12 books of Christmas: ‘Odysseys and Photographs’

I am completely in love … with Albert Schweitzer.

How could you not be after looking at his photograph in “Odyssey and Photographs: Four National Geographic Field Men — Maynard Owen Williams, Volkmar Wentzel, Luis Marden, Thomas Abercrombie (National Geographic, $40)?

If you look at the picture that Wentzel shot of Schweitzer, the medical missionary in Africa, you see what Wentzel meant about the doctor’s “reverence for life” as two kittens make themselves at home on his cluttered desk.

These vintage collections from this fab four aren’t your typical travel photographs.

Beyond the pretty pictures, they suggest incredible stories. In his foreword, Gilbert Grosvenor calls these men the “greatest photographer-storytellers in our history.” He may be right.

I never imagined that a shot of dead fish would fuel my desire to go to Panama again or that a picture of jitterbugging teenagers in 1957 Austria would make me LOL, but these did.

In the epilogue, Sam Abell, himself a Geographic photographer, tells the story that exemplifies the fluency and grace of these “field men.”

Abercrombie was in an old castle in Spain having coffee when a woman approached him with a small book and asked him what it was. He looked at it, determined it was Arabic and began reading from it in French. Abell writes, “This is it. A man from Minnesota reading Muslim prayers in French to a Belgian family in a Spanish castle.”

The mind boggles at the gymnastics the brain can do, but the heart, awed by their vision, soars.

Click here for “12 books” posts.

— Catharine Hamm, Times Travel editor

[Image: National Geographic online store]

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 23, 2008 at 6:00 am by Catharine Hamm and is filed under Africa & Middle East, Asia, Book Reviews, California, Central America, China, East Coast, Eastern Canada, Europe, Global, Great Britain, India, Mexico, New Mexico, Pacific & Australia, Pacific Northwest, Rocky Mountain States, Southern States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.