Simon Perchik, Star Black, and Edward Butscher will usher in this summer’s iteration of the Poetry Marathon on Sunday at the East Hampton Town Marine Museum on Bluff Road in Amagansett.

There will be four readings this year, all of them this month. Each starts at 5:30 p.m. and is followed by a reception. The Marine Museum will be open for tours, as well.

Mr. Perchik, a prolific poet who lives in Springs, published his latest collection, “The B Poems,” with Poets Wear Prada at the end of last year. A review in The Star called it a deep exploration of the underworld in verse lacking all artifice.

Ms. Black has written several collections of poems and teaches in the M.F.A. program at Stony Brook Southampton. Mr. Butscher, formerly of East Hampton, won the Poetry Society of America’s Melville Cane Award for his biography “Conrad Aiken: Poet of White Horse Vale.” His work has appeared in American Book Review and the Saturday Review of Literature. 

The marathon, founded by Bebe Antell and Sylvia Chavkin, is now headed up by Dee Slavutin of Springs, herself a poet. “It brings to the community the lyrical allure of the oral tradition,” she said in a release. 

The Amagansett Library has a packed literary summer planned with an Authors After Hours series that begins Saturday night with Gerard Doyle, an actor and narrator, and continues to mid-August. 

Mr. Doyle, who is the performing arts teacher at the Ross Upper School in East Hampton, has recorded hundreds of audiobooks, including the “Inheritance” series by Christopher Paolini, “Sea of Trolls” by Nancy Farmer, and “The Looking Glass Wars” by Frank Beddor. He won an AudioFile Earphones Award for his first audiobook, “A Star Called Henry,” and has won myriad awards since then.

The series will continue on July 15 when Dava Sobel will speak about her book “The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars.” The book describes the extraordinary women at the Harvard College Observatory who helped discover previously unknown information about stars through studying and analyzing “the glass universe,” half a million photographic plates. 

The novelist Alan Furst will talk about “A Hero of France” on July 22. The story takes place in Paris in 1941, and follows Mathieu, a leader of the French resistance, through the war years in the Nazi-occupied city. Mathieu helps Allied bombers and fighters who have come down in France return to safe territory. Mr. Furst is acclaimed for his historical espionage thrillers.

On Aug. 5, Sheila Kohler will discuss her memoir “Once We Were Sisters.” The book chronicles her childhood and her sister Maxine’s, well-to-do white girls in apartheid South Africa. Maxine was killed when her husband, who had beaten her and their six children for years, drove off a road in Johannesburg, in what was perhaps more a murder than an accident. The memoir explores guilt, privilege, familial relationships, and death.

On Aug. 19, Jules Feiffer, the acclaimed cartoonist, will wrap up this summer’s Authors After Hours series, speaking about his 1993 children’s book “The Man in the Ceiling,” which was adapted into a musical recently seen at the Bay Street Theater. In the story, a boy named Jimmy has a problem. He wishes more than anything to be a famous cartoonist, but cannot draw a hand. Complicating matters are Jimmy’s father, who wants his son to be athletic rather than artistic, and Uncle Lester, who cannot seem to write a love song for the musicals he writes.

“The Rules

Do Not Apply”

Ariel Levy

Random House, $27

“To this day I feel comforted and relieved of loneliness, no matter how foreign my surroundings, if I have a pad and a pen.” As much as Ariel Levy’s arresting memoir, “The Rules Do Not Apply,” is about taking bold steps — she discovers Cap T, Cap L True Love when she meets Lucy during a blackout, describing her as a woman who “had the radiant decency of a sunflower” — the real spine of this book is about Ms. Levy’s passion for writing. 

“As a journalist, I’ve spent nearly two decades putting myself in foreign surroundings as frequently as possible. There is nothing I love more than traveling to a place where I know nobody, and where everything will be a surprise, and then writing about it. It’s like having a new lover — even the parts you aren’t crazy about have the crackling fascination of the unfamiliar.”

In the mid-’90s Ms. Levy was at New York magazine. But it wasn’t the glam job one might imagine. Her task was to “take the articles the writers faxed over and type them into the computer system — it was 1996, email was still viewed as a curious phenomenon that might blow over.” Her job was also to input the crossword, one black or white box at a time. 

Then someone told her about a nightclub in Queens for obese women. Ms. Levy was 22 when she hopped onto the subway with another lowly staff member — a photographer whose job it was to alphabetize negatives at the magazine. Ms. Levy reported. Mayita took photographs. The resulting article was given the headline that Ms. Levy dubs her best ever: “WOMEN’S LB.”

Ms. Levy, now a New Yorker staff writer, is a superb essayist. “Thanksgiving in Mongolia,” the heartbreaking centerpiece of this memoir, about the premature birth then loss of her baby, won a National Magazine Award. She edited “Best American Essays” in 2015. I remember reading her portrait of Diana Nyad, “Breaking the Waves,” in The New Yorker and thinking that I wasn’t interested in long-distance swimming, but why am I so fascinated by this narrative? 

The answer, of course, was clear: Ms. Levy is a master at finding the perfect detail. Then juxtaposing that detail with another one. She doesn’t just find the best shell on the beach. She discovers the best beach glass, the best sand-polished stones. And then she listens to the wind through the best conch. The writing is clear, straightforward. Style never gets in the way of story. 

The story she calls the “most ambitious” of her career was about Caster Semenya, a star runner in Limpopo, South Africa. Ms. Levy got on the plane without a single contact in Africa, not knowing how she would even get in touch with the subject of her story, a person who had grown up without running shoes, but then was given running scholarships to the University of Pretoria. She’d won the women’s 2009 World Championships in Berlin and was destined for the Olympics. 

Ms. Levy arrived and began trying to find ways in a rural area to suss out a story. The story was about whether she was a woman or a man. It was all about the chromosomes. “Semenya was breathtakingly butch,” Ms. Levy writes. “She had a strong jawline and a build that slid straight from her ribs to her hips; her torso was like the breastplate on a suit of armor.” When she finally meets Semenya, she realizes that “writing for me was like running for Caster Semenya: the thing I had to do.”

As Ms. Levy was about to pack up and head back to the states, she realized she needed to see African wildlife. After all, she reasoned, she hadn’t been mauled by an animal, hadn’t been assaulted in Johannesburg. “But the danger that we invite into our lives can come in the most unthreatening shape, the most pedestrian: the cellphone you press against your head, transmitting the voice of your mother, pouring radiation into your brain day after day; the little tick bite in the garden that leaves you aching and palsied for years. It can come in the form of an email from an old lover whom you have not spoken with for many years, which you receive when you are back at the lodge, sitting under a thatched roof drinking a cup of milky tea. It can come when, instead of writing to the person with whom you share a home and a history, the person you adore and have married, you write to your old lover. And you say, ‘Today I saw a family of lions licking each other in the yellow grass, and they looked like they were in love.’ ”

Indeed, a much larger danger was lurking back home inside her marriage. We will discover that Lucy’s drinking torpedoes their union. And then there is the issue of children. About wanting to get pregnant at age 37, Ms. Levy writes: “From the minute the dragon of our fertility came on the scene, we learned to chain it up and forget about it. Fertility meant nothing to us in our twenties; it was something to be secured in the dungeon and left there to molder. . . . By the time we tried to wake it, the dragon was weakened, wizened. Old.”

Of course there are rules that do apply. The Golden. The reminder of how much we need all that love. Those rules about the importance of family first. And how one chooses to define family. 

And there’s another rule that applies: leavening tragedy with humor. Ms. Levy is quite funny about her mother’s ban on Cheez Doodles. And the game she plays with her father of Mummy and Explorer in which they take turns pretending to be Tutankhamun and the explorer searching for the tomb. “At the climax of the game, the explorer stumbles on the embalmed Pharaoh and — brace yourself — the mummy opens his eyes and comes to life. The explorer has to express shock, and then says, ‘So, what’s new?’ To which the mummy replies, ‘You.’ ”

No need for a spoiler alert here because from the first pages — “Until recently, I lived in a world where lost things could always be replaced” — the last lines of this memoir are inevitable. We know there will be great sadness. Ms. Levy’s marriage to Lucy is over. She has lost the baby she so desperately wanted and knows she will never have a child. And yet . . . “As everything else has fallen apart, what has stayed intact is something I always had, the thing that made me a writer: curiosity.” 

And then Ms. Levy the writer adds one word for herself and her readers: “Hope.”

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

Ariel Levy lives part time on Shelter Island.

“Berlin for Jews”

Leonard Barkan

University of  Chicago Press, $27.50

Leonard Barkan is a Renaissance man, in more ways than one. A Princeton professor, he’s also a classics man, an art history man, an archeology man, an architecture man, a man who loves to travel, and a Jew who has spent much of the last couple of years in Berlin.Who better to write a book with a title like “Berlin for Jews”? 

The title might be understood as simply describing a guidebook for Jewish tourists, and, indeed, it is partly that: Mr. Barkan suggests that a first-time visitor immediately buy a transit pass and board the M29 bus line to see sights like Checkpoint Charlie, the Berlinische Galerie, and the shops on the Kurfürstendamm. There are maps, reproductions of old portraits, and photographs of the city, most of them taken by Mr. Barkan’s talented spouse, Nick Barberio, that provide purposeful orientation. 

But the title also suggests a question: What, besides a geographical area, was pre-Nazi Berlin for the significant minority of Jews who lived there and formed a culturally, artistically, and financially significant part of German society? And what is it for us — and for Mr. Barkan, who says he’s having a love affair with the city — today? 

To answer the first of these questions, Mr. Barkan takes us to a cemetery, Schönhauser Allee, which he presents as “Jewish ground zero,” a physical reconstruction of the city’s history from the point of view of its Jewish residents. Its monuments are “a thesaurus of Jewish family names” and “a riot of majestic titles,” and form a catalog of the architectural fashions in which wealthy Germans memorialized themselves, ranging from Romanesque to High Gothic to Renaissance and beyond; they are a critique of that culture itself. 

“Ornament defines culture,” Mr. Barkan observes, and these highly ornamented tombs testified to a people determined to acquire a culture that was not bequeathed to them by their forebears, and acquired not always gracefully but with great self-confidence: “If this be kitsch, they made the most of it,” he comments. 

Trained as a close reader of texts, Mr. Barkan brings the cemetery to life. He learned German in school when he was 12, growing up in New York, having already picked up Yiddish at home, and he tells us that there is “common ground between the language of the Nazis and the language of their most abject victims.” Upwardly mobile American Jews like the Barkans, especially in New York, had always felt an affinity with German, “the preferred language and civilization,” the language of science, philosophy, and classical music. 

But his parents spoke Yiddish to each other when they did not wish young Leonard to understand (though he picked it up quickly), and he does not hesitate to drop a Yiddish expression into his fluid, readable prose when it expresses something that has no precise equivalent in English — like tchotchkes, the particular kind of knickknacks found covering every horizontal surface in a Jewish family’s home.

Mr. Barkan turns next to the Bayerisches Viertel (the Bavarian Quarter), where those who couldn’t afford grand houses of their own occupied perhaps the world’s first “luxury multiple housing” and which was known at the time as “the Jewish Switzerland” — perhaps because it was a safe haven even before the need for a haven became brutally apparent. For Mr. Barkan it possesses “the quintessential status of what it means to me to be a Jew.” 

Berlin’s Jewish community “believed themselves to be Germans, just like their Christian neighbors,” and produced, in 1929, a volume called “The Jewish Address Book of Greater Berlin,” whose oddity Mr. Barkan explains through a fanciful analogy with another minority simultaneously privileged, tolerated, and oppressed: What if prominent gays got together and produced “The Homosexual Address Book of Greater New York”? It too would be the challenging expression of “separatist and assimilation impulses.” 

The rest of Mr. Barkan’s book is devoted to three prominent Jewish Berliners, carefully chosen to embody the zeitgeists of their eras. The first is Rahel Varnhagen, the unlikely proprietress of a salon — a group of distinguished artists, thinkers, and culture mavens met to engage in brilliantly witty dialogue. She was what Mme. de Stael was to Paris, what Perle Mesta was to Washington: the glue that bound together the cosmopolitan essence of a city. And she attained this status without a fortune or great personal beauty, apparently because of her extraordinary conversational abilities — like Dorothy Parker presiding over the Round Table at the Algonquin two centuries later, but without (pardon the pun) her waspishness. 

Beethoven found his way to Rahel’s house, along with Mendelssohn and Rossini and the writers Kleist and Heine, as well as the nephew of Prince Louis Ferdinand. What was remarkable, and untrue of her later counterparts, was that Rahel was a Jewess — and that this was apparently an unspoken secret kept by almost all of the people who frequented her house. 

James Simon, Mr. Barkan’s favorite Berlin Jew, is described as “bourgeois, liberal, statesmanly, global, supremely generous in giving and bashful in accepting thanks,” a man who almost single-handedly stocked the museums of Berlin with vast collections of important and valuable antiquities. The Zionist Chaim Weizmann took him to be a collaborator with the nascent Nazi movement, calling him “the usual type of Kaiser-Jüden . . . more German than the Germans.” 

And it is true that he was on close terms with Kaiser Wilhelm, his partner in the acquisition of archaeological treasures from the Middle East, including those of Palestine. But it is also true that Simon’s name was removed from the exhibits he had bequeathed to the museums of the city, shortly before his death in 1932, though the breathtaking exhibits themselves remain. 

I had never heard of Rahel Vernhagen, and Simon only vaguely, but every academic in the humanities is familiar with the estimable theorist Walter Benjamin — though having read him did not prepare me for Mr. Barkan’s portrait of the scion of a wealthy and cosmopolitan family that celebrated both Rosh Hashana and organized Easter egg hunts, a man driven by sexual impulses, an urban flaneur nevertheless unable to achieve worldly or academic success, and ultimately driven into exile and then to suicide. 

Yet he was the forerunner of modern writers as diverse as Jane Jacobs, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes. He was a writer who claimed membership in what he believed to be the elite stratum of intellectual achievers, who were, he explained in “Berlin Childhood Around 1900” (a project not very dissimilar from “Berlin for Jews”), of necessity Jewish. Benjamin, for Mr. Barkan, seems to epitomize the paradoxes of being Jewish in Berlin — paradoxes that World War II did not put an end to in a city whose great project has been to rise from the ashes of almost total physical destruction and, partly through acts of atonement, reclaim its humane status. 

Since most of the book concerns prewar Berlin, one cannot escape the unvoiced tension between the upward mobilization and growing confidence of Berlin Jewry before 1930 with what we know is, sooner or later, coming. It reminded me of the 1782 novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” (perhaps better known as the 1988 film “Dangerous Liaisons”), in which French aristocrats sport and connive in decorous languor, oblivious of the fact that in a few years the French Revolution would take its bloody revenge on their privilege and decadence. 

That Mr. Barkan can make a study of people whose homeland devoured them entertaining and palatable is a stunning achievement.

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

Leonard Barkan, a former wine columnist for The Star, used to live in Springs.

As summer 2017 is off and running, so are the many authors traveling to the South Fork. Whether they come for work, play, or a little of both, BookHampton will continue to host them at its Main Street, East Hampton, shop. 

Among others, notable authors putting in appearances to read, discuss, answer questions, and sign copies are William Norwich, John Aldridge and Anthony Sosinski, Daphne Merkin, Richard Haass, Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni, and Mike Lupica. 

Tomorrow at 5 p.m., Mr. Norwich, a writer, editor, and video and television reporter, will discuss his 2016 novel, “My Mrs. Brown,” which chronicles a genteel Rhode Island woman’s daunting journey to Madison Avenue in search of both her voice and a must-have Oscar de la Renta dress. Attendees will learn more about what The New York Times called “a contemporary fairy tale . . . a gentle rebuke to today’s hyped-up fashion culture.”

On July 13 at 5 p.m., John Aldridge and Anthony Sosinski will discuss their book, “A Speck in the Sea,” a memoir of survival and search-and-rescue off Montauk. It recounts the authors’ harrowing adventure at sea after Mr. Aldridge was thrown off the back of the Anna Mary while his fishing partner, Mr. Sosinski, slept below. First a New York Times Magazine feature story, it is now in development as a motion picture with the Weinstein Company. 

The next day, also at 5 p.m., Daphne Merkin, a former staff writer for The New Yorker and a regular contributor to Elle, will discuss her new memoir, “This Close to Happy.” About coming to terms with “chronic psychiatric illness,” it recounts her three hospitalizations for depression and the gradual progression of her condition. In the words of Carol Gilligan, the distinguished psychologist, “It brings a stunningly perceptive voice into the forefront of the conversation about depression, one that is both reassuring and revelatory.”

For a glimpse into foreign policy, the following week Richard Haass will discuss how the rules and institutions that have guided the international community since World War II are seemingly ceasing to exist. His new book, “A World in Disarray,” examines global disorder and argues for a revised international system that may better benefit a world in which power is becoming dispersed. Mr. Haass, the president of the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations, will be at BookHampton on July 22 at 5 p.m. 

To kick off August, Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni will talk about her witty, self-deprecating “After Andy,” which recounts her entrance into the art world. On Aug. 4 at 5 p.m., she will detail her various meetings with Andy Warhol and how she eventually landed at Andy Warhol Enterprises. As the last person hired at the Warhol Studio before the artist’s death, Fraser-Cavassoni has a unique perspective on the end of an era and his elevation to icon status.

To wrap up that weekend, on Aug. 6, the sportswriter and best-selling author Mike Lupica will read from “Point Guard” at 4 p.m. In the third novel of Mr. Lupica’s “Home Team” series, his protagonist, Gus, grapples with how to handle others’ prejudices toward him concerning his Dominican heritage, and with his own biases about having a girl on his basketball team.

Other writers who will visit the shop this summer include Marshall Watson, Janice Parker, Sheila Nevins, Carrie Doyle, Jennifer Ash Rudick, and John Freeman. A list of them, and other information, can be found at BookHampton.com.

George Saunders in Sag

The Esther Newberg Authors Tea, new this year, will welcome George Saunders to read and talk about his work on Sunday at 11 a.m. at the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor. Signing up in advance is a must; the limit is 70 attendees. Mr. Saunders, a widely admired writer of short stories, has a hit on his hands with his first novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo.” The tea was organized by the family and friends of Ms. Newberg to honor her, a village resident, veteran literary agent, and executive vice president of International Creative Management, for her work in publishing.

Authors Night Tix

Authors Night, the yearly fund-raiser for the East Hampton Library, will be held on Aug. 12, a Saturday, on a field at 4 Maidstone Lane in the village. Tickets are now on sale at authorsnight.org and by calling the library.

It starts at 5 p.m. with a reception with hors d’oeuvres and wine under a tent, where guests can chat with authors of their choosing from among the roughly 100 on hand, buy books, and have them signed. The list is on the website, but it includes Malcolm Nance (“Hacking ISIS”), a commentator on issues of terrorism and intelligence; Alyssa Mastromonaco, the author of “Who Thought This Was a Good Idea? And Other Questions You Should Have Answers to When You Work in the White House,” and Ann (“Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants”) Brashares, with her new novel, set out here, “The Whole Thing Together.”

At 8 that night, attendees can repair to various houses for dinner parties honoring guest writers, among them Alec Baldwin, Robert A. Caro, Dick Cavett, and Blanche Wiesen Cook. Tickets cost $100 for the reception and start at $300 for a dinner.

Master Class With Rosenblatt

Roger Rosenblatt, the renowned essayist and memoirist, will be back at Stony Brook Southampton’s writers conference, which runs from July 12 to 23 this year, offering a master class. The title is “Imagine What You Know: Five Ways of Looking at Writing,” with guests including the poet Sharon Olds and the humorist Patricia Marx. The cost is $650, and the deadline is July 1. Participants will be able to take advantage of other conference offerings, as well, from readings to panel discussions. More information is at stonybrook.edu.

Little Emma lives by the sea in what’s nearly a fishing shack. But she doesn’t care, as long as she can spend her days with her dog, Nemo, on the beach, dreaming up stories and collecting shells and beach glass in the shadow of a striped, gull-bedecked lighthouse. She’s seen loggerhead turtles, dolphins, even whales, but never one close enough to touch, not until a young female whale becomes stranded one day, and she sets about rescuing it.

In “Emma and the Whale” (Schwartz & Wade, $17.99) by Julie Case, who lives in Colorado and spends summers in East Hampton, that touch is of utmost importance, as Emma discovers she can commune with the frightened beast, feel its suffering, read its thoughts, as it were. 

Beyond the fetching details in the illustrations by Lee White (panels of action are bordered by what looks like rope) and in the tale itself (“We’re having minestrone soup and rosemary bread for dinner,” Emma thinks at the outset of what she believes will be quick frolic), here is an empowering tale of one strong-willed girl on a mission of mercy. “I can do this,” she tells herself amid the tumbling waves as she puts her back into budging all that blubber. 

Then follows the reward of home and hearth.

“Mr. Moon”

Michael Paraskevas is a good time. As illustrators go, does anyone have more fun? Every page is a party bursting with weirdness, color, and creatures, and then the occasional beacon of sanity, a recognizably rendered human being dropped into the mix, hero or foil, observer or participant, a stand-in for the reader, maybe even for a young Paraskevas himself. 

In the Southamptoner’s latest picture book, a lush mood piece called “Mr. Moon” (Crown, $17.99), a long-lashed Miss Sun retires over the horizon, leaving the, yes, moon-faced orb as regent for the evening, doffing his nightcap to preside over all that needs to be tended to. The clouds must be fluffed by workers atop tall ladders. The sheep line up for counting; cows take to jumping. Crickets clear their throats for a cacophonous performance, while alley cats mass to rattle trash cans.

And in a crazy-quilt cityscape of red brick and brownstone tilting every which way, one sandy-haired boy peers out a second-story window and asks Mr. Moon to keep him company in his sleeplessness.

Cue the Gilbert and Sullivan: “We are very wide awake, the moon and I.”

“My Kicks”

In another, less dreamy city, a mother tells a boy, “Those shoes have seen their day!” They’re tattered, soiled, stinky. “It’s time for a new pair.”

But in “My Kicks” (Abrams, $16.95) by Susan Verde, who lives in East Hampton, the kid’s not too young to be bitten by the nostalgia bug: “They may be worn and torn,” he thinks, “but they’ve got stories to tell.” He learned to tie laces in them, first skateboarded in them (helmeted, of course). Splotches remind him of good times, painting, for instance, or just last summer, curbside, slurping up a Popsicle, all charmingly inked and watercolored by Katie Kath. “These sneakers have soul in their soles.”

Maybe so, but nothing lasts, does it. Certainly not childhood. Savor it, kid. Because when our hero eventually comes around and moves on to a fresh pair of bright kicks, the subtext of other, future goodbyes — to a family pet, a beloved grandparent — is devastating. If you choose to think about it.

“Going Deep”

Lawrence Goldstone

Pegasus Books, $27.95

On Aug. 26, 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt traveled a short distance from his summer home at Sagamore Hill on Long Island’s north shore to where the submarine the Plunger was docked near Oyster Bay. The boat had been scheduled for a presidential inspection to determine if submarines should be added to the American naval fleet. 

But Roosevelt was never one to stand on the sidelines. Rather than observing the submarine’s maneuvers from shore, the president boarded the Plunger to experience it firsthand. After a series of dives, including one that remained underwater for nearly an hour, Roosevelt returned to land a believer. “I have never seen anything quite so remarkable,” the president enthused of his ride.

Given the president’s endorsement, the Navy immediately made contracts for the construction of four new submarines, vessels that would greatly transform the nation’s naval capabilities and the shape of warfare in the 20th century.

That scene on Long Island Sound comes near the end of Lawrence Goldstone’s new book, “Going Deep: John Philip Holland and the Invention of the Attack Submarine.” Mr. Goldstone, the author of previous works on Henry Ford and the Wright brothers, intends his book to rescue Holland, whom he calls “the father of the modern submarine,” from relative obscurity and place him alongside those other more well-known American inventors. His thorough and deeply researched book accomplishes exactly that, but it also tells the far larger history of the submarine’s long and difficult journey to reality.

The idea of underwater boats had been around since as early as the 16th century, when the mathematician William Bourne introduced the notion in his 1578 work “Inventions or Devices.” Other inventors and engineers would envision their own versions of underwater vessels, but it was Jules Verne’s 1869 classic, “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” that seemed to turn everyone’s attention to the possibility of underwater travel. Yet for all that interest, building a successful submarine proved enormously challenging.

Holland’s genius and near-obsessive dedication to perfecting a working submarine took more than three decades, and he faced nearly as many personal as he did technical setbacks along the way. Born in Ireland, Holland had come to the States in 1872, going to work as a schoolteacher and choirmaster in New Jersey. Submarines, however, were his passion, and he taught himself everything he needed to know for their design.

Remarkably, from the very start Holland’s models showed the two great contributions that he would make to submarine technology. The first was establishing positive buoyancy that allowed for a submerged boat to float to the surface rather than sink to the bottom should the engine become disabled, a critical function for any crew on board. For this design, Holland had drawn his inspiration from the porpoise, much as flight engineers had looked to birds to guide their work. The design involved positioning diving planes near the front of the submarine that could be turned downward, allowing water to flow over them and the vessel to dip below the surface like a sea mammal.

Second, Holland understood that the submarine had to maintain a fixed center of gravity to guarantee its stability. Any change in weight distribution in the craft, including from the firing of a weapon, would shift the center. To offset any changes, Holland devised a series of “trimming tanks” that took on or released weight to keep the submarine balanced as it cruised below water.

All along the way, Holland battled skeptics who criticized his designs while he struggled to finance the costly work of testing and construction. Holland’s rivalry with Simon Lake, a mechanical engineer who built a series of Argonaut submarines and then the Protector, spurred him to perfect his own designs faster. Time and again, Holland won congressional design competitions over Lake, but Lake threw up roadblocks for Holland by protesting the contests as unfair. 

And Congress seemed all too happy to oblige with stalling innovation, imposing regulatory burdens, and withholding funding. (This is not the book to read this summer if you are looking for a story to renew your faith in the United States Congress, but it would be a particularly welcome Father’s Day gift for fans of the history of technology or the military.)

Soon Holland could self-finance no more. In desperation, he turned to Isaac Rice, the wealthy chairman of the Electric Storage Battery Company. Rice provided the necessary funding, but his investment came at a steep price, requiring Holland to hand over all his patents along with control of the company. That arrangement foreshadowed Holland’s eventual exclusion from the world of submarining. By the time of President Roosevelt’s 1905 ride on the Plunger, Holland had been driven out of his own company and barred by aggressive litigation from taking up any new submarine work. He died of pneumonia in July 1914 just as World War I was beginning, a conflict that would be marked by the presence of submarine warfare.

Holland would never know about that, or the significant advances made in submarine technology through the 20th century. But Mr. Goldstone’s book rightly places him at the center of that history. As Mr. Goldstone writes in the book’s conclusion, modern submarines “all sail in the spirit of John Holland.”

Neil J. Young is the author of “We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics.” He lives in East Hampton.

Lawrence Goldstone lives in Saga­ponack.

“50 Years 

of Rolling Stone”

Jann Wenner

Abrams, $65

The last 18 months have seen the death of an inordinate number of rock ’n’ roll musicians. 

It is a matter of course, of course, that 60-odd years after alchemists like Chuck Berry brought a new musical form into being, heroes of the genre’s first decades are passing from the stage. At the same time, the form’s high mortality rate has remained sadly consistent; while Berry, rock ’n’ roll’s duck-walking prototype, was 90 when he died in March, the singer Chris Cornell was just 52 when, two weeks ago, he took his own life hours after performing with his band, Soundgarden. 

Berry, a brash, ornery guitarist and rock ’n’ roll’s first poet. Cornell, a longhaired, imposing, somewhat sinister and oft-addicted vocalist at the forefront of a once-immensely popular subgenre dubbed grunge. Recently preceding these men in death were the likes of David Bowie, Prince, Glenn Frey, Gregg Allman, and Leon Russell. Each quite different from the others, each added a unique contribution to the sprawling beast known as rock ’n’ roll. 

In 1967, a 21-year-old San Franciscan, having lost his short-lived gig as entertainment editor for an alternative weekly, sought the counsel of Ralph Gleason, The San Francisco Chronicle’s jazz and pop critic and a mentor to the young scribe. “The idea that clicked was a ‘rock & roll newspaper,’ ” Jann Wenner writes in the introduction to “50 Years of Rolling Stone,” a 288-page tome of a size and weight befitting its storied subject.

Mr. Wenner, who bought a house in Montauk in 2009 and was an East Hampton resident before that, writes of his magazine that “rock & roll needed a voice — a journalistic voice, a critical voice, an insider’s voice, an evangelical voice — to represent how serious and important the music and musical culture had become, in addition to all its manifest entertainment value; a place where fans and musicians could talk to one another, get praise, advice, feedback; someplace we could shout, ‘Hail hail rock & roll, deliver us from the days of old.’ ”

By then, the “devil’s music,” spawned deep in the American South by Berry, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Carl Perkins, and so many others, had grown up. It was now the sound of “cultural and political upheaval, freedom from drug and sexual and social repression,” Mr. Wenner writes. “It was the post-World War II baby boom coming of age — and determined to have its way.”

“Like a Rolling Stone,” an angry, six-minute-plus song by Bob Dylan released in 1965, was also the title of an essay Gleason wrote for The American Scholar, one Mr. Wenner describes as “a personal manifesto and philosophical survey of the cultural and popular music landscape.” Naming his “rock & roll newspaper” after that title was also, he writes, a nod to one of his favorite artists, the Rolling Stones, who in turn had named themselves for “Rollin’ Stone,” a song by McKinley Morganfield, a.k.a. Muddy Waters, the Mississippi-born musician who had migrated to Chicago and electrified his country blues, thereby charting an inevitable course for the sounds that would follow. 

From the start, Mr. Wenner was daring, lucky, and good. Tom Wolfe, Annie Leibovitz, and Hunter S. Thompson were among the first to document, in words and images, the music, politics, and culture that Rolling Stone fearlessly chronicled. With a surfeit of rock ’n’ roll artists producing now-classic music at a prodigious clip, Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War, and the sexual revolution, all experienced through a kaleidoscope of psychedelic drugs, Rolling Stone had plenty to document, and Mr. Wenner, his staff, and their subjects had plenty to say. 

Thompson’s “Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas,” Mr. Wenner writes, “became the ‘Catcher in the Rye’ of our times — and then his coverage of the 1972 elections was so brilliant, funny, and original that both he and Rolling Stone became legend.” 

Later, Mr. Wolfe would serialize “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” which Mr. Wenner calls “our triumph.” “Tom wanted to write a new chapter on deadline for every issue for a year, and we would work in this rhythm, right on the very edge of possible disaster, just as Charles Dickens had published a century earlier. Tom told me it was not for the faint of heart, but where else could you have so much fun?”

“50 Years of Rolling Stone” is abundant with photography, iconic moments captured by Ms. Leibovitz, Ethan Russell, Baron Wolman, Richard Avedon, Herb Ritts, and Mark Seliger, among others. Standouts include Mr. Russell’s shot of Mick Jagger, an androgynous prince of darkness sashaying before thousands of spellbound subjects in 1969; Jimi Hendrix kneeling before the guitar he had just set afire at the Monterey Pop festival in ’67; a spread depicting a naked Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, each gazing at the camera with the intensity of a turbulent, doomed soul; a pensive Michael Jackson on the cusp of adolescence, and a seated Jimmy Page, head thrown back to drain a bottle of Tennessee whiskey, he and his cohorts in Led Zeppelin soon to enthrall another audience, somewhere in America in 1975.

For better or worse, Rolling Stone has tracked Western popular culture. As television consumed more time and attention, the magazine devoted more coverage to the medium and its own stars. As rock ’n’ roll aged and splintered ever further, hip-hop artists stepped in and assumed prominence in its pages. 

In the 1990s, the baby boom generation elected one of its own to the White House, and Rolling Stone embraced Bill Clinton’s candidacy and railed at his tormentors on the right. Meanwhile, rock ’n’ roll’s penchant for reinvention manifested again with the sound emerging from Seattle and embodied by vocalists like Mr. Cornell, Kurt Cobain, Layne Staley, and Eddie Vedder. (All but Mr. Vedder are now deceased; drugs are clearly a constant in the fast-paced world of rock ’n’ roll.)

With the 1960s a distant memory, Rolling Stone soldiered on in the new millennium, but George W. Bush (“adjudged by Princeton historian Sean Wilentz in a Rolling Stone cover story to be perhaps the worst president of all time,” Mr. Wenner writes) and his post-9/11 misadventure in Iraq gave the magazine new lifeblood. Rock ’n’ roll took note, too: The invasion of Iraq “was behind Green Day’s 2004 album, ‘American Idiot,’ which helped turn the band into one of rock’s biggest, connecting a younger generation with the sound of punk guitars,” Mr. Wenner writes. At the same time, the new century’s sonic signature “included the pop of Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, who ushered in a new kind of celebrity that would go on to be shaped by the age of social media.”

“50 Years of Rolling Stone” would be well worth its sticker price with the photos and Mr. Wenner’s reminiscences alone. It would be incomplete, however, without a sample of the magazine’s interviews, and artists like John Lennon, Mr. Jagger, Bono, and Mr. Dylan hold forth in extended excerpts. Mr. Dylan, who turned 76 last week, told the magazine in 2001 that “Every one of the records I’ve made has emanated from the entire panorama of what America is to me. America, to me, is a rising tide that lifts all ships, and I’ve never really sought inspiration from other types of music.” 

Hail hail rock ’n’ roll, deliver us from the days of old.

The Barnes Landing Association will hold its 16th annual Anna Mirabai Lytton writers and artists showcase on June 3 from 2 to 3:30 at the Barnes Landing meetinghouse at the intersection of Barnes Hole and Water’s Edge Roads in Springs. Participating artists and writers are Francine Whitney, Kate Rabinowitz, Dee Slavutin, Valerie King, Meredith Hasemann, Mark Ginsberg, Susan Friend, Paul Ehrlich, Ram­eshwar Das, Fran Castan, Lisa Dick­ler Awano, and Hiroo Dickler Awano.

The event has been named in honor of a student and young writer from Springs — the daughter of Ms. Rabinowitz and Mr. Das — who died in a traffic accident in 2013.