Suddenly, This Summer

Catch a wave of adventurously tsunamic reads. Set up ‘camp’ here.

Simply too busy to travel anywhere at the moment? No need to be blue, Lou—adventure and escape can be as near as your nighttable.

George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, and Hunter S. Thompson are all dead and buried, and there just doesn’t seem to be anyone around man enough to fill their moccasins. But photographer/diarist/adventurer Peter Beard, the last of the old school, swashbuckling, larger-than-lifers, is still going strong. This month brings a beautiful new edition of Beard’s brilliant 1965 book on Africa, The End of the Game: The Last Word from Paradise (Taschen, $40), with a new foreword by Paul Theroux, who knows a thing or two about the Dark Continent himself.

Cool Hotels Spain and Cool Hotels Italy (teNeues, $25 each) provide a stylish, vicarious vacation to a couple of our favorite destinations. Meanwhile, “Cool Hunter” columnist Bill Tikos gives us the big picture in The World’s Coolest Hotel Rooms (Collins Design, $30). 

Further afield, Ian Luna et al. chronicle the cultural Renaissance taking place in Japan in the electrifying Tokyolife: Art and Design (Rizzoli, $85). Jay Pridmore scales dizzying, dazzling heights in Shanghai: The Architecture of China’s Greatest Urban Center (Abrams, $50). And the rum-soaked, cigar-smoked culture of Cuba is celebrated in Cuba: Art and History from 1868 to Today (Prestel, $85).

Closer to home, photographer Jake Rajs peeks behind the hedgerows in Beyond the Dunes: A Portrait of the Hamptons (Monacelli, $60). He’ll have you using “summer” as a verb, too. Speaking of, many adventures from our formative years happened at summer camp, the “one place on earth where appropriated Native American terminology, competitive sports, social hierarchy, and libido-soaked nights lived in wholesome harmony,” note Roger Bennett and Jules Shell in Camp Camp: Where Fantasy Island Meets Lord of the Flies (Crown, $25). And what would summer be without surfing? Brian Chidester and Domenic Priore serve it up with verve to spare in Pop Surf Culture: Music, Design, Film and Fashion from the Bohemian Surf Boom (Santa Monica Press, $40).

On a musical note, Sonic Youth’s ageless Thurston Moore crafts an ode to an obscure but über-hip corner of the alternative scene in No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980 (Abrams Image, $25). It just doesn’t get much jazzier than Farah Jasmine Griffin and Salim Washington’s Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever (Thomas Dunne, $25)—or much more fun than Bodhi Oser’s bang-up Band ID: The Ultimate Book of Band Logos (Chronicle, $40).

Ending on a high note, art looms large in the form of whimsical British wunderkind Tim Walker’s photographic fairy tales in Tim Walker: Pictures (teNeues, $125). And proto-paparazzi—it was art back then—Ron Galella exposes one of our favorite icons in Warhol by Galella: That’s Great (Monacelli, $60).