Dennis Leri has been showing his work — mixed-media wall pieces blending metal and canvas and paint, and large works of abstract sculpture — for more than 20 years on the East End.

    He started by studying figurative sculpture at the Art Students League and the Sculpture Center, but his love of art began before that — at home.

    “I lived in a house full of art,” Mr. Leri said of his upbringing in Brooklyn. “It was a typical Italian-American family with several generations living together. My uncle John Nappi was an artist and had his studio in the house.”

    Mr. Leri served in Vietnam, and when he came back his sister, the artist Lorraine Danzo, made a suggestion to the foundering veteran. “She said, ‘Dennis, you’re not right in the head. Do your art, it’s the only thing that will bring you peace,’ ” Mr. Leri recalled the other day.

    He began with figurative work. “I was an academic,” he said. “A perpetual student. I still am.”

    After a move to Springs in the mid-1980s, Mr. Leri was “tickled to be invited” to a group show at Ashawagh Hall in the early 1990s. “It’s an awfully good place to get a start in art,” he said. “You meet a hell of a lot of people.”

    Today, Mr. Leri serves as the chairman of Ashawagh Hall’s art committee, a position he obviously enjoys. “There were 600 artists shown this year,” he said. “And the year’s not over.” He also buys some of the pieces, and over the years his house has become “filled with stuff from Ashawagh Hall,” he said.

    It was shortly after his first show that he “started to abstract. Then I got into mixed media and work with metals.” Presenting himself at the door of James DeMartis, a Springs blacksmith and artist, he learned to weld, and from there found his calling.

    Mr. Leri is known for large, geometric, abstract pieces, many of which are now in public spaces and private collections. He also makes wall sculptures, squares of metal in a frame, with various textures to form three-dimensional works of art. He was awarded “best mixed media” at Guild Hall’s 71st annual artist members exhibit.

    The artist has kept a hand in academia, this time as a teacher. He has led classes at his studio and now is leading adult workshops at the Golden Eagle art store in East Hampton, specializing in mixed media and figure sculpture.

    “It’s been an interesting journey,” he said. He had been surprised when he received a call from the store’s owner, Nancy Rowan, asking, “Do you know how to teach figurative?” But the return to his roots has provided an interesting twist in his teaching and his artwork.

    “We haven’t had a life model,” he said. One is coming in the spring. “So when I’ve been teaching, I’ve had to recommend anatomy books and break the human body down into different geometric shapes — which is what I do,” he explained.

    He has also seen how the figurative influence has affected his art. “Since I’ve been teaching, I’ve seen the difference in my geometric forms. You get influenced. There is a gentle sway and curve in my latest work that mimics the body.”

    Lately, Mr. Leri has been concentrating on smaller sculpture. The desk in his studio is covered with maquettes of paper pieces, abstract origami ready to be turned into larger works of brushed steel and other metals. Four pieces of work, each the size of a 3-year-old, are wrapped and ready to ship.

    Mr. Leri commented on the recent economic downturn and its effect on his art: “You have to adapt,” he said. His uncle, the artist, told him, “You’re a fine artist, but an artist needs to eat,” Mr. Leri recalled with a smile. “Make sure to get a trade, so you always have a way to make a living, and do your art.”

    “If you don’t have a living, you’ll make whatever sells,” Mr. Leri said. “And then, you’re lost.”

    The Bay Street Theatre will be transformed into a Mardi Gras set, structurally and musically, for the ringing in of 2012. Joe Lauro of Sag Harbor and his band the Who Dat Loungers have remade the venue’s stage into a large dance floor and added a lounge and bar area at the rear of the theater. Patrons will no longer have to leave the music to visit the bar, where purchases will support the theater. The renovations were designed and completed by Gary Hygom and John Sullivan, who work for the theater. With Mr. Lauro, they thought it unacceptable that Sag Harbor lacked a New Year’s Eve dance party.

    The evening will begin at 9 on Dec. 31, with New Dawn playing a blend of danceable soul and oldies. Dawnette Darden, the lead singer, also lends her vocals to the party’s headliners, the Who Dat Loungers, who will play New Orleans party music ranging from Louis Armstrong to Dr. John from 10:30 p.m. through the wee hours.

    Mr. Lauro, who runs Historic Films in Greenport, has compiled classic holiday and musical film clips that will be shown between sets, and the theater will have special lighting, decorations, confetti, and all things New Year’s. The $60 tickets come with a champagne toast at midnight and dessert. Special packages are available, including hotel rooms at Baron’s Cove Inn and the Sag Harbor Inn.

At 230 Elm

    Offering a live band for New Year’s is a first for Tim Burke at 230 Elm, the name and location of the former Polish Hall in Southampton, built in 1934, that he has owned for three years. Although the hall is used for other events such as weddings, fund-raisers, fashion shows, and corporate meetings, Mr. Burke has increased the music options there, including with a weekly open mike night at the more casual downstairs bar, 230 Down.

    For New Year’s Eve, only the first 200 ticketholders will hear “Auld Lang Syne” performed by Paul Mahos and New Life Crisis at their show, which will be set list and genre free, from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. The band’s mostly 1980s-influenced covers are known to be transformed by their unique stamp, with Mr. Mahos embodying the artists, whether Bono or Johnny Cash or Elvis. The band will also play originals, for example their radio hit “Daylight,” from when they were signed by Tommy Boy Records in 2000.

    An opening performance by Leah Laurenti of “American Idol” fame will start the party at 9 p.m. At midnight, balloons will drop and the scene from Times Square will be shown on a 12-foot screen. Black tie is optional. Tickets cost $75 in advance or $100 at the door.

A Blue Collar Ball

    A casual spot to see a band on New Year’s Eve is East Hampton Bowl, where the Blue Collar Band has been booked for a party. Ian Grossman, the general manager, said it was his first time booking a band for New Year’s at the alley’s lounge, which will soon be renamed Rumourz. Live music with reasonably priced drinks is something he said the East End could use more of.

    The BCB, as the band members call themselves, was created by John Havlicek, the lead vocalist and keyboard player, who is a builder by day. He said he has had some success as a solo artist and with the band through CD sales and gigs around town. He has new musicians that he considers “fresh meat” on the music scene.

    The band will play crowd-pleasing classic rock for the event, although the styles can range from light jazz to heavier rock. A $40 ticket will buy you admission, a hot buffet, four hours of bowling, and all of the familiar New Year’s traditions. The party will go from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m., and reservations have been recommended.

    Another year . . . and another totally subjective list of my favorite books of the year. As ever, it is a personal list, and one that totally leans toward my own sensibilities. And yet I can’t imagine a reader picking up any one of these books and not being challenged, stimulated, or wildly entertained — or all three at once. I hope you find one you enjoy.

    Happy holidays.

“The Pale King”

    Admittedly, a novel about a bunch of I.R.S. agents doesn’t exactly sound like a rip-roaring good time, and there are long stretches of crushing, nearly unendurable boredom. But if you can hang with it, you’ll find any number of riffs — about loneliness, for example, or the indignity of living a bureaucratic nightmare — that are as exhilarating as anything in contemporary fiction.

    This may be the saddest part of David Foster Wallace’s tragic suicide (in 2008): He was getting better.

“Townie: A Memoir”

    Andre Dubus III, who was the son of the great short-story writer Andre Dubus, is himself a well-respected novelist (“House of Sand and Fog”). Here he perfectly captures the Trans Am era of the 1970s in this affecting memoir about a teen living in his father’s shadow, dealing with divorce, and, most of all, fighting. It’s about expiating anger through violence. Young Andre loses fights, wins fights, and keeps on fighting until the drawn blood can drown out loss. Or does it? Either way, it’s a harrowing experience.

“Thinking, Fast and Slow”

    Daniel Kahneman’s book tells us nothing less than why we think the way we do. The conclusions are not always uplifting, but they are fascinating. We learn how fickle and easily persuaded minds are, and why we choose the things we do, and why we’re so often wrong. Mr. Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winner in economic sciences, has written a book that will keep you humble about your own cognitive intelligence while at the same time stimulating it.

“Those Guys Have All the Fun:

Inside the World of ESPN”

    James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales use the same technique they employed in their 2003 “S.N.L.” tell-all — of stringing together a series of interviews to tell their story — and the results here are just as seamless and effective. It is the tale of how a fired hockey announcer used a $9,000 cash advance on his credit card to form a television empire and change American culture for good. There’s also fun dirt on the ESPN broadcasters, who with 24-hour exposure have become more familiar to many of us than Cronkite was a generation ago.

“Blue Nights”

    How ironic is it that a writer once notorious for her “emotional coolness” is now America’s foremost chronicler of loss? While Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” dealt with the death of her husband, “Blue Nights” covers the death of her adopted daughter, Quintana, and is even more lucid and self-lacerating. Was she a good mother? Did she give enough? They’re questions all parents ask themselves, but rarely with the honesty of Ms. Didion.

“Feast Day of Fools”

    The third book in James Lee Burke’s new Sheriff Hack Holland series, and clearly influenced by Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men” — so much so, in fact, that a writer of less talent could be accused of theft. Most readers know Mr. Burke from his Dave Robicheaux series, which many consider the best crime fiction published in America. But the Holland books — full of crackling violence and dust bowl existentialism — just might top it.

“The Devil All the Time”

    Set in the same white-trash Ohio milieu as “Knockemstiff,” the author’s stunning fictional debut of a few years ago, Donald Ray Pollock’s work continues to read like a mash of William Faulkner and 1970s American exploitation cinema. This one is billed as a “thriller,” and though you’ll get plenty of “evil,” don’t expect “good” to show up anytime soon. This is noir fiction so thick you can barely see through it, and while it is thoroughly apolitical, it tells us more about the spiritual annihilation caused by poverty than a hundred sociologists.

“Steve Jobs”

    There will never be a need for another Jobs bio after this doorstopper, which includes Walter Isaacson’s unprecedented access to the man himself (more than 40 interviews). It says a lot about what a compelling read this is that the drama of Jobs’s personal life often supersedes that of his business life. (Jobs frequents a restaurant in Northern California where, unknowingly, his estranged father is the owner, and the inventor’s long-lost sister turns out to be the novelist Mona Simpson.)

    The flaw is Mr. Isaacson’s uncritical devotion to Jobs’s achievement: There’s no doubt that Jobs is the main architect of our technological future, but with a whole new generation who can barely take a moment to look up from their iPhones to have a conversation, the author never questions whether that inheritance is a blessing or a nightmare.

“The Paris Wife: A Novel”

    The story of Ernest Hemingway’s marriage to his first wife, Hadley Richardson, told from the wife’s perspective. The novel gets it all in: Paris in the 1920s, Scott and Zelda, and a portrayal of the characters later to be met in “The Sun Also Rises.” It’s a great concept, and Paula McLain does a credible job embodying the thoughts and feeling of her heroine.

    Things end badly for Hadley in the short term, of course — or was she “lucky” to have been spared a lifetime of torment? Ms. McLain hints at an answer.

“Go the F**k to Sleep”

    A children’s book for adults by Adam Mansbach, and a great guilt reliever: You’ve thought these very words — now someone has the guts to write them down. Almost as funny as this book are the reviews of it, on Amazon.com, for example, by “outraged” (and apparently perfect) parents. As for the rest of us who have a sense of humor, it is f**king hilarious.

—

    Kurt Wenzel is the author of the novels “Lit Life,” “Gotham Tragic,” and “Exposure.” He lives in Springs.

We’re all different people every day, as is said. You might be a Broadway singer and actress reprising “Camelot” with Jeremy Irons one day, playing opposite Matthew Modine’s Thomas Jefferson the next, and going on to headline the Noel Coward Awards, maybe squeezing in a dinner with Alec Baldwin.

    Come the weekend, though, there’s that riding lesson for your 5-year-old out in Amagansett. And wait a minute — late-breaking development — the Har-Tru’s calling for a quick set of doubles. Before you know it, it’s time to round up a passel of kids for “The Nutcracker” at Guild Hall.

    But what if you blurred the bifurcation? Instead of dividing your attention, combined your selves and made the personal, professional?

    Over what she called “a six-year journey” to record her new album, “Legrand Affair,” on which she sings the music of the film composer Michel Legrand, Melissa Errico had three children. At first, she sang pregnant. “We weren’t satisfied,” she said on a recent Sunday in Southampton, where she and her husband, the tennis commentator Patrick McEnroe, were staying with her mother. She would go on to find that the life changes had changed her artistry. “Having more children had me feeling more deeply,” the work coming to reflect her emotions about them. “So much of it was from the heart. . . . I sang it all over again,” each song in one or two takes, “trying to make it simpler and simpler. I didn’t feel like a young Broadway star anymore.”

    “This showbiz-motherhood thing is not easy, from starting up again to aging and having different priorities. I can sing a Noel Coward song so differently now.”

    “The more you feel, the quieter you get,” Mr. Legrand himself said to her.

    The album was produced by Phil Ramone, with original arrangements by Mr. Legrand, who conducts the Brussels Philharmonic Orchestra on the disc. Its title is a play on “The Thomas Crown Affair,” Norman Jewison’s 1968 movie starring Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, and one happy set of chess pieces. That film’s score is one of many dozens Mr. Legrand has written, its song “Windmills of Your Mind,” which is on the new album, winning him an Academy Award.

    Among the 15 tracks of hits and lesser-known tunes on “Legrand Affair” is “In Another Life,” a new song with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman. The disc has won praise from The Wall Street Journal and USA Today and was added to The Washington Post’s holiday gift recommendations.

    “This is Michel Legrand unbridled,” Ms. Errico said, “he has no restraint in style. It’s him late in his career, taking his own songs and tripping out. . . . It’s a real homage to the last things he ever did. There’s scope to it.”

    The two met while working on the musical “Amour,” for which Ms. Errico was nominated for a Tony Award. “Our music just went well together,” she said, her descriptions of his ranging from “chromatic” and “tangly” to “eccentric, sensual,” and capable of unleashing “a little tornado of emotion.” In contrast with Coward’s famous “talent to amuse,” she said, Mr. Legrand has “a talent to intrigue.”

    The relationship goes back to her childhood, in a way: “My father — he’s a classical concert pianist — loved Legrand’s music. He’d play it when trying to seduce my mother. I was already a devotee when we started rehearsals.”

    “I came out of the gate pretty high,” Ms. Errico said of her career, getting cast as Cosette in “Les Miserables” when she was a freshman at Yale. She has played Eliza Doolittle in “My Fair Lady” and was cast by Stephen Sondheim in the Bernadette Peters role in “Sunday in the Park With George,” which she’ll take up again at the Kennedy Center in June.

    Singing, Ms. Errico said, held a place in her “long-term soul . . . I’ve got to sing. If I had one day left, I’d sing a song.”

    Before her repeat performances in the American Musical Theater Salutes series at Guild Hall, Ms. Errico said, her first singing engagement out this way was in the mid-1990s at the Bay Street Theatre in “Make Someone Happy,” the musical by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. It had a set designed by Tony Walton and occasioned a backstage visit from Julie Andrews, who signed Ms. Errico’s guestbook, “With love from the other Eliza!”

    It’s the fourth year that the East Hampton Historical Society has mounted a family-oriented exhibit, “A Children’s World,” which features antique toys from the 1790s to the 1960s, but Richard Barons, the executive director of the society, seems as excited about the items on display as if it were the first time.

    The exhibit, which runs through the end of the year, “seemed logical when we started out — to do something for the whole family that’s free at this time of year,” Mr. Barons said.

    The initial show has grown, as both historical society members and the public have seen the exhibit and offered some of their own private collections to be put on display.

    “It seems to resonate with the people who come to see it,” Mr. Barons said. He took a Buddy L train engine down from the mantel, a heavy piece most likely from the 1930s. “It can run on coal,” he said, hefting the weight of the piece in his hands.

    “A couple came to the show two years ago, and said, ‘Call us,’ ” he said, about some contributors who put their collections on temporary display for the show. “But it can be a challenge. Most people don’t want their collection gone at Christmas. That’s when you want to display the toys,” he said.

    The show, mounted at the Clinton Academy on Main Street in East Hampton, features toys “from all countries, all periods,” Mr. Barons said. The show vividly depicts how children have played through the past three centuries.

    There’s a Christmas village, most likely constructed in the 1940s in Japan, made of paper and cardboard. There are folk art and handmade toys, along with a bevy of antique dolls. One is called 3-in-1 Little Trudy, an example of the composition dolls popular in this country until World War II. With a knob on the top of her head, hidden by a bonnet, Trudy’s head can be turned, Exorcist-style, to reveal three different faces — smiling, crying, and sleeping.

“The L.V.I.S. found it and gave it to us,” he said of a donation by the Ladies Village Improvement Society of a little sled, most likely from the 1890s. There is also a large collection of Steiff stuffed animals, ranging from the original “Teddy” bears, named for President Theodore Roosevelt, who staunchly refused to kill a black bear that had been chained to a tree on a hunting expedition in 1902.

    Other toys tell a tale of war — there is a rusty bomb or torpedo pedal car, along with biplanes and other military vehicles.

    The most delicate of the exhibit pieces will be displayed behind glass to discourage curious little fingers, but children and their parents are encouraged to attend.

The Clinton Academy will house a collection of antique toys — those representing land, sea, and sky are seen here — through the end of the year.

    “Last year a little girl, around 8, came to the exhibit with her dad,” Mr. Barons said. “She saw this antique cradle” — he gestured to a handmade doll cradle on the floor — “and told her dad that it was all she wanted for Christmas. The dad asked me, ‘Where do I get one of those?’ “ Mr. Barons laughed.

    “I saw the little girl again in the spring, over at the Mulford Farm, and she told me that she had gotten one for Christmas. She was so happy,” he said.

    The Clinton Academy, along with Home, Sweet Home, the Mulford Farm, and the Osborn-Jackson House — all East Hampton Historical Society buildings — are being properly decked out for the holidays. “This year also involves the library, and a couple of the churches,” Mr. Barons said, speaking of a village holiday stroll scheduled for Saturday.

    The toy exhibit can be seen on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and on Sundays from noon to 5 through the end of the month.

    Some community choruses would appear to perform “The Messiah” practically every Christmas. It is a linchpin of the choral repertoire, it’s in English, and it tells the story of Christmas in a compelling way. Yet performing it so frequently turns the piece into something of a ritual for singers and audiences alike, and we should be grateful that our local Choral Society of the Hamptons sponsors more diverse programming. How much better to pull “The Messiah” out only occasionally, so that in hearing it again we are actually surprised by its greatness.

    Is there another piece of music in the classical canon that begins as stunningly as Handel’s “Messiah”? On Sunday afternoon, the Choral Society of the Hamptons had me thinking no. First comes the sublime recitative “Comfort Ye,” followed by the vocal flourishes of the aria “Ev’ry Valley,” both delivered here with poise by the tenor soloist, Nils Neubert. Then the chorus enters strongly with “And the Glory of the Lord,” quickly rising to full volume, and completing a trio of pieces showing unparalleled beauty, energy, and power.

    The chorus was well prepared and delivered Handel’s many intricate passages gracefully and crisply — no mean feat. Its director, Mark Mangini, also brought out nicely layered dynamics in the voices. “For Unto Us a Child Is Born” was especially good, with changing dynamic shapes giving pleasing variety to the repetitions in the music. The rich tone of the baritone soloist, Mischa Bouvier, on “The People That Walked in Darkness” matched well with the striking, sinuous melody. The mezzo-soprano Suzanne Schwing and soprano Rada Hastings’s duet on “He Shall Feed His Flock” was a true highlight, particularly Ms. Hastings’s voice on Handel’s achingly beautiful melody to the text “Come unto him, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and he shall give you rest.”

    The chorus was accompanied by the South Fork Chamber Ensemble, which showed forth admirably on the instrumental movements, especially the “Pifa,” Handel’s musical introduction of the shepherd’s abiding in the field. Also nice were the light string passages in the aria “But who may abide the day of his coming?” If space constraints were not a factor, additional strings might have solved minor intonation problems that afflicted the small ensemble at times.

    “The Messiah” is composed in multiple sections. While the chorus performed primarily Part One, or the Christmas portion of the piece, some movements from Part Two were interpolated in. The near ubiquitous “Hallelujah” chorus, as Mr. Mangini pointed out in his program notes, is actually from Part Two, the section that pertains to Easter. However, he also allowed that you can’t really leave it out of any performance of the piece, and so we were treated to it. And, perhaps because it’s been a while since the Choral Society performed “The Messiah,” initially very few audience members remembered to rise for the “Hallelujah.” Slowly, people caught on and got to their feet. That so many had forgotten this age-old custom I took as a good sign: this “Messiah” was no ritual, but rather a fresh and excited performance of a masterpiece.

Frank Wimberley And East End Artists

    Beginning today, Spanierman Modern is showing both new work by Frank Wimberley and “Artists of the East End II,” which highlights works created from the mid-20th century to the present.

    Mr. Wimberley’s paintings are thick impastos of palette-applied, high-keyed colorful acrylic paint. Sometimes monochromatic and sometimes with sections or stripes, they all have a dynamic feel and a rich depth to them.

    “Artists of the East End II” marks the beginning of the modern East End artist colony which took off in the 1950s as painters fled the city to find new, large barn studios away from the summer colony in places like Springs that were dirt cheap. Already a community in New York City, they continued their involvement here.

    The exhibits are on view through Jan. 14.

Watermill Center Sale

    Robert Wilson has opened his New York loft to sell a selection of works from his collection for the holidays.

    The sale will feature ancient vessels and objects from places such as Africa, China, Indonesia, and Latin America up through midcentury and work by contemporary designers such as Marcel Breuer, Marianne Brandt, Hans Bellmann, Denis Santachiara, and Philippe Starck. Prices will range from $10 to $10,000.

    The sale will take place at 115 West 29th Street on the 10th Floor in New York on Monday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Proceeds from the sale will benefit the the Watermill Center Collection, which is being restored and catalogued prior to a move to a new storage facility. Paddle 8 will feature 25  to 30 items on its auction site, Paddle8.com, through Dec. 25.

Halsey Mckay in New York

    Patrick Brennan will be featured in two New York City shows in collaboration with Halsey Mckay Gallery in East Hampton.

    Mr. Brennan will show at Morgan Lehman Gallery in Chelsea tomorrow through Jan. 28. The exhibit will feature his latest paintings and is built upon an exhibit in East Hampton this summer. His work will be shown with Paul Wacker’s “Of Life” exhibit in the main exhibit space. A reception will be held tomorrow from 6 to 8 p.m.

    On Tuesday, “Moon Drawings, iMovies and Mirrors for Eyes,” will open with a reception from 6 to 9 p.m. The show marks the publication of “Mirrors for Eyes,” a 40-page monograph with full color illustrations by Mr. Brennan and Halsey Mckay Gallery. He will show “Moon Drawings,” a series of works on paper at the gallery space at 195 East Third Street. It will be on view through Feb. 18.

   The hollows of winter are gray and black lines by Piet Mondrian, whose volumed boxes are filled or empty, rich and poor, according to how your eye copes with them, the time you expend in pursuit of all of their quiet wind and weather and the patience they ask of you. They are indeed conundrums, emblematic of the manner in which one may decide garden change (remembered or on the spot, even though the spot may be but a repeated summer memory or one as close as a much-stared-at window view). Both are as difficult as the recollection of a specific Mondrian, blue or blue-gray, small or smaller still, on wood or canvas, smooth or with craquelure, free or under glass, internally framed and, of course, where was I when I first saw it, how old was I, in what mood, in or just out of love? How long did I look at it? Was it in a museum? Or a book? But none of that was so. It was in my parents’ living room, where, on an extended summer loan, an early Mondrian, on wood, glassed, stood on the Chickering piano and it had two small yellow squares among the grays and blues.

    To the terrace adjoining the revised potager has gone an elderly weeping mulberry in front of a boldly painted lattice screen. It is firmly staked against fall or tilt and I see it as a beginning of a set piece, a still life. Now stubbed back for winter, the mulberry, always a tardy performer, will, come spring, late in the season put forth its pendulous cords. When they are full-down, nearly level with the red sets of the terrace, I will put a two-gallon Haws watering can at its skirts, just so. I will also polish the brass on the rose sprinkler spout and fill the can so that it doesn’t tip, tilt, fall, or move from its spot. Willow bark will go in it and the can will be employed for rooting cuttings.

    Out the winter dining table window, due south, stands a quadrant of (I do use this as a barometer of recall) chaemycyparis pisifera aurea pendula grown far too exuberantly for what else grows there, four weeping dwarf Chinese dogwoods of perfectly serene and well-mannered comportment. The golden cypress is a most welcome burnish in the composition’s seasonal Dutch drabs, but too big is too big. Scale is all. Elements must fit or else the entire composition is awry.

    Prune hard, of course. But how? Spherically, echoing the dogwood? Or severely cubed to give bolster to the dogwood? My hands go up and I frame and frame, cutting here, tidying there, at times transplanting the quadrant. But not until spring. The gold of the cypress is too valuable to the composition. I could not, at any rate, bear looking at stubs for months.

    What is it, after all, but blues, grays, blacks, tans with yes that yellow on that piano years ago?

    Reading Warren H. Phillips’s new autobiography, “Newspaperman: Inside the News Business at The Wall Street Journal,” I was reminded of the expression commonly mistaken for an ancient Chinese curse — “May you live in interesting times.” Once one comes to understand that these words are neither ancient, Chinese, nor a curse, it becomes easy to appreciate them as a good wish, something to be made the most of. That is exactly what Mr. Phillips does.

    The son of an immigrant father of modest means, he was single-minded, from childhood on, in his ambition for a career in newspapers. In his first job, as a copyboy for The New York Herald Tribune, he earned $16 a week. Most of his career was spent at The Wall Street Journal, from which he retired in 1991 as publisher and C.E.O. of its parent corporation, Dow Jones & Company. The parallel rises of Mr. Phillips and The Wall Street Journal itself were a heady experience that certainly made for “interesting times.” These Mr. Phillips chronicles in this very well-written volume.

    Following his graduation from Queens College in 1947, Mr. Phillips sought jobs at several New York City newspapers, with no success. “Last on my list of New York newspapers . . . was The Wall Street Journal, ” he writes. “It was then a thin, one-hundred-thousand-circulation financial paper downtown at 44 Broad Street . . . just south of Wall Street. There my luck changed.”

“Newspaperman”

Warren H. Phillips

McGraw-Hill, $30

    And there, also, his career began. By the time he became the paper’s managing editor nine years later, the author had served as a foreign correspondent in several world capitals, its foreign editor, and its regional editor in Chicago. Along the way, he became imbued with The Journal’s uncompromising standards of honesty, integrity, and high-quality writing. (He quotes a Journal colleague as saying, “There is no such thing as bad writing. Only bad thinking.”) Indeed, a 1969 Harris Poll called The Journal “the most trusted newspaper” in America.

    When, at the height of the cold war, the C.I.A. pressed Mr. Phillips to allow it to place bona fide journalists in the paper’s Moscow bureau who would also be spying for the agency, he categorically refused. Not that he was unsympathetic to the request or unwilling to help his country. Rather, “I rejected their overtures for completely different reasons of conscience and practicality,” he states, elaborating that if the Soviets learned that even a single Journal correspondent was also a C.I.A. agent, it would jeopardize the safety of every other Journal correspondent in Eastern Europe. “This I was not prepared to do.”

    The major portion of Mr. Phillips’s story is the story of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones themselves for the 44 years he worked there. From his privileged vantage point, we witness exactly how his newspaper grew into a major international journalistic presence and how — toward the end of his career there — the signals were clear that the supremacy of print journalism was coming to an end. Though ultimately loyal to The Journal and to Dow Jones, Mr. Phillips is not unwilling to reveal their faults and blemishes, along with their strengths and successes. In a thoughtful epilogue, he shares his wisdom on The Wall Street Journal’s 2007 sale to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

    Spending virtually all of one’s career under one corporate roof causes one to feel like a member of a closed universe, knowing all the other members of that universe in person or as part of the corporate lore. While the author’s apparently encyclopedic knowledge of The Journal and Dow Jones will make this book most appealing to the other members of that particular universe, that is by no means to say that it lacks universal appeal to anyone interested in news and the news media of the last 60 years.

    Moreover, spending virtually all of one’s career under one corporate roof and reaching the top of the corporate ladder — that’s what turns someone into what used to be called “a company man.” And that is what Mr. Phillips is, though I don’t intend this as a criticism. By so artfully combining the story of his life with the story of the enterprise he served well for so long, he maintains an admirable personal modesty in the light of such impressive professional accomplishment.

—

    Warren H. Phillips lives in Bridgehampton.

    A weekend resident of East Hampton, James I. Lader regularly contributes book reviews to The Star.

Its glossy, heavy stock and appealing, even sexy, Hollywood set-worthy pictures may have some mistaking the Main Street Historic District Guide for a more commercial endeavor.

Although one section of Main Street is devoted to transient high-end consumerism, this booklet, produced by East Hampton Village and the East Hampton Historical Society, is a paean to Main Street’s permanence. Paid for by grants from the National Park Service and the state’s historic preservation offices as well as the historical society, the guide commemorates the tradition of preservation in the village and its more formalized efforts with the creation of historic districts.

The Main Street District, formed 25 years ago, stretches from Woods Lane to Huntting Lane. The guide highlights buildings that have been placed under public or nonprofit stewardship and residences still in private hands. These houses have had renovations or additions that have been completed since the historic district was established. The guide’s illustrations show how houses can be brought up to modern standards, the addition of pools and decks included, while still maintaining the traditional appearance of the streetscape.

    “We wanted to show how you can have a modern life in a historic building,” said Robert Hefner, the director of historic services for the village and the co-author of the booklet. In the quarter-century that the district has been in existence, there have been 150 projects approved. Only 18 properties out of 75 have remained unchanged, Mr. Hefner said. Yet, the streetscape remains consistent.

    According to Mr. Hefner, the applicants have been understanding. “Those who are attracted to Main Street are aware of the history and want to be part of that. They’ve tried hard to do the right thing.”

    The population of East Hampton continues to change. Mr. Hefner said that the book, which was sent to every village household and has been given to village inns for visitors, is an educational tool. “People who live here are no longer growing up in East Hampton and knowing its history.”

    The guide comes at a good time. The historical society, which has had a walking-tour pamphlet for many years, just ran out of copies. That tour is now included in the guide, with thumbnail full-color illustrations next to each description.

    Richard Barons, the historical society’s director and the guide’s other author, said the tour would soon become a cellphone app as well, with additional text and photos.

    Mr. Barons said that buildings we now take for granted — the windmills, Mulford Farm, and Home, Sweet Home, for instance — were all in peril at different times, and had it not been for the efforts of individuals and groups like the Ladies Village Improvement Society, they might all exist only in the 19th and early-20th-century prints and paintings made of them by artists such as the Morans and Childe Hassam.

    A painting by Thomas Moran of his house in East Hampton, called the Studio, and a photograph from when he lived here are included in the guide. The house is now being restored to the way it was when he lived in it. Mr. Hefner said the painting was included as a reminder of the artistic heritage of Main Street and the inspirational qualities that have attracted artists to it over the centuries.

    The simple saltbox structure at the Mulford Farm is one the earliest surviving homesteads in the village and the country. While many families visit the “old country” of their ancestors, here, Scottish Mulfords of recent vintage came to visit the new land of their 17th-century ancestors this fall.

    Mr. Barons showed the visitors around and told them of the background and history of several buildings and objects associated with the family. These included a high chest recently acquired by the historical society that was made in Connecticut and purchased by the Mulfords during the time they spent there during the Revolutionary War.

    The family members were thrilled to see the houses and objects associated with the Mulfords and how they had been preserved by a caring community, Mr. Barons said.

The Main Street guide includes interior photographs such as those above, of the frame of the Pantigo Windmill, left, and the ceiling of the living room of the J. Harper Poor Cottage, now known as the Baker House 1650.