“Fred W. McDarrah: 

New York Scenes”

Sean Wilentz, Introduction

Abrams, $40

It is bittersweet that a monograph devoted to Fred W. McDarrah’s photographs is being released by Abrams so soon after the announcement of the close of The Village Voice last month. And yet “Fred W. McDarrah: New York Scenes” is a fitting and compelling visual epitaph for a photographer, publication, and ultimately a city that no longer exists.

McDarrah, who died in 2007, had a 50-year career with the paper, beginning with chronicling the art, literary, and music scenes of bohemian downtown Manhattan in the 1950s and its eventual explosion into the counterculture of the 1960s. But he kept going after that, capturing a city in constant upheaval and renewal in the following decades.

The book is accompanied by an exhibition of 100 of the artist’s vintage prints from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s at the Steven Kasher Gallery in Chelsea. The show opened last Thursday and remains on view through Nov. 3. The photographer, who was a part-time resident of East Hampton for 25 years, will also have gallery space devoted to him as part of the Parrish Art Museum’s yearly reinstallation of its permanent collection, which will open on Nov. 11 in Water Mill. This is in addition to three more solo shows planned in New York and San Francisco.

Clearly he is having a moment. 

Although McDarrah started taking pictures at 13, when he bought his first camera at the 1939 World’s Fair, it wasn’t until he joined World War II in Japan that he thought about the medium seriously. He set up a darkroom for his photos while otherwise busy training paratroopers, he told The Star in 1999. His intention after the war was to become a magazine writer, and he enrolled in New York University as a journalism student, but he also took technical courses in photography prior to that. 

It was Philip Pavia, an artist who had started an artists’ gathering in the Village known as the Club, who gave McDarrah his first real assignment, taking photos of the events there and publishing them in Pavia’s related arts magazine, It Is. He captured the artists both at the Club and at play in the nearby Cedar Bar. His pictures have become some of the best known of that scene and period.

At the same time, he was meeting all of the Beat Generation poets, who were closely allied with the downtown artists of the time and participating in Club events. Soon, pictures of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac became as common in his portfolio as his photos of Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning.

By 1960, he was making books of those photographs with Elias Wilentz, the owner of the Eighth Street Bookshop and the father of Sean Wilentz, who wrote the introduction to the book. “The Beat Scene” and “The Artist’s World” were the result of those earlier efforts. 

Around that time, McDarrah joined The Voice at the invitation of its founders. Its first issue came out in 1955. He told The Star he started out selling ads, “eventually contributing some photographs.” In time, he became its photo editor, a position he held for many years, and then, in the last years of his life, he was a consultant.

On the whole, there are relatively few posed pictures in the book and exhibition, and many of those have an air of spontaneity to them. He seems at heart a photojournalist, relying on unfolding events for subject matter, whether it’s a New Year’s Eve party at the Club in 1959 with a dazed-looking Kerouac on his way out or a Women’s Lib protest in 1970. 

In the Star interview he contrasted his style of working with Mary Ellen Mark’s (who he said became much more involved with her subjects): “I’m going to take some pictures and then I’m gone.” Yet in the same article he noted that his portraits had an intimacy and openness that one can achieve only through knowing the subject well. This apparent contradiction can be reconciled in the book’s artist biography, in which writers from his estate note that he was always on the move, not stopping in one place too long for fear of missing something else. 

“Many photographers would say, ‘Oh, Mr. Motherwell, can I come over and take your picture?’ But you’re not going to get anything good that way,” he said in The Star. “But if Motherwell, say, or Franz Kline knew you, then you’d go to the studio and it would be very relaxed and informal.” One look at the photographs of Kline in the book and the show (two slightly different photos from the same year), looking diminutive next to his towering paintings, but so very relaxed, and it’s clear he is correct.

His diligence and love of the Village and its arts scene helped him capture early moments of later icons. These included Al Pacino in his first Off Broadway play, Woody Allen on the microphone at the Gaslight, and Bob Dylan at Cafe Wha?

There is an amazing photo in the book of the photographer’s son as a child with Andy Warhol and Susan Hoffman, whose Factory “superstar” name was Viva, as he is in mid-wail, mouth agape and eyes squeezed shut. According to the book, Warhol was a neighbor, and when McDarrah was taking care of the boy and got an assignment, he would drop him off there because there were artist’s supplies and things to do.

All in all, both book and exhibition document a life well lived and a herculean work ethic few can match, and we are all the better for it.

“Accessory to War”

Neil deGrasse Tyson

and Avis Lang 

W.W. Norton, $30

Not since “Watch Mr. Wizard” — created by a college science and English major turned radio announcer named Don Herbert in the golden days of black-and-white TV — has there been a more genial, positive, accessible media explainer of matters scientific than the bona fide astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. 

Off screen, Mr. Tyson is the director of the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium, also a veteran of various science-oriented commissions and boards, and an award-winning author on matters astrophysical, from the Big Bang’s foundational fury to voracious black holes to the rise and fall of poor ex-planet Pluto (though new research suggests it may soon regain its former celestial status).

Mr. Tyson’s latest book, written with his longtime researcher and editor, Avis Lang, has a darker and more political tone. 

As both the Trump administration and its critics would do well to study, “Accessory to War” lays out in often overwhelming detail the way scientific progress has from time immemorial been prompted, funded, often commandeered or co-opted by mankind’s warriors, their political leaders, and policymakers — for better and (too often) for worse. 

But Mr. Tyson also reveals the personal journey that led him to write the book, in part perhaps as expiation for his complicity in, in the words of the subtitle, “The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military.”

Growing up in anti-Vietnam War America, he says, images of the suffering on all sides “embedded themselves in my mind.”

They returned when his then-9-year-old daughter scampered by naked in a way eerily reminiscent of that 1972 Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of a little Vietnamese girl fleeing U.S. napalm. “In that fleeting moment they were one and the same,” he writes.

The real epiphany came at an April 2003 Space Foundation symposium in Colorado Springs — jammed with military men, aerospace industry leaders, and fellow scientists — when attention suddenly shifted to CNN coverage of the U.S. “shock and awe” assault on Baghdad. And Mr. Tyson was shocked at the audience reaction.

“Every time a corporation was identified as the producer of a particular instrument of destruction, its employees . . . broke into applause,” he recalls. “I was anguished. . . . In video games you’re expected to cheer when you destroy your virtual targets and proceed to the next level. But it’s hard to accept that kind of behavior when your targets are real. People die. . . .”

“Then and there,” he continues, “I grasped the unattractive, undeniable fact that without the Space Symposium, without the many symposia like it . . . without the power sought by its participants — both for themselves and for the nations they represent — and without the tandem investments in technology fostered by that quest for power, there would be no astronomy, no astrophysics, no astronauts, no exploration of the solar system, and barely any comprehension of the cosmos.”

And Mr. Tyson scrolls through history to find an amazing antecedent to this view.

Back in 1696, he notes, the Dutch astronomer and mathematician Christiaan Huygens saw military conflict as one of several necessary prods to progress and creativity — that “such a mixture as Misfortunes, Wars, Afflictions, Poverty and the like were given us for this very good end, viz. the exercising our Wits and Sharpening our Inventions; by forcing us to provide for our own necessary defence against our Enemies. . . .”

“And if Men were to lead their whole Lives in an undisturb’d continual Peace, in no fear of Poverty, no danger of War, I don’t doubt they would live little better than the Brutes, without all knowledge or enjoyment of those Advantages that make our lives pass on with pleasure and profit. . . .”

Indeed, Mr. Tyson concedes that star charts, calendars, chronometers, telescopes, maps, compasses, rockets, satellites, drones, much of modern electronics and communications began not as purely “inspirational civilian endeavors. Dominance was their goal; increase of knowledge was incidental.”

He finds fascinating tidbits in sorting through the procession of this not really so covert connection.

Astronomers developed useful knowledge for determining one’s position on earth and knowing when night would fall and daybreak — or eclipses — occur, critical stuff for commanders of armies and navies. 

The Greek military inventor and mathematician Archimedes reportedly conceived a “burning mirror” to redirect and focus sunlight to enflame a fleet of Roman ships, circa 213.

The first real telescope was created by a spectacle maker for the military commander in chief of the Netherlands in 1608 during the Catholic-Protestant Eighty Years’ War. 

Galileo reportedly learned of it and made better ones — first achieving three times magnification, eventually 60 times “to discover [the enemy] at a much greater distance,” as he explained, “so that for 2 hours and more we can detect him before he detects us. . . .”

Early photography and spectroscopy became the midwives of astrophysics, providing visible images of heavenly objects and — by analysis of the wavelengths of light they emitted — an idea of their physical composition. 

In more recent times, World War II and the Cold War accelerated military and scientific progress, the space race, U.S. men on the moon. And the Cold War’s end produced a devastating, corresponding de-escalation. The number of aerospace companies fell from 75 to 62 by the fall of the Berlin Wall and to just five by 2001, Mr. Tyson notes — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics — despite a resurgence in defense spending prompted by the Vietnam War and, with only a slight pause, continuing thereafter.

That outlay was kicked into even higher gear by the 9/11 attacks and U.S. responses.

In fact, the Iraq war was a bloody showcase for new space-based technology, with satellites both military and civilian enlisted to provide vastly improved communications, observation of the enemy, guidance for friendly forces and their weapons — tanks, jets, missiles, and more. Returns on one global aerospace index rose nearly 90 percent, compared with a 60-percent rise in global equities, Mr. Tyson reports.

Along with the rise in defense or dual-use space spending came an escalation in aggressive Washington rhetoric and rationale for U.S. supremacy in space.

Even months before 9/11, a commission headed by soon-to-be-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld invoked the threat of a “Space Pearl Harbor” and called for “power projection in, from, and through space” so that America would “remain the world’s leading space-faring nation, [able] to defend its space assets against hostile acts and to negate the hostile use of space against U.S. interests.” 

An “altogether a grandiose and open-ended agenda,” Mr. Tyson calls it. 

And while some subsequent administrations dialed back to simply maintaining a “competitive advantage” in space, we now see re-escalation. “It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space; we must have American dominance in space,” Vice President Mike Pence recently declared.

But the author explains how the proliferation of other nations in space, Russia and China foremost among them — with all their satellites, missile stockpiles, progress on killer energy beams, and already demonstrated long-range internet hacking — make dominance for any one of them increasingly unlikely.

Although not altogether opposed to President Trump’s proposed Space Force in recent interviews, Mr. Tyson here warns that preparation can lead to extermination. “Each further step on the continuum escalates the danger, from simply operating in space, to operating militarily, to operating aggressively, to operating lethally.” 

The fallout, figurative and literal, from war in space — destruction or disruption of satellites critical to communications, global positioning, and national defense, not to mention actual space-based chemical, biological, or nuclear missile attacks on terrestrial targets, and counterattacks in kind — would be too dangerous and costly for any rational consideration, Mr. Tyson believes.

“An optimist might contend that nobody but a rational actor would ever be permitted to make such decisions,” he writes, “but anybody who has watched the 1964 movie masterpiece ‘Dr. Strangelove’ or witnessed the rampant irrationality of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign is unlikely to agree.”

Like many others before and since, he calls for more international coordination and cooperation in space, despite the apparent hollowness of many such pacts, plans, and promises. 

The International Space Station, after all, seems likely to continue operations at least through 2024, he suggests, with mixed crews and heavy lifting by Russian rockets despite enflamed Moscow-Washington relations.

Taking pie in the sky to new heights, non-scientists might say, Mr. Tyson also suggests astrophysical solutions to some potential causes of war. Noting the critical importance to all high tech of “rare earth elements” now largely controlled by China, for example, he pictures widespread mining of asteroids found to contain them.

And to ensure sufficient water for our planet, there could even be capturing of comets, some of which “contain as much water as the entire Indian Ocean,” he writes. “The way to snare a comet is to match orbits with it and break off a piece, which should be very easy.”

Of course some sources of war have little to do with natural resources: ideology, religion, national pride, a leader’s lust for power, as we have been reminded by 9/11, subsequent terrorism, the violence attending fear and hatred of “the other” worldwide. 

Mr. Tyson knows this. Early on in this book he recalls that a down-to-earth demonstration of bellicose human nature after a banquet of the American Astrophysical Society in January 1991 was cut short by America’s launching Operation Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf. 

Walking off “some confused energy” in the streets of Philadelphia, he shouted to a 20-something mechanic working late: “Did you hear we went in?”

The answer — “Fuckin’ A! We’re at war!” — came back with a giddy fist pump.

“Probably I should have seen that coming,” Mr. Tyson concedes. “He was plugged into a primal passion that has energized so many wars across the millennia.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson is a part-time resident of East Hampton.

David M. Alpern ran the “Newsweek On Air” and “For Your Ears Only” network radio shows for more than 30 years, hosted weekly podcasts for World Policy Journal, and now voices news stories for the visually impaired at gatewave.org from his home in Sag Harbor.

“Fashion Climbing”

Bill Cunningham

Penguin Press, $27

Anna Wintour, Vogue editor and arbiter of style, once said, “We all get dressed for Bill.” Indeed. To have your picture taken by Bill Cunningham, New York’s original street-fashion photographer, who believed in ordinary people’s self-expression through clothes, was certainly a feather in one’s cap. He democratized fashion by showing that style wasn’t dependent on money or status, and his weekly roundup of street fashion in his long-running New York Times column, “On the Street,” featured every age, race, gender, creed, sexual orientation, and even our four-legged friends. For him, it was about the statement, the confidence of the wearer, and not much else.

Mr. Cunningham died in 2016 at age 87, taking photos for his column right up until his death. And it was only then, with some surprise, that his family discovered he had secretly written a memoir. 

“Fashion Climbing” was released last month during New York’s Fashion Week. But much like the 2010 documentary “Bill Cunningham New York,” which he reluctantly allowed to be made, the book isn’t so much about fashion as it is an affectionate telling of the journey of a gentleman who found true beauty and joy within the frivolity of fashion and became a modern-day anachronism.

The story begins in his “middle-class Catholic home in a lace-curtain Irish suburb of Boston.” In the summer of 1933, when Mr. Cunningham was 4, his mother caught him parading around in his sister’s dresses. She gave him a thrashing and threatened to break every bone in his body if he ever wore girls’ clothes again. Naturally, it had the opposite effect.

Forced to attend a trade high school, where his parents hoped the boy’s artistic tendencies would be curbed, Mr. Cunningham found his calling in an after-school job at the newly opened Bonwit Teller branch on Boston’s Newbury Street. Working as a stock boy and helping during the store’s fashion shows by taking photographs with a $5 camera, he learned one of his greatest lessons from Mrs. Rosalind DeHart, the store manager: “She showed me how to observe every woman I saw, seeing how she was dressed and accessorized, and then taking her apart in my mind’s eye and putting the right kind of clothes on her.”

After a two-week, all-expenses-paid stint at Bonwit’s New York store, the company offered him a prestigious scholarship to Harvard, which he likened to prison. He gave up on academia and fled back to New York in 1948, where he took to life “like a star shooting through the heavens.” 

Much of the storytelling depicts a young man of irrepressible exuberance. His unflappable spirit and constantly sunny disposition lend a sort of charming, slightly soft-in-the-head quality to the narration. But he also throws in a few meaningful revelations, like this one, which comes closest to shedding light on his sexuality, a topic about which he was famously guarded:

“It’s a crime families don’t understand how their children are oriented, and point them along their natural way. . . . The country would not have half the trouble with mentally disturbed people it has if parents would accept each child’s God-given personality and stop trying to force what they feel is more suitable for their offspring.”

There’s a lot about hat making and his millinery trade in this slim, 200-odd-page memoir, with photographs to show that he was essentially a designer of truly kooky head-toppers.

East End readers should delight in a wonderfully entertaining chapter titled “The Southampton Shop.” By the mid-1950s, Mr. Cunningham had a robust New York millinery business, which he operated under William J., leaving out his last name to avoid further embarrassing his parents. Having developed a popular line of “beach hats” — a photograph shows an octopus hat with tentacles swooping down across a face, and another with a fish perched atop a model’s head with its body and tail trailing down her back — the author decided he would sell them in Southampton, “the watering spot of the New York Social Register.” 

He rented a tiny shop on Job’s Lane across from the old Parrish Art Museum for $1,000 for the summer and filled the window with his whimsical creations, much to the horror of the conservative Southampton dowagers, who found them vulgar and blamed the hats for a sudden influx of prostitutes to the genteel village. 

The shop, which was adored by the young and the eccentric, lasted four summers. By 1960, Mr. Cunningham noticed a stark shift in fashion. Young women had stopped wearing hats, and William J. closed for good. But no matter, because as he was dismantling his store, Women’s Wear Daily called looking for a fashion photographer.

“Fashion Climbing” is a lovely glimpse into the life of one of New York’s most celebrated shutterbugs, a master of invisibility in an industry full of people who long to be seen. But mostly it is simply a joy to read because its storyteller was so very, very charming.

“A Double Life”

Flynn Berry

Viking, $26

Those who disappear seem to have a tenacious hold on the collective imagination. In 1974, a wealthy, charismatic British aristocrat, Richard John Bingham, the seventh Earl of Lucan, vanished after — as far as we know — killing his children’s nanny at their posh London home, having mistaken her for his estranged wife. He left behind an irresistible pall of intrigue, and strange theories proliferated over the years, from his drowning in the English Channel to his living in India as a banjo-playing hippy called Jungle Barry. There was even a far less prosaic ending suggested when a claim surfaced that he had been fed to tigers in a private zoo in the English countryside. 

Despite his being officially declared dead by the British High Court in 1999, the Lord Lucan mystery continued to pique lurid fascination and excite conspiracy theorists. Today, it remains a story unlikely to ever have a complete ending.

An American author, Flynn Berry, a longtime summer resident of Amagansett, has decided to at least fictitiously resolve this real-life mystery in her astute new thriller, “A Double Life.” This is her second novel, following “Under the Harrow,” a 2017 Edgar Award winner for best first novel.

In “A Double Life,” Ms. Berry reimagines the real-life story by staying true to many of the details of the crime — although moving the action forward a couple of decades — while fictionalizing the characters. The narrator here is Claire Alden, a seemingly ordinary 34-year-old physician living in north London. But she’s really the daughter of Lord Colin Spenser, who vanished 26 years earlier, in 1992, after becoming the prime suspect in a brutal attack on Claire’s mother and nanny. (His character is perhaps the least fictitious, right down to his partying ways and the Eton education. Also interesting is the use of “Spenser” as his surname, which could be a nod to Spencer, Princess Diana’s maiden name, a family to which Lord Lucan was related.)

After her father’s disappearance, Claire and her family fled to Scotland, where they assumed new identities but remained haunted by the tragic past. Now an adult, with a brother who is struggling with addiction (“Robbie looks like our father. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why he mistreats himself. It’s the only act of revenge he can take”), Claire is understandably consumed by the possibility that her notorious fugitive father might still be alive. She hangs on to this possibility obsessively; it’s the only way she might ever find out what really happened on the fateful night.

In satisfyingly ominous prose we also learn of Claire’s seething rage: “It isn’t him. I call the dog, I say sorry in a strained voice. The path is narrow here, we have to pass within a few inches of each other, and I look at him again, to be sure. Then I clip the dog’s leash and hurry towards the houses and people on Well Walk. I wish it had been him, and that instead I was searching the ground for a heavy branch, and following him into the woods.”

Complex characters, especially the blue-blooded dastardly villain (“He’s a hedonist. That’s part of my fury — during all of this, even now, he’s somewhere enjoying himself”), are brought heartbreakingly to life while Britain’s unjust, and still prevalent, class system, which lies at the heart of this tale, lends the narrative some moral weight.

Ms. Berry paces her storytelling well, alternating between Claire’s present-day investigations and the patching together of memories and stories from her mother’s diaries of her married life almost three decades earlier. In doing so, the reader uncovers a young woman both defined and imprisoned by a past. Hers is a world falling silently apart, the innocent victim of a dreadful moment that changed everything utterly, like the floor dropping out from beneath her, so that all she is left with is a life that curdles into something more crippling and disturbing.

Here, she remembers the last time she saw her father, when he gave her a candy cane from the top of his ice cream: “He might have already made the weapon before we sat together in a booth at Luxardo’s. It’s difficult for me to think of that visit. Not because I could have stopped him, exactly, I was eight years old. But the scene seems grotesque. The little girl accepting the red-and-white candy from him. It’s like he made me complicit.” (Note: It’s highly unlikely for an English native to say “candy.” She would have said either “sweet” or “peppermint stick.”)

Although her sleuthing is perhaps the story’s weakest link, especially the blackmailing that eventually leads to a crucial lead, “A Double Life” culminates in a pretty gripping and plausible conclusion.

That an American author too young to have lived through the actual Lucan mystery chose a very British story to retell as her own solidifies the fact that, along with royal weddings and colonialism, Britain rules when it comes to crimes featuring colorful miscreants.

There’s a name to what Susan Verde and Peter H. Reynolds have been doing in the children’s book realm — the wellness series, they call it, referring to “I Am Yoga,” then “I Am Peace,” and now “I Am Human” (Abrams, $14.99), in which our unnamed hero contemplates just what that means.

But don’t worry, parents, despite lines like “I have big dreams” and “I have a feeling of wonder,” it’s not all pie-in-the-sky pabulum, as it dawns on the kid that he can be an idiot. Or, shall we say, that he makes mistakes: “I can hurt others with my words, my actions, and even my silence.” He knows fear, the root of so many of our problems, wouldn’t you agree?

And yet this book of fewer than 30 pages, each with only a smattering of Ms. Verde’s words in ample white space surrounding and showcasing Mr. Reynolds’s fetchingly inked and watercolored illustrations, is in fact a journey, as our guide hints at the outset. He can power past the sadness that dogs modernity, he comes to realize; he can choose to be thoughtful and compassionate. He can help that old lady with her groceries, play fair, listen. He can show contrition, for God’s sake.

All of which might put a reader in mind of how the schools — with their stabs at teaching “character,” their nice-try cellphone bans, their gymnasium banners pleading for adult restraint during athletic contests — continue their game efforts at stanching the disintegration of decent society brought on by the digital scourge. 

But while the man’s too big, the man’s too strong, as they say, he needn’t always win. Here, Ms. Verde, an East Hampton yoga instructor, extols in an extended author’s note the “many positive psychological and physiological benefits” of loving-kindness meditation, in which, she writes, you close your eyes, breathe deep, and repeat four phrases wishing health and happiness for someone else, and then four more wishing the same for yourself.

It’s a start.

“Color East Hampton”

Speaking of series, Jake Rose’s “Color East Hampton” (Color Our Town Press, $14.95) is the 11th in a succession of handsome coloring books celebrating historical or merely significant structures, all geographically specific. It follows “Color the Hamptons,” should you feel the urge to let your crayon stray as far west as the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center.

With them, Mr. Rose, a student of history, “pursues his passion for architecture, photography,” and, it says in his biographical note, “historic landmarks.” He collaborates with other artists, who produce line drawings working from his photos. 

In East Hampton, this is most clearly evident in an interior showing the chockablock counter at Scoop du Jour. It’s detailed, as most of these images are. Too detailed for coloring? The notion does pop up, but then again, colored markers know no boundary, and lines are meant to be obscured. 

He’s too polite to say so, but downtown East Hampton is pretty sterile, corporate, even unappealing, so after a quick nod to tucked-away Rowdy Hall and its “Arts and Crafts inspired dining room with a copper topped bar and fireplace,” number 15 out of the book’s 24 images on the graphical tour, he hightails it for the outskirts, each structure in the hit parade — the Cedar Point Lighthouse, the LongHouse Reserve — accompanied by a solid paragraph of local history, occasionally recounted with welcome idiosyncrasy: “Conveniently located between Sag Harbor and Amagansett,” he writes of Three Mile Harbor.

Mr. Rose is a summertime resident of a place with a real downtown, a funky, walkable village, Greenport, which naturally he has documented with a coloring book, something he’s done as far afield as the Upper West Side of Manhattan. And this enterprising young man apparently isn’t done, eyeing as he is, it says in a release, “neighborhoods and small towns across America.”

Let me finish the thought: before time, tide, and bad taste sweep them away. 

He’ll wear it around his neck like he was Mark Spitz. 

The Pulitzer Prize. Paul Harding won one for “Tinkers,” his 2009 novel about a son and his aged father in New England and attendant questions of identity and memory. Now he’s at Stony Brook Southampton, and for those teaching in the M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature, among the faculty duties is participation in Writers Speak, the Wednesday evening series of receptions and readings, which is just starting up for the semester.

Next week’s may be headlined by Mr. Harding because of his newness, but there will be other readers nearly as new, like Cornelius Eady, the poet, and Amy Hempel, the short-story writer. They’ll be joined, on that faculty-focused evening — “Your professors! Reading their own works!” in the cheery words of the fall flier — by your friendly neighborhood regulars, from master memoirists like Roger Rosenblatt and Lou Ann Walker to at least one more poet, Julie Sheehan, and even the man in the information office, as it were, Andrew Botsford — actor, bon vivant, associate editor of The Southampton Review, and possibly the party least likely to have been responsible for the flier’s gratuitous “and more!!!!” referring perhaps to the cheese tray and sauvignon blanc.

For those of you out there who’ve been to one of these, put thoughts of the Radio Lounge aerie out of your head, as it’s being renovated, and simply keep to the Duke Lecture Hall on the first floor inside another Hall: Chancellors. That’s where an open house for prospective students will start at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, with Ms. Walker, the program director, laying out the workshops in various genres, and then the chatfest reception at 6:30, with the readings at 7. Questions, answers, and a chance to have books signed wrap up the proceedings.

Moving on to what’s coming down the pike, look for M.F.A. program alumni taking turns at the lectern on Oct. 24; Jonathan Santlofer, the crime novelist, with his new memoir, “The Widower’s Notebook,” on Nov. 7; two from the world of publishing — Alison Fairbrother of Riverhead Books and Alexandra Scholldorf of Skyhorse Publishing, both holders of Stony Brook M.F.A.s — on Nov. 28, and the poet, critic, and professor Lloyd Schwartz on Dec. 5.

All for free.

Memoir may be all the rage, and salable, while poetry is seeing a minor resurgence in popularity thanks to new outlets in social media, but is anything connecting the two? 

To explore the topic, Guild Hall has put together a reading and talk called “The Art of the Personal” on Sept. 16 at 3 p.m., with three writers of significance in both genres, and of significance on the South Fork, for that matter: Philip Schultz, Jill Bialosky, and Grace Schulman. 

Two of the poets have come out with memoirs in the recent past — Mr. Schultz with “My Dyslexia,” Ms. Bialosky more than once, the latest being “Poetry Will Save Your Life” — and Ms. Schulman did so just last month, with “Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage.”

And so the question becomes, in the words of whoever handled the public relations duty on the Guild Hall website in this case, if not Ms. Bialosky herself (she’s an executive editor at W.W. Norton, after all): “What happens to memory when the imagination comes into play? It’s expected, desired, in poetry, of course, but doesn’t memoir deal with autobiographical fact, what actually happened? And why would poets want or need to write memoirs?”

Hinted at right there are collections of poems the participants have written that do indeed tackle the stuff of memoir: Mr. Schultz’s “Failure,” for one, which won him a Pulitzer Prize and which considers the hamstrung life of his father, or Ms. Bialosky’s “The Players,” which, to borrow the words of Ms. Schulman’s subheading, could be called the portrait of a family — or of motherhood.

“What are they after and how does it affect their poetry?” wonders the website. And that’s where the post-reading chat comes in. Why not pop in and find out?

This one’s free, but reservations, which can be made with a click at guildhall.org/events, are a must.

Don’t expect the fatuous “poet voice” — that mannered intonation of poetry read aloud, singsong, overstuffed with pregnant pauses, a favorite of the M.F.A. program, the slam, the coffeehouse — when writers of substance like Carole Stone and Virginia Walker take to the lectern, which they will starting at 6 tonight at the Southampton Historical Museum’s Thomas Halsey Homestead along tree-lined South Main Street in that village.

The reading is part of a series organized by Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan, the founder of the North Sea Poetry Scene and a past Long Island poet of the year, so designated by the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association in Huntington Station. Admission is a suggested $5, and an open mike follows. The next, and final, poetry happening will be on Sept. 20 at 6 p.m., in the form of an open workshop that will consider the works of Anne Bradstreet, Pablo Neruda, and Allen Ginsberg, among others. (Information on that score can be had by emailing [email protected].)

Free verse at the 17th-century domicile of an early English settler might seem incongruous, but pleasingly so, and less incongruous, at any rate, than what’s inside, a tribute to Shinnecock culture, artifacts, way of life — in the 1640s domicile of an early settler, a harbinger of a coming wave that would sweep away such things. 

The gathering, however, is en plein air, and tonight, Ms. Walker reported in an email, “I will be reading from recently published poems on everything from the darker edge of religious belief to dealing with mortality,” mixed with other, unpublished work. A Shelter Island resident and professor of English at Suffolk Community College, she co-wrote, with the late Michael Walsh, “Neuron Mirror,” a 2014 collection of poetry that with associated events and such has raised more than $10,600 for the Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research.

Her compatriot for the evening, Ms. Stone, a Springs part-timer and professor emerita of English at Montclair State University, has a number of collections to her credit, the latest being “All We Have Is Our Voice,” due out at the end of the month from Dos Madres Press. “All the poems are persona poems,” Ms. Stone said by email, “with figures (mostly women, but not all) married to famous men. Mrs. Lincoln, Frau Freud, Frida Kahlo, but also César Vallejo, Raymond Carver, etc.” Below is one of them.

“First Lady: Mary Todd Lincoln”

No longer choosing from dozens of pairs

of shoes, in bare feet, I pace

the long corridors. In a white pool

of attendants I clutch my worn lace collar.

I waltzed at White House balls, 

wore velvet gloves, bonnets

trimmed with grosgrain, taffeta gowns

that Robert sold at auction.

What shame for a son to commit his mother

to an asylum. My husband’s portrait

stares down from the superintendent’s wall.

But no daguerreotypes of his bearded face

are allowed in my small space.

Beneath the damp earth, he needs nothing,

not even his tall hat or the Bible

he read aloud as I dozed.

I will demand a pension from Congress.

“Watch out for their leavings,” the unsatisfied housewife says to the peripatetic photographer as they stroll an Iowa cow pasture in “The Bridges of Madison County.” It might be the only memorable line in the entire book, one best kept in mind by the Authors Night attendees as, well heeled or not, they tread the fields of the enigmatic 555 address on Montauk Highway in Amagansett, the former Principi farm, where once roamed large hoofed beasts.

Come Saturday night, literary animals will prowl there, sniffing out books to buy, authors to chat up or hit up for a quick name-scrawl, hors d’oeuvres to cram, and the inevitable plastic-tumbler chardonnay to wash them down with. The location may be new, but the evening remains a big-tent benefit for the East Hampton Library, of course. Accordingly, tickets are $100, and they’ll be available at the door. The party starts at 5 p.m.

Or, $300 will get you that and entrée to dinners at private residences around town organized around certain books, with their authors, fresh from the reception, in attendance. There were 33 of them to choose from at last check, ranging from the societal (David Margolick and “The Promise and the Dream,” on M.L.K. and R.F.K.) to the suspenseful (Helen Harrison and “An Accidental Corpse,” which reimagines the infamous Jackson Pollock car wreck) to the tell-all (Emily Jane Fox of Vanity Fair and “Born Trump”). They start at 8 p.m.

Robert James Waller, invoked above, unfortunately can’t make the reception, as he died in 2017, but while it’s true authors like him will be well represented, there will be others of far more substance seated at a table and ripe for cornering. Robert Caro, for one, the man obsessively chasing the white whale of “the last man who knew how to run the country,” as he’s been called, Lyndon Baines Johnson, in a multi-volume biography that’s bound to end up as midcentury America’s answer to Edward Gibbon on the Roman Empire. 

As for other authors, they number about a hundred, so a visit to the Authors Night website makes sense. Everything you could conceivably need to know is right there. 

“Frenemies”

Ken Auletta

Penquin Press, $30

Back when the World Wide Web was a mere inkling, the ad agency world was blissfully straightforward. Clients would be served ads for TV, radio, and print. These well-crafted campaigns would then be broadcast to a captive consumer who was watching television, listening to the radio, or reading the newspaper.

It was “full-service” advertising, from soup to nuts, and it was all the rage. A glut of famous agencies was born, where officers in chief could sleep well at night knowing their clients’ every need was being tended to. Add to that the fact that all the creative thinking was happening under one roof — it was heady stuff.

That was my blissful world from the 1980s into the new millennium. I was a creative director at M&C Saatchi and BBDO, both multinational agencies, where I was paid an exorbitant wage to make ads for blue-chip clients like British Airways, Pepsi, FedEx, and HBO. It was a fun, entirely indulgent period when ad agencies, and especially the creative head honchos, could do no wrong. 

Then one day the internet rocked the boat and spilled everyone’s champagne.

The prolific Ken Auletta, a media reporter, critic, and best-selling author, delves into this tectonic shift and the Darwinian battle that ensued in “Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else).”

It is an excellent account, superbly researched, and Mr. Auletta presents his findings in his usual engaging style, along with a fascinating cast of characters who emerged in the early 2000s to rattle the world of advertising.

“Goodbye, Don Draper,” reads the book jacket description. “A ‘Mad Men’ world has turned into a Math Men (and women — though too few) world, as engineers seek to transform an instinctual art into a science. The old lions and their kingdoms reel from fear, however bravely they might roar.”

It is not simply book jacket hype. The marketing and advertising industry truly descended into a Dante-ish hell created by the advent of digital and social media. All of a sudden consumers (i.e., people) were wildly disobedient, moving their eyeballs about in ways that were almost impossible to track. Brands shifted to lower-cost, quick-turnaround digital campaigns, while the use of technology muscled in on job roles and budgets. The full-service agency couldn’t really offer the full service anymore. The industry saw the birth of many specialist shops offering expertise in niche mediums, social or mobile. For traditional agencies, it was a time to adapt or collapse.

“Frenemy” is a word popularized by Martin Sorrell, formerly the chief executive of WPP, the world’s largest advertising and marketing holding company. He became Sir Martin Sorrell in 2000 when he was knighted by the Queen. According to Mr. Sorrell, Google is a “frenemy” of WPP’s, as are Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook, in that they form close partnerships with agencies by selling ad space, but at the same time compete against one another by eradicating interruptive advertising and shrinking ad revenues.

Through extensive interviews — some 450, apparently — the author follows the money trail as revenues began to be siphoned off from ad agencies and funneled into Google, Facebook, and a “myriad of other new digital enterprises.” 

From Shoshana Zuboff, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, the author relates this insightful summation: “The game,” she wrote, “is no longer about sending you a mail-order catalogue or even about targeting online advertising. The game is selling access to the real-time flow of your daily life — your reality — in order to directly influence and modify your behavior for profit.”

Ultimately, however, and rather unfortunately, the book relies heavily on interviews with Mr. Sorrell, who is quoted as telling the author “I will stay here until they shoot me!” in describing the likelihood of his stepping down from the helm of WPP anytime soon. But he did, in mid-April, ahead of the findings of an investigation into alleged personal misconduct. 

Since Mr. Sorrell is such a central figure in “Frenemies,” it throws into question the sincerity and accuracy of the information imparted by the other key players featured — Irwin Gotlieb, Rishad Tobaccowala, Carolyn Everson, Beth Comstock, Anne Finucane, and Gary Vaynerchuk — all marketing agitators caught adrift on the tumultuous tide. 

But luckily Mr. Auletta has Michael Kassan, who serves as this book’s omnipotent protagonist. The author follows Mr. Kassan’s trajectory from disgraced lawyer in California to his seizing an opportunity in an industry fraught with chaos and disruption, and therefore full of clients in need of more advice, by founding MediaLink in 2003. A strategic advisory group that partners with major companies around the world, MediaLink prided itself in offering pragmatic insight and strategies by simply being “in the room” when deals are done.

All the chaos and disruption bred enormous opportunity for MediaLink, and by the book’s end Mr. Kassan has sold his company in a $200 million deal.

Mr. Auletta has written more than a thriller here on the media’s new frontier, and even leaves us on a cliff when it comes to where it will all end.

Harking back to the 1979 lyrics from the new wave band the Buggles — “Video killed the radio star / In my mind and in my car / We can’t rewind we’ve gone too far” — we live in a world in which Google, Netflix, Amazon, and technology generally killed the goose that laid the golden egg. Maybe advertising’s future lies with Amazon’s Alexa, the creepy in-house system that not only knows your purchasing history but your sleep habits, music preferences, and food choices. Whatever the future, we have indeed gone too far to look back now. 

With this Mr. Kassan agrees, as he notes at the end of this book that if he were ever to write a memoir, it would be titled “No Rearview Mirror.”

Ken Auletta lives part time in Bridgehampton. He will read from “Frenemies” at Fridays at Five on Aug. 3 at the Hampton Library there.