“The Great Nadar”

Adam Begley

Tim Duggan Books, $28

The title of Adam Begley’s amiable and readable new biography, “The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera,” might provoke a couple of questions. The first is “Who?” Nadar (the nom de plume of a 19th-century Parisian photographer, writer, illustrator, and balloonist christened Félix Tournachon) may or may not be familiar throughout France, but he’s hardly Monet or Victor Hugo. 

And “Great” in what ways? As an artist or, as the title suggests, as a showman? He seems to have been both. 

As to his artistic merit, you can decide on the basis of the dozens of his photographic portraits, and a wealth of accompanying testimony from his contemporaries, that Mr. Begley presents. He had a large, enthusiastically reviewed one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1994, so obviously there is something in his work to respect and admire, but how much of his success while he lived was due to his skill and talent and how much to the novelty of photography itself is a moot question. 

He had the largest photographic studio in Paris, and his subjects included everyone of note in French culture — writers like Baudelaire, George Sand, Dumas, and Hugo; the actress Sarah Bernhardt; the artists Gustave Doré and Daumier, and hundreds of others. But whether he truly succeeded in capturing “in every portrait an intimate and compelling psychological likeness,” as Mr. Begley claims, is a matter of individual judgment. 

In my own judgment, several of his studies are truly haunting and fascinating — portraits of Baudelaire, of his mother as she lay dying, of the poet Théophile Gautier, of the gorgeous Bernhardt at 20, and (my favorite, but unaccountably absent from the book) a full-length view of Victor Hugo at his desk that embodies the essence of the writer’s power and conviction. 

Other pictures, though, seem run-of-the-mill. In his defense, Nadar was practicing an art in its infancy; cameras themselves were clumsy affairs, and the process of recording images involved dipping plates in a witches’ brew of chemicals and exposing them for relatively long periods of time, during which the subject had to remain immobile. It isn’t surprising, then, that some of them came out looking more like Mme. Tussaud’s waxworks than living people. Whatever spontaneity and psychological acuteness these pictures reveal may be due as much to the sitters’ ability to retain some natural expression of face and body as to Nadar’s talent in posing and capturing them. 

And he wasn’t above fudging the details: When he photographed George Sand, no longer young and never beautiful, he obligingly retouched the work at her request, removing some of the wrinkles and chins. The movie actress Anna Magnani understood better than Sand or Nadar how a face acquires character and mirrors the psyche; she told her makeup artist on “The Rose Tattoo,” “Please don’t retouch my wrinkles; it took me my whole life to earn them.” 

Mr. Begley seems, at times, too heavily invested in Nadar, too eager to establish his credentials as a worthwhile biographical subject. He claims, of his “extraordinary hero,” that “proof of his genius, the portraits are his own ticket to the pantheon of great artists.” But if you spend the word “genius” on Nadar, what’s left for Diane Arbus, Annie Leibovitz, Yousuf Karsh, Richard Avedon, or Henri Cartier-Bresson?

There was more to Nadar’s résumé than his picture taking, though. For several periods in his life, he left the business in the hands first of his brother, Adrien, and later of his son, Paul. At 20, Nadar was a penniless Bohemian, homeless and often hungry, but he had a flair for writing, and became a highly successful journalist, producing short, gossipy pieces called feuilletons that appeared regularly in widely read newspapers — blogs, in effect. 

Nadar also had a knack for illustration and began to produce satirical political cartoons to accompany his writings in an inimitable and original style. Looking at his wickedly accurate caricatures with their accompanying texts, you could claim him as the inventor of the political cartoon, prefiguring Thomas Nast and Gary Trudeau, and even of the comic strip, in the vein of Jules Feiffer or Art Spiegelman.

And as if all this weren’t enough, he was a pioneer in the new craze for ballooning. Committing oneself to a voyage of unknown duration and destination, riding in a wicker basket under a bag filled with flammable gas, was both a stunt for daredevils and a path to new technologies of travel. In this, Nadar was almost clairvoyant: Despite his commitment to balloons, he believed, correctly, that the future of air travel was in flying machines that could be guided easily and landed safely. 

With Jules Verne and others, he founded the Society for the Promotion of Heavier-Than-Air Locomotion, and in 1863 Nadar announced, “It’s the propeller — the sainted Propeller! — that will carry us into the air.” And so it was.

All this was decades before the Wright Brothers, of course, so those who wished to soar with Nadar had to be content with the balloon, which, once aloft, was at the mercy of the elements; winds could carry it out to sea or smash it to earth. With characteristic bravura and a keen taste for spectacle, Nadar built the largest balloon in the world, the accurately named Le Geánt, which boasted a wine cellar and a lavatory. 

Its maiden voyage was a comedy of errors. Its second almost ended in tragedy: As it quickly climbed, its pilot released too much gas and it plummeted earthward. A gale was blowing on the surface, and the gondola in which the passengers rode bounced along “like a crazed comet,” as Nadar described it, narrowly missing a train, spilling its passengers out, and at last coming to rest in a grove of trees. The nine voyagers, including Nadar and his wife, suffered various degrees of injury, but no one, miraculously, was killed. 

Chastened, he nonetheless persisted in ballooning, and when Paris was besieged during the Franco-Prussian War, he organized a complicated scheme whereby balloons were used to observe the enemy from a safe height, and the intelligence gathered sent back via carrier pigeon.

Nadar’s last years (and they were many; he was born in 1820 and died in 1910) were comparatively uneventful. He lived to see the invention of the airplane, of course, and before his death, the incomparable Jacques-Henri Lartigue was documenting his own life and times through photographs that are truly breathtaking. 

But Nadar deserves his place in history. Mr. Begley shows that he did us the great service of illustrating, in several mediums, and in his multifaceted and theatrical way of living, a century that was like no other in its artistic and scientific accomplishments, particularly in France. And Mr. Begley deserves our thanks for bringing this singular pioneer to our notice.

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

Adam Begley is the author of the biography “Updike.” A former writer at The Star, he is a regular visitor to Sagaponack, where his parents have a house.

“Liner Notes”

Loudon Wainwright III

Blue Rider Press, $27

The subtitle of the musician Loudon Wainwright III’s memoir, “Liner Notes,” leaves nothing to chance. A longtime visitor to East Hampton and sometime resident of Shelter Island, Mr. Wainwright’s memoir, published on Tuesday (his 71st birthday), is a lengthy rumination “On Parents and Children, Exes and Excess, Death and Decay, and a Few of My Other Favorite Things.” 

In “Liner Notes,” the artist, who in 2013 told this reporter that he had performed at the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett perhaps 40 times, weaves tales of an oft-meandering career marked by deep ambivalence with candid admissions of personal shortcomings that closely tracked those of his father, the celebrated Life magazine writer and editor and a direct descendant of Peter Stuyvesant. 

Indeed, Loudon Wainwright Jr. looms large in “Liner Notes,” as the son frankly itemizes the father’s foibles — excessive alcohol consumption, infidelity, and a somewhat uncomfortable distance and coldness toward his flesh and blood. At the same time, the son’s reverence for his father is illustrated by the inclusion of several of the latter’s Life magazine essays, some of them deeply felt meditations on the “death and decay” of the son’s subtitle. 

Mr. Wainwright, with an affection tempered by that dysfunction, recalls a privileged upbringing in 1950s Westchester County, the son of a Northeastern blue blood and a “country girl” from rural Georgia. The tale gets more interesting in the 1960s, a coming of age that, like so many of his generation, included transcendent experiences with LSD and Grateful Dead concerts, which invariably led to a Summer of Love sojourn to San Francisco. 

“I hitchhiked across the country with a knapsack, a guitar, a sleeping bag, and one hundred dollars I’d made selling pot,” he matter-of-factly recalls. 

Living communally in the Fillmore district, dropping acid and attending concerts, he puts his own music on hold, selling his guitar to pay for yoga lessons. The era also includes a surprising anecdote about Donald Fagan, later of Steely Dan fame but then “a quiet, geeky wannabe hippie,” blowing minds with an impromptu performance of a Ray Charles song on “an old, out-of-tune upright piano” at the Good Karma Cafe. Elsewhere, he takes in a 1964 performance by the Isley Brothers featuring a spellbinding young guitarist named Jimi Hendrix. 

At the outset of his career a half-century ago, the singer-songwriter was one of many to which the “new Bob Dylan” tag was affixed by a music industry that, even in that era of unbridled creative exploration, apparently preferred assembly-line product to artist development and originality. (Years later, he playfully confronted this history in a most Dylanesque song called, naturally, “Talking New Bob Dylan.”) When his third album finally yielded a hit, a novelty song called “Dead Skunk,” the artist suffered from the industry’s same default tactic, to categorize. When he did not return to the formula, the record label’s enthusiasm waned. For so many artists, some version of this story is a sad refrain to their careers.

Hence an ambivalence, though Mr. Wainwright concludes his memoir with a deep affection for “the 75-90,” the minutes of the performance itself that make worthwhile all that accompanies the musician’s life: the endless travel, the rootless existence, the many temptations to self-destruction, usually through sense gratification of one sort or another. 

Along the way, Mr. Wainwright freely admits, he freely indulged, acting out the traits of his father as he entered and departed relationships characterized by too much drinking, quarrelling, and, inevitably, going astray. In the process, though, Mr. Wainwright demonstrated a remarkable penchant for making his collaborations musical. He and his first wife, Kate McGarrigle, the Canadian singer-songwriter, who died in 2010, produced Rufus and Martha Wainwright, each a successful musician, the former a resident of Montauk. He and Suzzy Roche, who with her sisters perform as the Roches, have a daughter, Lucy Wainwright Roche, who is also a singer. His sister Sloan is a singer and songwriter, and another sister, Martha (known as Teddy), served as his manager.

In 49 mostly brief chapters, Mr. Wainwright intersperses sometimes-lengthy excerpts of his song lyrics alongside the prose. Initially, they are somewhat tedious, a literal retelling of the subject he has just observed, and, if one is unfamiliar with his music, they may seem mundane, void of reflection, metaphor, or even poetry. Paired with his considerable gift for melody, however, the words on the printed page spring to life, and when put to music are revealed as the essence of our shared, tangled human experience — guilt, fear, joy, sorrow, and all the rest. The author dedicates “Liner Notes” to “the family, and all we put us through.”

“The most important people in my life, the principal players, if you will, are members of my family,” he writes. “To a degree, it’s important to escape your family in order to achieve some autonomy in the world, but the reality is that you never quite get away from your ‘loved ones.’ I’m often asked why I’ve written so many songs about the people in my family. The answer is: How could I not? They are the ones who have meant the most in my life, and they continue to have a hold on me, even those who have died. Especially those who have died.”

The excerpt that follows, from a song called “So Many Songs,” underscores the artist’s approach to his life and work, which of course are themselves inexorably intertwined. 

I’ve written so many songs about you

This is the last one, after this I’m through

It’s taken so long to finally see

My songs about you are all about me.

Loudon Wainwright III will perform “Surviving Twin,” a show of songs and stories, at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor on Sept. 15 and 16 at 8 p.m.

After the hubbub of the season, here’s a sane respite, and it’s free: Poetry Pairs is back at Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater on Sunday, with staged readings by Stephen Dunn, a winner of a Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and Jill Bialosky, an editor at W.W. Norton, novelist, and author of a new memoir, “Poetry Will Save Your Life.” 

That book traces the comfort that poems by Ben Jonson, Emily Dickinson, and W.H. Auden, among many others — often offering insight into the experience of bereavement — have provided Ms. Bialosky throughout her life, from the premature death of her father to her sister’s suicide to two failed pregnancies. 

Family life and the inevitability of loss are also central to “The Players,” from 2015, the latest of her several collections of poems. She lives part time in Bridgehampton.

Mr. Dunn won a Pulitzer in 2001 for “Different Hours,” his 11th collection, which in plainspoken language explores the mysteries of the everyday. He attended Hofstra on a basketball scholarship, the Guild Hall website notes, narrowly escaped a constrained life in advertising, traveled to Spain, and eventually earned a master’s degree in creative writing at Syracuse, where he studied with the poet Philip Booth (speaking of unadorned language). 

He is distinguished professor emeritus of creative writing at Stockton University in New Jersey. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and numerous journals. 

The readings start at 3 p.m., and reservations are required. Poetry Pairs is organized by Fran Castan, a past Walt Whitman Birthplace Association Long Island poet of the year.

“The Nutcracker

in Harlem”

T.E. McMorrow

and James Ransome

HarperCollins, $17.99

It seems unfashionably early to be discussing holiday season fare. Either the marketing blitz for the festive period has begun earlier than ever or T.E. McMorrow has breathed new life into a children’s Christmas classic with such a timely twist that, in the current sociopolitical climate, it begs to be on the shelves now rather than later.

Set in Harlem during the 1920s, this jazz-inspired retelling of “The Nutcracker,” with gorgeous illustrations by James Ransome, does something more than offer a black cultural representation for young readers: It reintroduces some of the original characters and plot themes as imagined by the story’s creator, the German author E.T.A. Hoffmann, who wrote and published it as a novella in 1816. 

Alexandre Dumas altered that original version, making it lighter and less scary. In 1892, Dumas’s version was turned into a ballet with music by Tchaikovsky, eventually becoming Balanchine’s Christmas season ritual, sugarplums and all.

But something happened to Hoffmann’s story in this progression from dark to light: Marie became Klara, and her flights of imagination became sweeter and more tame. Without returning to the depths of Hoffmann’s darkness — with which Freud would have had a field day — Mr. McMorrow has reintroduced Marie as the protagonist. Here she is a sweet and somewhat shy African-American girl, surrounded by her large, music-loving family, celebrating one snowy Christmas Eve in an elegant home in Harlem.

Marie falls in love with a nutcracker doll that turns into a handsome teen after she falls asleep. In her rich, coming-of-age dreams, an army of angry rodents appears, hot on the trail of Christmas candy and sweet potato pie. Happily, a more modern, girl-power moment ensues, with Marie relying only on her smarts to win the battle.

Each page is filled with sumptuous illustrations and paintings by Mr. Ransome, who has worked on dozens of children’s books and teaches at Syracuse University. His style not only illuminates the delights of Hoffmann’s literary treasure, but perfectly captures the glitz and gaiety of the era’s thriving black culture. 

From an author’s note we learn that Mr. McMorrow worked as a stagehand for a ballet company in Harlem many years ago, where he saw “the power of music and dance transform people.” Today, as some readers might know, Mr. McMorrow is a reporter for this publication, as well as a playwright and member of the Drama Desk in New York City. 

His well-crafted, quasi-homage to the original “Nutcracker,” together with illustrations that help the imagination run wild and the inclusive theme of Christmas magic, will be sure to provide an escape from the tedium of the imminent commercial holiday season.

Rosset, Considered and Reconsidered

Looking for more Rosset? There was the front-page obituary in The New York Times in 2012, but after a lull there followed in relatively speedy succession a posthumous autobiography, a collection of his decades of correspondence with his friend Samuel Beckett, and “Barney’s Wall,” a documentary film about a 12-by-15-foot collage and mural the publisher and part-time East Hamptoner put together toward the end of his life in his East Village apartment — each written about in these pages.

You can add to your library another assessment, “Barney: Grove Press and Barney Rosset, America’s Maverick Publisher and His Battle Against Censorship,” by Michael Rosenthal of Columbia University. It’s all there, from the introduction to America of a literary avant-garde to Rosset and Grove’s tilting against the country’s Puritanism, the focus being on how Grove’s legal victories helped spur the cultural revolution of the 1960s. 

The book, from Arcade Publishing, makes use of Rosset’s papers at Columbia and numerous interviews.

A Two-Fisted Lawyer’s Life

Speaking of litigation, Martin London, a retired trial lawyer who spends summers in Montauk, has self-published a memoir, “The Client Decides,” with a loaded subtitle hinting at his courtroom exploits and client list, from the beautiful to the brawlers: “A Litigator’s Life: Jackie Onassis, Vice President Spiro Agnew, Donald Trump, Roy Cohn,” and if that weren’t enough, from the advertising world: “and More.”

The title proper, it’s worth noting, comes from the words of another heavyweight attorney and colleague, the late Simon H. Rifkind: “We do not decide what kinds of cases we try; the client decides that for us.”

Mr. London leads with this: “How did the kid from Carroll Street between Schenectady and Utica Avenues in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, end up doing a tour of duty as the chairman of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, one of the nation’s, indeed the world’s, leading law firms?”

He doesn’t return to that question until the back of the book, in a section simply dubbed “Personal,” but in the intervening pages a reader’s eye might well be drawn to a chapter on the author’s having butted heads with our current president, who in “Trumping Trump” is introduced with something he said to The New York Post in 1985: “The rich have a very low threshold for pain.” But Mr. London’s no one-note, and that tale isn’t one of successful strong-arming as much as waiting out, persevering until a bully, or at least his seconds, can be brought before a clear-eyed judge who will hear none of it.

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.

The cover of Critical Hit number one shows its two heroines, faces obscured by scarves, bandit-style, cargo pants looped with utility belts worthy of Batman, wielding the heavy tools of their vengeance-wreaking trade — a sledgehammer and an ax. In shaded relief above them we see what spurs their mission — the lab-experimented cat, the hunter-stalked deer — and understand that the gals have turned the implements of the abattoir and the barnyard into weapons of animal liberation.

Matt Miner created the mini-series, with its action “on behalf of tortured animals,” he said in an email, “as a way to give voice to the frustrations I feel working in the animal protection arena and, at times, feeling helpless to stop the cruelty all around us on a daily basis. Our heroes don’t fight guys in capes and tights, they take on dog fighters and animal abusers.”

And it’s for this reason that he’ll be at what could be called a comic-book convention with a conscience, courtesy of Nancy Silberkleit, co-C.E.O. of Archie Comics, on Sunday at 111 Cove Hollow Road in East Hampton. “It excited me that he was using graphic literacy that way,” she said of what prompted her invitation.

Mr. Miner, who lives in Queens, donates his profits from the series and from its predecessor, Liberator, both published by Black Mask, “back into my real-world dog rescue work with redemptionrescues.org.”

In what would otherwise be its dotage, Archie Comics, as it nears 76, has become hip, even aware, you might say, thanks to Ms. Silberkleit’s interest in social issues. “We’ve made efforts to promote healthy eating — well, you can’t make Jughead that way,” she said, laughing over the stick-thin character’s indulgence of his hamburger habit, which could out-clog Elvis Presley’s.

Archie Comics not long ago introduced a gay character created by the writer-illustrator Dan Parent — Kevin Keller, who’s also popular on the atmospheric CW television series “Riverdale,” based on the comic book. In print, “Riverdale High School just didn’t represent who makes up these schools today,” Ms. Silberkleit said.

What’s more, she led the company to publish a Rwanda issue, one titled “Bottle Battle” addressing ubiquitous plastics, and another, “The Trend Setter,” in which Archie Andrews himself is mercilessly mocked for something as inconsequential as a hat — even by goody-two-shoes Betty. “She’s supposed to be understanding,” Ms. Silberkleit said. “We expect a thumbs-up from her, but she takes the hat and throws it in the garbage can, showing that actions can be just as hurtful as words.”

“This is the 21st century,” she went on, “and there are many new ways we have to be responsible. Like with cyberbullying. You have to think about what you say. Is your information real? Is it kind? Is it supportive? Socially, with the internet, it’s really been a challenge, we’ve had to up our game. So we try to be out there and high-spirited and friendly.”

And thus the theme of her Comic Book Extravaganza. Its hours are 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., and admission is free.

Other attendees include Marty Grabstein, a voice-over artist who worked on the animated “Courage the Cowardly Dog,” a cult favorite that aired on Cartoon Network, and Captain Kaos (Matt Rohde), a Shelter Islander who takes striking photos of “Star Wars” figurines set up in the outdoors around the East End. For collectors, Atomic Comics of Shirley will have a booth.

“It’s a day for families to come out and maybe dress up in costumes,” Ms. Silberkleit said. “A day to meet artists and see how comics are made.”

First, Virginia Walker, a poet and professor from Shelter Island, donated all the sales of her last collection of poems, “Neuron Mirror,” a collaborative work with the late Michael Walsh, to the Lustgarten Foundation for pancreatic cancer research. So far that total is $9,000.

Now she’s holding a poetry contest to raise more money.

“One by one, poet friends from the East End community of poets succumbed to this deadly cancer, which has a six-percent survival rate,” Ms. Walker said in a release, referring to Antje Katcher, who with Mr. Walsh was part of the East End Poetry Workshop, Robert Long, who was an editor at The Star, Siv Cedering, and Diana Chang.

Continuing the tribute and fund-raising effort, three others from the poetry scene here, Carole Stone, George Held, and Mindy Kronenberg, will judge the contest, which has a theme of empathy. It is open to those 18 and over and closes on Sept. 9, with an awards ceremony at the Onyx Theater in Oakdale on Nov. 18. The first 100 entrants will receive a copy of “Neuron Mirror.”

Poems, with a $20 check made out to the Lustgarten Foundation, can be sent to Ms. Walker at P.O. Box 1032, Shelter Island Heights 11965. The website neuronwalker.com has more information.

“The Gatekeepers”

Chris Whipple

Crown, $28

If there’s a new book on politics that should be read at the Trump White House — but probably won’t be — it’s this one, “The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency,” by the veteran TV journalist and producer Chris Whipple.

Because the most dramatic exception yet to the thesis of Mr. Whipple’s new book may well be the Trump White House — former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus in particular. After all, what point to a gatekeeper who controls the flow of memos, reports, and briefing books to a president who evidently prefers Fox News to paper, even if kept to a page or two to suit his widely reported short attention span?

What point to a gatekeeper who controls the outflow of presidential speeches, remarks, and official statements when the president insists on defining his policy preferences and himself in predawn blasts on Twitter, or long talks with The Times?

What point to a gatekeeper limiting access of special interests and special pleaders to a chief executive who mixes regularly with the wealthy and powerful at his pricey weekend retreats? And who’s accessible 24/7 to warring counselors and kin, some involved in ousting Mr. Priebus himself for Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, a retired general with limited experience in the entrails of D.C. and G.O.P. politicking or policy?

Still, starting with interviews he did for a 2013 cable TV series, Mr. Whipple has provided an engaging, informative close-up of 17 men closest to the presidents they served, detailing the extraordinary power — and pressure — they experienced, and the tense times of their service: Watergate, Iran-Contra, 9/11, Iraq, financial meltdown, global terror, health-care battles, Syria, North Korea.

But the book also contains ample evidence that its thesis is a bit overstated.

The presidents here, often as not, seem to define themselves precisely by the chiefs they choose, who by their relative competence and confidence (or overconfidence) then become key to whether the man in the Oval Office becomes the presi­dent he wants to be. “Every president reveals himself by the presidential portraits he hangs [and] the person he picks as his chief of staff,” the historian Richard Norton Smith has said.

Mr. Whipple begins with Richard Nixon’s chief of staff, brush-cut H.R. Haldeman, previously the manager of two losing Nixon campaigns, but who says he was the “pluperfect SOB” the new president wanted (at the suggestion of his own former boss, Dwight Eisenhower).

And Haldeman did become notorious for saying no, even at times to the president himself when he thought it necessary, though at other times, Mr. Whipple reminds us, H.R. simply ignored R.N. orders he thought unwise.

Of course when it came to Watergate, at least the cover-up, Haldeman went along and went to jail following Nixon’s unprecedented resignation, thanks to the White House tapes. (Mr. Whipple suggests a rationale for the taping grew from J. Edgar Hoover’s lying to Nixon that Lyndon Johnson ordered a “bug” on his plane.)

Unmentioned is the oft-denied but enduring notion that Haldeman’s successor as chief of staff, Gen. Alexander Haig, saw Nixon so unstable under the shadow of impeachment that he proposed the military obey no Oval Office order Haig hadn’t co-signed. (Generals Mattis and McMaster, please note.)

Haig remained chief briefly under fill-in President Gerald Ford, but his high-handed ways infuriated Ford loyalists. And their freewheeling access to the Oval Office (“spokes of the wheel,” Ford called it) produced chaos — followed by Ford’s asking the former Nixon aide Don Rumsfeld (“a ruthless little bastard,” Nixon called him) to become chief of staff.

Rumsfeld brought with him a frighteningly fast-paced work atmosphere, flurries of memos and barked orders, and a young protégé named Dick Cheney, then thought of as whip-smart and a genial practical joker.

But there was a limit to what that Dynamic Duo could do to redeem Ford’s reputation and re-electability, especially after the president redefined himself again — and them — with a surprise “Halloween massacre” that, among other shakeups, made Rumsfeld defense secretary and Cheney chief of staff.

And Ford was still dogged by a faltering economy, his pardon of Nixon (in the public interest, he felt), a tumble on the wet steps of Air Force One (mocked mercilessly by the media), and a disastrous TV debate against Jimmy Carter, the onetime nuclear sub commander, peanut farmer, and Democratic governor of Georgia: “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.”

Carter won and then defined himself as outsider in chief by not selecting any formal chief of staff — the J.F.K. and L.B.J. model, Mr. Whipple notes. “He’d been manager of [his own] campaign, why wouldn’t he be manager of the White House staff too,” explains the author James Fallows, then a Carter speechwriter.

Worse yet, first among equals of Carter’s campaign carry-overs, and thus de facto chief of staff, was his savvy political strategist Hamilton Jordan, 31. A brash former frat boy at the University of Georgia, Jordan was previously executive secretary to Carter as governor, but with none of his boss’s polish and little love for the Washington ways he’d shaped the campaign against, or the “nitty-gritty” of getting policy developed and enacted.

Tieless in chinos and boots, “Ham” often hid out in other aides’ offices to avoid decisions waiting to be made, shunned the press, and made headlines with after-hours escapades — “a sort of personal thumb-your-nose style,” another staffer called it.

None of that kept Carter from making Jordan the manager of his re-election campaign and replacing him with a man many thought should have been chief of staff from the start. The Atlanta lawyer Jack Watson, “charming and focused,” had gotten to know Washington as director of the Carter transition, later head of intergovernmental affairs.

“But a functioning White House, however belated, could not change the harsh reality: inflation, unemployment, sky-high interest rates,” Mr. Whipple concedes, not to mention the lingering Iran hostage crisis. “I don’t think an officially designated chief of staff would have changed anything,” Jimmy Carter himself insisted.

Another Southern outsider who defined himself by his choice of chief of staff, at least initially, was Bill Clinton, drafting his kindergarten classmate Thomas F. (Mack) McLarty, with a fortune made in trucking and gas but no Washington experience.

“Mack the Nice” typified and enabled Clinton’s loyal “Arkansas Mafia,” whose members and other ambitious aides came and went through the Oval Office “like a White House version of the stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers film ‘A Night at the Opera,’ ” Mr. Whipple writes.

Eventually, with his agenda paralyzed and Hillary furious (not least over failure of her health reform plan), the Clintons decided to sack Mack and bring in Leon Panetta, a Nixon administration veteran, later a nine-term Democratic congressman from California, then serving as director of Clinton’s Office of Management and Budget.

Panetta learned to deal with Clinton’s famous predawn calls, his reluctance to stop revisiting decisions already made, and his wife’s penchant for playing chief of staff herself “if she felt he wasn’t being well served,” Panetta says.

But Panetta had set a two-year limit on being chief of staff “to protect [his] humanity,” and was replaced by his former deputy, the entrepreneur-banker Erskine Bowles, previously head of the Small Business Administration, later a part-time Clinton debate coach.

Generally successful in keeping the president focused on his top priorities (“You can’t do a thousand things,” he lectured Clinton), Bowles also led “marathon negotiations” with House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott to get both the first balanced federal budget since 1969 and a Children’s Health Insurance Plan (CHIP) that invested $27 billion in care for poor kids, he recalls telling Clinton. “You could have lit the room up with the smile on his face.”

Far less joyful is Bowles about the successful strategy he devised to handle the Monica Lewinsky scandal — creating a separate staff to deal solely with the president’s sexual indiscretions, led by his deputy, John Podesta, calling himself “Secretary of Shit.”

So far from defining the president was Bowles, indeed, and so disappointed by Bill’s behavior, that it literally made him ill. “I don’t want to know a f*cking thing about it,” he said at one point. At another: “I think I’m going to throw up.” And, finally, he left.

Podesta became Clinton’s fourth and final chief — with “a fine mind, a tough hide, a dry wit . . . a better hearts player” than Bowles, Clinton has written. Together they reached the decision for massive bombing to pacify the Balkans, and for using executive orders to sidestep Congress — “a strategy Podesta championed and would later help perfect as an adviser to Barack Obama,” Mr. Whipple notes.

Clearly the gold standard for White House chiefs of staff was James Baker under both Ronald Reagan and Baker’s longtime Texas pal George H.W. Bush (after two bad picks by Bush: his friend John Sununu, the brilliant but intolerably arrogant, self-serving governor who helped him win in New Hampshire, and his polar opposite, Samuel Skinner, a Chicago businessman serving well as transportation secretary but soon admittedly “overwhelmed” in a tight election year).

Baker was first chosen because Reagan, although also an outsider — an actor from Hollywood no less — was persuaded that he still needed a director, and a guide in the ways of Washington and national politics.

Baker had served as finance chairman of the Republican Party, undersecretary of commerce in the Ford administration, then ran campaigns against Reagan for Ford and George H.W. Bush. In all of which he had impressed key men around Reagan (and, importantly, his wife, Nancy) with his organization, cool efficiency, smooth manners, dress, and charm, Mr. Whipple writes.

Of course conservatives who celebrated Reagan’s win as their own coming to power were outraged by the selection of a pragmatist instead of their ideological favorite, Ed Meese, a Reagan confidant. But Baker cannily proposed that Meese become “counselor to the president” with cabinet rank to preside over cabinet meetings, take charge of policy, and supervise domestic and national security councils. Baker would control access to Reagan, the flow of paper, speeches, and staff.

“It worked for the Gipper, it worked for the country . . . and I was still in position to run everything,” says Baker, who recruited a strong staff, set up a Legislative Strategy Group to decide what was doable (“a key to my success”), and charmed the press while waging continuous rear-guard action against conservative “true believers.”

Baker’s mastery was evident in tense times that followed: the potentially mortal shooting of Reagan, making deals with Democrats for a tax cut, killing a plan to polygraph top officials in search of a leaker, and eventually persuading Reagan that it was necessary to raise taxes when a stubborn recession stalled economic growth.

But all that, plus feeling scapegoated over one instance of bad debate prep in the 1984 re-election campaign, made Baker want out. And the president, with surprising indifference, let him switch jobs with Treasury Secretary Donald Regan — a disaster for all concerned (and perhaps an early sign of Reagan’s developing dementia).

Regan’s outsized ego ultimately put the new chief of staff at odds with Nancy — and out of a job. And it left Baker out of touch with backstage birthing of the Iran-Contra embarrassment — illegal arms sales to Tehran to help free American hostages in Lebanon and illegally fund mercenaries fighting Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista regime. “Iran-Contra never would have happened on James Baker’s watch,” says Dick Cheney.

Not so many years later, ironically, it was Cheney as V.P. and his old mentor Rumsfeld as defense secretary, again, who clearly out-muscled President George W. Bush’s chief of staff, Andy Card, and his doubts about the Iraq War for which Dick, Rummy, and others had been paving the way even before 9/11.

And so it goes. Barack Obama went through four chiefs in his eight years as he fought increasingly effective G.O.P. opposition, announced from the very first, to save a staggering economy, pass the Affordable Care Act (followed by horrendous staff work on the healthcare.gov rollout, but now more popular than ever), and develop a variety of effective (but by definition reversible) executive orders to advance his agenda.

For all the former chiefs interviewed for this book, it seems, the job was more demanding than they ever imagined, but one they would not have missed. If in the end they emerge more as servants than shapers of their presidents, we can still appreciate their extraordinary efforts and accomplishments — as well as the personal, political, and historical forces at play when they fell short.

Chris Whipple, who summers on Shelter Island, will speak about his new book at the Quogue Library on Aug. 6 at 5 p.m. and will be at Authors Night in East Hampton on Aug. 12.

David M. Alpern lives in Sag Harbor, worked more than 50 years as a reporter, writer, editor, and broadcaster for U.P.I. and Newsweek, and now hosts a weekly podcast for World Policy Journal.

“Poetry Will Save

Your Life”

Jill Bialosky

Atria Books, $24

In 1939, W.H. Auden famously asserted that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Jill Bialosky seems to offers a diametrically opposing view in her unusual and affecting new memoir. Using 51 poems, ranging broadly from nursery rhymes to a Shakespeare sonnet, she sets out to demonstrate how reading and remembering poetry can provide a kind of salvation. 

The informing, seismic event of Ms. Bialosky’s childhood was the sudden death of her father when she was 2 years old. There were subsequent aftershocks: her mother’s active dating life and her remarriage to someone fifth-grader Jill and her two sisters had never met; the birth of another sister; the faltering and eventual dissolution of that second marriage, followed by her mother’s retreat into depression. 

All of these incidents were out of Ms. Bialosky’s control, yet she identifies strongly with Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” the poem that commits her to a love of poetry when it’s read aloud by her teacher. She sees her own story in it. 

“There are two roads one might travel: The road where families are whole and not broken, and fathers don’t die young, and mothers are happy — where everything seems to fit together like pieces in a puzzle; and the road I travel, which is crooked and not quite right, with bumps along the way.” Of course she can’t change the past, but she looks to the future, to choosing the right path — in effect, to the power of autonomy. She quotes Frost: “Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.”

The narrative of “Poetry Will Save Your Life” moves back and forth in time in the present tense (which enhances its fluidity) between the writer’s youth and her adulthood, with the touchstone of beloved poems as a constant. In one chapter she’s contentedly married, a burgeoning poet and editor; in another she’s still single and lonely, anxiously seeking love and purpose. In both circumstances, she’s instructed and consoled by lines of passion and despair by, among others, Louise Bogan, Gerald Stern, Denis Johnson, Sharon Olds, and Sylvia Plath. 

And then there’s the discovery of Emily Dickinson, whose works make Ms. Bialosky “feel smart to think I understand them,” although the poems she cites, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” with its crushing line “This is the Hour of Lead,” and “ ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” clearly reflect her own tenuous passage from grief to happy possibility.

As a self-conscious, fearful, and introspective girl, Jill Bialosky claims books as her “secret companions.” The characters in favorite novels “inform my envy, my empathy, my courage, my consciousness.” She relates easily to Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” whose heroines grow up in an all-female household, and to the concentration on mothers and daughters in “Pride and Prejudice.”

It’s not surprising that she feels a similar shock of recognition on reading Dickinson’s playful “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” and poems of self-realization by Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Louis Stevenson. Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room” brilliantly recounts her own first awareness of the dichotomy of separateness and belonging. “But I felt: you are an I, / you are an Elizabeth, / you are one of them.” And Stevenson’s “The Swing” “recalls that same frightful realization of one’s own solitary self, sailing over the lip of the horizon ‘up in the air and down.’ ”

Ms. Bialosky suffered major losses as an adult, which must have reignited the pain of that first catastrophic loss, the death of her father. Two pregnancies resulted in the stillbirth of a daughter and the death of a premature son. And her cherished youngest sister, Kim — who she helped raise in a fatherless home during their mother’s emotional absence — committed suicide in her 21st year, a tragedy related in an earlier memoir, “History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life.”

Again and again, poems come to mind, offering their shared experience of bereavement, and their words of solace: Ben Jonson’s “On My First Son,” which opens “Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy”; Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” which orders: “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,” and, inevitably, Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” about enduring and mastering loss. Poetry and daily ritual help to mitigate grief, but, we’re told, “Eventually I find comfort in the idea that there are no clear answers.”

When Ms. Bialosky and her husband finally bring home a living child, a baby boy, they’re unprepared, without a crib or even a diaper — “We are still living in the aftermath of ravaged promise.” Feeling “selfish and voracious,” she wants to be her child’s only caretaker. Yet, “My psyche will not quite allow itself to feel the happiness and love that is flooding through every cell of my body. I keep expecting something terrible to happen.” 

She compares herself to the narrator of Plath’s “Nick and the Candlestick,” which begins, “I am a miner. The light burns blue.” Ms. Bialosky writes: “Like the speaker in this magical poem . . . I am a miner excavating a rich new world, but always now with hesitation and awareness of life’s fragility.” 

There are chapters in this book dealing with friendship, memory, shame, faith, danger, and mortality, and each subject becomes a part of the author’s own history, deftly illuminated by particular poems. Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool,” which we are advised “should be taped on the refrigerator of every house with a teenager,” reminds Ms. Bialosky “with its nod to the rhythms of the street” and its devastating last line, “We / Die soon,” of jumping rope with her best friend, Marie (a future suicide), to the hypnotically repetitive verses of “Miss Mary Mack,” and “of all the perils and vulnerability that growing up held.”

During the recitation of the 23rd Psalm at her grandmother’s graveside, “I think of my father in his dwelling place and his mother, my grandmother, now with him,” she writes, “and that one day I too will be dwelling in the house of the Lord forever.” She wonders if the psalm may be only a “myth of consolation,” but concludes that it is sustaining nevertheless, and that poems may be the same as prayers.

Poems about fathers have special importance to Ms. Bialosky, and “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden “evokes memories and reverberations of the complicated ‘austere and lonely offices’ of a collective childhood, whether rich or poor, where a father wields his tender and cruel power.” 

Two poems about mothers stand out as well: “My Mother’s Feet” by Stanley Plumly (who was Ms. Bialosky’s teacher) and Lucille Clifton’s “Fury.” The former is a love letter from the poet-son to his mother, and the latter a “scalding” depiction of a woman’s ambition and sacrifice. Ms. Bialosky’s earlier ambivalence toward her own mother seems to be contained in this pair of poems. We learn from her narrative how beautiful her mother, now in her mid-80s and living in a care home, still is, and that her daughter has come to terms with past difficulties between them, and with their current reversal of roles. “Now I am my mother’s keeper. . . . As once my life depended on her, now hers depends on me.”

Two additional poems are rendered to illustrate this familiar phenomenon: Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Child Is Father to the Man” and Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps Up,” from which Hopkins borrowed his poem’s title.

Auden’s words “For poetry makes nothing happen” are from his poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.” That line is preceded by “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. / Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still.” The madness Auden refers to is political strife. When Ms. Bialosky boldly declares that poetry will save your life, her meaning is more personal. “We’re all born mortal. We have to contend with the idea of mortality.” The closing of her own poem “Terminal Tower” (not included here) tells us, “I saw through the stone into the abyss. It was dark and splendid.” 

Like the weather and politics, the human condition isn’t altered by poetry, but this lovely memoir poignantly and credibly shows how it can inspire our acceptance of it. 

Hilma Wolitzer’s novels include “An Available Man” and “The Doctor’s Daughter.” Her poems have appeared in New Letters, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. She and her husband were part-time residents of Springs for many years. 

Jill Bialosky, an editor at W.W. Norton, lives in Manhattan and Bridgehampton. She will read from her new book at BookHampton in East Hampton on Friday, Aug. 25, at 5 p.m.