(FORTUNE Magazine) – From the early 1930s to the mid-1940s, Arthur Fellig was at every tenement house fire, gangland shooting, shipwreck, and major disaster--natural and otherwise--that took place in New York City, capturing the gory events with his bulky Speed Graphic camera for the Acme Newspictures syndicate and the city's tabloids. A Runyonesque character who dressed in rumpled clothes and was never without a fat cigar, the man who called himself Weegee spent his nights cruising the city in a beat-up Chevrolet, monitoring shortwave police radio, then dashing to the scene. The results make for one of the finest of a very strong crop of new photo books in stores as the gift-giving season approaches.

The 250 or so images in Weegee's World (Bulfinch, $75), beautifully printed in rich duotone, aren't strictly grit and grime. Weegee's camera also captured the other side of New York: the weekend throngs at Coney Island, lovers embracing in a dimly lit cafeteria, Easter Sunday in Harlem, aristocrats at the opera. In all, it's a must for anyone who has an interest in photography and the human drama.

The same goes for Requiem (Random House, $65), a collection of gut-wrenching battlefield images of the Vietnam War and the French-Indochina conflict that preceded it--all taken by photographers who died covering the two wars--from pastoral scenics of magnificent countrysides to up-close, in-your-face images of hand-to-hand combat, wounded and dying soldiers, jungle patrols, and displaced villagers. Many of the 250 images were taken by North Vietnamese and Vietcong photographers, who provide a perspective we've rarely seen.

Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood (Knopf, $25) focuses on a different sort of battlefield, the one inhabited by teenagers who live in a city whose culture is dominated by the entertainment industry. The outgrowth of a grant that photographer Lauren Greenfield received from National Geographic, the book is a documentary about the children of Los Angeles--the rich ones with famous parents, personal trainers, and swimming pools; the aspiring models who get their training on runway shows in retirement homes in Pasadena; the 17-year-olds from the inner city who spend $600 on clothes and limos for the prom.

The Soul of the Game (Workman, $30) is about kids who play basketball on inner-city asphalt courts where the game is a religion and reputations and legends are made. The photos by John Huet--often isolated shots of players bursting by an opponent or soaring through the air--are outstanding. Nate Archibald and Bernard King are there, as are Earl Manigault, Ray Lewis, Pee Wee Kirkland, and others who never made it far from the playgrounds. "There wasn't one thing he couldn't do," the Amsterdam News' Howie Evans writes in one accompanying essay about Joe Hammond, perhaps the best street player of them all, "but he didn't want to do it in the NBA."

German Photography, 1870-1970 (Yale University Press, $60), a scholarly work, includes some 400 images by more than 150 photographers--including Alfred Eisenstaedt, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Helmut Newton, and August Sander. Along with a dozen essays, they provide a piercing look at Germany's role in the evolution of the art.

Finally, there's Half Past Autumn (Bulfinch, $65), a delightful stroll down memory lane with Gordon Parks, one of the all-time greats of photography. Starting with his work in the early 1940s for the Farm Security Administration, this beautifully produced retrospective of 300 of Parks' images takes us through his fashion work for Vogue and Glamour and his photo essays on segregation for Life and others to his celebrity assignments (Muhammad Ali, Ingrid Bergman, Leonard Bernstein) and the abstract color shots that are his most recent focus. Run--don't walk--and get this book.