PRESENTING WHALES, A MUMMY A ROOFTOP GARDEN, A LONE EAGLE

Author: By Peter F. Neumeyer

Date: SUNDAY, December 7, 1997

Page: G4

Section: Books

Sent from her home in the country to stay in the city with cranky Uncle Jim, Lydia Grace of ``The Gardener'' was writing to her out-of-work parents during the gritty Depression days of 1936. With horticultural zest and an instinct for beauty, the small girl makes Jim's urban rooftop bloom, and his bakery thrive. And though the old grump isn't exactly smiling, you know that love has cracked the stony heart.

Seven years ago, in the surprising ``The Money Tree,'' David Small played his illustrations against Sarah Stewart's text in such a way that one meant little without the other. In ``The Gardener,'' Small's fluent line and virtuoso watercolors work in gentle union with Stewart's epistolary text. (Subtle strategies, these, in maturely conceived picture books.)

Nicola Davies and Nick Maland's ``Big Blue Whale'' is a book of my dreams. Davies translates her understanding of whales into clean, clear, concise, and informative prose about the size, the feel-of, the anatomy, and the behavior of the ``biggest creature that has ever lived on the earth.'' Maland's accompanying drawings, laid across the pages in infinite variety, appear both impressionistic and precise, perhaps because his masterful cross-hatching can be simultaneously evocative of shadow and of detail.

The text itself plays three tunes at least by modulations in size, in font, and in position. Add to this typographical flexibility the design and color of the illustrations, and the hue of the pages overall, and you have a blue-ice dream of a book. Add finally, there's an index, too. ``Big Blue Whale'' is a book worthy of a child.

Mitsumasa Anno's three-volume ``Math Games'' -- now reprinted in paperback from the 1982 edition -- is a boot camp for children in training to meet Borges, Escher, Bach, and other jugglers of infinity. Explaining the sort of math primer he has set out to write, Anno says it's ``one that would teach not only the skills essential to the mastery of arithmetic, but also a way of thinking that would have bearing on all scholastic subjects. It would be a book that would share with readers the joys of creative discovery and at the same time occasionally throw them into a puzzling quandary.'' This, says Anno, meant a book about ``a way of thinking about things.''

``Quandaries,'' especially visual ones, are Anno's stock in trade in his vastly entertaining earlier books, which dance in and out of folktale, history, and art. His characters have to be followed, hidden clues must be found, and shapes and numbers must be manipulated -- ``must be'' because Anno's ``voice'' is so engaging, his gnome-esque characters so cheerful, and his settings so irresistible that even innumerates (your humble servant) cannot stop themselves.

Mercifully, each volume has terminal notes to prompt parents and teachers on Truths and Ideas such as ``Difference,'' ``The Concept of One,'' ``Comparing and Classifying'' and ``Sets'' (Volume 1) through topography and mazes (Volume 3). In arithmetical terms, the books are deceptively comprehensible on the surface, but Anno enmeshes us cunningly on another level with visual conundrums (such as tall figures casting shorter shadows than do short ones) until the eyes blink and the mind spins.

The impeccably lucid prose, the countless questions and puzzle challenges derived from the teeming and whimsical illustrations, with their suggestion of a sort of UNICEF internationalism, should not merely captivate child and adult, but ignite both with excitement of discovery.

I don't really know whether a memento mori -- a reminder of the passing of all earthly beauty -- is exactly what children prefer to grapple to their collective bosom. But certainly mummies have a fascination. And Eve Bunting's ``I Am the Mummy Heb-Nefert'' is a haunting venture. Heb-Nefert, a young noblewoman, loved and married the pharaoh's brother, lived richly in her native Egypt, died -- and rose outside herself to observe and describe the elaborate particulars and ceremonies of her burial (not to mention that of her mummified cat). Today, she lies forever next to her ``Noble One,'' in the ``night that follow[s] night,'' rising ``above myself'' to watch as people peer into the glass museum case in which she lies.

Implausible in the retelling, perhaps. But Bunting's prose is so poetic and so densely informative, and David Christiana's illustrations are so moodful, his depictions of mummies so eerie, that this curious tale of love and of the beauty of the world could be a book that finds a corner in your heart.

Certainly not a beautiful picture book, but demonstrably spellbinding as real-life adventure, is James Cross Giblin's biography of Charles Lindbergh. And I mean ``demonstrably,'' because as long as it was lying about in my living room, there was hardly an adult -- wife, sons, even dinner guests -- who didn't remove to a quiet corner with the book for as much as an hour. The story of the infamous kidnapping, and the excitement of the chase after the abductor-killer, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, is gripping. The sharp treatment of Lindbergh's right-wing excesses during the Hitler years, his dedication to establishment of an Air Corps, his later commitment to the environment, his dubious political enthusiasms, and the intermingled triumph and sadness of his life, are treated with alert precision and measured interpretation.

It would be good to know whether teenagers in our hip-hop culture voluntarily sit still long enough to read a prosy, intelligent, photo-illustrated book -- with nary a basketball or a rock band in it. I hope they will, for Giblin's account of the giddy rise, the rapid fall of the brave, adventurous, youthful, troubled man bears out his subtitle: ``A Human Hero.''