In Naked Babies, Nick Kelsh and Anna Quindlen collaborate to produce a unique view of babies - one that owes nothing to tradition, sentimentality, or the cult of the cute. Unlike traditional baby photographs, Nick Kelsh's amazing black-and-white pictures focus on specific aspects of babies - the perfection of a hand, the swirls of a cowlick, the smoothness of skin on the neck - and all are honest, exquisite, and invitingly tactile. Anna Quindlen's essays are as graceful, snappy, perceptive, and personal as anything she has written. They muse on what it is about babies that causes our hearts to crinkle and fold: "The meaning of life is in them." Share what Quindlen has learned as a mother: "From time to time I would lie on the floor with my babies to see exactly what they were seeing when it looked as though they were just wasting time," and juxtapose babyhood with adulthood: "The next time you are sitting in a meeting after three cups of coffee, badly needing to go to the bathroom but instead doodling dutifully, crossing your legs and watching the clock, remember that if you were a baby you would have gone by now, and no one the wiser." Kelsh's photographs and Quindlen's text complement each other perfectly. Two masters of their craft have created an unusual meditation and a wondrous book - a totally original gift for every parent or parent-to-be. Anyone who has ever witnessed a baby escape from his mother's arms--sans clothing--and run wildly, or crawl as the case may be, about the house in what can only be described as a euphoric state knows that babies are really at their best when they're naked. No bonnets or booties to hold them in--just pure, blissful nakedness. In Naked Babies author Anna Quindlen and photographer Nick Kelsh expertly record this unique time in childhood when modesty means nothing at all. Quindlen's perceptive and personal essays are remarkable musings on motherhood and the amazing little miracles that babies are, while Kelsh's photographs are, well, amazing little miracles in their own right. Shot entirely in black-and-white, these are not cutesy, sentimental, or traditional photographs. Rather, Kelsh captures "specific aspects of babies--the perfection of a hand, the swirls of a cowlick, the smoothness of skin on the neck--and all are honest, exquisite, and invitingly tactile." Both "an unusual meditation and a wondrous book," Naked Babies is the perfect gift for the parent or the parent-to-be. A portfolio of baby pictures from a "Day in the Life" photographer, with an essay by the beloved Quindlen. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. When Quindlen quit writing her New York Times column not long ago, its devotees unleashed cacophonous keening over losing their regular dose of her distinctive blend of sentimentality, intellectuality, and political correctness. She wanted to devote more time to writing books. The scant text here is an early fruit of that dedication. It dispenses with intellectuality and p.c. in favor of indulging a perennial favorite among sentimentalists: going gaga over babies. Written to accompany Kelsh's lovely baby photos, it revives the Wordsworthian Romantic line on infancy ("trailing clouds of glory do we come") and extends it into the twenty-first century, with nary a nod to that old bugaboo, original sin, or to the God that even Wordsworth acknowledged. Well, theology might have been a pooper at this party (although Quindlen's intelligence will make some wish she had invited it for just a few moments), where the object is, after all, to just LOOK at those beautiful babies! Ray Olson Despite the publisher's protest to the contrary, this ode to the physical and spiritual perfection of babies is almost too cute for words. ``Babies are meant to be naked, as surely as they are meant to be nurtured and loved,'' writes Quindlen, novelist (One True Thing, 1994, etc.), former New York Times columnist, and popular chronicler of yuppie motherhood. And while photographer Kelsh may seem at first glance to have captured these naked babies in rarely photographed poses--they drool and cry and play with their wee-wees, they wrinkle and dimple in their rolls of fat--they are still undeniably cute. Even the isolated hand or toes or pair of eyes conveys the essence of adorableness. And, after all, why pretend that it could be otherwise? -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Nick Kelsh's photography is familiar to millions from the Day in the Life .. series and his photographs for Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Anna Quindlen, whose New York Times column won a 1992 Pulitzer Prize, is the author of the essay collections Thinking Out Loud and Living Out Loud ; the bestselling novels Object Lessons, One True Thing , and Black and Blue ; and two children's books. The mother of three, she lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.