“The Suffragents”

Brooke Kroeger

Excelsior Editions, $24.95

Although the 19th amendment, which gave women voting rights nationwide, is still less than 100 years old, this month marks the centennial of New York State’s granting women enfranchisement three years before the rest of the nation followed suit in 1920. 

Throughout the great­er part of this year, New Yorkers have celebrated 100 years of women’s suffrage in various ways (there was even a recreation of a suffrage rally and march on East Hampton’s Main Street in August), but one essential aspect of the women’s suffrage movement — the role men played in helping sway history — has been largely overlooked. That is, until Brooke Kroeger’s “The Suffragents,” which hit bookshelves in September. 

Although it is noted that the fight for women’s suffrage began nearly 70 years earlier, “The Suffragents” begins with an image of a parade along New York’s Fifth Avenue in 1911, where thousands of men and women marched under a Men’s League for Woman Suffrage banner. Ms. Kroeger, however, sets the tone for the next 11 chapters, which are separated year by year, from 1907 to 1920, by explaining that those men in attendance were not random supporters of the cause. 

She goes on to recount the untold narrative of how some of New York’s most powerful and influential men involved themselves, despite adverse responses, in the women’s suffrage campaign. 

While it was the initiative of the National American Woman Suffrage Association to invite upstanding men to support the enfranchisement of women and march, orate, write, and help influence both the general public and government officials, it was not long before the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, which remained active from 1909 to 1917, attracted thousands of others on its own. 

Notable throughout the book, though, are the various men — and, startlingly, women — who publicly shared their beliefs that women were unfit to vote. Not only did female suffragists contend with cunning remarks, men who associated themselves with the movement were demeaned, catcalled, and whistled at during their countless appearances. 

Nonetheless, the author, a professor of journalism at New York University, commends the leadership of men like Oswald Garrison Villard, John Dewey, Max Eastman, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and George Foster Peabody, all of whom fought for the cause despite a greater public outcry. 

Ms. Kroeger, in true journalistic fashion, details the various conversations, correspondence, and setbacks of the campaign, as well as the eventual success the National American Woman Suffrage Association had in gaining the vote. And it could not have been done without the invaluable help of the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, which largely led the charge in changing public perception on the streets and getting important political figures, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, to eventually accept that women deserved the vote in New York and across the country.

Brooke Kroeger’s previous books include “Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist.” She lives part time in East Hampton.

“You Belong to Me”

Colin Harrison

Sarah Crichton Books, $27

If there is such a thing as “classic” Colin Harrison, the Brooklyn and Jamesport-based writer’s new novel, “You Belong to Me,” would certainly qualify. This, Mr. Harrison’s eighth novel, is yet another of his New York noirs that marry traditional crime fiction with elements of social observation. 

Fans of the author will find the usual hallmarks: panoramic descriptions of Manhattan life; a successful, and highly sexual, white-collar hero; an exhaustive knowledge of esoteric subject matter (in this novel, map collecting), and hair-raising scenes of violence that are meticulously detailed. Mr. Harrison’s 2000 novel, “Afterburn,” for example, contained scenes of torture that I am still trying to forget.

“You Belong to Me” is a somewhat gentler affair. The hero, Paul Reeves, is a Manhattan immigration lawyer obsessed with collecting old maps of New York. As the novel opens, Reeves is on his way to a map auction with his friend Jennifer Mehraz, the beautiful young wife of an Iranian financier. The stroll to the auction house is described with the author’s usual eye for New York atmosphere:

“Now they were cutting through Rockefeller Center, where the Friday lunchtime crowds were out, men in their shirtsleeves, women letting the September sun hit their legs, eating their expensive sandwiches, phoning, texting, watching and being watched.” 

The author extends his set piece to describe a Christie’s auction from the inside, then expounds on some of the finer points of map collecting. The sexual tension between Jennifer and Paul intensifies as the collector secures his prize. Then Jennifer is suddenly whisked away by a mysterious man in army fatigues. Game on. 

As in many of Mr. Harrison’s novels, the writer pursues a number of separate plot lines that seem hopelessly disparate, only to eventually tie them together with enviable skill. In this novel, Jennifer revives an old affair, infuriating her wealthy husband, Ahmed. Paul pursues another, more valuable map, while Ahmed, along with his Uncle Hassan, assembles a bevy of lowlife assassins to take on Jennifer’s lover. Suffice to say that these narratives all collide with swift and bracing brutality. The revenge is served up cold, with maximum collateral damage. Violence begets violence, especially in a Colin Harrison novel. 

Of course, if it’s sheer murder and mayhem you’re looking for, there are any number of contemporary writers even more grisly than Mr. Harrison. The reason this author stands out in the world of noir is his ability to keep a plot rolling even as he indulges his strong social eye and personal esoteric pursuits. If, for example, you think map collecting isn’t exactly a subject matter to get your loins buzzing, “You Belong to Me” might make you think again. Here is Paul Reeves on the subject of an 18th-century New York map that he covets, described with an almost erotic feverishness: 

“The delicate lines drawn by a surveyor in 1766. The irregular lettering set in type. The attention to inlets where ships could be hidden, the heights where cannons could be placed. The implicit message, given the enormous care and detail of the map, a loyal warning to the King of England: this rich, fabulous island of Manhattan will be fought over, this New York City will be where destiny turns. My city, Paul thought.”

Not all of the rabbit holes Mr. Harrison explores are of equal interest, however. One chapter, for example, begins this way: “Very few people understand the history of tape.” Well, you’ve got me there. “That it was first made with tree sap, animal parts, and especially boiled fish bones, all natural adhesives slathered onto strips of eel skin, fabric, and rag-content paper.” The excitement mounts as the author moves on to explain cellophane tape. Earlier in the novel is a shorter, and punchier, disquisition on New York City rats.

Since the ambition in Mr. Harrison’s work indicates a wish to be taken as a serious novelist, it must be mentioned that the characterizations in “You Belong to Me” can sometimes veer into cliché. Paul Reeves is a likable, well-rounded hero. But the villain Ahmed is a cipher, and yet another possessive Middle Eastern man with an Othello complex via American blondes. There is Paul’s girlfriend, Rachel, a frivolous advertising executive who sounds like she’s on loan from Candace Bushnell. “Because he was eligible,” Rachel thinks of Paul. “Because she wasn’t getting any younger.” 

All the heavies in the novel are Middle Eastern and Latino cutouts, and the novel’s one gay character gets a two-page inner monologue that somehow equates homosexuality with the exclamation point. “So happy! He shook hands with the hunk-a-dunk and gave him an If ever you want to try something different smile, found a cab magically, and was soon back on his way uptown! . . . So exciting!”

What is exciting is watching Mr. Harrison take these shaky characterizations and still manage to spin a gripping potboiler. It’s good to know that the author’s gift for momentum is intact, as is his love for New York. After a lavish description of the timeless Grand Central Oyster Bar, one of his characters states, memorably, “You had to have places in the city like that, or you didn’t know who you were anymore.” 

Paul Reeves’s map collecting, then, becomes a metaphor for freezing a city in time. It’s an illusion, of course, but one that Mr. Harrison, the so-called “bard of New York noir,” can’t help but indulge.

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

“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.

“Legendary Sports 

Writers of the

Golden Age”

Lee Congdon

Rowman & Littlefield, $35

He may have written, in verse, about the “One Great Scorer” in the sky who will note for eternity “not that you won or lost — but how you played the Game.” And his first name may have adorned a popular sports website that paradoxically contributed to the dismantling of his beloved world of print journalism. But the most important thing to know about Grantland Rice might well be that he enlisted as a private in World War I when he was 37 years old, a father, and famous. He declined an assignment to Stars and Stripes and requested the front lines, seeing action as an artilleryman in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in the fall of 1918.

Rice, from Murfreesboro, Tenn., a grandson of a Confederate soldier who fought there, wasn’t debilitated or even disillusioned by the war, but rather saw it as a demarcation. Having grown up before 1914, “that more innocent period in U.S. history remained, for him, the world as it ought to be,” Lee Congdon, a professor emeritus of history at James Madison University, writes in “Legendary Sports Writers of the Golden Age.” 

His code of honor was reflected in his writing, notably in his ongoing criticism of the boxer Jack Dempsey, who, for all his ferocity in the ring — at 6-foot-1 and 187 pounds he won the heavyweight title by destroying a 6-foot-6, 245-pound Jess Willard — was essentially a draft dodger. 

Dempsey is important here as one of the four towering figures of the sporting “golden age,” as popularly conceived, meaning the Roaring Twenties, along with Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones, the courtly Southerner who almost single-handedly popularized the game of golf in this country, and Red Grange, the “Galloping Ghost” at the University of Illinois, who as a halfback with the Chicago Bears elevated professional football, “once a shabby outcast among sports,” as The New York Times had it in 1938, into “a dignified and honored member of the American athletic family.” (For what it’s worth, Mr. Congdon considers the golden age to extend through the Great Depression and all the way up to the ultimate loss of innocence, the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy.)

College football was Rice’s favorite sport, as was borne out in his most famous opener, in which in 1924 the former Vanderbilt classics major compared the Notre Dame backfield to the Four Horsemen: “Famine, Pestilence, Destruction, and Death . . . the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army football team was swept over the precipice. . . .”

Florid perhaps, overblown, but at least creative and memorable. Rice’s enthusiasm, however, often got the better of him when it came to hyperbole. Back to Dempsey, from a lead paragraph: “In four minutes of the most sensational fighting ever seen in any ring back through all the ages of the ancient game. . . .”

But with the benefits of time and distance and a smaller audience, he could be more rigorous: “Dempsey’s face was a bloody, horribly beaten mask that Tunney had torn up like a ploughed field.” (This was the fight after which Dempsey famously told his wife, “Honey, I forgot to duck.”)

Furthermore, in his memoirs, Rice, who died in 1954, wrote of boxing as indecent, plagued by “thugs, crooks, cheaters, bums, and chiselers.” He could also, at the end of his life, anyway, be prescient, becoming “alarmed by the win-at-any-cost approach of many football coaches and players,” Mr. Congdon writes. As Rice himself put it, “If football isn’t character-building it is no game to be played.”

In a 1951 issue of Sport magazine, he lit into college presidents in an open letter that lamented the quasi-professionalism of college football — long before the advent of the lucrative television contract, decades in anticipation of more sophisticated critics like the late Frank Deford, and roughly 30 years in advance of ESPN’s hyping of players practically into superheroes. 

The height of his influence, however, came with his syndicated “Sportlight” column, which began in 1915, when he moved to The New York Tribune, and which “made him the most famous and highest-paid sports writer in the United States,” according to Mr. Congdon, enabling him a dozen years later to build a mansion on West End Road in East Hampton Village. 

In those years Rice was solidly in the Gee Whiz school of hero worship, as opposed to the jaundiced Aw Nuts school of cynics and fiction writers like Damon Runyon and Ring Lardner, and if Rice was damned with faint praise as a “nice man” and a “good writer,” but an innocent one, Mr. Congdon argues on behalf of his “resolve to elevate rather than depress the human spirit.”

Take Babe Ruth. The two were friends for three decades, so Rice knew all about the womanizing, the drinking, the other indulgences of “our national exaggeration,” as one writer of the Aw Nuts school described him. He chose instead to focus on what Ruth did and meant for “the kids, the cripples, the heart-weary, and the underprivileged,” as he wrote in a 1948 column as Ruth was dying of cancer.

And then there’s the fixed World Series of the 1919 Black Sox scandal, which nearly killed the sport. Ruth’s heroics on the diamond saved baseball. The nation needed him.

When Ruth died, Rice paid tribute to him in verse, as was his tendency: “Game called by darkness — let the curtain fall. . . . The Big Guy’s left us with the night to face, / And there is no one who can take his place.” 

Another era gone.

“I’ll Have What

She’s Having”

Erin Carlson

Hachette, $27

Many years ago, when Nora Ephron and I were young and single, a mutual friend tried to fix us up by inviting both of us to a party. Unfortunately, she invited so many other people that Nora and I never connected. 

This sounds like the premise of an Ephron movie like “Sleepless in Seattle,” in which two people destined for each other fail to connect until the happy ending — but in real life, though we were neighbors on the Upper West Side for years, we never met, and the closest I’ve ever gotten to her is reading Erin Carlson’s posthumous biography, “I’ll Have What She’s Having.” That title, as fans of the writer and director know, is the famous line, delivered by Rob Reiner’s mother, that tops Meg Ryan’s faked orgasm halfway through “When Harry Met Sally.” 

What emerges in the book is a picture of a kooky, crafty, ambitious, hilarious, insecure, sometimes spiteful, always entertaining woman pursuing a brilliant career as a novelist, essayist, script writer (stage and screen), and director, right up there with that other transplanted New Yorker Woody Allen. The focus stays mainly on the work, but her life pretty much was her work. Her failed marriages to Dan Greenburg and Carl Bernstein (out of which came her novel “Heartburn”) are dealt with summarily, and her third marriage — the successful one, to Nicholas Pileggi, a.k.a. Mr. Right — doesn’t get much space either, beyond his baffling description of her as “the kind of Italian mama I grew up with: They make a house really a home.” So far is that from anything anybody else ever said about her that it may be why the marriage succeeded. 

What we mostly get is a step-by-step narrative of how three movies — “When Harry Met Sally,” “Sleepless in Seattle,” and “You’ve Got Mail” — got made, from original idea to postproduction, and of how Nora surmounted the innumerable hurdles she encountered: temperamental actors, know-nothing executives, costume designers who didn’t understand the look she was going for, set designers who forgot that her least favorite color was blue, all balanced by enough competent craftsmen to realize her vision and by her creative synergy with her sister and collaborator, Delia. 

You can learn a good deal about the moviemaking process here, but the book takes for granted that you possess more than basic knowledge of Hollywood and its ways. Its target audience is Ephron fans, who have seen the films over and over and remember every scene. Maybe that’s why sometimes the synopses of key scenes in those “three iconic films” — like that faked orgasm in Katz’s Delicatessen and the mix-up at Cafe Lalo that brings Ms. Ryan and Tom Hanks together in “You’ve Got Mail” — are muddled and hard to follow. Perhaps Ms. Carlson assumes we know by heart what happens, but I had to watch them on YouTube to figure it out. And I was disappointed that, even though the scene in Katz’s is described in exhaustive detail, one of my favorite moments goes unacknowledged: Immediately after Ms. Ryan ceases her ecstatic moaning, she daintily eats a forkful of coleslaw. 

Even dedicated admirers may find it hard to dig out from under an avalanche of names of Nora’s friends and co-workers, their friends and co-workers, their agents and psychiatrists and chauffeurs and the spouses of all these people. Ms. Carlson is a diligent and careful researcher who interviewed literally hundreds of people for this book (not, unfortunately, Ephron, who died in 2012), but she seems to have felt compelled to include every detail she learned, pertinent or not. 

If you have only a casual interest in the movie business, you may find yourself foundering in a sea of references you won’t understand, scenes you don’t remember, anecdotes you don’t get. People are often referred to by their first names only, which works fine for most of us with Cher but maybe not for non-movie-buffs with “Demi.” And do we really need to know the name of Nora’s therapist’s husband, since he never figures in the story?

Ms. Carlson is a career journalist, writing about movies for trade papers like The Hollywood Reporter, and her prose is gossipy and filled with the lingo of the trade — directors “helm” films, producers “greenlight” projects, clients are “repped” by their agents. Still, all her hard work results in a believable portrait of Ephron, and also, inevitably, of Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks — America’s Sweetheart (sometimes a little ditzy and cranky) and Mr. Nice Guy (who also had a more complicated off-camera side). 

But the book claims to be more than a narrative of Ephron’s life. The subtitle is “How Nora Ephron’s Three Iconic Films Saved the Romantic Comedy,” which seems to promise a critical examination of the films in the context of the genre. And that, Ms. Carlson doesn’t give us. 

Two of the three iconic films were based on earlier romantic comedies, “Sleepless” on Leo McCarey’s “An Affair to Remember” and “Mail” on Ernst Lubitsch’s “The Shop Around the Corner,” which Ms. Carlson could have but didn’t use as the foundation of her investigation of the genre. And her roundup of the rom-coms that Ephron’s oeuvre presumably made possible is puzzling; it includes “There’s Something About Mary,” which, like all Farrelly brothers’ films, is more raunch than romance, and also “Sex and the City,” which Ms. Carlson admits tends to “subvert the romantic comedy, with nakedly unlikable characters like Carrie Bradshaw.” 

Surprisingly, she doesn’t mention the present-day version of Ryan and Hanks, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, whose terrific debut as a couple in “Crazy, Stupid, Love” is as close as any recent film comes to recapturing the Ephron ethos, and whose “La La Land” won six Oscars in 2016, including Best Actress for Ms. Stone. 

Ms. Carlson makes a game attempt to measure the appeal of Ephron’s movies by describing the “new climate of political and social conservatism during the 1980s,” which, she says, may account for “the Sandra Dee-ification of Meg Ryan” (nice phrase!) in “Sleepless.” This is a promising line of inquiry, but it occupies only a couple of pages; film history is not really what Ms. Carlson wanted to write. Nor is film criticism, in the Rotten Tomatoes sense, her forte; to say, of Ms. Ryan’s work in one of her roles, “Meg ripped open her soul and laid it bare” sounds more like a PR release than a review. 

So “I’ll Have What She’s Having” is a book not to be pored over for its deep analysis of movie comedy, but rather to be skimmed for the nuggets it offers — the witty sallies of and delicious stories about Nora Ephron, and her gritty, touching struggles toward fame and success that, despite the fits and starts, Ms. Carlson manages to display. 

Richard Horwich taught literature at Brooklyn College and New York University. He lives in East Hampton.

Nora Ephron had a house in East Hampton for many years.

“The Ninth Hour”

Alice McDermott

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26

“Truth reveals itself . . . it’s really that simple.” These lines are the spine of Alice McDermott’s extraordinary new novel, “The Ninth Hour,” a work astonishing for how compellingly it tells the tales of several nuns who serve an early-20th-century Brooklyn neighborhood, and for how those nuns interact with those in their care, and the mistakes and corrections made by all of these people.

The story begins on a miserable February 3rd. A recently fired trainman sends his wife, Annie, out to the market, pushes the sofa against the front door, then hooks up a hose to the gas oven. When Annie returns, neighbors help her shove the door open and light a match against the darkness. A policeman sees Sister St. Saviour, a Little Nursing Sister of the Sick Poor, as she’s returning to her convent, weary and aching after standing all day asking for alms in the frigid rain. Searching her face, he calls her in. “Softhearted . . . one of us,” the sister thinks to herself about the policeman. 

Sister St. Saviour tends to Annie as well as the neighbors. Annie, pregnant, soon has a job in the convent laundry, learning the secrets of ironing and cleaning from the slightly irascible Sister Illuminata — they wash and iron the clothes of the people they minister to and distribute clothing they collect to those in need. The baby, Sally, spends much of her childhood in the basement laundry, she and her mother extremely close. 

In her teens Sally determines that she has a vocation and, wearing a novitiate’s veil, follows Sister Lucy on her nursing rounds to people’s homes. The work is grueling, painstaking. Mrs. Costello, who has lost part of her leg to an infected dog bite, is bedridden, obstinate, repetitive. “Sally knew Mrs. Costello’s moods. Sometimes the tale of her catastrophe caused her to flatten her lips against her teeth in bitter anger. Sometimes, as now, retelling the tale merely made her weep. Sometimes it was the neighborhood women she condemned.” 

Mr. Costello is a doorman at a local hotel where Sally finds work. In a plot turn, Mr. Costello and Annie begin spending afternoons together. When the nuns discover the trysts, they beg Annie to atone. Otherwise she is damned.

Sally, in an astonishing act, tries to “save her mother’s soul even if it mean[s] the death of her own.” And of course there is so much more that takes place in this narrative. Such complexity in this beautifully wrought, carefully orchestrated book. Everything falls into place. With heavenly sleight-of-hand.

Which is not to say all these nuns are destined for sainthood. One nun admits to herself that she’s jealous of another because the former thinks Sally likes the latter better. The nuns occasionally judge each other harshly for their looks, their actions, their attitudes. Sally is taken aback by Sister Lucy’s analysis of women who fail at their wifely duties. “Sally recalled Sister Lucy saying that if that dog had been drowned as a pup, still Mrs. Costello would have found an excuse. She had married without knowing the duties of married life. Duties, Sally knew, her own mother understood. Perhaps relished.”

Nonetheless, Ms. McDermott has a bit of fun playing personalities off each other, voicing opposing viewpoints. Especially with Liz Tierney, Annie’s best friend. The two of them walked their babies together, calling themselves “empresses.” Liz will have six children, and she adores the life forces, the “busyness,” as well as the messiness of her family’s life. Her attitude about women and men is quite entertaining: “The nuns did more good in the world than any lazy parish priest, she liked to say, especially in arguments with her husband. . . . The priests were pampered momma’s boys, compared to these holy women, Liz Tierney would argue. . . . ‘It’s the nuns who keep things running.’ ” 

But Mrs. Tierney, who loves the nuns, “also harbored in her heart the belief that any woman who chose to spend a celibate life toiling for strangers was, by necessity, ‘a little peculiar.’ ”

There’s a wonderful account in Ms. McDermott’s novel — this one historically true because her stories are emotionally as true as true can be — about Jeanne Jugan, a 19th-century French woman who found a blind widow whose family had cast her into the street. She took her home, bathed, fed, and cared for her. Then she discovered another abandoned woman in the streets, and another, and another. Some women, noting what Jugan was doing, came to help her care for the elderly. And soon they founded the Little Sisters of the Poor, going out with baskets to beg for money.

When a rich man who didn’t want to give Jugan money punched her in the face, she rose. “ ‘Yes, but my ladies are still hungry.’ Then he gave her all the money he had.” Charles Dickens came to visit her — and she wangled a big check out of him. When the president of France awarded her a gold medal, she melted it down to feed her ladies. 

But then a local priest went to the Vatican, claiming he’d been the one to take in the blind widow, that he’d founded the Little Sisters of the Poor. A plaque proclaiming his accomplishments was placed on the convent. He stopped Jugan from leaving the nunnery to seek donations, ordering her to do housekeeping. She accepted the snubs without rancor. Years after her death, Jugan’s role was uncovered, and a new plaque created. The elderly nun recounting Jugan’s tale, a woman who has taken the name Sister Jeanne, says, “Truth reveals itself. It’s really quite amazing. God wants us to know the truth in all things, she said, big or small, because that’s how we’ll know Him.”

And it is Sister Jeanne’s ultimate sacrifice at the end of this searing work that stays with us.

The Ninth Hour, the time of afternoon prayers, the biblical time of Christ’s death. Surely there has never been as strong and clear-eyed a novel about kindness as Alice McDermott’s “The Ninth Hour.” Winner of a National Book Award for “Charming Billy,” Ms. McDermott is yet again at the height of her formidable powers. This work of art comes to us at a time when, as much as ever, we need a call to compassion.

Laura Wells, a regular book reviewer for The Star, lives in Sag Harbor.

Alice McDermott has been a summertime visitor to East Hampton since she was a child.

“The Gourmands’ Way”

Justin Spring

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30

In this era of the Food Network, local sushi and ramen bars, and international ingredients readily available at your neighborhood supermarket, it may be hard to fathom how provincial America’s relation to food once was. Just a century ago there was virtually no European or Asian influence on our nation’s menu. As Justin Spring argues in his new book, “The Gourmands’ Way: Six Americans in Paris and the Birth of a New Gastronomy,” it took two world wars and a handful of Americans abroad to drag European cooking to this country. 

In this well-researched, fun, and beautifully written book, Mr. Spring chronicles the lives of gourmands who shared their knowledge of French food and wine with a prosperous postwar America. The six chronicled here are M.F.K. Fisher, A.J. Liebling, Richard Olney, Alexis Lichine, Alice B. Toklas, and Julia Child. Though their expertise was diverse, their timing was impeccable. As Mr. Spring writes, by the 1950s, “Americans were tired of the austerity mandated by the Great Depression and World War II. They wanted a return to abundance and pleasure, and they now had the money and leisure to pursue both.” 

While advertised as a “biography” of six individuals, “The Gourmands’ Way” is much more fun than that. Rather than formal profiles, Mr. Spring weaves the lives of his subjects into a larger narrative that is surprisingly lively and engaging. 

He begins, as all food writing probably should, with the incomparably voracious A.J. Liebling. As a journalist who covered World War II for The New Yorker from Paris, Liebling exploited a diminished French currency while indulging his Rabelaisian eating habits (much of which is recorded in his masterpiece “Between Meals”). Liebling’s idea of the perfect Normandy lunch, for example — as recounted by Mr. Spring — began with a few dozen oysters, moved on to spider crab, then a slow-baked casserole of cow stomach enriched with calf’s foot, a partridge, a leg of lamb, and a few steaks. More wines are consumed than there is time to enumerate, and everything ends with multiple bottles of Calvados brandy. Presumably there was a cardiologist on standby.

Though some will luxuriate in these loving descriptions of gluttony — of which there are many in Mr. Spring’s book — vegans and animal lovers need beware. The gourmands profiled here were all meat-eaters par excellence. Take, for example, the food writer Richard Olney and his taste for ortolans (or songbirds). The recipe, as reported by a friend of Toklas’s in The New Yorker, calls for the birds to be kept in a dark room to keep them “drowsy and inert,” and they are “stuffed in the gloom for a fortnight with millet seed. . . .” They are then force-fed Armagnac for what Olney called “the sacrifice.”

The ritual of eating them is just as charming. Also from The New Yorker: “The eater is supposed to seize them by the beak with the fingers of one hand and consume them, bones and all, beginning with the feet. . . . Old engravings show ortolan-eaters with napkins hoisted like tents over their heads to enclose the perfume. . . .”

Grotesqueries aside, there are some lovely portraits of a forgotten Paris, particularly in the chapters profiling Toklas, the lifelong companion of Gertrude Stein, who finds herself suddenly widowed and living without a franc to her name in Stein’s momentous Paris apartment. With Gertrude’s estate contested by her avaricious brother, the Picassos and Cezannes on the walls are of no use to Alice, her sitting room, as Mr. Spring writes, “chockablock with modern masterpieces, yet threadbare and as cold as an icebox.” (Later, Toklas would go on to financial solvency with “The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book,” which presciently included a recipe for hashish brownies!) 

Then there is the newlywed Julia Child, satisfying her randy husband’s sexual desires in the afternoons (who knew, Julia!), then hurrying over to the Cordon Bleu school for cooking classes. She apparently had “no patience for the dirt, worn crockery, faulty electric ovens, and overall mismanagement she encountered there”; it is a portrait of decrepitude that runs counter to the idea of the Cordon Bleu as the grand cathedral of culinary France.

The successes mount. M.F.K. Fisher, Olney, Toklas, and Liebling all become indispensable American writers. Alexis Lichine, the self-described “Merchant of Pleasure,” brings French wine to the masses, becoming rich in the process. And Julia Child, of course, becomes a fixture on American public television.

In the mid-1960s, however, this Franco invasion begins to run its course, the rift spurred by a burgeoning French economy and tensions between Charles de Gaulle and Lyndon Johnson over America’s involvement in Vietnam. By then, however, the wool was fully dyed, with restaurants like Le Pavillon and La Cote Basque already having become American benchmarks, and the New York Times food critic Craig Claiborne declaring French haute cuisine as “the best in the world.” Even President John Kennedy got into the act, announcing in 1961 that “every man has two countries — France and his own.” 

It is this legacy that Justin Spring so strongly evokes in “The Gourmands’ Way,” a loving portrait of food obsession and the people who liberated American cuisine from its provincial doldrums.

Kurt Wenzel is a novelist, regular book reviewer for The Star, and former restaurant critic for The New York Times. He lives in Springs.

Justin Spring’s previous book, “Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade,” was a finalist for a National Book Award. He lives in Bridgehampton and New York City.

Art and Writing at the Parrish

Creative fiction is the goal of Jennifer Senft’s next writing class at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, where students will tread the halls in search of artistic inspiration. “Enjoy friendly conversation and feedback in a small group environment,” the museum website pipes in.

The instructor’s background? “She’s got more degrees than a thermometer,” as Dr. Phil would say — a bachelor’s in cinemas studies from New York University, a master’s in psychology, also from N.Y.U., and an M.F.A. in writing and literature from Southampton College. She teaches women’s studies, humanities, and English at Suffolk Community College.

The classes will meet on two Fridays, Nov. 10 and 17, from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. The cost is $90, or $70 for museum members. You have two weeks to think about it; registration closes Nov. 3.

Schulman on Ashbery

John Ashbery, the eminent poet, a frequent visitor to Springs, where he had friends among the hamlet’s painters and fellow poets, died at the age of 90 last month in Hudson, N.Y. Now Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor will host another renowned poet, a Springs part-timer, Grace Schulman, in a reading of Ashbery’s work and a discussion of his life and influence. It starts at 5 p.m. on Saturday.

Ms. Schulman, a professor of English at Baruch College and a recent winner of a Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America for her distinguished lifetime achievements, will be joined by other poets: Star Black of the Stony Brook Southampton faculty, Marc Cohen, whose work has been anthologized in “The Best American Poetry” series, and Susan Baran.

Want more? “The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life” by Karin Roffman came out over the summer.

“Leonardo da Vinci”

Walter Isaacson

Simon & Schuster, $35

Unfinished, abandoned, fanciful, and failed are hardly the words we associate with genius in today’s results-oriented society. So it is a good thing that Leonardo da Vinci, a true Renaissance man, did not come of age in the 21st century. We would snicker at the thought of him, even as we partook of the modern iterations of his inventions or the things that became possible after adapting his ideas.

It is almost not worth reviewing Walter Isaacson’s biography “Leonardo da Vinci.” Already a best seller in pre-sales in one category on Amazon as of this writing, the book has been optioned by Paramount for Leonardo DiCaprio in what might be the most unimaginative casting ever delivered by Hollywood. 

Captured by the author who brought insight and relatability to subjects such as Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Kissinger, and Steve Jobs, Leonardo in Mr. Isaacson’s hands is a dreamer who imagined buildings, inventions, sculptures, and paintings so perfect they could often exist only as ideas. And for Leonardo, the working out of the idea, the planning, the sketching, and the design often were enough. His boundless curiosity didn’t allow him to tarry too long on one particular thing; there was always something new to question, discover, or solve.

The things that fascinated him — the movement of water, flight, atmosphere, engineering, arms and armaments, the movement of bodies, and the curl of human hair — are repeating elements in his art and design work throughout his life. An overarching theme of the book is that for him the forms of nature are repeated in humans and share a similar relationship to geometry and other physical properties related to science. He saw the analogy as a spiritual connection, and it became a leitmotif in his paintings. Similarly, he thought that the bodies he was representing should evoke their emotions. 

He was not the first artist in Italy in the 15th century to tackle complex problems of design, be they buildings or technological innovations. Brunelleschi was one predecessor, famous for designing the dome for which the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence is known. Leonardo was also not the first artist to dissect cadavers to ascertain the most accurate way to depict the human form. Yet he channeled the most advanced ideas and knowledge available to him into breakthroughs inconceivable to those before him. 

Similarly, artists had been analyzing perspective in previous decades, yet he refined not only how objects were placed in a receding background, but also realized that those objects farther away needed to be in softer focus, in different shades and tones of color, and eventually even blurry to replicate true optical experience.

Not seeing hard outlines in nature, he emphasized the curves and boundaries of figures with sfumato, a smoky atmospheric shadowing that separated forms from each other and from their surroundings. In examining paintings completed in the years immediately before his masterpieces and in the studio of artists like Verrocchio, in which he worked, it is clear how revolutionary his contributions were to the representation of the human form. Artists like Michelangelo and Raphael were able to achieve more ambitious projects, but without his example, it is not guaranteed that they would have developed as completely as they did into High Renaissance masters.

What was Leonardo’s problem? Mr. Isaacson doesn’t attempt to diagnose him definitively but suggests that had he been around today he would have likely sought treatment for some kind of attention deficit disorder or some other imbalance. He was known to have ups and downs, periods of extreme activity and productivity and then indolence and artistic blocks, driving his patrons mad.

Charming, attractive, erudite, and foppish, he was welcome at court, in art studios, and in the workrooms of the most accomplished mathematicians and scientists, who also called him a friend. He kept a retinue of young apprentices, of varying talents and attractiveness, some of whom became lifelong companions.

Leonardo was a perfectionist who also moved around quite a bit, serving the courts of the Sforzas in Milan, the Borgias in Florence, Pope Leo X in Rome, and King Francis I in France, where he died in 1519. Rather than leave his unfinished painting commissions behind, he often packed them up to continue working on them, which is why the Louvre has a significant cache of his paintings.

Mr. Isaacson probes all of the artist’s papers, seeks out every extant work, and reads the scholarship of those who have addressed the artist previously to come up with a full and engrossing profile of the artist, from his illegitimate birth in 1452 in Anchiano, Italy, to his dying breath as one of the most revered individuals of his time.

The author moves fluidly between the scientific inquiries of Leonardo’s notebooks and the artistic achievements in his sketchbooks, and carries the same themes, such as the artist’s boundless curiosity and inquiry, through them in a way that does not seem too facile or overapplied.

Confronted with the endless schemes and unrealized projects in his notebooks, Mr. Isaacson concludes, in light of some of Leonardo’s later failed water projects, that “in order to be a true visionary, one has to be willing to overreach and to fail some of the time. Innovation requires a reality distortion field. The things he envisioned for the future often came to pass, even if it took a few centuries. Scuba gear, flying machines, and helicopters now exist. Suction pumps now drain swamps. . . . Sometimes fantasies are paths to reality.” 

The book is organized primarily chronologically but also thematically, and an early section that lays out the major themes guarantees that they will be repeated later to explain specific projects. This makes “Leonardo da Vinci,” at more than 500 pages, a bit more swollen than it needed to be. There was a time when readers simply went back to the earlier parts of a book if they had questions about the material covered. 

The author also inserts his opinion about the quality and authenticity of Leonardo’s artworks, which seems intrusive when the best scholars and connoisseurs now and in history have preceded him. But this is not an academic work; there is no need for Mr. Isaacson to defend his credentials. He presents an exhaustively researched and thorough book, taking a modern look at a man who helped usher in the notion of modernity.

Walter Isaacson, a former editor of Time magazine, has spent summers on the South Fork for many years.

“Iowa”

Lucas Hunt

Thane & Prose, $21.99

Lucas Hunt’s new book of poems, “Iowa,” is a somewhat uneven collection that shows the poet engaging his subject matter through use of precise evocative imagery, while other poems — notably his shorter ones — fail to engage because they neglect to provide readers with surprise or illumination. So there is much to admire in this collection and much one wishes Mr. Hunt had further revised. 

The physical book itself seems something of an anomaly; poems are printed on the recto pages only, an affectation that belies the poet’s simple, honest, and direct statements. Rear cover copy informs the reader that this volume is “the first of five books in an autobiographical collection of cinematic poetry.” This reader hopes the poet will improve upon his work by adding poetry to what is only cinematic.

What does this mean? Too many of Mr. Hunt’s shorter poems seem to lack poetry’s transformational energy, never leaving behind the literal or the cinematic for the figurative. Here, for instance, is “Walking” in its entirety:

With dogs on a gravel road

dust from passing

truck plumes

into a cloud over

the soy and corn fields.

Obviously, the title is meant to be read as part of the poem’s sentence. But what is the point of a poem that offers only an observation? Where is the poetry? Yes, the poem offers an image, and one may argue it offers an image as practiced by Williams and Pound. But this type of Imagism lacks the touch of modernist ambiguity or figuration found in Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” or Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro.” What would the Williams poem be without the ambiguity of “So much depends / upon”? What would the Pound poem be without the final metaphor of “petals on a wet, black bough”?

In another short poem, “To You,” Mr. Hunt tries to add the figurative but confuses his reader. Here it is:

Suspended hair feathers

wave like leaves;

nature’s hand

applauds in the trees.

Here, Mr. Hunt unsuccessfully mixes his metaphors. First, hairs are not feathers; second, it takes two hands to applaud, unless, of course, Mr. Hunt is using “hand” in its meaning of to applaud, as in “let’s give him a hand,” which, of course, would make the verb “applauds” in the final line a redundancy. East Hampton’s own Allen Planz used to say at his readings that short poems were more difficult to write than long poems; I’m inclined to agree.

This reviewer also noticed a number of poems in which Mr. Hunt uses punctuation inconsistently or commits a number of grammatical or mechanical inconsistencies. Mr. Hunt needs to be more careful in his use of language, as every poet must. I’d be remiss if I didn’t call him out on these failings. True, some readers may accuse me of being too fastidious, but poets — especially poets — need to honor their language and its rules because mistakes detract from the work’s efficacy. 

The poem “Tornado,” for instance, contains several errors, including “In nearby towns, or farther off, / A city candidates visit to get the vote.” What’s needed here? For the article at the beginning of the second line to disappear or for the poet to add an apostrophe and an s after city? Later in the same poem, Mr. Hunt writes, “Hits someone on the head and blood / soaks their face, / they run for cover . . .” I’m not maintaining that civilization will collapse (it hasn’t yet!) as a result of faulty pronoun agreement, but the rules exist for a reason. I also don’t get the sense that the rule is violated on purpose to mimic the voice of a speaker who doesn’t understand that “someone” is a singular pronoun and doesn’t agree with “their” and “they.”

As for punctuation, poets may decide to dispense with it entirely or use it to influence rhythm or use it as a grammarian might. Whatever choice a poet makes, readers will wish that the poet would follow his choice consistently, at least within each individual poem. In “Calling,” Mr. Hunt confounds this reader with his inconsistent comma usage. Here’s the first stanza:

Lake borne urges come to fruition

ripe watermelon juice down

both cheeks, pink rinds

smile from a sink a friend

calls late at night to talk about love.

Clearly, Mr. Hunt has decided to use commas in this poem, and in this first stanza we note the comma as caesura after “cheeks.” Perhaps Mr. Hunt has chosen to disregard the use of commas at the end of his lines; one would expect a comma, mechanically speaking, at the end of line one. Poets, however, often employ line breaks as commas, a contemporary convention. But Mr. Hunt does use the interior comma; so why include a comma after “cheeks” but not after “sink,” where another comma is expected to separate the two images? This inconsistency occurs elsewhere in this poem and in other poems in this collection and is simply maddening.

But I’m done playing the stuffy pedant with his picayune complaints. Mr. Hunt has a real eye for the apt image. The book is chock-full of effective imagery. The book’s third poem, “Cornfield,” recreates on a blank white page the complexity of a field, with its energies and subtleties, in a distinctly sensuous way. A single sentence broken over nine lines, here’s the poem in its entirety:

Emerald waves applaud midsummer’s

undulant hills, honeyed kernels,

amber tasseled stalks inert,

wind-wisped leaves stir earth’s aroma,

slow circling suspensions of time transpose

a dust blown cloud, adagios of air,

granular infinitudes above

a gravel road, long grassy ditch lined

with barbed wire fence that goes nowhere.

This poem is worth our time and scrutiny. It’s not only the cornfield that Mr. Hunt skillfully recreates here but also the sense of open space above and around it. The poem’s first line conveys motion and metaphor. The poem is rich in visual imagery and interesting diction (“granular infinitudes”). The language is fresh, the picture is clear, and the poet utilizes effective closure — the fence that goes “nowhere” offers a counterpoint to the image of the field and the space above and around it in slow, perpetual movement. 

Even Mr. Hunt’s use of “inert” in line three seems apt; my dictionary defines this word as “not having the power to move itself.” So, while the field appears to sway, the ears of corn will not move unless another agent — like the wind — acts upon them. Readers smell the earth in line four, and the addition of a term of musical direction, here made plural, “adagios,” bolsters the sense of movement and auditory imagery within, around, and above the cornfield.

Immediately following “Cornfield” is “70th Avenue,” another strong poem dependent almost entirely upon imagery. But Mr. Hunt put this poem together without wasting a word. He also includes unexpected verbs, as poets must, and the verbs in this poem elevate the poem out of mere descriptiveness to the figurative level that distinguishes poetry from prose. The lines that simply describe place us firmly in the Midwest and are often fragments, like the opening two lines: “Barbed wire fences / overgrown with weeds.” But the poem’s final two lines rescue the rest of the poem from the mundane: “Fields roll under power lines / and harvest the sky.” That’s lovely closure, especially Mr. Hunt’s use of “harvest.” We expect the field to be harvested, but here the field performs the action of the verb, and this seems both true and new.

Many other poems like this exist in this collection, including “Dollar an Hour,” “Hired Hand,” “The End,” “Leaving the Farm,” and “Buena Vista Road,” just to name a few. These poems are economical, descriptive, and employ interesting metaphors or use verbs in surprising ways.

A favorite poem is “Cicadas.” Here Mr. Hunt employs wonderful poetic music, which is too often, in this reviewer’s opinion, missing from this collection. Mr. Hunt mines a wider vocabulary here for its sonic properties. The imagery is as precise as in “Cornfield,” but in this poem form and content most effortlessly merge. After all, this poem concerns the cicadas’ sound, a “unisonic / hum,” and Mr. Hunt uses alliteration, assonance, and consonance most effectively. This poem, therefore, seems to bristle with energy. It’s a pleasure to read multiple times, especially aloud.

I’m hoping Lucas Hunt will hone his editorial eye and begin to write short poems that will rise above the banal to surprise and engage as well as some of his longer poems do in “Iowa.” I’ll be watching for new work from him to gauge how he improves. With a talent like his, there’s no doubt he will. 

Dan Giancola’s books of poems include “Part Mirth, Part Murder” and “Songs From the Army of Working Stiffs.” He teaches English at Suffolk Community College.

Lucas Hunt, formerly of Springs, is the author of the collections “Lives” and “Light on the Concrete.” He will read from “Iowa” at Harbor Books in Sag Harbor on Sunday at 5 p.m.