstatic reveries: carnations that “tip their spice,” “the ancient shrub” that is the lilac, the face “rounder than the Moon” of red clover. The Dickinson homestead is now a museum, its gardens reconstructed. Wandering through this book, we can smell the hyacinth that bloomed on the poet’s windowsill in winter, hear the thrum of hummingbird wings, smell the cooking odors from the kitchen and imagine Dickinson pruning, staking, digging — and listening and watching. Here is poetry grounded in earth and birds and blossoms, balm for these oppressive times of “a certain Slant of light.”

If a farmer ever finds a moment to gaze at the clouds, it’s to watch the weather with trepidation and hope. GOOD HUSBANDRY: Growing Food, Love, and Family on Essex Farm (Scribner, 296 pp., $26) is a memoir of a rougher sort of life attached to mud. As the book opens, Kristin Kimball and her husband, Mark, are desperate. Tens of thousands of winter squash, cucumbers, brussels sprouts and tomatoes — food for 200 paying customers — won’t survive transplanting if there’s no rain. Miracles do happen.

In her previous memoir, “The Dirty Life,” published in 2010, Kimball described a lightning strike of love — first with a farmer and then with a plot of 500 acres in northern New York. She leaves behind a magazine career, steady paychecks, the entertainments of city life. “Good Husbandry” picks up the story: two children, both born in their farmhouse (described in voyeuristically satisfying fashion); the surprising enchantment of crops that need tending, draft horses that need work, cows that need milking.

I am often overcome by FOMO when I read about the farming life. Am I being deprived of one of life’s most profound connections to the soil? Kimball is merciless — with exquisite prose — in detailing the travails that beset her family; it’s nerve-racking simply to read about problems that are unimaginable to most of us. A marauding fox has to be shot, but “who wants to blast holes in a small fierce thing with knowing eyes?” A chicken begins eating eggs, “a capital offense” on a farm. Kimball takes her outside, strokes her feathers and thanks her for her work, then puts “her head under my foot” and pulls “up on her body firmly to break her neck.” If you can barely stand to read that, leave the kitchen.

Fragrant flowers, from “The Scentual Garden.” Ellen Hoverkamp

Some of the farm’s workers last only a day. “You get used to it and find the rewards override the discomfort,” Kimball explains, “or you get out.” Marriages can become strained under even the most comfortable of circumstances. Kimball’s partnership is “as complex as the farm itself”; she describes the journey she and Mark take “across a craggy landscape.” They find a compassionate therapist who is “part shrink, part coach, part shaman.” This memoir throws pails of icy water on anyone’s farming fantasies.

And yet. The children thrive, learning early to relinquish “their own desires for the greater good.” The farm grows — meals are glorious and bountiful. Financial stability arrives, at least for a moment. Walls come down, the supporting beams of a shared life are strengthened. “Even a radical farm imparts conservative values. … In the same way the military makes you a person who stands up straight, a farm will give you grit and perseverance.” A friend recently told me about JOMO, the joy of missing out — but my gratitude for those who spend their lives giving us food grows ever more bountiful. I closed this lovely book with a fervent wish that everyone in it live happily ever after. And get some rest.

There’s something in the air: Two gorgeous books urge us to follow our noses. Isabel Bannerman gardens with her husband, “Mr. B,” in Cornwall, on the romantic, ancient and storied grounds of their house within a castle, Trematon. Complete with battlements. I was thoroughly transported by SCENT MAGIC: Notes From a Gardener (Pimpernel, 256 pp., $45); it’s as much a memoir through a lifetime of appreciating the fragrance of the seasons as it is a plant guide. “The witchcraft of scent somehow acts as an emulsion, fusing all,” Bannerman insists. “It is tranquilizing for the gardener.”

Bannerman generously opens a world beyond sweet. Those marigolds at the door might smell rank and repellent to some, but to me they’re marvelously zesty. Bannerman is as felicitous a writer as she is a garden designer. “Smells,” she proclaims, “have a life force that speaks to us in an old language.” Fragrance is powerful: The smell of frying onions will make silkworms “curl up and die.” Air pollution inhibits pollination. About 15 percent of white flowering plants are highly scented; only 9 percent of red ones are. The heady hyacinth is an old beloved; Louis XIV’s gardeners planted 26,290 of them over the winter of 1688-89 for his private garden at Versailles. Spring rolls around with daffodils “vulgarized and overexposed” though still “lovable.” Sarcococca “offers a great hug of warmth, a buttery, spicy smell” during dreary winter days.

Mr. B remarks, while cleaning out some planting beds, how often weeds “smell meaty and unpleasant” — and there’s a lot of smelling of rank and fetid and foul roots and broken stems and soil during vigorous bouts of weeding in these pages. Returning home in the gloaming after a long hot day, Bannerman notes that they “poured a drink, rolled a cigarette. … Much on mind, much anguish, friends in peril, garden silent but for an owl in the dell.” Then she and her husband have a nostalgic conversation about their first gardens. “Mr. B smelled the wisteria and felt filled with a wonderful warmth and well-being.” This is a beautiful and moving book, something to linger over, to cherish — and to remind us, as Bannerman writes, “this is a great day to inhale.”

Umberto Pasti’s Moroccan bone garden. Ngoc Mihn Ngo

No matter how beautiful a blossom might be, if it has no fragrance, Ken Druse, author of THE SCENTUAL GARDEN: Exploring the World of Botanical Fragrance (Abrams, 255 pp., $50), finds it “somewhat lacking.” On a whim, I planted a few mounds of santolina in the gravel near some chairs; every pinch of the plant is delightful — all thanks to VOCs, the volatile organic compounds in the oil glands of a flower, the chemicals that truly turn our heads. Plants also use those VOCs to communicate with one another, letting them know of marauding caterpillars, for instance, so their neighbors can switch on their “defensive hormones.”

Druse is a gardener (and prolific author) who carries a sachet of lavender in his car, to crumple when he needs a hit of fragrance; he lays flowers across his dashboard for the pleasure of their company during a ride. The science of smell is somewhat confounding: An organic compound called indole, for instance, which is found in jasmine and orange blossoms, is also found in coal tar and decomposing shrimp. The narcissus N. Actaea illustrates the indole paradox: From a distance it smells like honey, but up close you can pick up traces of black pepper and cow dung. Sadly, many roses have lost their fragrance, having been bred for color or long stems — or the strength to withstand “harvesting, packing, handling, shipping, repackaging and more shipping.” A few breeders, though, are specializing in fragrance again.

Druse discusses scent-capturing techniques like infusing, distilling, decocting and maceration, and explains perfumers’ terms as well. A “fragrant accord” sounds like something that should happen in our nation’s capital, but it’s a three-note sequence involving the different weights of scent in a perfume. The top note gives the first impression; the middle or heart notes come next; and the base notes, those woody vetivers, or sexy animalic musks, are the last to fade. An encyclopedia of fragrant plants, lavishly illustrated with photographs by Ellen Hoverkamp, ensures that you put your olfactory organs to work next time you’re browsing through a nursery. The Clethra that proliferates in my woodlands, scenting the air with a spicy honey, drew thousands of tiny bees. We all swooned through the late summer days.

Twenty years ago, when Umberto Pasti fell asleep under a fig tree in the tiny village of Rohuna in northern Morocco, his soul was occupied by jennun, rural spirits. He dreamed himself into a garden, woke up and gardened his dream into reality. EDEN REVISITED: A Garden in Northern Morocco (Rizzoli, 240 pp., $55) chronicles Pasti’s adventure in a land where even the winds are given names and the trees have moods. Houses, built entirely by hand, sprang up out of the earth; over the years, two acres became five, then grew to 25, covered with indigenous and exotic plants.

Garden rooms were carved out and named. The Garden of Consolation is a place to visit during the impossibly hot summer months. The marvelous Bone Garden is “an open-air curiosity cabinet” with the bleached skulls, ribs, tibias and femurs of donkeys, goats, rabbits, sheep, cats and dogs nailed to tree trunks; garlands of jawbones and fringes of vertebrae are draped over branches, and there’s a totem pole for dancing around. Dinner is served under the “dim white glow radiating from the tree.” In the redolent photographs of Ngoc Minh Ngo, you can feel the shimmering heat of the baking sun, smell the rich Gardenia thunbergia, become dizzy at the sprawl of red poppies. Those of us enduring frozen winters in the north crave just such magic.

Traveling onward to the land where houses have names — Chatsworth, Haseley Court, Herterton — and are known equally for the elegance and beauty of their gardens. An instant classic, Kathryn Bradley-Hole’s ENGLISH GARDENS: From the Archives of Country Life (Rizzoli, 491 pp., $85) contains a lifetime of travel itineraries. Great Dixter in East Sussex is vibrant with experiments in color and texture; tulips dance through a box parterre at Broughton Grange, an Oxfordshire garden recently designed by Tom Stuart-Smith — who has also been invited to refresh parts of the garden at Chatsworth for the Duke of Devonshire.

When you get hungry and need a place to rest, check into the hotel at Gravetye Manor in West Sussex, whose restaurant features meals whipped up with the produce from a large, walled, oval kitchen garden. Truly, a woman who is tired of English gardens is tired of life. Or at least of weeding.