"The Gershwins and Me," by Michael Feinstein with Ian Jackman Michael Feinstein, celebrated as a singer-­pianist, a cabaret entrepreneur and a major spokesman for the preservation of what has come to be known as the American Songbook, has now published a large (8 1/2 inches by 11 ­inches), lavishly illustrated coffee-table book entitled "The Gershwins and Me: A Personal History in Twelve Songs." Interestingly, Feinstein's hefty volume resembles, in some respects, the gaudy 1920s Broadway musicals through which the composer George Gershwin (1898-1937) and his lyricist brother, Ira (1896-1983), began to make their marks as major figures in American popular culture. The George Gershwin Family and the Ira and Leonore Gershwin Trust George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin arriving in Los Angeles, 1936. A Personal History in Twelve Songs By Michael Feinstein with Ian Jackman Simon & Schuster. $45 As stylishly produced as a successful 1920s musical, scattering its variegated pictorial elements across every chapter, "The Gershwins and Me" provides, as those productions did, a clutch of the memorable songs that still link the name "Gershwin" to the fond memories of millions of Americans. The songs include "I Got Plenty o" Nuttin,"" "They Can't Take That Away From Me" and "Love Is Here to Stay." A lyric by Ira, printed in full, adorns the head of every chapter; a bonus CD, in a vinyl flap on the inside back cover, offers Feinstein's voice-and-piano rendition of the 12 Gershwin songs to which the chapters are linked, followed by 12 briefer spoken tracks of him discussing different aspects of the music or its origin and interpretation. This might be a good place to mention that this reviewer once made an adaptation, which Feinstein recorded, of some decidedly non-­American cabaret songs, Arnold Schoenberg's "Brettl-Lieder." This is already a considerable amount for a single book to offer, and the imaginative selection of visual material, much of it rare or unfamiliar, heightens its value. In addition to the inevitably numerous photographs, which range from stiffly formal portraits to vacation-spot snapshots, the images include antique sheet music covers; book jackets; telegrams and letters; reproduced paintings and drawings (both Gershwin brothers painted as a hobby); concert programs; clippings and, of course, posters, program covers, heralds (advance publicity fliers) and lobby-display cards from Gershwin-scored shows and films. A number of photographs show Feinstein himself at various points in his life, including some that picture him with the elderly Ira Gershwin, for whom he worked as an archivist in the early 1970s, or with Ira's wife, Leonore (with whom Feinstein had a well-publicized falling-out, discussed at length in the chapter on ""S Wonderful"). The volume's more arresting images include a moody, pensive photo portrait of George, bearing an affectionate inscription to Adele Astaire, who with her brother, Fred, starred in two of those 1920s Gershwin shows; the inscription includes a musical quote from "The Man I Love," a song that Adele would have introduced in "Lady, Be Good!" (1924), had it not been cut during the show's pre-Broadway tryout. Balancing the photo's somber look are pictures of George enjoying himself, including a shot of him sitting at the piano ecstatically warbling songs from "Porgy and Bess," and a costume-party photo that shows him improbably made up as Groucho Marx. Probably the book's loudest visual is a full-page, pink-hued reproduction of the artist Miguel Covarrubias's Vanity Fair caricature of the bandleader Paul Whiteman, who commissioned and premiered Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." The caricature's comic extravagance provides an extreme contrast to the full-page or double-page spreads in other chapters that seem to demand closer inspection by reproducing spidery handwritten manuscripts: pages from the "tune books" in which George jotted down potentially usable melodies; multi-paged letters from George, in Europe, to Ira and to the lyricist Irving Caesar; a sheet on which Ira has scrawled a parody of "The Man I Love" (its lines include "I'm building me a home / Just meant for one"); and a notebook leaf bearing drafts of lyrics for "Lady in the Dark," Ira's 1940 collaboration with Kurt Weill (one of several notable composers he worked with in the years following George's tragically early death). Michael Feingold, chief theater critic of The Village Voice, is also a playwright and translator.