The Hot Corner offers some safe and...

The Hot Corner offers some safe and sane holiday gift recommendations:

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster. By Jon Krakauer (Villard Books; $24.95): A climbing-reporting assignment for Outside magazine goes horrifyingly awry for Krakauer, who witnesses death and devastation on the slopes of Everest during a 1996 expedition.

NBA At 50 (NBA Video; $14.99): Finally, the NBA taps into its rich history for the benefit of a generation that knows Jerry West and Elgin Baylor only as front-office executives and defines “basketball antiquity” as Larry Bird’s rookie season.

The NFL’s Greatest Games: The Ice Bowl (Polygram Video; $19.95): Play-by-play re-creation and anecdote-laden recollection of the greatest football game that should have never been played--the bone-chilling 1967 NFL championship game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Green Bay Packers.

NFL Legends Football ’98 (Accolade; $39.95): This CD-ROM game enables you to pit teams and/or all-stars from four “classic” eras of professional football--1997, 1968, 1950 and 1932. See how Steve Young might fare as a two-way player in ‘32, or if Marion Motley could outrun Dick Butkus under 1950 rules and conditions.

The U.S. Open: Game, Set, Unmatched. By Roger M. Williams. (Time Life Books; $29.95): Elegantly illustrated coffee-table-book study of “the revered centerpiece of America’s tennis tradition,” from Don Budge to Venus Williams.

Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir. By Doris Kearns Goodwin (Simon and Schuster; $25): Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, recounts her childhood as a Dodger fan growing up in Brooklyn during the late ‘40s and ‘50s amid the haunting specter of bomb shelters and the Bronx Bombers.

When We Were Kings (Polygram Video; $17.95): Muhammad Ali, George Foreman and Don King converge in Zaire in 1974, back when heavyweight championship fights still mattered and Ali could verbally rope-a-dope an entire continent--to say nothing of Foreman--into stunning submission.