Can the descriptor “prolific” apply to an author who writes, in the latest example, a book with all of 238 words in it? 

Whatever the answer, Susan Verde of East Hampton is back with another children’s book that optimistically pushes back against the encroaching darkness — of geopolitics, on the domestic front, in the form of in-school and after-school pressures, and courtesy of the consciousless wizards of Silicon Valley who conjure gadgets and flickering applications increasingly difficult to pull eyes from.

“The thoughts in my head are like rushing water,” the hero of “I Am Peace” (Abrams, $14.95) worries, hands clasped at chin, “and I feel like a boat with no anchor . . . being carried away.” Swamped, you might say.

The answer is mindful meditation — Ms. Verde describes it well in an extended author’s note at the back of the book, but essentially here the kid slows down, looks inward, and pays attention to where, and how, he is in the world. 

His apparel matches the book’s title, too, with a beanie adorned with peace symbols, one the size of a Mercedes-Benz hood ornament unironically slung around his neck, all rendered in ink and watercolor in the best cartoonish way by Ms. Verde’s longtime collaborator, Peter H. Reynolds, who, again, is entirely in sync with the author’s less-is-more approach. It’s hard to imagine a picture book with more white space in it.

But all is not interiority. Our hero takes action. “I can share kindness with others,” he says to himself. He feeds birds from his hand; he grows a tree (yes, it is subsequently hugged). He hands over his sack to a feathered friend to be “carried away to those who need it.”

The seeds of hope.

“Wipeout the Wave”

Sorry, moms, this is not the Billy Baldwin of the hunky Massapequa brothers-in-acting, but rather a guy from Sag Harbor who once ran a cookie store and mail order business in Lower Manhattan. Now he’s come out with what might be the strangest picture book of the year. 

The story behind “Wipeout the Wave” (Decozen Books, $17.95) is best told by Mr. Baldwin himself in his jacket copy: “One day when I was walking along the beach I noticed a funny little wave that seemed to flow differently from all the other waves at the sand bar. It looked like the wave was trying to awkwardly fit in, but then suddenly crashed down, wiping out a small bird.”

Wipeout’s troubles begin at a surf contest, when, awkward indeed, he nearly crushes a female participant and is browbeaten out of there by his fellow swells. Pushing his new misfit status before him like floating plastic detritus he can’t shake, he searches the Seven Seas for companionship and understanding, along the way taking in a movie with a glowing jellyfish, dancing the samba with an octopus where it’s warm, playing iceberg pinball with Flubber the Whale where it’s cold, even dreaming about aliens befriending him in the Indian Ocean. 

All of it, every square inch of every page, in fact, illustrated as a multicolored aquatic phantasmagoria by one Liesl Bell of Jeffreys Bay, a world-famous surfing spot in southernmost South Africa. 

But if you’ll indulge just a bit more plot summation, Wipeout pulls his watery self together only with a little help from a chance encounter with Surfer Steve, who keeps a bag of granola on his board and a Rip Curl flat bill on his head. Turns out there’s a circle of elders called the Wave Council, who are happy to inform Wipeout he’s not an outcast at all, but something much cooler — a rogue wave. 

Sometimes nomenclature can make all the difference.

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.

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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

There is nothing lonelier looking

than a solitary ear of corn lying

on a kitchen counter all husked up

saying nothing yearning to have

its silk removed by excited 

fingers in the autumn dusk 

A tomato has that color and shine

plump with the promise of messiness 

a cucumber has that cool and feels 

no need to speak to you — not like a 

a root vegetable whose heroic soul 

has endured dirt dark and excavation

When far from the madding field 

kidnapped from the good farmer’s 

roadside stand tenement stack

600 kernels and 16 rows are not 

enough to give a singleton cob 

a sense of community

So sad so dislocated lying there

without a pillow of scallions or cover

of butter — the salt seems miles away

and totally disinterested like the French

when contemplating un epi de mais.

Would they let a leek sleep alone?

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