“Rocky Graziano: Fists, Fame, and Fortune”

Jeffrey Sussman

Rowman & Littlefield, $36

Let’s begin at the middle. Because for Rocky Graziano that also means the peak, his epic trilogy of title bouts with Tony Zale from 1946 to 1948, “the bloodiest, most intensely fought middleweight fights of the 20th century,” Jeffrey Sussman writes in his new biography, “Rocky Graziano: Fists, Fame, and Fortune.” They matched the immigrant slums versus the industrial heartland, he writes, “the streetfighter, the Italian delinquent, the ex-convict who fought like a junkyard dog against the upright, all-American, clean-living good guy.”

Graziano was one of history’s hardest punchers. Zale, “the Man of Steel,” earned that sobriquet in part because of his past in the steel mills of Gary, Ind., but also for the strength of his impervious jaw, and yet by the third round of their first meeting at Yankee Stadium his face was “a mask of blood. The handsome Midwesterner looked as shattered as if he had been in a terrible car crash. . . . A plume of blood flew in an arc from Zale’s face with each punch.” Graziano’s gloves were wet with it.

Both fighters hit the canvas. But Zale was legendary for his body blows, and one such to Graziano’s solar plexus in the sixth round left him gasping for air. It was the turning point. Zale knocked him out.

“Hell, he looked like the loser, me the winner!” the outwardly unscathed Graziano told a reporter. 

The opposite would be the case in the rematch in 1947 in Chicago, when, with the likes of Frank Sinatra and J. Edgar Hoover in the audience, Graziano, his face “like raw, bloody hamburger,” won the title, again in the sixth round, but only after a cornerman wielding a quarter “broke the skin of the swelling” under his purpled egg of a right eye, clearing his vision sufficiently to allow him to make of Zale’s head “an inanimate, disengaged speed bag that was turning a brighter shade of red with each punch.”

“Ma, Ma,” Graziano shouted into the ring announcer’s microphone, “your bad boy done it, he’s world champion.” The stuff of the movies, really. Better than the movies. The dead end kid makes good. 

A year later Zale would regain the middleweight crown from Graziano, who, notoriously reluctant to train and only too happy to indulge in the good life once he had the means, wasn’t in his best shape. But historically it’s nearly an afterthought, for “the Wop, the Guinea, the guy with olive-oil hair, the Noo Yawk greaseball from the Lower East Side,” as the author imagines him thinking after his loss to Zale, “the thug, the former gangster wannabe,” who went AWOL from the Army after slugging an officer, showed himself, when he was champion, to be personable, charming, self-deprecating. He quickly became almost as big a star as Sinatra himself, and by his own estimation more popular than any champ outside of Joe Louis, this in a day when boxing was king.

Mr. Sussman, a boxing fan as much as a scholar, renders battles from 70 years ago with gripping immediacy, alternating between an apt midcentury sensibility (an errant punch “arrived like a man just missing a bus”) and deadpan humor (“Rocky’s mouthpiece flew from his mouth like a fleeing animal”).

And if the spraying droplets of blood put you in mind of Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull,” about Jake LaMotta, so much the better, as LaMotta was a “reform school chum” of Graziano’s. The movies, in fact, are much to the point, as here was the original Rocky — before the undefeated Marciano, and long before the Sylvester Stallone film, in which, in fact, Graziano’s top cornerman, Al Silvani, portrayed, yes, a grizzled cornerman.

With his good looks and tousled jet-black Dean Martin hair, Graziano was effortlessly charismatic, attracting the attention of Hollywood as soon as he made a name for himself. Marlon Brando studied his walk and speech, with its “dees, dems, and dos,” for his role as the palooka Terry Malloy in “On the Waterfront,” and even for Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Brando, Montgomery Clift, and, more improbably, James Dean were considered to play Rocky in “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” the 1956 film version of Graziano’s hit autobiography, a role that wound up going to Paul Newman. 

(During filming, the author notes with some amusement, Newman, though in top shape, was crumpled, curled up on the canvas, and sucking air after taking a right hand to the midsection from Tony Zale, for some reason brought in to play himself and coasting at maybe 60 percent as they sparred. He was dismissed from the set.)

After his boxing career was over, Graziano, the natural, eminently likable simply by being himself, went on to co-star with the comic Martha Raye on television and appeared in innumerable commercials. 

He’s probably remembered more for pitching Lee Myles transmissions and Raisin Bran or bantering with Johnny Carson than for what he did as a pugilist, and this is what Mr. Sussman set out to rectify. He has successfully reintroduced to boxing fans and the culturally curious this ring savage with the mold-breaking personality who punched his way out of miserable poverty. 

“To get in the ring with anybody to fight you got to be a little wacky,” Graziano once said. “The fight for survival is the fight. . . . It’s a tough business, man. It’s a tough business.”

Jeffrey Sussman lives part time in East Hampton. 

“The Wife”

Alafair Burke

Harper, $26.99

The first thing that hits you upon opening “The Wife” is its uncanny timeliness. Angela’s husband, a charismatic economics professor at N.Y.U., Jason Powell, is accused of sexually inappropriate behavior by a college intern. The book came out soon after the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke and the #MeToo movement started and focuses on many of the same questions that until that moment had simply been swept back under the proverbial rug.

Jason is not only charismatic, he is a kind, gentle, and honorable man, and we don’t want to believe he could have done this. Nor does his wife, whom Jason met and then married when she was a struggling single mother working as a caterer in the Hamptons. He loves her and her son and has done everything to protect them from a tragic event in her past.

So is the intern lying? Should we assume she is telling the truth because so often women have not been believed? Was it just a misunderstanding?

But just as we see, with some relief, that the action appears to be moving toward the “misunderstanding” scenario, a much more serious allegation comes along, one of rape, from a business colleague, Kerry Lynch. Will Angela continue to believe in her husband? (While the reader is privy to information that seems to point to Jason’s innocence, she is not.) And while she may be willing to believe him innocent of rape, will she still want to stand by him when it comes out that he has been sleeping with Kerry — whom the police wish to question but who seems to have disappeared? Will this marriage survive? Will poor, loyal Angela survive? Will Jason the mensch survive? Is he really a mensch?

As the police detective, who will methodically and quietly maneuver her way behind the scenes through this novel while much sturm und drang goes on front of stage, says, “You know how it is. The stories never line up. No one’s version is ever a hundred percent accurate. The hard part is figuring out which parts are wrong, and more importantly, why they’re wrong. Bad guys out-and-out lie because they’re trying to protect their asses. But victims? That’s trickier. Some of them almost apologize for the bad guys as they’re reporting the facts, because they’re full of guilt, blaming themselves. Or they mitigate the awfulness of what happened to them, because the full weight of it would kill them if they stopped to absorb it. Or they say they didn’t drink, or didn’t flirt, or didn’t unhook their own bra, because they’re afraid that to admit the truth would be giving him permission for everything that happened after.”

Like a game of pass the parcel, as the story progresses, layer after layer of the past, and the truth, is revealed. Except that further layers will reveal that the past is not quite what we have been told, and the truth becomes less and less easy to assess.

One of the complications is that Jason is not just a professor; he is the author of a best-selling book and a regular talking head on television with a quarter of a million followers on Twitter. Inevitably the case receives extensive media attention, and that is what Angela dreads. For years she has managed to keep hidden a hideous event that happened to her when she was still a teenager. Now it looks as if this might be revealed and her life will be further turned upside down. The book asks a worrying question: If you suffer through a traumatic event, do you recover? Or do you just think you have recovered?

Ms. Burke writes gracefully and fluidly, and her characters spring quickly to life and involve you in their lives, to the extent that you have to restrain yourself from nervously skipping ahead to see what happens. 

As I had in both “Gone Girl” and “The Girl on the Train,” what I felt while reading “The Wife” was foreboding. You keep hoping for a happy ending but you fear you are not going to get it. You have to keep reading — you’re involved with the characters — but part of you is awaiting the arrival of some metaphorical zombie apocalypse.

Did you play naughty kitty as a small child? A classic grandmother’s game. The small child holds out a hand and granny strokes it gently, “Nice kitty!” And again, “Sweet kitty!” “Loving kitty,” “Darling kitty,” and so on. But somewhere along the line the stroking hand will give a slap, “Naughty kitty!” The little moppet yelps but is hooked — and must play again, and again, breathless with tension, until Granny hands the by now thoroughly overexcited child back to his or her mother.

That’s “The Wife.”

“Entertaining kitty!” “Articulate kitty!” “Engrossing kitty!”

Slap!

“Naughty kitty!”

Sheridan Sansegundo, a former arts editor at The Star, lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

Alafair Burke’s previous suspense novel was “The Ex.” She lives part time in East Hampton.

“Tango Down”

Chris Knopf

Permanent Press, $29.95

It begins with a local’s dream: Construction on yet another too-large Hamptons house of questionable taste has been halted. But there’s a catch, as “facedown in a slurry of blood, sawdust, and cutoffs from the finish work going on around the windows and door frames” is the moneyed homeowner, one Victor Bollings, a high-powered international business consultant. He’s had his head stove in with one of his own golf clubs. Though one wonders, a driver? With the composites these days, you can almost hear the harmless ping.

No matter, in “Tango Down,” the latest murder mystery from Chris Knopf, in steps our investigatory man, Sam Acquillo, on-site as he’s putting together fine cabinetry for the house-in-making, something he’s prone to do to earn a living and simultaneously ease his mind, troubled as it is with past crimes, past wrongs, past rights, past flare-ups of temper, and those nagging life-choice mistakes we all make. He’s also relatable, as the kids say, psychologically if not in lived experience, because he’s full of contradictions: M.I.T. grad and onetime professional boxer, former R&D man who works with his hands, trained petrochemical engineer who has “resisted mobile devices for as long as I could . . . what a pain in the ass.” He gets his news from NPR on the radio in his basement workshop.

What’s more, for anyone out there reading this who might not have encountered him before, Sam’s good company, known to sail, not motor, around Little Peconic Bay, or kick back in an Adirondack chair on the lawn of his North Sea cottage and take in the “flying white egrets, tacking sailboats, cloud shadows darkening large swaths of iridescent water.” He’ll rise now and again to hit golf balls off the breakwater for retrieval by Eddie, the dog he’s reluctant to call “his,” as the two live, as Sam puts it, “in a congenial arrangement where I fed him and gave him a place to sleep, while he hung around when I was there. . . .”

For the record, Sam is secure enough in his masculinity to swing small wood for occasional self-defense, a three-quarter-size Harmon Killebrew slugger, no 42-ounce Babe Ruth job but still truncheon enough to take down a black-jumpsuited special ops creep ninja-ing it around his property one starry evening.

Turns out Victor Bollings was a spook, deep undercover, liaison at Langley, heavy in covert operations in Colombia, the works. Giving too much away? As the revelation comes shortly before the tale’s halfway point, maybe not, and almost certainly not for those readers who like to guess what’s coming, as opposed to us escapists merely along for the ride and thus happy to be surprised. Besides, intelligence? Everybody’s doing it; we’re all in conversation with the Russians whether we know it or not.

Beyond that, forgive me, this is neither the time nor the place for plot summation. So what’s going on here? The book is readable, sharp. The action is just frequent enough for a kick in the pants. It’s hard-boiled but not overcooked. When Sam’s love interest in a relationship based on “a mutual preference for avoidance and denial” is found to have two small brain tumors, for instance, the c-word diagnosis somehow avoids melodrama, and you find yourself caring. 

The narrative is not without stumbles. It’s tricky, though: As this is the eighth book in the Sam Acquillo series, the author understandably feels a need to backtrack and fill in details. Mentioning Sam’s grown daughter in France may add nothing whatever to the story, for one example, but readers who see the novel as a visit with an old friend may disagree and find comfort in such references to past adventures.

Personally, I prefer to keep an eye out for the philosophical asides, which can be validating. “Troubles make you live longer,” Sam approximates in Latin to an Aussie in a bar on Tortola, where he’s chasing background intel.

And then there’s the mysterious pleasure of a line like this. Sam, elbows on dark wood at Mad Martha’s, the local dive, to the ponytailed vet behind the bar: “Glass, ice, something clear, and a cocktail napkin to soften the experience.”

Cheers, buddy.

Chris Knopf divides his time between Southampton and Connecticut.

“The Female Persuasion”

Meg Wolitzer

Riverhead Books, $28

I wish a male reviewer had been assigned Meg Wolitzer’s timely and clever new novel, “The Female Persuasion.” It could have been an edifying exercise in literary biases, since Ms. Wolitzer has too often been labeled a writer of “women’s fiction.” That is to say, her stories vibrate with nuanced insights and observations, mostly about relationships between parents and children, husbands and wives, men and women, women and women. Or, as V.S. Naipaul, the Nobel laureate, called it, “all that feminine tosh.”

Ms. Wolitzer wrote a scathing New York Times essay in 2012 titled “The Second Shelf,” about the different literary rules for men and women, which relegate her “to that close-quartered lower shelf where books emphasizing relationships and the interior lives of women are often relegated,” while elevating the Franzens and Eugenideses, now writing about the same subject matter, to the singularly highbrow literary shelf. 

Indeed, on Amazon, a search for Meg Wolitzer will take you to the “women’s fiction” category, and to some place even more minimizing: “women’s domestic life fiction.” Yet Tom Perrotta’s excellent but decidedly domesticated “Mrs. Fletcher,” about a single mother’s relationship with her college-bound son, is simply listed on Amazon as “contemporary fiction.” 

That said, even for the sake of a worthy experiment, I’m not sure I would have relinquished the opportunity to read a Wolitzer novel in advance of its release date. Since discovering her brilliant 2003 book, “The Wife,” about a woman who curbs her own talents for the benefit and glory of her Nobel Prize-winning author husband, I have fallen greedily upon every new novel she publishes. There was the 2005 sharp-tongued, family tragicomedy, “The Position,” about four siblings who discover that their parents had once published a “Joy of Sex”-like manual, complete with illustrations of easy-to-recognize Mom and Dad; “The Ten-Year Nap” in 2008, a stay-at-home mama drama about four New York mothers emerging from a decade in babyland; “The Uncoupling” in 2011, in which a debilitating spell falls over the women of a suburban town and saps them, en masse, of their libido, and “The Interestings” in 2013, a sweeping narrative that follows a group of friends who meet at an arts camp in the ’70s and age into midlife and beyond.

“The Female Persuasion,” the author’s 10th adult novel, will be in bookstores on Tuesday. Read in our often bewildering #MeToo world, it’s an almost prophetic tale of gender and power. But framing and shaping this story, as is the case in most Wolitzer books, is a sustained inquiry into relationships. 

The book begins with Greer Kadetsky, a college freshman and bright go-getter who, because of her disengaged, pot-addled parents, ends up in unheard of Ryland College, rather than Yale, where she had been accepted. But at Ryland her life changes, possibly in ways that it would not have at Yale. At a frat party one night, she is groped by a male student, who does that and far worse to other female students and gets away with it, propelling Greer into activism and championing female causes. 

Also at Ryland, she encounters 63-year-old Faith Frank, “a couple of steps down from Gloria Steinem in fame,” who later becomes Greer’s employer and mentor, a relationship that offers a gimlet-eye view of how women of different ages continue to wrestle with feminism in the modern era. Then there’s Cory Pinto, Greer’s high school sweetheart, “twin rocket ships,” as they are called, since they are the only two at their suburban school earmarked for the Ivies. While Greer’s trajectory is blighted, Cory goes to Princeton, and the two stay more or less committed to each other, with the goal of sharing an apartment in Brooklyn after college.

There is nothing seriously the matter with any of them. But then come life’s bumps and a seismic event in Cory’s life, sending the twin rocket ships on divergent courses. Greer’s parallel universe of the Faith Frank women’s foundation where she works unravels at the hands of a rich white man.

As Ms. Wolitzer delineates these fracturing lives, in her pleasant, no-frills style, she pursues convincing inquiries into deeper, more nuanced relationships within the story. Beautifully developed and complex commentaries on what parents owe children, and how much children often feel they owe their parents; the increasingly unrealistic expectations society has come to place on an Ivy League education (Ms. Wolitzer teaches creative writing at the Southampton campus of Stony Brook University); the friction between magnanimous corporate America and idealistic women, and the reckoning between the original feminists and the daughters of sexual liberation, the slightly entitled second-wave feminists. 

Here’s an example of Ms. Wolitzer’s generosity, nuance with her characters, and insight:

“Faith stood beside Greer over the deep stainless-steel sink, where she ran a thudding flow of cold water down upon the bloody thumb and then dried it. . . . The light touch of this powerful woman was profound. So too was her choice to use her power in this tender way. Maybe that’s what we want from women, Greer thought as her thumb pulsed and percolated with blood. Maybe that’s what we imagine it would be like to have a woman lead us. When women got into positions of power, they calibrated and recalibrated tenderness and strength, modulating and correcting. Power and love didn’t often live side by side. If one came in, the other might go.” 

It’s feminine tosh all right, but being rescued for contemporary literature. I wonder if men would agree.

Meg Wolitzer lives in Manhattan. For many years she was a visitor to Springs, where her parents had a house.

“The Book of Resting Places”

Thomas Mira y Lopez

Counterpoint, $26

I don’t know if “tour de force” can be applied to a 23-page essay on death — big subject, limited space — but Thomas Mira y Lopez packs so much, so subtly and so smoothly, into “Memory, Memorial” that a reader can be forgiven for wondering. 

It opens his debut essay collection, “The Book of Resting Places,” as he visits the house in the Pennsylvania countryside where his mother has been left to figure out what comes next after what gave her life meaning is gone. At the center of the visit is the Ohio buckeye tree, now more than 20 feet tall, that her husband, Rafael, a cell biologist, had planted before a seizure led to two craniectomies and paralysis. The tree, visible from the kitchen window, becomes a stand-in for the father, as does an American elm in Central Park, purchased as a memorial tribute, which takes a dark turn as the author contemplates the number of branches in the park that have fallen and killed people.

Mr. Mira y Lopez reveals himself to be something of a scholar of classical mythology, here the seed of a tree becoming a metaphor for a coin to pay Charon for passage across the underworld rivers Styx or Acheron. Later, we see him wedge a coin between his father’s dead fingers. “He might need this,” he tells his mother.

Part of what’s appealing about this author and guide is how hard he is on himself. It shows honesty. As when he goes on to explain that what he’s really doing is setting his father afloat like driftwood on the Lethe, the river of oblivion and forgetfulness, “trying to obscure memory, to make surreal or unreal what I would otherwise have to account for as the truth.”

He pulls the old trick of imagining he’s standing outside himself, watching his motions as if he were part of a movie, as he runs through Central Park and his father lies dying. Later in the vigil, he says to himself, in essence, Where’s the harm in taking a break to catch the Giants game and order Chinese? 

The answer comes in a bracing turn as his father, in an expletive-laced harangue from the grave, excoriates his son for his inattention: “. . . you tried to pretend I wasn’t there . . . you stayed away while I was dying . . . you were content to let me go if it made your life easier, you selfish son of a bitch. But now I’m coming to get you.”

He haunts the rest of the book.

Meanwhile, the mother, Judy Thomas, is no cipher, no mere figure of sympathy, not simply some eccentric widow, although she does imagine herself entombed in her afterlife by mounds of her own belongings in an 8-by-10 Manhattan Mini Storage cube, climate-controlled behind a corrugated steel door, her cremains settled in next to Senator Sumner’s desk and a painting by Alfonso Ossorio. 

In fairness, her first wish was to have her ashes placed in a low stone wall next to her parents’ behind St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton (the author spent a good chunk of time hereabouts as a kid). Decades later, she still laments the tomb-raiding actions of her own relatives, “who took all the best stuff” from her mother when she left East Hampton, stealing away, in her son’s words, “what kept the dead alive.” Her thinking, he adds, is that “if she recovers her mother’s prized possessions, she’ll recover her mother herself.”

Possessions — kept, jettisoned, shown, stored — figure throughout the book, and in eye-opening ways, for instance in the definitions of a collector, who “displays a self,” and a hoarder, who “searches for one.” 

Among the journalistic pieces, Mr. Mira y Lopez visits a real pro of a collector near Tucson, where he got his M.F.A. in writing. The collector, Roger, owns a junk shop chockablock with historical artifacts — a mummified 4,500-year-old child, the skull of a Mexican soldier shot at the Alamo — much of it insensitively displayed. Roger is friendly, engaging, entertaining; the author likes him a lot. But when he discovers Roger’s racist id revealed on Facebook, his reaction is dispassionate rather than visceral, and it ties in with one of the book’s themes — the bifurcation of the self. The old saw has it that we’re all different people every day. Here it’s posited that we’re different people at one time. 

What’s more, if the person you care most about disappears, and you’re left bereft, clinging to memories, who exactly is the ghost?

“It’s All Relative:

Adventures Up and Down the World’s Family Tree”

A.J. Jacobs

Simon and Schuster, $27

A decade ago there was no point even considering researching your roots if you weren’t prepared to spend days, months, or potentially years trawling through dusty registers and reels of microfilm. But now, people just sit at their kitchen table on an otherwise unexceptional weekday morning and drool saliva into a test tube.

During the Winter Olympics last week, a commercial for 23 and Me, a consumer genetic testing company, came on promoting its home-based saliva collection kit to help you discover if, as the commercial said, you possess “the DNA of a champion.”

According to ABC News, genealogy is the second most popular hobby in the United States after gardening, and the second most visited category of websites, after pornography. It’s a billion-dollar industry that has spawned profitable websites, television shows, scores of books, and a cottage industry in DNA ancestry testing, including apps for people who not only want to learn more about their DNA, but to keep interacting with it. 

Now, a new book: “It’s All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World’s Family Tree,” by A.J. Jacobs, which confirms that the beguiling promise of all this ancestry hunting is not so much to have scientific proof of your genetic heritage, but instead to construct a narrative for yourself that is more interesting than the one you’ve got. Or, at the very least, to identify in the family tree a strain of talent you can claim heir to, even if only at a molecular level. 

Even the author agrees: “Genealogy is the most self-aggrandizing hobby ever. Look at all these thousands of ancestors who all teamed up to create their ultimate masterpiece: Me!”

Mr. Jacobs, whose parents have a house in East Hampton, is a talented writer, an editor at large of Esquire magazine, and the author of other humorous “quest” books such as “Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection” and “The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible.” 

“It’s All Relative” follows his rather neurotic journey from becoming piqued by the family chain to attempting to throw a Global Family Reunion for over 3,000 relatives, which, if successful, would make it into the Guinness Book of Records.

“Relatives” are, in fact, relative. Apparently, Barack Obama is his fifth great-aunt’s husband’s father’s wife’s seventh great-nephew. He’s 13 steps away from Einstein, 24 from Halle Berry. Daniel Radcliffe is a cousin and so is his wife. The point is that we’re all related. But that also makes every one of us special, which ultimately means none of us are.

Mr. Jacobs gave himself 51 weeks to plan the mega-reunion and, although there’s a countdown report at the end of each chapter reminding us of the event, most of the book delves into an array of related topics like our animal cousins — we share 98.8 percent of DNA with bonobos — Ellis Island, Neanderthals, surnames, alternative families, inbreeding, and more — all told in offhanded humor that The New York Times described as “often-effortful wit.”

But humor is also relative, and while this reader was mostly unmoved by his effortful attempts to be self-deprecating and snappy, his loyal fans, who have turned him into a best-selling author, will surely appreciate this book too. And if not, at least his family will. All seven billion of them.

The strength of Mr. Jacobs’s storytelling is his anecdotal sharing, but only when he allows the reader to enjoy the inherent comedy in the situation presented rather than interjecting his attempts at amusing commentary. 

One of my favorites is toward the end of the book, about 15 weeks away from the reunion, when the author is frantically trying to recruit celebrity “cousins” to help market the big bash and, he hopes, bring in sponsors. So far, he’s got the likes of Donny Osmond (Mormons are big into genealogy), Ricky Gervais, Olivia Wilde, and Dr. Oz to hold up signs that read, “I Am a Cousin.” But he decides to go even bigger and hops on a plane to Houston to meet with the older President Bush and his wife, Barbara, whom Mr. Jacobs had interviewed a few years ago for Esquire.

“There’s the president, sitting in a wheelchair, wearing a blazer, khakis, and pink-and-yellow argyle socks. Mrs. Bush and her Maltese dog are by his side.”

“I explain to them why I’m here. ‘I’m helping to put together a family tree of all seven billion humans. And you’re on this tree. Because you’re humans.’ ”

“ ‘Well, thank you,’ the former first lady says dryly. ‘That’s very flattering.’ ”

“I tell them how we are related. ‘I thought we were more closely related than that,’ says the president . . . I tell them about some of their distant cousins, including Bill Clinton, who is President Bush’s 10th cousin once removed.”

“ ‘I always felt that Bill Clinton was my son from another mother, so I suppose that makes sense.’ ”

And then, President and Mrs. Bush held up his “I Am a Cousin” sign and smiled for the camera.

The Global Family Reunion took place on June 5, 2015, at the New York Hall of Science in Queens. It never made it into the record books. Too bad all that energy and time had not been harnessed for something more altruistic.

The Star welcomes submissions of essays for its “Guestwords” column of between 700 and 1,200 words. Submissions can be sent for review by email, in text or Word format, to [email protected].

Please include a short biographical author’s note. Submissions should be final drafts. We cannot accept multiple versions of a piece. Selected work will be published in the newspaper as well as on our website, easthamptonstar.com.

Six aspiring novelists — all graduates of Stony Brook Southampton’s Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing — are sitting in a conference room on campus waiting to meet their mentors and receive the latest critique of their work. They’re pioneers, the first students chosen to take part in the BookEnds program, a new workshop established by the faculty members Susan Scarf Merrell, author of the critically acclaimed novel “Shirley,” and Meg Wolitzer, whose novels include the 2013 New York Times best seller “The Interestings.” 

The goal of the yearlong workshop? To give the young writers the tutelage and feedback they need to put their manuscripts through the ultimate transformation — making the leap from promising to polished to published.

“Their work is exciting,” said Ms. Wolitzer, explaining why she and Ms. Merrell chose the six candidates, all of whom had written thesis novels during their M.F.A. studies. Nevertheless, for the past six months the two have been pushing their charges to rip up and rethink everything. 

“Instead of just making the work a little bit better, sometimes you have to do something macro to it,” Ms. Wolitzer said. 

The BookEnds experiment began last July when the six aspiring authors sat down with Ms. Wolitzer for a five-day intensive workshop during the Southampton Writers Conference. The ensuing months have been filled with biweekly peer critiques via Skype, master classes with Ms. Wolitzer and Ms. Merrell focused on discussions of craft, and, of course, reams of revisions. 

On Saturday, the group got together at the midpoint of the creative journey and received a bit of good news/bad news from Ms. Merrell. “I really commend you guys — the manuscripts are in terrible shape,” she said. “I say that as the highest compliment. You have ripped them up, you have made yourselves vulnerable, and that is exactly what we wanted you to do in the first half of the year. Things looks worse right before they start getting better.”

The next big deadline for the members of the workshop comes in June, when they deliver their final manuscripts to Ms. Merrell and Ms. Wolitzer. Then, “literary agents will be screening each of the novels and meeting with the students in July at the Southampton Writers Conference,” Ms. Merrell said. “Of course, no one can predict what will appeal to a particular agent, but we are certain that these six fine novels will be in peak condition.”

This year only creative writing students in the Stony Brook Southampton M.F.A. program were eligible for the workshop, but the next go-round will be open to fiction writers who have completed thesis novels at other institutions. (Applications are currently being accepted; more information can be had by emailing [email protected].)

Now that the maiden run of BookEnds is heading into its final stretch, the group of workshoppers lucky enough to be accepted to round two will be happy to know that “the pilot year has exceeded our expectations,” Ms. Merrell said. “We knew we had a methodology to help recent M.F.A.s fine-tune their books, but honestly, even we are impressed at how effective our technique has proven to be.”

“Don’t Save Anything”

James Salter

Counterpoint, $26

It is a near certainty in publishing that when a writer of renown passes away, a year or so later a haphazard collection will appear in bookstores. It is almost always a flimsy thing, this book, which may include some uncollected magazine pieces, a few poignant letters, a book review or two, some lost poems — any scraps the writer’s estate can find to pad what is advertised as the final word of a great writer. Twenty-six dollars, please. 

This was the fear in learning the daunting title of a new book of nonfiction by James Salter (who died in 2015), “Don’t Save Anything: Uncollected Essays, Articles, and Profiles.” 

Happily, as it turns out, the title is misleading. As the writer’s wife, Kay Eldredge Salter, states in her preface, “don’t save anything” refers to a notion her husband held about his own work. To paraphrase: Resist the temptation to hold material for later use. Throw everything in now. In fact, most of the pieces included in “Don’t Save Anything” are more than serviceable, and a handful indispensable, many of them, as Ms. Salter states, rescued from boxes the writer had “stored in places I could only get to with a ladder.” 

It is astonishing now to think that a writer of Salter’s prestige once wrote for People magazine. But that is exactly what happened in the mid-1970s, when he was sent to Europe to profile writers such as Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, and Antonia Fraser. (Different magazine, different world.) All three pieces are collected here, each showing Salter’s gift for brief portraiture. Of waiting to meet the Nabokovs at their hotel in Montreux, he writes, “The great chandeliers hang silent. The tables in the vast dining room overlooking the lake are spread with white cloth and silver as if for dinners before the war.” Of Nabokov himself, he states, “Novelists, like dictators, have long reigns.” 

I would dare to venture that such sentences, and subjects, have not appeared in the magazine since.

An essay on his literary hero, Isaac Babel, crystallizes the Russian writer’s genius. “The strength,” Salter writes, “came not when you could no longer add a sentence but when you could no longer take one away.” Salter imagines Babel’s last moments before his execution by Stalin’s regime in 1940: “What he felt as he walked to the chamber or courtyard in which he would be executed, shaken and alone, we cannot know. It may have been memories, his wife, daughter, even the fate of the folders of manuscripts that had been taken from him. Then, standing or kneeling near a wall, like countless others, he was shot.” 

Not all the pieces here have the same heft. In “Passionate Falsehoods,” Salter remembers his work in film, and shows he is not above a bit of name-dropping. There is a light romp for The New York Times in which he takes to the Austrian slopes with the legendary skier Toni Sailer, and another about eating in France that culminates with a recipe for figs served with a Scotch whiskey sauce. Even among the fluff, however, one can find genuine literary pleasures. In “Passionate Falsehoods,” Salter writes of hanging out with Robert Redford, just then on the cusp of mega-stardom, “There was a dreamlike quality also, perhaps because Redford seemed to just be passing through, not really involved. It was washing over him, like a casual love affair.” 

The one misfire might be the essay titled “Younger Women, Older Men,” written for Esquire in the early ’90s. While advocating the erotic tension of disparity — “the woman’s age should be one half that of the man’s plus seven years” — Salter includes brief fictional sketches meant to illuminate his theme. Instead, these fragments — unmoored from a larger whole — are carried off with precious descriptions of exotically named beauties nestled among the trappings of leisure. “She had a slight accent, South America, Rome?” “They order a good wine — Raoul knows these things.” The timing, also, couldn’t be worse. While Salter never endorses anything perverse or untoward, the specter of Roy Moore and #MeToo casts a pall that makes for uneasy reading.

Again, what one cherishes here most are the biographical sketches, displaying the author’s keen eye for what was once known as character. An appraisal of Dwight D. Eisenhower, for example, almost single-handedly revives Ike’s beleaguered reputation. “Those who think of him only as president, an old crock with a putter, fail to see the man as he really was. He was tough, resilient, wise.” Somehow Salter makes us believe it.

But it is an evocation of the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio that is perhaps the collection’s piece de resistance. D’Annunzio is a Salter hero writ large — louche, romantic, libertine, staunchly European, and, like Salter himself, a former fighter pilot. For 20 sublime pages the profiler sinks his teeth into his subject and doesn’t let go. About one of the poet’s famous works, “Alcyone,” the author writes, “It describes the sensations of a Tuscan summer, the sounds, smells, glare, the burning noons. Many of the poems are of astonishing beauty. . . .”

Much the same could be said of the work of James Salter, this valedictory collection proving once again his place among the essential American writers of the last half-century. 

Kurt Wenzel is a novelist who lives in Springs.

James Salter lived in Bridgehampton.

“Manhattan Beach” and

“Lincoln in the Bardo” 

Interesting that two of America’s keenest observers of contemporary life turned to the past for their latest work. Coincidence, or have current events overshadowed the possibilities of fiction? Jennifer Egan’s book follows a female diver at the Brooklyn docks during World War II, while George Saunders’s inhabits a number of voices surrounding the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie in 1862. Neither is as good as these authors’ best works, but in an off year for American fiction, both were still among 2017’s most satisfying. 

“Killers of the Flower Moon”

by David Grann

A work of nonfiction comparable to “In Cold Blood” and “The Executioner’s Song,” and the year’s best book. It tells the story of the Osage Indian tribe, who negotiate the rights to their mineral-rich land in 1920s Oklahoma — only to come under siege from murdering land barons. As the deaths pile up, J. Edgar Hoover comes to investigate, a case he will later use to increase the profile and power of the F.B.I. A story so rich and unique it seems impossible it is only being told now. 

“Leonardo da Vinci”

by Walter Isaacson 

When it comes to biographical subjects, Mr. Isaacson doesn’t mess around. He has tackled Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and now da Vinci, his most mercurial subject yet, “illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical,” as Mr. Isaacson writes. There are two arrests for homosexual acts, a blood feud with Michelangelo, and a stint as a spy for the Borgias. In his free time Leonardo managed a little work, too, including art, engineering, geometry, botany, physics, and much else. Nothing, it seems, escaped this genius’s mind, for which the very term “Renaissance man” appears to have been invented. 

“Lost City of the Monkey God” 

by Douglas Preston

Yet another nonfiction title that surpassed most of this year’s novels. In 1940, Theodore Morde, a journalist, journeyed to the Honduran jungle to investigate the myth of a lost city. He returned with the news that he had discovered it, with artifacts in hand, only to mysteriously commit suicide before revealing where it was located. Seventy-five years later, Douglas Preston and a team of scientists go in search of Morde’s trail, encountering along the way a “Raiders of the Lost Ark” bevy of dangers, everything from quicksand to jaguars. A great adventure and gripping read. 

“Meet Me in the Bathroom” 

by Lizzy Goodman

An oral biography of the second great era of rock in New York City, the decade starting in 2001. Ms. Goodman pastes together hundreds of interviews from the period’s most seminal bands: the Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Vampire Weekend, etc. There is plenty of decadence, of course, and a mother lode of gossip — the Strokes and Ryan Adams have a go at each other, for example. But the book also explains how these bands met the challenge of new technology, managing to survive and even thrive during the digital revolution. Though it ends in 2011, it already feels nostalgic. Can you imagine these bands emerging in today’s Manhattan? 

“The Force”

by Don Winslow

The fallen hero of Don Winslow’s ambitious police novel, Denny Malone, is the kind of character who would have been played by Al Pacino in his prime, as directed by Sidney Lumet. Denny is tough, smart, foulmouthed, and the best cop in Manhattan North — and, oh yes, he and his fellow officers have stolen millions in drug money. Stephen King said “The Force” was “like ‘The Godfather,’ only with cops.” But it is also a sprawling overview of New York City, depicting a gritty Manhattan awash in hypocrisy and greed, both high and low. And all of it written in Mr. Winslow’s spare, machine-gun-fire prose. 

“Sticky Fingers” 

by Joe Hagan

A biography that the subject himself, Jann Wenner, called “deeply flawed and tawdry,” so you know it’s good. It follows the inception of Rolling Stone in 1967 to the near present — though it’s in the era of the early 1970s that the book really sings. Drugs are everywhere, including with the journalists themselves, who were occasionally paid in cocaine. Mr. Wenner is depicted as a mass of dichotomies: fearless and insecure, generous and manipulative, straight and gay. The story ends with the erroneous campus rape story, which cost the magazine millions of dollars and at least some of its reputation. But who could dispute Rolling Stone’s vast influence, or that its story needs to be told? 

“Pachinko” 

by Min Jin Lee

“History has failed us, but no matter,” reads the first line of Ms. Lee’s new novel, her second after “Free Food for Millionaires.” “Pachinko” is a more ambitious affair, spanning four generations of a Korean family trying to survive under Japanese rule. The metaphor is the Japanese pachinko game itself, something of a hybrid of pinball and slot machine. Fortunes rise and fall in this epic tale, and the mercurial nature of destiny is explored through dozens of characters. But what seems both lasting and timely about “Pachinko” is the struggle and triumph of the immigrant experience, Ms. Lee giving dignity to what seems like an endlessly besieged group. 

“Red Famine” 

by Anne Applebaum

It is nearly impossible to imagine a leader purposely starving to death three million of his own people — unless, of course, that leader’s name is Joseph Stalin, of whom we have come to expect such things. Stalin apologists have always contended that the suffering in Ukraine (primarily between 1931 and 1933) was simply a matter of bad economic policy. But Ms. Applebaum’s research confirms what others had long theorized: In order to quell various rebellions in Ukraine, Stalin’s regime systematically cut off all access to the region’s food. The results were gruesome, as the population was reduced to eating dogs, garbage, and eventually each other. A grim but necessary lesson in bureaucratic barbarity. 

Kurt Wenzel is a novelist and regular book reviewer for The Star. He lives in Springs.