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.

“Sag Harbor: 100 Years of Film in the Village,” an homage to a century of cinema on Main Street, came out on Tuesday. Written by Annette Hinkle, former associate editor of The Sag Harbor Express and currently the community news editor of The Shelter Island Reporter, the book traces the theater’s history from the silent era to its nearly four-decade tenure as the last independent, single-screen theater on the East End. 

The book is filled with vintage photographs, recollections and testimonials by village residents, and fascinating details about films shown there and the people who made it possible. In her introduction, Ms. Hinkle writes, “The beautiful thing about the theater was that for the eight decades it stood, it remained the same. As the world beyond transformed, grew, suffered, went to war and became jaded, within those four walls life appeared to remain a perpetual constant.”

In his foreword, the novelist and essayist Jay McInerney writes, “For as long as any of us could remember, the big red letters floating above Main Street on the white facade of the cinema situated us and grounded us, reminding us, if perhaps we’d had one too many at the bar in the American Hotel, across the street, of just where we were: SAG HARBOR.”

A book launch will be held at Sylvester & Co. in Sag Harbor on July 8 from 6 to 8 p.m. Copies of the $35 hardcover will be in local bookstores and other locations — Naturopathica in East Hampton, Marders in Bridgehampton, and the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill among them, according to Ms. Hinkle — by the end of this week. A portion of the proceeds from sales will be donated to the Sag Harbor Partnership’s campaign to rebuild the cinema, and Ms. Hinkle will have a table at the partnership’s Party Under the Tent on Long Wharf on July 16. 

“The Whole Thing

Together”

Ann Brashares

Delacorte, $18.99

Summer, Wainscott, family weirdness. In “The Whole Thing Together” the young-adult novelist Ann Brashares of “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” series fame is back with her suite of strong suits showing. 

The book is immediately engaging, fast moving, and appealingly easy to read. All of these hold through the book’s conclusion in spite of a somber fork in the narrative road. It’s light and breezy meets situation tragedy.

“The Whole Thing Together” is a roundup of the drama befalling a 21st century blended-type family over the course of a summer. Issues, emotions, and decades-old dysfunctions abound. “The Brady Bunch” could never have seen these kinds of complications coming. 

The situational setup, worthy of the family chart at the beginning of the book, is everything here, so stay alert: Lila (a blond, beautiful hippie-type who comes from old money and grew up summering in Wainscott) and Robert (a high-powered investment banker of Bengali heritage raised in Canada by loving adoptive parents) were married briefly but divorced and remain stridently bitter and estranged. They share three daughters ages 19, 21, and 22. They also share joint custody, in a week-on-week-off arrangement, of a large summer house on Georgica Pond in Wainscott. (“How?” the real-estate realists among you might ask. Brashares does not show us a copy of the deed, so you guys will just have to use your imaginations.) 

That way of doing joint custody, where the kids stay in the family home but the parents come and go according to a custody plan, is called “birdnesting,” by the way, only perhaps it does not usually apply to summer houses on Georgica Pond or parents who have in no way come to terms with each other. But this book is written for a young-adult audience, best for ages 14 and up, and that group is less likely to harbor real estate-related disbelief, right? 

Meanwhile, both Lila and Robert are remarried, and each has a 17-year-old child: Ray, son of Lila; Sasha, daughter of Robert. These two individuals live in the same room in the shared house on Georgica Pond, Robert one week, Sasha the next, and so on as the house’s joint custody demands. These two also share their three older half sisters: Mattie, a snarky beauty who no one expects much of; Quinn a green-thumbed free spirit whose understanding everyone relies on, and Emma, a type-A checker-off of accomplishments whose directions everyone follows. Sasha and Ray have each lived with their sisters back home in New York City (Sasha) and in Brooklyn (Ray), where joint custody is also maintained. But because of the bitterness and separateness sustained by their not-shared parents, Ray and Sasha have never met. While this circumstance surely stresses the boundaries of plausibility, Ms. Brashares depicts the rancor between Lila and Robert with numerous details, and the reader will more or less enter the logic of the novel.  

Amid a liberal scattering of recognizable local businesses and local terrain, summer in Wainscott eventually brings the not-couple’s not-shared children together. The romantic direction in which Sasha and Ray’s relationship seems to move may be creepy to some readers — indeed it is fraught for the characters. There’s quite a bit of guilty talk, for example, from Ray’s point of view, about the Sasha-smell of the sheets in their not-at-the-same-time shared bed (Reader: Do not get stuck on the gross-out of no one changing the sheets between teenage-opposite-gender stays at the house or you will not be able to read the book). 

There’s a prohibition around this relationship well beyond the circumstances of the not-shared parents’ estrangement. Divorce and its ripples — family complications and convolutions — are part of the domestic landscape for many teen readers. It’s not always so clear who counts and who does not count as family. 

The book unfolds as a series of scenes pushing through the summer, the point of view shifting as third-person narration focuses on different characters in irregularly rotating turns. While Ray and Sasha’s story of meeting and forming a relationship initially seems central, it is churned under among concurrent narratives. The summer in question is also the moment for the youngest of the three shared half sisters, Mattie, to learn about her biological parentage and the moment for Emma, the oldest of the sisters, to become engaged. 

Events lead to an engagement party, which precipitates a crisis, which gives way to a tragedy: The family loses Quinn, cast throughout the novel in the role of binder, soother, the ultimate middle child. Her loss is spun here as the avenue toward forging commonality and healing family wounds, an extremely optimistic silver lining.

“The Whole Thing Together” is a patchwork in terms of narrative point of view; depth is not seriously attempted, and issues and emotions are covered in a glancing way, with a kind of extended sound-bite technique. The novel indicates more than truly plumbs the depths of complex ideas around family, but it’s an entertaining and accessible read, with the rolling, scenic quality of the narrative working to create a credible outline of the blended-type family dynamic. 

Many young people with parents who could not work it out, divorced, and continue not to work it out, will likely find something to relate to here. But if they don’t, there’s plenty of young-adult realistic fiction out there that features all kinds of families.

A visit to the East Hampton Library young-adult department should stand teen readers in good stead. Lisa Michne, head of young-adult services, runs a beautifully designed room just for high school students that is staffed and supervised seven days a week. Teen readers can find hangout space away from family dynamics, and book recommendations for the asking.

Evan Harris is the author of “The Art of Quitting.” She lives in East Hampton.

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. 

“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.

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.

“Dear Mr. Beckett”

Barney Rosset

Opus, $32.95

”Barney and I go to the tennis matches. . . . We play games, and we talk politics. We don’t talk literature. I don’t talk literature with nobody.” — Samuel Beckett

Years ago Barney Rosset’s wife, Astrid, telephoned to invite me to shoot pool with Barney in their East Hampton home. Me? Pool? I told Astrid I’d think about it and call her back.

I pondered the fact that I hadn’t played pool since I was a kid and I was no good at it then. Next I thought about Barney, the legend. And I got the quivers. Who was I to play pool badly with a legend? I called back and declined.

The legend? Rosset died in 2012, age 89. The New York Times front-page obit chronicled his life. And what a life. 

Rosset, the son of a Chicago banker, was a lifelong renegade. His one credit was a 1948 film he produced, a documentary called “Strange Victory,” about racism in post-World War II America — a noble flop. His previous publishing hit was a mimeographed newspaper, The Anti-Everything. But that adolescent effort predicted a future that would change America and indeed world culture.

One of Rosset’s first acquisitions for Grove Press, a modest reprint press he acquired in 1951 for $3,000, was with an unknown writer named Samuel Beckett, an Irishman who lived in France, wrote in French, and was rejected by French publishers. An initial letter to Beckett, included in “Dear Mr. Beckett,” a marvelous collection of interviews, telegrams, reviews, clippings, canceled checks, book covers, contracts, letters, photos, and scribbles, goes as follows: “Our catalogues have already been mailed to you so you can see what kind of a publisher you have latched onto . . . I hope you won’t be too disappointed. We will do what we can to make your work known in this country.”

Beckett responded in June 1953: “I hope you realize what you are letting yourself in for,” going on to explain that his novels were unsalable, his plays unperformable, and adding, “All are difficult in ways which I am not disposed to mitigate.”

After this unpromising start, Beckett and Rosset first met in Paris at the bar of the Pont Royal Hotel. Rosset recalls: “Beckett came in, tall, trench-coated and taciturn . . . ready to get rid of us.” They ended up near dawn drinking champagne at La Coupole. 

And so began one of the great literary and personal friendships of the 20th century. Rosset’s first letters to Beckett from New York begin with “Dear Mr. Beckett” (June 15, 1953), progressed to “Dear Samuel” years later, and finally, on March 23, 1957, “Dear Sam.” It is not too much to say that Rosset truly loved Beckett — even naming his son Beckett. This just doesn’t happen in today’s conglomerate culture. Love is bad for the bottom line.

Beginning with “Waiting for Godot,” which revolutionized world theater, Rosset was to publish almost all of Beckett’s work. Beckett went on to win a Nobel Prize in 1969. He was not pleased with the froth of his prize, but accepted it anyway.

Rosset’s other publishing triumphs included the works of Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, Frank O’Hara, LeRoi Jones, David Mamet, John Rechy, and Marguerite Duras.

His legal campaigns against the censorship of D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” were epic. United States censorship rules at the time were rooted in the 19th century. The government dictated what we could and could not read. To bring a banned book into the country was the equivalent of drug smuggling. Rosset, in a one-man war, changed all that. He fought more than 60 legal challenges for Miller’s book alone (which he had signed up over a game of table tennis with Miller). It sold 100,000 copies in hardcover and over a million in paperback. 

Rosset loved a good legal fight and eventually had the funds for those fights. He was our great postwar cultural impresario. As the filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker said, “He knew what would last and what was dross. I think he was born knowing. Very few are. . . .”

Lois Oppenheim in her introduction to this wonderful literary scrapbook notes that what Beckett and Rosset “had in common was perseverance. ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on. . . .’ ”

Even after Rosset overreached and ended up with fancy offices, 120 employees, and mounting debts and was bought out by George Weidenfeld and Ann Getty in 1985, he kept on going with new presses named Blue Moon and Foxrock. Despite lifelong accusations of being a “smut peddler,” he ended up a true cultural hero.

No review can do justice to this comprehensive and detailed compilation about Beckett and Rosset and so much else. A big thank-you to Astrid for pulling this all together, presenting facsimile reproductions that, as one reviewer put it, exude “a wonderful period aroma.” “Dear Mr. Beckett” is an essential document of a revolutionary era in American letters and culture. He was our scrappy, daring, and unbowed neighbor.

I am sorry I didn’t go to play pool with him. In fact I never even met Barney. This is my eternal regret.

Bill Henderson is the publisher of the Pushcart Press in Springs.

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.