“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.

“Gertie Milk &

the Keeper of Lost Things”

Simon Van Booy

Razorbill, $16.99

I’ll be honest, and honestly I don’t particularly want to be honest, as I consider myself a fan of Simon Van Booy’s — from his recent entirely successful novel, “Father’s Day,” which out-realisms realism, to his heartfelt short stories, his Welsh background, his fin de siecle good looks. But with “Gertie Milk & the Keeper of Lost Things,” his new novel for young readers, I had trouble telling what was comedy and what was simply a lark.

Wait a minute, you’re thinking, it’s a middle-grade novel, where do you get off laying on such criticisms in the first place? Because, reader, the beginning’s so strong. Consider: A 12-year-old girl washes up on a deserted beach, could be anywhere, in nothing but a nightgown and slippers — no memories, no identity beyond a name sewn into her soaked attire. “All around there were boulders covered with slick sea grass, like the wet fur of some once-terrible creature that had not risen for a thousand years.”

Later, “Her missing memories might have been close, just a few thoughts away, but trying to remember felt like going around a corner that never ended.”

Time slippage is at play. What with the large wine stain birthmark on Gertie’s cheek, visions of a David (“Cloud Atlas”) Mitchell adventure danced. Uh, for young readers.

But such lyrical writing, nothing new to Mr. Van Booy, doesn’t return.

As she walks the island of Skuldark, which is of the earth, only existing a bit like the unseen space between the walls of a house, Gertie chances upon Kolt, his name an acronym for his position as the sole remaining Keeper of Lost Things. He’s the size of a golf tee at first, having ingested, Alice-like, some shrink­ing spice when he meant to grab the growing spice (an element of the plot that is not revisited). The Keepers are an order charged with selecting the choicest of misplaced items and returning them, in essence to make people less fearful, fear being the root of all our problems. Gertie is the new recruit.

The vast collection of lost things sits in chambers off labyrinthine passageways beneath Kolt’s cottage, where he lives in British eccentricity, eating peach cake and sipping tea like (I’m sorry, once you start thinking this way you can’t stop) a well-dressed Mr. Tumnus from C.S. Lewis. 

And his contentment is similarly sundered, as outside the cottage lie scattered the larger lost items, camouflaged World War II-era fighter planes, for instance, and among them a (yes, again) Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang heap of an old Jaguar, the vehicle that will transport Kolt and Gertie through time.

One of their stops is a hollowed-out Los Angeles after the Information Wars. People have fled for floating cities beyond the earth’s atmosphere, and the planet has been turned into a giant community garden. 

That’s all intriguing, but unfortunately it’s a fleeting visit, and what we’re left with is a sidekick, Robot Rabbit Boy, about the size of a Cabbage Patch Kid and equally worthy of an ax handle to the midsection. The product of a genius toymaker who went off her nut, he’s metallic, his speech is limited to a few nonsense phrases (“Eggcup,” he chirps), he’s weaponized with a laser that shoots from his button nose — he’s not funny.

But all is not lost, if you’ll pardon the pun, as Mr. Van Booy, who has written books on philosophy, strives to get some profundities across to the reader, in the form of lessons Gertie learns on her hero’s quest or even her own realizations. Fear not death, for one. “Remember,” Kolt tells her, “the human body isn’t the start of life, it simply holds it for a moment, the way you can fill a cup with water from a slow, deep river. Even if you empty the cup, the river flows on, and the water becomes rain, or snow, or mist. . . .”

Heavy stuff, leavened incessantly by stabs at humor: “You may not know this, Gertie, but for the first 180,000 years, our species of human lived short, painful lives with lots of hair and no shampoo.” Prehistory, furthermore, was a time when “even just showing up unannounced with fairly good teeth was a good enough reason to be burned alive or thrown into the cooking pot with a potato or two.”

The enemy across time, it should be said, is a roguish band called the Losers, who “want to strip the world of ideas, and destroy all technology so that humans can start again — having made such a mess of things,” Kolt says, and Gertie can be forgiven for feeling conflicted, given the logic of that aim.

But Gertie, her 12-year-old wisdom enhanced by encounters with such learned figures as Eratosthenes and Lao-tzu, comes to see human progress “as brave people holding hands in a long line, passing ideas to one another. . . .”

That’s right, kid. Keep hope alive.

Simon Van Booy earned an M.F.A. in writing at Southampton College. He is a former South Fork resident and remains a visitor.

“Man of the Hour”

Jennet Conant

Simon & Schuster, $30

The only element I might question in Jennet Conant’s new biography of her grandfather James Bryant Conant is the title. “Man of the Hour” does inadequate justice to the lofty accomplishments of Mr. Conant, not to mention the span of time during which his influence was felt. But perhaps I quibble.

Over the course of a lifetime that lasted just short of 85 years (1893 to 1978), Mr. Conant established an early reputation as a brilliant chemist, headed a unit of the Army’s chemical warfare division during World War I, served as the president of Harvard University for 20 years, was one of the leaders of the Manhattan Project, which developed the first U.S. nuclear bomb that brought World War II to a conclusion, and served as the American high commissioner for Germany during the early Cold War years. Among other things.

By just about every measure, Mr. Conant’s was a life of significant achievements. He brought a flinty New England competence to everything he tackled. His granddaughter, a New York Times best-selling author, brings comparable skill to the potentially tricky task of recounting that life.

Family standing mattered tremendously in the Boston of Mr. Conant’s birth. His own family was second-tier, at best. Rather than arriving on the Mayflower in 1620, the first Conant to reach America came on the sister ship Anne in 1623. Instead of residing in fashionable Back Bay or Beacon Hill, the family made its home in old but plainer Dorchester, and young Jim Conant graduated from the local Roxbury Latin School, not from one of the traditional boarding schools where most Harvard students of the day prepared for college.

Upon entering Harvard College, however, his academic prowess distinguished him. College was followed by graduate school, also at Harvard, and he obtained a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1916. After a brief stint in private business in Queens, Mr. Conant entered the military during World War I, where his training was put to good use in the then-new field of chemical warfare. (“The war . . . made stars of organic chemists.”)

Following the armistice of 1918, Mr. Conant joined the chemistry faculty of his alma mater. He married Grace (Patty) Thayer Richards, daughter of a famous Harvard chemistry professor and chairman of the department. He gained not only a devoted wife, but also a powerful mentor in his father-in-law, though no one ever seems to have argued that Mr. Conant’s rise at Harvard was anything but well deserved.

His appointment as Harvard’s 23rd president, in 1933, was exceptional not only because Mr. Conant was the youngest person ever to assume the position, but also because it was rare for the president not to have come from Boston’s firmly entrenched social elite (which included his wife’s family).

Leading America’s oldest university was a daunting task; Harvard was tradition-bound, to say the least. Mr. Conant understood the need for the institution to cast a wider net, in an effort to attract the best students and most brilliant faculty members, regardless of their social backgrounds, in order for “Harvard to become a truly national university.”

Educational reform and the democratization of education were priorities of Mr. Conant’s throughout his life. He pursued these goals less as a highly visible crusader than as a quietly persistent statesman.

Unlike how such matters would play out today, Mr. Conant remained at the helm of Harvard throughout the most attention-worthy chapter of his life, which coincided with the period of World War II and its aftermath. This time, the warrior scientist occupied a position of top leadership. The saga of the development of the nuclear bomb is a tale of intrigue, suspense, setbacks and triumphs, political machinations, and moral quandaries.

As chairman of the National Defense Research Committee, Mr. Conant was among the most highly placed civilians in the development and deployment of the first nuclear bombs. He is described as a thoughtful, tactful, principled administrator who earned the confidence of American presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Lyndon B. Johnson.

When it came to the Manhattan Project, Mr. Conant did what needed to be done, in the interest of bringing the war to an end. He was, nevertheless, deeply mindful of the cataclysmic potential of what had been created. “While Conant cautioned against ‘fear, panic, and foolish, short-sighted action’ in his public speeches, privately he was wrestling with his own post-atomic jitters.” In 1946, after giving the matter careful consideration, he turned down President Truman’s offer to become the first head of the Atomic Energy Commission.

One forgets, reading this biography, that the author is a direct descendant of her subject. (Clearly, we have here a biography, not a memoir.) That is as it should be. Ms. Conant remains a dispassionate observer of Mr. Conant’s life. In a carefully researched and thoroughly annotated work, she needs only to report. There is no real synthesis, nor does there need to be. Mr. Conant’s life and multifaceted career speak for themselves. Though he worked very hard and applied himself with proper Yankee diligence to every assignment and challenge, he did not have to struggle to succeed. He was good.

Thus, this is a work of history as much as biography. As an account of the scientific research and development that were the underpinnings of both World Wars, it is outstanding. Add to that the description of nuclear politics of the 1940s and beyond (both domestically and internationally), and you have a book that makes an important contribution. (The descriptions of the career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and one of the “fathers of the nuclear bomb,” inspire me to refresh my awareness of that particular story.)

I should note that one advantage that the author brings to bear here, as a direct descendant, is her understanding of the one area of Mr. Conant’s life that was less successful than the others — his home and family life. Things were not easy. Patty Conant was a deeply nervous and anxious person. Those tendencies ran in her family. (Both of her brothers committed suicide.) Moreover, the Conants’ two sons found their father lacking on numerous occasions. To her credit, Ms. Conant does not demur when it comes to reporting on these aspects of her grandfather’s story. The result adds to an honest and balanced examination.

Although he appeared multiple times, over the years, on the cover of Time magazine, James B. Conant’s name has faded from most people’s awareness. Jennet Conant’s first-rate volume about him should help reverse that phenomenon. 

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

Jennet Conant lives part time in Noyac.

Christmas is less than a month away, for spiritual good, for consumerist ill. Here’s some good: The author of “The Nutcracker in Harlem,” The Star’s T.E. McMorrow, will be signing copies of the charming picture book, recently out from HarperCollins, at two Books of Wonder stores in Manhattan on Sunday — at 18 West 18th Street from 1 to 3 p.m., and at 217 West 84th Street from 4 to 6. He’ll be joined by the book’s illustrator, James Ransome, a veteran of the genre, and by two other children’s book author-illustrators, Matt Tavares and Susan Jeffers.

Mr. McMorrow was once a stagehand at a ballet company in Harlem. His book is a welcome Jazz Age retelling of the classic and oft-performed holiday story, with an African-American cast of characters led by a brave girl protagonist, Marie.

Every year

she gave him a shirt

yellow or worse

and every year

he hated her gift

and never failed

to tell her so.

Now he wishes

he had kissed her

forehead and understood

that a woman doesn’t

always know what to give

her only son

for Christmas.

Bruce Buschel is a writer, producer, director, and restaurateur who lives in Bridgehampton.

“Kurt Vonnegut: 

Complete Stories”

Collected and introduced by Jerome Klinkowitz and Dan Wakefield

Seven Stories Press, $45

Once upon a time Kurt Vonnegut walked the Hamptons. The last time I talked to him was outside the Sagaponack General Store. I was walking to my bike with my lunch; Kurt was slogging north toward the store. Kurt didn’t really walk; he slogged as if the weight of the cosmos were on his shoulders. 

“Hi, Kurt,” I said. 

“Hi, Bill,” he said, and slogged on.

The very first time I talked to him I was a drunk college kid enamored of “Player Piano,” his brilliant 1952 novel that predicted with horrifying accuracy the robotic future that is upon us. Thinking I’d never connect, I asked information for his phone number in West Barnstable, Mass. Amazingly it wasn’t unlisted. I dialed. Kurt answered. Good grief! What’s a buzzed college kid to do when a god answers?

“What are you doing now?” I blurted out. 

“I’m playing poker with a friend,” Kurt said. 

“Oh!” said I, and hung up in terror.

In between the first and last conversations, we met now and then at various Hamptons cocktail parties. At one I announced to him my literary disdain for “The Bridges of Madison County,” a purple-prose best seller of the time, expecting he’d agree. “Well, I tell you, Bill, that novel meant a lot to many women.” Kurt shut me up.

Kurt was a contrarian, and we need one badly out here on the East End. When men landed on the moon I was awash in tears at the triumph of the human spirit. Kurt pooh-poohed the entire adventure in The New York Times Magazine. “Moon!” he scoffed. “Big deal.”

When the most recent extravagant beachfront mansion was planned for Sagaponack — one with dozens of toilets — Kurt was horrified. In fact he vowed to leave the Hamptons forever if it ever went up. 

It did. 

He stayed long enough for me to say hi at the Sagaponack store that last time.

Boy, do we miss him — that shambling, head down, creased-face man in the beat-up raincoat who loved the world, and was broken by the foolish people who were trampling it underfoot, helpless to help themselves.

So what about this book? Is it any good? Answer: Not only is this book good, it is monumental — 912 pages of Vonnegut’s stories both published and unpublished, 98 stories total. If you love Vonnegut, you need this book.

A special thanks to Seven Stories Press, a small independent publisher that obviously put all its love and finances toward collecting and printing this handsomely designed and bound volume. One does not venture into a project this huge without lots of moxie and affection. No e-book this, it’s meant for the long run after our electronic mania has subsided.

In his foreword, Dave Eggers (novelist and founder of McSweeney’s) states, “This collection pulses with relevance . . . the satisfaction we draw from seeing some moral clarity, some linear order brought to a knotted world, is impossible to overstate.”

The stories were culled and are introduced by Dan Wakefield (novelist and author of the memoir “Returning: A Spiritual Journey”) and Jerome Klinkowitz (author and scholar of midcentury American literature). The stories are divided into thematic sections: “War,” “Women,” “Science,” “Romance,” “Work Ethic vs. Fame and Fortune,” “Behavior,” “The Band Director,” and “Futuristic” — each section introduced by Mr. Wakefield or Mr. Klinkowitz. 

Along the way the editors relate the path of Vonnegut’s life — which might be a revelation to his multitude of fans who remember him as a countercultural icon. 

Vonnegut in fact was for 20 years a writer of short stories about middle-class America that he sold to popular slicks like Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post. He was a determined craftsman, shaping his tales to the pleasure of his editors and enduring stacks of rejection slips with stoicism.

He was born in Indianapolis in 1922, played the clarinet in the local high school band, studied at Cornell (biochemistry), was a soldier in World War II captured by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge, survived the firebombing of Dresden in 1945 (the setting for his first commercially successful novel, “Slaughterhouse-Five”), and labored as a publicist for General Electric from 1947 to 1951, hating the corporate life, composing short stories at night. 

When his stories started to sell to the slicks (at 50 cents a word), he was able to quit G.E. and settle in West Barnstable with his first wife, Jane Cox (the true unsung hero here — his cheerleader, file keeper, and mother to their three children plus three more adopted when Kurt’s sister and her husband died). Somehow, with the odd jobs and a stint at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Vonnegut supported his family as a freelancer (almost impossible today) with his short stories and early novels like “Cat’s Cradle,” “Player Piano,” “Mother Night,” and “The Sirens of Titan,” which sold poorly until in 1969 “Slaughterhouse-Five” made Vonnegut a celebrity flush with cash, a situation that made him wary: “I feel uneasy about prosperity.”

He was always on the side of the underdog, and I suppose he felt out of place in the glittering Hamptons late in his life (he died in 2007).

When I saw him for the last time, his heavy-lidded eyes gave the impression of “unalterable weariness for the crimes of his fellow humans,” as Dave Eggers sums him up in his introduction to this wonderful labor of love.

Bill Henderson edits the Pushcart Prize and lives in Springs. His memoir “All My Dogs” is just out in paperback.

The bus bores into the city

Of noises, rectagons

And life in death museums.

Getting to its pickup

Means a daydream drive

Through an Eastern woodlet:

Oak, pine, hickory

And shy dogwood trees,

Reclaiming their dead leaves.

The road is steeply banked,

Exalting the modest trees

And their rose windows.

I, too, am elevated

Passing through the glen’s

Green, quiet peace.

Then a Then, keener

Than this Now:

A school bus trip;

A yellow flying carpet

Sweeps my fourth grade class,

Mackinawed and lunch bagged,

Past stoops and bars,

Life insurers, pool halls,

Funeral homes and florists,

To the dark museum’s

Lighted diorama

Hall of Eastern Woodlands.

Still I stand before

The magic artifice

Behind the guardian glass.

Bernard Goldhirsch formerly taught English in Brooklyn. He lives in Springs.

Sarah Maslin Nir’s “Horse Crazy”

You might know Sarah Maslin Nir from her night-prowling articles in The New York Times. Or by way of her father, the late Yehuda Nir, a psychiatrist and author who lived part time in Springs. Or maybe from her stint as a writer for The Star, where she once even contributed to that fun but defunct freebie, The Daily Classic, which the paper used to put out during the week of the Hampton Classic horse show in Bridgehampton.

Horses being much to the point, as Simon & Schuster has just given Ms. Nir a significant advance for a book titled “Horse Crazy: The Story of a Woman — and a World — in Love With a Beast,” in which she will apply her investigative reporter’s skills to riding — her love of it, others’ passion for it, and what the heck is behind the four-legged appeal. Her own experiences range from “patrolling the meadows of Central Park as a teenaged mounted officer to sloshing through the peat bogs of Scotland to sprinting around the quarries of Rajasthan” in India, in the words of a release.

It’s expected to be out in early 2019.

“Because of the Horses”

Let us now praise the graphic artist, as, speaking of horses, “Because of the Horses” by Patricia McGrane is just out, featuring a striking blood red and Confederate gray cover by Ryan Salinetti. She’s a designer of books, other publications, and websites who lives in Southampton and Massachusetts.

The book, historical fiction set during the Civil War, uses a single family to explore how Tennessee was torn apart — some of its residents favoring secession, others supporting the Union; some active abolitionists, others comfortable with the status quo. The author incorporates two bits of her own deep background into the tale — a family house in Jonesborough that was a stop on the Underground Railroad, and her great-great-grandfather’s diary of his activities as a horse trader to both sides of the conflict.

“Do No Harm”

Paul Vincent Moschetta

Post Hill Press, $16

“You are susceptible to very high highs and very low lows,” says the psychiatrist to Andy Koops, the manic-depressive protagonist in “Do No Harm,” a debut novel by Paul Vincent Moschetta, a psychotherapist specializing in marriage therapy with offices in Manhattan and East Hampton. He and his wife, Evelyn Moschetta, have co-authored several books on marriage counseling and were contributing editors to the popular and long-running Ladies Home Journal magazine column “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” 

Like Andy Koops, the reader of “Do No Harm” is also likely to experience wild mood swings regarding the merits of this book.

It starts on a high: a near flawless opener that deftly portrays a character who is vulnerable and immediately sympathetic. He is a high school senior in the mid-1960s when his father, suffering from depression, hangs himself one day in the garage of the family’s Oyster Bay home. Andy’s mother is an alcoholic who “sipped vodka in small doses, from 2 p.m. to bedtime, every day,” leaving manic-depressive Andy cutting classes at school and in a perpetual drug haze. 

Stoned out of his brains the day his father commits suicide, Andy barely reacts to his father’s death. Fast-forward three years and he’s a junior in college, high on LSD, when suddenly the memory of that day and the pain come rushing back with such “neon intensity” that Andy flies through a psychotic adventure around campus and ends up in the acute services unit at Central State Psychiatric Hospital. 

It’s a great preamble for a “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”-type thriller. Unfortunately, the author decides to then take us through a lengthy, and somewhat clichéd, back story of Dr. Enzo Gambelli, who will turn out to be the Nurse Ratched character three years later when Andy, now living in Southampton, ends up back in the psychiatric ward after another psychotic bender has him attempting to steal a plane at Suffolk County Airport because he believes he has an appointment with President Nixon in D.C. 

It is only here, some 50 pages into the book, that the real story kicks in. That’s the a lot of throat clearing, and it’s a shame. Dr. Moschetta, who also practiced at two psychiatric hospitals on Long Island, offers what seems to be a keen insider’s knowledge of the abuse that exists in mental institutions and the dehumanizing state of some of this country’s most vulnerable people.

Most people know the axiom taught to medical students, attributed to the ancient Greek Hippocrates but timeless in its quiet sanity: “First, do no harm.” But many doctors do harm, and Dr. Gambelli is one of them. A vividly depicted character, Gambelli is far more evil and twisted than Nurse Ratched, a sadist who runs his ward with an iron fist, keeping patients cowed through abuse and overmedication. He also has a stranglehold on the ward’s charge, a man who basically becomes Gambelli’s bitch by enduring brutal sexual encounters that are not always consensual, told with unflinching detail, and fueled by Gambelli’s inhaling of amyl nitrate poppers, or liquid gold.

Into the story comes Jay Conti, a maverick social worker assigned to Andy’s ward. A contrast to Gambelli’s evil, Jay Conti helps Andy formulate a plan to free himself from the catatonic effects of Thorazine, a mood disorder drug prescribed by Gambelli in extra-large doses because Andy is categorized as “uncooperative.” Jay is there to remind the reader that we go to doctors for help and healing; we don’t expect them to make us worse. But Gambelli’s darkness ensures that the story escalates to remarkably evil heights, all the while punctuated by some blackly comic scenes recounting the absurdities of hospital bureaucracy.

As debut novels go, this is a commendable effort. Although Dr. Moschetta said that he is currently working on adapting the story for the screen, the ending of “Do No Harm” suggests a sequel in the future. Fans of “grip-lit,” as psychological thrillers are sometimes called, will surely be pleased.

Reader, if you were paying close attention to the Aug. 3 issue, you may have seen a short notice like this one having to do with a poetry contest — empathy was the theme — raising money for the Lustgarten Foundation for pancreatic cancer research. 

Well, we have the winners: Stacey Lawrence of South Orange, N.J., Joanne Pilgrim of Springs and of The East Hampton Star, and the late Cecilia Crittenden of the Dominican Sisters of Hope, whose poem was submitted by friends. A poetry reading will be held in their honor on Nov. 18, a Saturday, from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Onyx Theatre of the CM Performing Arts Center on Montauk Highway in Oakdale. Other participants’ poems will also be read. 

The judges were figures from the East End poetry scene: Carole Stone, George Held, and Mindy Kronenberg. The winners’ poems will be published online at lustgarten.org and neuronwalker.com. 

The contest, the work of Virginia Walker, a Shelter Island poet and professor, was really more than a fund-raiser, as it paid tribute to poets here, her friends, who died of pancreatic cancer: Antje Katcher, who was a member of the East End Poetry Workshop, Robert Long, who was an editor at The Star, Siv Cedering, and Diana Chang.

It raised $805 for the Lustgarten Foundation, adding to the effort Ms. Walker began with the publication of “Neuron Mirror,” a poetry collection she wrote with the late Michael Walsh. The total raised is now up to $10,363, she said in a release. 

Registration ahead of time for the reading has been requested, particularly if you’d like to read your own work. Ms. Walker can be called at 631-749-2394 or emailed at [email protected].