Skip to main content

A Vessel ‘So Remarkable’

A Vessel ‘So Remarkable’

Lawrence Goldstone will read from “Going Deep” at the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor on June 8 at 7 p.m.
Lawrence Goldstone will read from “Going Deep” at the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor on June 8 at 7 p.m.
Nancy Goldstone
By Neil J. Young

“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.

Wrestling the Sprawling Beast of Rock ’n’ Roll

Wrestling the Sprawling Beast of Rock ’n’ Roll

Jann Wenner, then a 21-year-old San Franciscan, launched his “rock & roll newspaper” in 1967. Below, the singer Rod Stewart personified the 1970s influence of disco and glam on rock ’n’ roll.
Jann Wenner, then a 21-year-old San Franciscan, launched his “rock & roll newspaper” in 1967. Below, the singer Rod Stewart personified the 1970s influence of disco and glam on rock ’n’ roll.
Baron Wolman and Charles Gatewood/The Image Works Photos
“The idea that clicked was a ‘rock & roll newspaper,’ ” Jann Wenner writes.
By
Christopher Walsh

“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.

Needful Things

Needful Things

Three new children's books by local authors
By
Baylis Greene

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.

For the Sake of the Family

For the Sake of the Family

Sheila Kohler
Sheila Kohler
Beowulf Sheehan
By Laura Wells

“Once We Were Sisters”

Sheila Kohler

Penguin, $16

Incandescent. Sheila Kohler’s “Once We Were Sisters” is a story of betrayals. Not a thousand pinpricks. A thousand sword thrusts. Yet how can a memoir about a sister’s death — most likely caused by her wife-beating husband, who may have been trying to engineer a car crash to kill himself as well and leave their five children orphans — be so luminous? Ms. Kohler’s patient storytelling. Analysis and reanalysis of the events. Beautiful language. Rancor under control.

The two sisters grew up on Crossways, the family estate outside apar­theid Johannesburg, tended to by legions of servants. When Sheila is 7 and her sister, Maxine, is 9, the parents leave on an 18-month around-the-world tour, ostensibly a business trip. Not so terribly long after this tour their father dies.

Their mother, vacillating between distant and far-too-invasive, sends them to boarding schools as well as a few suspect “finishing schools.” 

Above all, Mother sleeps. She grasps sleep greedily in her clenched fists, as though it were the most precious thing in the world. She sleeps all through the long hot afternoons in the green light of her high-ceilinged room with the shutters drawn down, one arm flung with abandon across her face, her dark curls clinging to her damp forehead.

And she drinks. She starts drinking at sundown on the glassed-in veranda, surrounded by her two sisters and younger brother, while the blue hills disappear in the dim light.

These maternal relatives will come back to play a major role after Ms. Kohler’s mother’s death. 

But first more about Ms. Kohler’s years of longing and self-discovery. She loves literature. She yearns to write. Her mother’s take? “When I tell Mother I would like to be independent, to find meaningful work, she stares at me blankly and says with genuine surprise, ‘What on earth would you want to work for, dear?’ Much of her life has been a successful struggle to avoid any work.”

Within close proximity Sheila and Maxine marry. Sheila has become pregnant upon losing her virginity, although the pregnancy does not come to term. Her husband, Michael, is a handsome American scholar. They live in Paris. But when the larger family travels through Europe, Michael chooses to remain apart. “In Rapallo Michael prefers to lie on his bed and read ‘Jane Eyre.’ My mother scoffs. ‘A man does not read in the morning,’ she says. Reading is considered an idle pastime, not to be indulged in too frequently. It therefore becomes an illicit source of pleasure.”

Maxine marries Carl, an extremely well-regarded Afrikaner heart-transplant surgeon. “Mother says my sister and I have both married vultures, bloodsuckers. Mother does not mince her words.” Both young women begin bearing children. But Maxine is often beaten “black and blue.” Her children are sometimes harmed as well. This by a man who saves people’s lives, who holds human hearts in his hands in the medical theater. 

Not long after, Sheila Kohler’s husband drinks a bottle of vodka and announces he’s having an affair. She turns to Nonna, her mother-in-law, for advice. “There are triangles within triangles in this complicated plot,” Ms. Kohler writes.

In my case [Nonna] counsels patience. (I am, you have to understand, paying the mortgage on her apartment in Switzerland and our entire household is mainly maintained by my money.) She tells me not to make her son feel guilty: “No one wants to feel guilty, do they dear?” she asks me.

“Indeed,” I, the guilty one, say.

“Pretend he has the measles,” she says. “Pretend to be asleep when he comes home late at night,” she says. “The family is sacred, don’t you think, darling? Do it for your girls,” she says, and advises taking a lover.

Throughout, the sisters remain close, visiting each other, often with their children, in France, Italy, skiing, living: “My sister and I are always flying long distances back and forth to meet in beautiful places.” But there is one day in Rome when the two sisters are to meet at the Hotel Hassler on the Spanish Steps. Maxine is late. Sheila grows increasingly concerned. She thinks about the moment when her brother-in-law, Carl, has told her of a time when Maxine was extremely ill: “. . . he imagined he would be accused of killing her.”

“ ‘Why on earth would they accuse you?’ I asked innocently at the time, though my words would come back to me with an ominous ring. As I write of them today, hindsight casts its dark wing and colors them. For who else but someone with murder in his heart would have that troubling thought? Was this something Carl had planned to do for a long time or at least considered? Was it a constant possibility in his mind? A way out of his unhappiness?”

In the extraordinary chapter just before these thoughts, Ms. Kohler writes of the time when Carl called the black female servants into the bedroom to help the “ ‘master,’ and they are forced to participate in a particularly South African form of wife-beating, holding my struggling sister down on the bed, while he beats her.” Maxine was 39 at the time their car crashed into a lamppost on a deserted road. 

Ms. Kohler delivers so many of these horrors to us ever so gently. She writes about her three great-aunts, who were spinsters. Why? Because their father’s will stipulated that if any of the them married, all their diamond-mine money would be taken away from all three of them to be distributed to their cousins. Those cousins? They kept sending suitors over, hoping to appropriate their fortune.

Ms. Kohler’s own mother? She left all of her money to her ne’er-do-well side of the family. Not a dime for Ms. Kohler, her only direct descendant.

Even today Ms. Kohler keeps a photo of Maxine in her presentation dress for the queen on the wall of her own bedroom. People mistake the young woman in the image for Ms. Kohler, “which makes my heart tilt with sorrow.”

Ms. Kohler writes about how hard she has looked for the truths of her life and of her sister’s, how she has used and sometimes misused the facts of their lives and the lives of people around them in her fiction — she has written 10 novels. This memoir comes across as remarkably, heartbreakingly true. This writer is not settling scores here. She is coming to grips with the overarching mysteries and extraordinary pains of her life. 

Yet even that Sisyphean task brings more heartbreak: Ms. Kohler dedicates this memoir to her sister’s five children. Who lost their mother at a very young age.

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

Sheila Kohler lives part time in Amagansett.

Poems for Fractious Times

Poems for Fractious Times

Bill Henderson
Bill Henderson
By Carole Stone

“Pushcart Prize XLI”

Edited by Bill Henderson

Pushcart Press, $19.95

The poems in “Pushcart Prize XLI,” which anthologizes the year’s best fiction and essays, edited by Bill Henderson with the Pushcart Prize editors, reflect a wide range of voices in contemporary American poetry. The narrative mode dominates as each poet tells his or her tale. But it is a fragmented and interrupted narrative that reflects the disjuncture of American life. 

Suffering, for example, is shown through the surreal, as in Mathias Svalina’s “From Thank You Terror,” which describes being beyond death. The poem begins “I was dead / but they kept killing me / by the seaside” and is soon followed by questions: “But where is the sonnet of power? / Where is the sonnet of suffering?” Mr. Svalina’s almost-answer is “when the skin comes off / it comes off like a shower curtain.” Hardly sonnet-like, but the image packs power.

In “I Dream of Horses Eating Cops,” Joshua Jennifer Espinoza uses the sardonic metaphor of a rebellious carnivorous horse as escape from things as they are: “My dad was a demon but so was the white man in uniform / who harassed him for the crime of being brown.” 

Animals suffer, too. Robert Wrigley in “Elk” describes an elk falling through the ice, freezing to death, and being eaten by coyotes. The coyotes in Jane Springer’s “Walk” did not want the meat of an accidental kill that she encounters on a walk “in these woods.”

Themes of alienation and prejudice dominate the collection. For example, Sally Wen Mao in “Anna May Wong Blows Out Sixteen Candles” shows us how Asians were cast as stereotypes in movies through the voice of Wong, who was cast as a woman who pours someone’s tea and was held “at knifepoint, my neck in a chokehold.” Her role: “If they didn’t murder me, I died of an opium overdose.” The central image is of a boy in school who stuck needles in the speaker’s neck, asking, “Do Asians feel pain the way we do?”

Adrian Matejka addresses the issue of color in “The Antique Blacks.” His poem interrupts narrative, leaping from “In Richard Pryor’s origin myth of black / size, the two most magnanimous black men / in the world are peeing off the 30th Street Bridge” to the speaker’s personal experience: “It’s like back in Indiana, where my white / mother said, You are black because my black / father’s jurisdiction includes the skin heliotrope / I’m in.” Images of blackness like the first black man in outer space are juxtaposed against whiteness: “Him & his pack of white / friends — a flotilla.” The poem, long, dense, and angry, must be reread for full comprehension of the nuances of color.

Another poem that departs from conventional narrative using paragraphs and indented lines to show prejudice is James Kimbrell’s “Pluto’s Gate: Mississippi.” It is spoken in a colloquial voice and deploys unusual and strong similes; “my face stinging like a voodoo doll,” and “white as God’s white-ass golf balls.” He shows time and place — Starbucks, a Plymouth push-button Belvedere, a pool hall — to dramatize class and racial differences between blacks and whites in Oxford, Miss. 

Poems of a son’s relationship to a father include Martin Espada’s “The Beating Heart of the Wristwatch,” with its pessimistic ending, “We try to resurrect the father. / We listen to the heartbeat and hear the howling.” 

David Tomas Martinez uses the mythic father as king with absolute power to show the everyday experience of male power through the figure of Oedipus. The poem, “Consider Oedipus’ Father,” begins, “It could have been a car door / leaving that bruise, / as any mom knows, / almost anything could take an eye out.” It should also be noted that Mr. Martinez pays tribute in this poem to William Carlos Williams’s red wheelbarrow. 

There are other family poems, like Kate Levin’s “Resting Place,” which merges the theme of the death of a bird with her fear for her son’s safety. Death is paramount in these poems, as in Jean Valentine’s “Hospice,” which begins with the poignant “I wore his hat / as if it was the rumpled coat / of his body, / like I could put it on.”

Tatiana Forero Puerta’s “Cleaning the Ghost Room” confronts the issue of how we face the dead through the trope of mother and daughter. The speaker’s mother makes her clean and dust “the ghost room” where Mr. Traynor died. When she objects, her mother tells her, “You want the dead on your side.” She recalls her fear and dislike of her mother: “I held the / can of Pledge, an old sock rag, and / antagonism for my mother.” The poem suggests the complex feelings she has for her mother and how to confront death. If as a girl she hadn’t dusted “the accruements / of the departed,” she might not be able to “polish the rust / off the roses — embossed in the bronze of Mami’s urn.”

The poems selected for “Pushcart Prize XLI” speak in bold and varied voices using imagery that ranges from movies to myth to capture life and death in contemporary America. They are a pleasure and an education to read.

Carole Stone, professor emerita of English at Montclair State University, is the author of poetry collections including “American Rhapsody” and “Hurt, the Shadow: The Josephine Hopper Poems.” She lives part time in Springs.

Bill Henderson lives in Springs.

A Fighter Turns Thoughtful

A Fighter Turns Thoughtful

Left, Alec Baldwin as Jack Ryan in the 1990 film "The Hunt for Red October"
Left, Alec Baldwin as Jack Ryan in the 1990 film "The Hunt for Red October"
Alec Baldwin looks inward in his new memoir
By
Kurt Wenzel

“Nevertheless”

Alec Baldwin

Harper, $28.99

Of the many hats Alec Baldwin wears as a performer and public figure — film, stage, and television actor, writer, comedian, radio personality, political activist, etc. — there is also that of the combative provocateur (the “bloviator” to some), the man who can’t seem to avoid public confrontation. 

Part of the expectation in picking up Mr. Baldwin’s new memoir, “Nevertheless,” is that the author’s more pugnacious tendencies will be realized. Given the freedom of a memoir, you think, a warrior like Mr. Baldwin couldn’t resist the temptation to rekindle old battles, relitigate lost cases, refire missed punches. This is, after all, part of the appeal of writing a memoir: You get to have the last word.

As one would expect, there are moments of raw pugnacity in “Nevertheless”: Custody lawyers and celebrity photographers can still stir Mr. Baldwin’s ire. But the surprise for many readers will be just how thoughtful and measured a book this is. A successful second marriage, and perhaps a bit of age, seems to have mellowed the actor/author, and the overriding tone of “Nevertheless” is more rueful than contentious.

The memoir spends a good deal of time on Mr. Baldwin’s childhood, and these early chapters are evocative in bringing to life the author’s rough-hewn boyhood. Mr. Baldwin grew up lower middle class in Massapequa, in a cramped, ranch-style home overstuffed with siblings and overseen by unhappy parents trapped in a bad marriage. Money was forever in short supply. Their home, he writes, “was always receiving notices about the electricity or phone being turned off.” 

It is perhaps these early struggles that fueled his ambition. “If I wanted money,” Mr. Baldwin learned in those years, “I’d have to go out and get it.” His attempts to earn his own cash, however, were often short-circuited by his mother. After a day of mowing lawns, he’d come home to find her at the kitchen table, weeping about finances. “The 40 or 50 dollars she was short was, uncannily, the amount I had in my pocket at that moment. . . . And whoosh, out it came, she took it, no more tears.” 

He finds refuge in sports, but also reading; he devours all the major best sellers of the era. And of course there are movies, which he watches on television by the dozens with his father. Mr. Baldwin’s favorite actor of all time? William Holden, who, he writes, was “handsome, graceful, charming, and funny. . . . Holden could do it all.”

Of course William Holden was also notorious for his alcoholism, and, like his hero, Mr. Baldwin would eventually encounter his own challenges with addiction. “Nevertheless” is brutally frank about the writer’s drug and alcohol problems, which seemed to grow as swiftly as his charmed early career. 

After a truncated foray to George Washington University, Mr. Baldwin auditions for acting classes at N.Y.U. and is duly accepted. Shortly after, he lands a recurring role on the daytime soap “The Doctors,” and then in prime time on “Knots Landing.” He writes how during these years he begins to “steel” himself for stressful auditions with whiskey-and-sodas (drinking to relax was also an acting trick of William Holden’s). The partying grows in intensity, possibly buoyed by his father’s fatal bout with cancer. 

Finally there is a meltdown at a hotel in Oregon, where he is shooting “Knots.” In a viscerally harrowing narrative sequence, Mr. Baldwin recounts his descent into the abyss. We pick up one early morning after he has been snorting cocaine since 4 o’clock the previous afternoon. 

“When I call room service I fumbled for the words, saying something like ‘. . . I know how busy you can be and I was wondering if you might send over a bottle of champagne NOW!’ — punching certain words, as I am slightly deaf when high. ‘. . . I would appreciate that. One bottle of champagne. NOW!’ ”

Suffice it to say that the bottle is delivered and then consumed in under a minute, more lines are snorted, and a delirious Mr. Baldwin ends up asking for help from the TV image of Jane Pauley. Finally his heart stops beating and he ends up in the hospital. Luckily, this is the beginning of the end of it: Mr. Baldwin enters A.A. for both alcohol and cocaine. He has been substance-free for decades.

The career grows, but not without its stops and starts. After starring in “Beetlejuice” and “The Hunt for Red October,” he is offered a part in “The Marrying Man,” a project he knows is subpar but for which he will receive his first million-dollar payday. The movie is a flop, and there is a fallow period in Mr. Baldwin’s career that includes stinkers such as “The Shadow” and “Prelude to a Kiss.” He is oddly dismissive of his unforgettable turn in “Glengarry Glen Ross,” writing, “I’ve still never really understood audiences’ appetites for that kind of double-barreled acting.” Huh?

He credits his role in Broadway’s 1992 revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire” for revitalizing his interest in his craft. When he does return to film, he finds nourishment in a series of prestigious character roles, in, for example, “State and Main,” “The Departed,” and “The Aviator.” 

Of course it’s not a Hollywood memoir without a certain amount of dish, and Mr. Baldwin doles out a decent helping. Of Harrison Ford, he writes, “Ford, in person, is a little man, short, scrawny, and wiry, whose soft voice sounds like it’s coming from behind a door.” The director Philip Noyce, he writes, is a “marginal talent.” And you can almost hear him biting his tongue as he gently chides his ex-wife, Kim Basinger. “I went to New York knowing that I needed a break from her and her self-absorption as well. Kim could be funny. She could be a mess. But most of all Kim was about Kim.” 

Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Meryl Streep all garner high praise. As does Tom Cruise, whom Mr. Baldwin admires for his work ethic. Never one to follow popular opinion, he even speculates that Scientology might be the key to Mr. Cruise’s success, rather than a distraction. “Does Scientology,” Mr. Baldwin asks, “function as some kind of coach that not only gives permission to its flock to unabashedly pursue their dreams, but demands that you go for it, without apology, keeping your focus on yourself and your goals?”

As fun as much of this is, the last third of “Nevertheless” feels schematic and rushed, with Mr. Baldwin offering quick anecdotes when more elaborate commentary would be welcome. How exactly do people like Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen work? What is the key to their genius? The writer seems too intent on the finish line to tell us. He does, however, spend an inordinate amount of time going over his MSNBC case, in which he was dismissed from his talk show after only a few episodes. 

And in an endless chapter titled “The Interests of the Great Mass,” he enumerates, in exhausting detail, his years of political activism. Even if you share the actor’s political perspective, it’s a momentum killer for the reader — though there is an amusing anecdote about Bill Clinton. At a political fund-raiser at East Hampton’s Turtle Crossing restaurant in 1997, Mr. Clinton spoke intimately with Mr. Baldwin and Kim Basinger about the then-ongoing Monica Lewinsky scandal. The author quotes, “ ‘Even if I did do it,’ ” he said, ‘don’t I deserve to be forgiven?’ . . . Kim spun toward me and squealed, ‘I think he just told us he did it!’ ”

By the end, you begin to notice the strange pyramidal shape of “Nevertheless,” broad at the bottom about Mr. Baldwin’s childhood and early days as an actor, then increasingly slender as you move toward the present day. I suspect the writer’s early ambitions for the book were curtailed by a deadline. Or maybe he just lost interest along the way. As a result, “Nevertheless” ends up being a book intermittently evocative and wise, hurried and superficial. 

It’s not until the very last chapter, where again he hearkens back to his childhood, that Mr. Baldwin’s writing reminds us of the book that might have been. 

“Those football games at dusk, the testosterone and ego galloping up and down the field we carved out within the golf course. I can feel that air around me now. We were so focused and present. No cell phones. No streaming TV. . . . What I wouldn’t give to go back and see us then. Just to look at us, at my young self, and say, ‘Do you realize that you have everything you could want right here?’ ”

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

Alec Baldwin lives in Manhattan and Amagansett.­

A Picture Is Worth 25 Lives

A Picture Is Worth 25 Lives

Janet Lee Berg
Janet Lee Berg
By Hazel Kahan

“Rembrandt’s Shadow”

Janet Lee Berg

Post Hill Press, $15

In the 72 years since it ended, World War II has provided us with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of stories, a global event that has kept on giving. Just when one thinks the stories have all been told, the emotions have all been felt, the survivors almost all now gone and buried, we are presented with another novel or movie or memoir. Perhaps the injunction to “never forget” has become unnecessary with new stories forever emerging to remind us.

Janet Lee Berg’s novel “Rembrandt’s Shadow” tells a story she describes as “loosely based” on wartime experiences of the wealthy bourgeois Katz family: Benjamin Katz was the grandfather of her husband, Bruce Berg. In many ways this is an all too familiar World War II story, containing as it does the iconic elements of loss, degradation, dislocation, resilience, but also, here, of suicide, the ultimate human failure of resilience. 

Because we have seen these elements in numerous movies and television productions, in photos, books, and museums, Ms. Berg’s words easily evoke the corresponding images from 1940s Europe, a period and a reality that she presumably knows only indirectly. In contrast, from her references to Long Island’s cultural life in the 1970s, one may presume from its lively details that she was a participant in that culture.

“Rembrandt’s Shadow” also transcends the familiar: Ms. Berg borrows from lesser-known, actual events that involved her husband’s family during the war, when the brothers Katz, art dealers renowned well beyond their hometown of Dieren in Holland for their expertise in the Dutch masters, negotiated with agents of the Nazi leadership to exchange these paintings for Jewish lives, a bargain with the Devil if ever there was one.

Hermann Goring, Hitler’s art expert, actually visited the family’s home in 1940, standing in their living room as one such negotiation took place. The imagination leaps to a scene where one such masterpiece is transferred from reluctant Jewish to grasping Nazi hands, as the silent family looks on. The most significant of these trades was the exchange of Rembrandt’s “Portrait of a Man” for visas that permitted safe passage for 25 members of the Katz family, including the mother of Bruce Berg and his sister. 

In 2007, Katz heirs on Long Island filed a claim with the Dutch government for the return of more than 200 works of art now held in Dutch museums. The claim is under dispute until it is determined whether any or all of these works were sold forcibly or voluntarily, depending in part whether they were sold before, during, or after the war. The most recent available information about the disposition of the art comes from newspaper reports published in September 2007.

In Ms. Berg’s fictionalization, the Katz family becomes the Rosenbergs, with Sylvie, the second of four children, at the story’s heart. As in the real-life story, the family lives in Dieren, in a milieu of affluence and privilege that captures Jewish life in Holland from the 1930s to 1941, before and during the Nazi occupation. Sylvie’s father, whom she adores and who treats her as his favorite, is often absent, traveling to promote his art business as he generates the wealth that permits her mother to be a socialite, indulging herself in fashion and luxury while neglecting her children and relegating their care to the “waitstaff.”

Although the framework of art exchanged for Jewish lives provides “Rem­­brandt’s Shadow” with a dimension not found in other World War II memories, Ms. Berg also invokes what have become the familiar early signs of encroaching Nazism: playground bullying and ostracizing by German children of their Jewish classmates; the gradual dawning realization that neighboring families have disappeared; sights and sounds of uniforms and boots on quiet, cobbled streets; sudden airplanes in the quiet skies; buckling affluence and the decline of lavish parties, expensive clothes, cigars, and champagne; the leg of lamb replaced by spaetzle; the maid leaving because Germans are forbidden to work in Jewish households; closed doors behind which anxious adults whisper and confused children eavesdrop; yellow Jewish six-pointed stars sewn onto coat sleeves. And that final, dreadful day when the family closes the front door of their beautiful home behind them for the last time, standing silently with other Jewish men, women, and children on railway platforms as they leave the known and the precious behind for what turns out to be forever.

It is an old, familiar story of loss — of life, identity, and the predictable. However, with safe passage assured by the Rembrandt painting, the Rosenberg family is taken to Spain and then to an internment camp in the West Indian island of Jamaica, where they spend the war years. (Despite my own internment and refugee background, it was a surprise to learn that Jews were interned in the Caribbean.)

“Rembrandt’s Shadow” unfolds in chapters headed by time and place, from the 1940s to 1969 to 1972 and from Holland to Long Island — Massapequa and Queens — Las Vegas, Tennessee, North Carolina, Thailand, and (a tourist visit) Dachau. A note to the author: This back and forth is somewhat of a distraction that for this reader disrupted the story’s flow. Designating the chapters as, for example, Sylvie’s story or Helene’s (her mother), Michael’s (her son), and Angela’s (her son’s girlfriend) might anchor the story in human rather than geographical or temporal terms.

After the war, the family is dispersed — Sylvie and her mother to New York, the siblings to England. Sylvie’s story recedes from its central place, displaced by the next generation’s love story set against the Vietnam War, yet retaining the themes of separation and loss redolent of the years in Europe. 

Much of the book’s texture emerges from four of its themes: mothers, interfaith tension, the written word, and secrets. Since Sylvie is 16 when the Rosenberg family is forced to flee Holland, she will have struggled with her distant, distracted mother into her teenage years. When she herself becomes a mother, her son, Michael, leaves home, taking to the open road in his struggle to escape from his overly protective, demanding mother.

Sylvie is unable to accept Angela, Michael’s Catholic girlfriend, who escapes her loving but suffocating Italian mother. (Ironically, Ms. Berg has dedicated the book to “Mother.”)

Although the Rosenberg family is secular, Sylvie’s is hostile to Angela because she is not Jewish. While less hostile, Angela’s mother expresses her displeasure at her daughter’s love for a Jewish man. These interfaith tensions are enlivened by the travels of a golden Star of David necklace through the lives and generations of both families.

Secrets weave in and out of “Rembrandt’s Shadow”: an unknown, now dead sister, a rape leading to an abandoned brother, jewelry hidden from a mother, love letters never sent and then stolen.

Finally, the novel’s fourth and epistolary theme is manifest in love letters, family correspondence, and a diary, as well as in conversations with a cat. Although Michael is a writer, we don’t see his work, but we do know some of his thoughts. (Interrupting a story with an epistolary or journal entry break is a tried-and-true writer’s device, but another note to the author: Not all of the journal’s entries in this book appear to have been written by the same person.)

As this reading of “Rembrandt’s Shadow” by Janet Lee Berg demonstrates, there is always room in the Western literary tradition for one more story from World War II.

Hazel Kahan is a writer and programmer at WPKN radio. She lives in Mattituck.

Janet Lee Berg, a Star contributor for many years, will read from “Rembrandt’s Shadow” at BookHampton in East Hampton on Friday, May 12, at 5 p.m.

From Troubadour to Titan, Barefoot and Bombed

From Troubadour to Titan, Barefoot and Bombed

Ryan White
Ryan White
Inger Klekacz
By Christopher John Campion

“Jimmy Buffett: A Good Life All the Way”

Ryan White

Touchstone, $26.99

So I’m doing this gig a few months ago, a happy-hour thing, playing mostly to an indifferent crowd but not taking any offense because it’s not one of my regular joints and these people don’t know me and didn’t have any idea I was even going to be there. Out of nowhere this Lee Trevino-like fat drunken slob, who is sweating the outline of a bra into his green polo shirt and looks like he just got fished out of a water hazard at Augusta, staggers up to the bandstand, scowls at me for 10 seconds, and slurs, “What? No Buffett? How ’bout a little ‘Margaritaville’?”

Guess he didn’t care for that steady diet of Replacements, Stones, and Elvis Costello I’d been feeding him.

Now I’d love to tell you this was an isolated incident, but I do 250-odd gigs a year (emphasis on the “odd” sometimes), and when I’m playing a place that requires cover tunes this occurs a lot. The requester doesn’t always come in such an unlovely package or even demand that particular song. There are a couple of other songs with the same gestalt. Sometimes it’s “Brown Eyed Girl” or “Sweet Caroline” or, the latest catnip to morons, “Wagon Wheel,” released a few years ago by the band Old Crow Medicine Show and subsequently by Darius Rucker, formerly of Hootie and the Blowfish fame (or infamy, depending on where you fall on that). The song has been characterized as a “Dylan sketch” rescued and completed by the boys in the O.C.M.S. My theory is that ol’ Bob chose not to finish it in an attempt to spare us all.

Out of the great modern songbook, why are these the most requested songs in a pub on any given night? That cosmic question I cannot answer. What I can tell you is that I’ve seen the most wistful of people transformed into effervescent ambassadors of joy within an instant of hearing any of those tunes, but only one of them ever birthed a business empire. 

In Ryan White’s superb new biography, “Jimmy Buffett: A Good Life All the Way,” he explains exactly how that happened and why, but not before he takes you on a chronological quest through the singer’s life and wild ride of a career. 

It begins with an origin story about his sea captain grandfather, who instilled in the young Jimmy a nautical fascination and insatiable thirst for adventure that would go on to inform his whole life and work. (Hence the title of his 1978 album, “Son of a Son of a Sailor.”) Then, in the early 1970s, after rolling craps trying to get a music career going in Nashville, he took a trip to Key West for some gigs with the notorious and always colorful fellow folk hero Jerry Jeff Walker, and that led to him fall in love with the place and make it his base of operations for the launch of his career. 

From there Mr. White introduces us to a coterie of characters orbiting in and around the Chart Room Bar who became Mr. Buffett’s friends, collaborators, and co-conspirators, each more eccentric and lovable than the next. 

At the time the only people down there were misfits of the highest order: smugglers and pirates, barflies and beach bums, artists and dope dealers — everyone living off the grid when there wasn’t even that much of a grid to be on. These were the people who would become Mr. Buffett’s audience and go on to be the inspiration for many of his compositions. 

The author does a beautiful job of capturing the carefree nature of the time period through some rhapsodic passages and a number of interviews, with his subjects unfurling robust and ribald 2 a.m. tales of misbegotten mischief born of the bottle, thus giving us more insight into the Buffett world, the beginnings of the mariner-poet persona, and his method of controlled chaos.

Jimmy set about steadily building a fan base, playing every coffeehouse, canteen, college student union, and bucket of blood that would have him — an intrepid troubadour, perfecting his craft of storytelling, singing, and songwriting. He made records that didn’t do great business, but all the while through his persistent touring his career kept inclining, and along the way he put together his now-beloved Coral Reefer Band and had the breakthrough hit with “Margaritaville.” And that’s when things really ratcheted up into high gear.

They say in life you’re judged by the company you keep. Well, in Mr. Buffett’s case that would be people like the Eagles, Hunter S. Thompson, and Jack Nicholson, all of whom come into play here. It’s a veritable who’s who of the paradigm-shifters and ruling personalities of the period. 

His tours became a rolling bacchanal of excess and individual exploits (his and the Coral Reefers’), but the truly remarkable thing is that in most biographies like this, this is where our hero changes, becomes a megalomaniac, lonely at the top, paranoid — you know, an a-hole. But not Mr. Buffett. He stayed the same guy: egoless, out for a good time, concerned with putting on a good show for his fans, and caring deeply about the people who worked for him. And he never took himself all that seriously. I’ve read a lot of these books, and that is rare, my friend.

Things got even more interesting when the Mexican chain restaurant Chi-Chi’s tried to co-opt the name Margaritaville for its own revenue-generating purposes, and Mr. Buffett lawyered up and blocked the effort in court, proving he was synonymous with the term. He parlayed that into an entrepreneurial enterprise of staggering proportions through a chain of restaurants of his own by that name, coupled with a burgeoning lifestyle brand.

As with all of these biographies, I have a feeling it will be read mostly by Mr. Buffett’s fans, a treasured keepsake for the Parrot Head set (what his rabid fans call themselves), but I’m here to tell you that you don’t even have to be an admirer of his music to enjoy this book. 

He was constantly told by radio programmers throughout his career that he was “too country for New York and L.A. and not enough country for Nashville,” so he just kept going, built his own audience, and became his own genre. So his is a uniquely American story that carries with it the most important message, whether your pursuit is art or commerce, and that is to always be your authentic self and keep working. 

I just removed from my being all the resentment of having been asked to play “Margaritaville,” closed my eyes, and listened to it with fresh ears — really nice tune. 

Christopher John Campion, a regular visitor to Amagansett, is the author of “Escape From Bellevue: A Dive Bar Odyssey,” published by Penguin-Gotham.

Jimmy Buffett lives part time on North Haven. 

Yet Another White Meat

Yet Another White Meat

Bill Schutt
Bill Schutt
Jerry Ruotolo
By James I. Lader

“Cannibalism”

Bill Schutt

Algonquin Books, $26.95

It’s not necessarily a subject one would expect in a book aimed at a general readership. Those who overcome their surprise, however, and pick up Bill Schutt’s recently published volume, “Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History,” will be rewarded with a well-organized, thorough, and highly readable study of a phenomenon few of us pause to think about. This is a book you can sink your teeth into. (I promise, I’ll stop.)

If there is an implicit subtext to Mr. Schutt’s work, it is to question the origin and the reasonableness of the taboo against consuming other humans. A biology professor at L.I.U. Post and a research associate in residence at the American Museum of Natural History whose previous work was “Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures,” he is a qualified guide for the journey on which he leads us.

That journey begins, very logically, in the realm of nature. How common is it for creatures to consume their own kind? And for what reasons do they do so? Mr. Schutt is intent on pointing out that cannibalism is hardly an anomaly in the natural world, although he is eager to dispel certain myths concerning some of the species in which it is presumed to be common.

He provides a wide variety of examples, including tadpoles, certain snails, chimpanzees, sand tiger sharks, and polar bears. Not surprisingly, the less-well-known examples make for some of the most interesting reading. The descriptions of the elaborate mating practices of the Australian redback spider are fascinating. The excellent nature illustrations by Patricia J. Wynne deserve credit for adding interest as well as understanding.

While establishing that cannibalism is well documented in the natural world, Mr. Schutt helps us place the phenomenon in proper perspective as he builds toward the consideration of cannibalism among humans. “Currently, only 75 species of mammals (out of roughly 5,700) are reported to practice some form of cannibalism.” He adds that the “overall low occurrence of cannibalism in mammals is likely related to relatively low numbers of offspring coupled with a high degree of parental care (compared to non-mammals).”

What can we conclude about the prevalence in nature of members of various species consuming their own? Cannibalism “occurs across the entire animal kingdom, albeit more frequently in some groups than in others. When the behavior does happen, it happens for reasons that make perfect sense from an evolutionary standpoint: reducing competition, as a component of sexual behavior, or an aspect of parental care.”

Which brings us to the human realm, where Mr. Schutt writes as well about history, anthropology, and psychology as he does about science. When it comes to human cannibalism, we tend to think about overcrowding and food shortages. “The unfortunates involved in shipwrecks, strandings, and sieges have also resorted to cannibalism, and by doing so they exhibited biologically and behaviorally predictable responses to specific forms of extreme stress. Although conditions may have been unnatural, the actions that resulted were not.”

In addition to consideration of the siege of Leningrad during World War II, Mr. Schutt gives us a highly detailed chapter about what befell the Donner Party as they attempted to make their way from Independence, Mo., to California by stagecoach in 1846 and 1847. It’s fascinating, gruesome, and deeply affecting. Research into the events surrounding the Donner Party is ongoing, and Mr. Schutt gives us a synopsis of it, including the confusion that ensued in 2010, when some public-relations hacks at Appalachian State University issued a premature report on work by A.S.U. researchers that gave the impression that there may have been no human cannibalism among the Donner folks. Spoiler alert: Not true!

The author disabuses us of the notion that human cannibalism is universally viewed as aberrant behavior. He catalogs instances, over a wide swath of history, of its being culturally approved — including among certain Chinese people until well into the 20th century.

On the other side of coin, Mr. Schutt also pays ample attention to the sources of the widespread cannibalism taboo. He examines Freud, the Brothers Grimm (many of whose folk-tales-turned-fairy-tales are posited as cautionary tales for badly behaved children), and the Judeo-Christian tradition, which holds that dead bodies must be preserved intact so that body and soul can be reunited at some idealized point in the future.

As an author, Mr. Schutt evidences a number of admirable qualities. His breezy style helps make palatable (oops!) a difficult subject. Of the female redback spider, for example, which consumes parts of her partner as they mate, he writes, “While the benefits of a risk-free meal for the redback mom-to-be are fairly obvious, one has to wonder what the hell is in it for the male?” (The answer, by the way: “The puzzled scientists determined that females that had recently eaten their mates were less receptive to the approach of subsequent suitors. Cannibalized males also copulated longer and fathered more offspring than non-cannibalized males.”) Isn’t nature grand!

Elsewhere, the chapter on George Donner and his fellow travelers is titled “The Worst Party Ever.”

An experienced scholar, Mr. Schutt is not lazy when it comes to thoroughly reviewing extant research on his subject or interviewing other researchers. Moreover, he was willing to travel widely in pursuit of material. Among other places, we find him wading knee-deep in a pond in Arizona, examining salamanders, tramping around Alder Creek, Calif., in the Sierra Nevada foothills, in 105-degree heat, accompanying a border collie specially trained to detect buried human remains, even 170 years after the Donner Party set up camp there, and dining on sautéed human placenta in Dallas with a mother of 10 who had saved an extra one for him. (“Within seconds, the kitchen filled with an aroma that reminded me of beef.”) That particular chapter, incidentally, bears the title “Placenta Helper.”

Looking to the future, Mr. Schutt wonders whether climate change could create the kinds of crowding or shortages that would have an impact on various species, including humans.

Ultimately, the question becomes, does shedding light and fact and understanding on the matter diminish the taboo that has so long and widely shadowed cannibalism? That is probably for each reader to answer individually. As for me, I will only say that I hope the editors of The Star don’t place this review in too close proximity to the paper’s “News for Foodies” column.

A weekend resident of East Hampton, James I. Lader regularly contributes book reviews to The Star. 

Bill Schutt, who lives in Hampton Bays, will read from “Cannibalism” at Southampton Books on April 1 at 6 p.m.

Book Markers 03.30.17

Book Markers 03.30.17

Local Book Notes
By
Star Staff

Poetry Readings, Two of ’Em

April arrives Saturday, and with it, as sure as the spring rain, will come the tired journalistic references to “the cruelest month.” But National Poetry Month also brings with it something else inevitable, but more welcome, the open-mike intonation of poems by Billy Collins, that infuser of humor, revitalizer of the form, and professorial rock star among poets, to the extent such is even possible.

Otherwise, poetry fans, go ahead and pick something of your choosing to read — new and original, old and favorite, you name it — at one or both of a couple of readings in Sag Harbor, on April Fools' Day, Saturday, at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books and on April 2 at 3 p.m. at the John Jermain Memorial Library. The former will be headlined by Susan Dingle and Maggie Bloomfield, the gals behind the popular Poetry Street monthly series of readings at the Blue Duck Bakery on East Main Street in Riverhead. The latter promises coffee.

 

L.I. Poet of the Year

Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan has been named the Long Island poet of the year by the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association in Huntington Station, where a ceremony will take place at 2 p.m. on April 23. The honoree will read at the free event.

Ms. Nuzzo-Morgan is a past poet laureate of Suffolk County, founder of the North Sea Poetry Scene, author of several collections of verse, and one of the editors of the anthology Long Island Sounds. She lives in North Sea and is resident poet for the Southampton Historical Museum, for which she will host a series of readings in July and August at the Thomas Halsey Homestead.