“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.

“Doctorow:

Collected Stories”

E.L. Doctorow

Random House, $30

E.L. Doctorow is best known and admired for novels such as “Ragtime” and “The Book of Daniel,” in which he uses his imagination to alter and enrich factual events. People plucked from history — J.P. Morgan, Houdini, Emma Goldman, Freud, and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg among them — engage fictionally with one another, as well as with a fleet of invented characters. Asked by the editor Ted Solotaroff whether two of those real-life figures had ever actually met, as depicted in a scene in “Ragtime,” Mr. Doctorow replied, “Well, now they have.” 

That kind of winning self-confidence is apparent not only in his novels, but also, it turns out, in his short stories.

The novels have notably strong political and social content, which might at first glance seem to be missing from the stories. “Willi,” which opens “Doctorow: Collected Stories,” is an intense account of sexual passion, obsession, and betrayal, culminating in an act of physical violence. The story is set at a nonspecific time in an unspecified rural place, ostensibly removed from the world at large, until the final two sentences. “This was in Galicia in the year 1910. All of it was to be destroyed anyway, even without me.” 

A more blatantly political tale, tipped off in its title, “Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden,” was originally published in 2003, during George W. Bush’s administration, but it feels chillingly current. When the shrouded body of a small boy is found in the White House Rose Garden after a National Arts and Humanities function, paranoia and attack mode quickly set in. A White House liaison says, “Wouldn’t you think it figures, from this crowd, something disgusting like this? . . . Not that I ever expect the artists, the writers, to show gratitude to the country they live in. They’re all knee-jerk anti-Americans.” 

The dead child can’t be immediately identified, but a consulting psychologist from the C.I.A. speculates, “This feels to me like an Arab thing,” before adding, “Then he could be from where they hate us. . . . He could be a Muslim kid.” Terrorism is on everyone’s mind, even after the suspected vest of explosives is ruled out. Instead, the asthmatic child wears a bronchodilator on a lanyard around his neck. Viewed on a lab table, the body’s “little chest was expanded, as if the kid was pretending to be Charles Atlas.” He’s dubbed P.K., for Posthumous Kid, by F.B.I. agents. Numerous people are detained and interrogated, deportation is threatened, and various cover-ups are invented. 

The incident never happened. The abandoned body wasn’t a child, after all, but a rabid raccoon, requiring everyone (including the first dog) to be tested. And the elderly widowed groundskeeper who made the discovery in the Rose Garden may be suffering from dementia.

The nearly retired Special Agent B.W. Molloy is brought in to serve as the chief investigator of the case and the conscience of the story. As he methodically probes and scrutinizes, tracking down the identity of the body and who put it there and why, he also looks backward at his own career, and inward. Had he wasted his life? “Whatever his motives, it was a fact that he’d spent [it] contending with deviant behavior, and only occasionally wondering if some of it was not justifiable.” 

The unraveling of the mystery of the dead child in the Rose Garden, in all its tragedy and complexity, becomes secondary to Molloy’s discoveries about himself.

The propulsively readable “Walter John Harmon,” concerning a cult led by a con artist (and former auto mechanic) who absconds with his worshipers’ funds, along with one of their wives, also seems eerily prophetic when it’s discovered that Harmon, who’d never wanted anything written down, had drawn up elaborate plans, before his departure, to build a wall around his community. 

Among my personal favorites in this collection is “The Writer in the Family,” the first-person narration of a gifted adolescent boy named Jonathan, charged by relatives with writing letters to his paternal grandmother, purportedly from his recently dead father, so that she will not suffer the knowledge of his death. Caught between his destitute, embittered mother and his rich, imperious aunt — the perfectly titled “Frances of Westchester” — Jonathan obeys the latter, up to a point. 

Precociously resourceful, he invents a new life in Arizona for his father, where he prospers as he never did in his actual life. His brother questions the necessity of the arrangement — “Does the situation really call for a literary composition? . . . Would the old lady know the difference if she was read the phone book?”

And their mother objects to this final manipulation of her late husband in the service of protecting her despised mother-in-law. “He can’t even die when he wants to!” she cries. “Even death comes second to Mama! What are they afraid of, the shock will kill her? Nothing can kill her. She’s indestructible! A stake through the heart couldn’t kill her!” 

The pleasures of this story are myriad — the dark and often hilarious politics of family, the arc of the boy’s shifting loyalties, and, as in all of Mr. Doctorow’s work, the keen emotional insight. “I thought how stupid, and imperceptive, and self-centered I had been never to have understood while he was alive what my father’s dream for his life had been.” In his bold, final letter “from Arizona,” Jonathan attempts to ameliorate this harsh judgment of himself. 

“Wakefield,” inspired by the Haw­thorne story of the same name, but reset in modern suburbia, is another standout. Partly by accident and partly by design, a man finds himself living in the garage attic of his own home. From this hideout, he can, unobserved, observe his wife and children and contemplate his marriage. This is a popular, perhaps irresistible, premise among contemporary writers — Andrei Codrescu and Daniel Stern also wrote stories with the same title and similar theses.

In Mr. Doctorow’s version, Wakefield wonders, “What is there about a family that is so sacrosanct . . . that one should have to live in it for one’s whole life, however unrealized one’s life was?” He recalls infuriating, Cheever-like arguments with his wife, Diana, in which she addresses him by his surname (“one of her feminist adaptations of the locker-room style that I detested”). And he envisions her morphed into her own mother — “the widow Babs,” who opposed the marriage — in 30 years, “high-heeled, ceramicized, liposucted, devaricosed, her golden fall of hair as shiny and hard as peanut brittle.” Yet Wakefield also notes Diana’s enduring grace and beauty, declares his steadfast love for her, and, as the days and weeks go by, feels “despicably lonely.”

There are writerly gems throughout this collection. A grade-school teacher in “The Hunter” reads aloud to the residents of an old people’s home. “They sit there and listen to the story. They are the children’s faces in another time.” Later, the teacher poses with her young students for a class photo, “holding her hands in front of her, like an opera singer.” A music box in “Baby Wilson” plays “ ‘Columbia the Gem of the Ocean,’ as if anyone would want to hear it more than once.” 

In “Jolene: A Life,” Phoenix is seen by the title character as “a hot, flat city of the desert, but with a lot of fast-moving people who lived inside their air-conditioning.” And the description, in the same story, of the “busyness” of an empty street at 3 in the morning, which reads like the literary caption for a Hopper painting, concludes, “It was the world going on as if people were the last thing it needed or wanted.” 

A few complaints of redundancy have been made about this volume, because all of the included stories had been previously published, in varied assortments, in other collections, while others have been left out. But several of the stories here seem deeply interconnected by their reflections on the way we live now, in families and in society — most particularly regarding the urgent and contentious matters of immigration and assimilation. 

A priest in “Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden” remarks cautiously about his congregation of immigrants, “They love their Blessed Virgin. But they are learning to be Americans.” In “Heist,” the peddlers on New York City streets “come over from Senegal, or up from the Caribbean, or from Lima, San Salvador, Oaxaca, and find a piece of sidewalk and go to work.” And in “Wakefield,” a group of scavengers at a Dumpster are seen, with admiration, as performing “entry-level work into the American dream.” There is even a story titled “Assimilation.” 

According to the dust jacket copy, E.L. Doctorow — the writer in our national family — selected the contents of this compilation himself shortly before his death in 2015. Respect should be paid to his choices, even without an explanatory introduction, and, given the shelf life of most books — alleged to be somewhere between yogurt and cottage cheese — a new edition of work by a master of fiction is always welcome. 

Hilma Wolitzer’s novels include “An Available Man” and “Summer Reading.” She and her husband live in Manhattan and were part-time residents of Springs for many years.

E.L. Doctorow lived part time in Sag Harbor.

“The Nine of Us”

Jean Kennedy Smith

Harper, $29.99

Haven’t we had enough of the Kennedys? I feel satiated with this family’s story. Like many, I know the anecdotes and am familiar with the dynasty’s glorious highs and tragic lows. Goodreads lists 133 books under the header “Best Books About the Kennedys.” I have 10 of them on my bookshelf.

In “The Nine of Us: Growing Up Kennedy,” Jean Kennedy Smith, the penultimate child of Joe and Rose Kennedy’s nine offspring, doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know. In fact, in many instances, the author tells us far less, especially about the sorrows of death, infidelity, and disability. 

Ms. Smith does, however, uniquely offer the vantage point of a kindhearted sister. She shares her memories from an exclusive perspective inside the history-making set of siblings. On that claim, “The Nine of Us” is a lovely addition to the Kennedys’ literary history.

This memoir opens with a description of the family home in Hyannis Port, Mass. “The white house looked out over the sea. It was a sturdy and practical house, an overgrown Cape Cod cottage with white wooden shingles and black shutters, set back on a lawn that was worn in places from too many football games. A circular drive brought you up to the front steps, which ascended onto a long, wide porch. The beach waited just beyond the grass. A breakwall jutted out to the left to help calm the sometimes unruly seas.”

The author’s portrayal of the well-built white house sited just beyond the “unruly seas” seems a metaphor for the family’s solidarity and protection in a volatile and dangerous world.

As one often hears from children of big families, the older ones were drafted to raise the younger ones. “Mother and Dad taught us to take care of one another without telling us to. They taught us to love one another without forcing us to,” Ms. Smith writes. Joe Kennedy Jr., the eldest, asked that she be his goddaughter. “I never felt alone,” she reflects. 

Ms. Smith could have retitled the book “The Eleven of Us,” since her parents are ever-present in each scene. Every chapter opens with a quote from either Rose or Joe Kennedy. 

“At the helm were Mother and Dad. Mother, a petite woman with an indomitable nature and a sure understanding of what we needed in life. Dad, a towering presence, always with the right answer for our worries and a tender place for our growing spirits. They were our leaders, teachers, and champions. They made everything possible. They made everything clear. Our story is theirs. Falling in line, matching their step, into life we marched.”

Early in the book, Ms. Smith offers brief profiles of each sibling in chronological order. The characterizations are mostly polite and lack the bite that siblings often feel. “Joe seemed to know we were looking up to him. . . . Jack took books everywhere he went. . . . Rosemary had a beautiful Irish face and smile.” 

In these personality sketches, and in many instances throughout the work, Ms. Smith’s diplomatic skills take control. I wished for an author who was a little less of a lady and more a woman. The reader longs for a bit of sour to break the saccharine reminiscences. We want to know what emotions were inevitably roiling below the chipper commentary.

In contrast, the numerous photographs, generously lent from museums, libraries, and private family collections, will surprise and move even the most seasoned of Kennedy watchers. These extraordinary images stirred my heart as they reminded me of a more optimistic and hopeful America. They reveal poignant moments that show the Kennedys were really a flesh-and-blood family.

The narrative strengthens when it goes a bit deeper and touches on more delicate topics. The stories of her immigrant grandparents and the prejudice they endured are authentic and relevant. “They left for the only reason anyone would ever leave Ireland: They were starving, and desperate for work,” Ms. Smith explains, going on to recall the prevalence of “No Irish Need Apply” signs across Boston at the time. 

The author does not include anything of her years as the United States ambassador to Ireland. The reader wonders how the poetry of that appointment must have felt.

Similarly, Ms. Smith barely touches on the challenges faced by her sister Rose, writing little more than that she had trouble keeping up with the others and that her condition was difficult to treat. And yet, later in life, Ms. Smith founded an organization that provides art and education opportunities to people with disabilities. Again, the reader hungers to know how her history informed her adult feelings and choices.

Her words grow lyrical and her spirit seems to soar when writing about the ocean. Life lessons were mixed in with sailing instruction. “In our family, we found common ground on the sea,” she writes. “Saltwater was in our blood, in our genes.” 

Ms. Smith’s urgency is revealed in the epilogue. “It is sometimes difficult to comprehend that I am the only member of our original family still living.” She adds, “My parents and brothers and sisters had the earliest and most profound influence on my life, and I remain so proud of what they accomplished in the years that followed those special, yet too-short days that we all spent together.” 

She concludes the book with a passage from a letter that her father wrote to her brother Bobby, who was at that time a young boy of 14, at the height of World War II: “It is boys of your age who are going to find themselves in a very changed world, and the only way you can hold up your end is to prepare your mind so that you will be able to accept each situation as it comes along. So don’t, I beg of you, waste any time. Do all the things necessary to get yourself in good physical condition — and work hard.”

Ms. Smith punctuates this call to action — which has particular agency just now — with a final “Amen.”

Sally Susman is regular book reviewer for The Star. She lives part time in Sag Harbor.

Jean Kennedy Smith lives in Sagaponack.

For a body of water 110 miles long, 21 miles across at its widest point, and encompassing 1,320 square miles of open water within a coastline of about 600 miles, Long Island Sound somehow tends to be overlooked. But now the giant glacially formed estuarine body is getting its due, thanks to Patrick Lynch’s remarkably comprehensive “A Field Guide to Long Island Sound,” which comes out on March 21 from Yale University Press.

The maps are clear, the photography colorful, the illustrations detailed and accurate — flat-out beautiful, really — and Mr. Lynch, formerly with Yale’s Office of Public Affairs and Communications, is responsible for nearly all of it in what seems an effort of a lifetime, not unlike David Allen Sibley’s “The Sibley Guide to Birds,” which the author heartily recommends as a companion piece. 

Here, though the eye is most readily drawn to Mr. Lynch’s bird illustrations, the work is very much one of natural history, with sections on wind and water patterns, the zooplankton and sea jellies of the Sound’s relatively shallow depths, the surprising vegetation of the beaches and dunes — the eastern prickly pear cactus, for one — the muted splendor of unlikely havens like the marshes of Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, and on to a chapter on human history, from oystering to whaling. While this last understandably focuses on the Connecticut shore, it’s a welcome reminder that what is outwardly the least interesting of states isn’t quite. 

On Long Island, Mr. Lynch’s considerations of tucked-away natural gems are always informative and at times eye-opening: “The bluff plant community is unique in the Long Island Sound area,” he writes of Wildwood State Park in Wading River, “for in addition to the usual black cherries, sumacs, oaks, and maples, the bluff area contains an unusual number of American beech trees, forming one of the few maritime beech forest communities on the East Coast.”

Get out your hiking boots.

“Two Syllable Men”

John McCaffrey

Vine Leaves Press, $14.99

“Two Syllable Men” by John McCaffrey is a short collection of 12 stories in which the men are either a) divorced, b) in the process of getting divorced, c) looking for girlfriends, or d) dissatisfied with the girlfriends they have. And the women assume the roles of ex-wives, ingenues, manic pixie dream girls, or, in one memorable instance, a psychologist who eats barbecue pork sandwiches during therapy sessions. 

The main thrust of the book is the existential search for pure masculinity — whatever that might mean in a time when the gender binary is rapidly decaying. Mr. McCaffrey manages to both subvert and reinforce the Bechdel test, which, to pass, a work of fiction must have at least two named female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man. In “Two Syllable Men,” the male characters exist in the stories only in relation to women. The bulk of their interactions are with women; the majority of their thoughts are about women. On the other hand, the women function as the objects of desire, or to facilitate the life-changing realizations of the men.

In “William,” the first story in the collection, William looks through his girlfriend’s notebook, and what she’s written there causes him to recall a fight when she accused him of cheating with “some young girl.” William called his girlfriend (she is not named) “crazy” and “possessive.” Something else she’s written reminds him of “the night before. They had gone to a movie. And then back to her apartment. They had undressed each other. Played. Danced and wrestled their way to the bedroom. Then, on her low-lying bed, they kissed. And he was flooded with joy; it ripped through him. He had gripped her bare shoulders. Licked at her skin, off-white and flawless. Gripped her tighter and tighter; absorbed her body. Later, as they lay sated, he looked at her and said: ‘I feel so content.’ ”

We do not know what the girlfriend makes of all of this — the dancing, the wrestling. She’s gone out to fetch pizza and, for the reader, lives only in William’s memories. The story is two pages long, but by the end it appears that William has resolved to be kinder in the relationship, more aware. “William walks toward her, searching for the right word.” It is the subtle use of the word “right” that indicates William has changed, and for the better. 

The following stories, “Daniel,” “Graham,” “Kevin,” etc., center on damaged men (“a man without purpose or identity”; “I was hurting from my wife walking out on me”; “after his wife left him, Byron tried to blunt his loneliness with obsession”; “Steven felt inadequate in this raucous world of ribald men”; “after my wife and I separated, I spent most evenings wandering the cavernous aisles of a local Sam’s Club”) pursuing or being pursued by attractive women (“she was tall and stylish in a beige mini with matching heels”; “a great looking blonde in a halter top”; “a tall, lithe woman”; “the sound of her voice ignited an erection”; “she was wearing a black turtleneck that accentuated long, taut breasts”; “she was tall and shapely”). 

All of these stories are variations on the classic boy-meets-girl scenario. Mr. McCaffrey has a knack for plotting, moving briskly between scenes in a way that holds the reader’s interest. Threaded throughout the book are references to “The Sun Also Rises,” most explicitly in “Thomas,” a meta-story wherein Thomas is cast as Cohn in a dramatized version of the novel. What convinces Thomas to take the part is the possibility that he might have a chance to sleep with the actress portraying Brett. “An image of Carolyn’s nipple popped into Thomas’s mind. Things started to seem less complicated. He visualized the two of them together. And then he gave his answer.”

Moments of humor like this add an absurdity to the world of “Two Syllable Men,” in which masculinity is ever at stake and the male characters feel as though they’re on the verge of being outed as phonies. 

What “Two Syllable Men” aims to do, according to the copy on the back of the book, is “explore the male psyche in all its fragmented glory.” It’s an inward, navel-gazing collection of stories. The characters have a bluster, a bravado that’s often countered by a raw vulnerability. If they can just find the right woman, their problems will be solved. 

The overall impression, after reading the book cover to cover, is that women are from Venus and, yep, men are still from Mars. This lends a melancholy feeling to the stories. The characters are separated from one another along gender lines. They want to connect, but they can’t quite figure out how to cross the divide. 

Emily Smith Gilbert is the managing editor of The Southampton Review. She lives in East Hampton.

John McCaffrey is the author of “The Book of Ash,” a science-fiction novel. He lives part time in Wainscott.

“Steven Spielberg: 

A Life in Films”

Molly Haskell

Yale University Press, $25

That Steven Spielberg is a certifiable American genius is hardly a matter of debate. A shortlist of the films he has directed includes “E.T.,” “Jaws,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and “Schindler’s List” — though there are 10 more “second tier” films one could name that are nearly as astonishing. There is an argument to be made that he is the greatest filmmaker in American history, surpassing even Orson Welles, John Ford, and Howard Hawks, and he may be the most naturally gifted director in the history of cinema.

You’d think such kudos would be enough for any writer to hang her hat on, but in Molly Haskell’s new minibiography of the director, titled “Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films,” she affords her subject all these superlatives and more. This compact, insightful — but at times overly gushy — biography often goes beyond hyperbole into the realm of hagiography. At one point she literally compares the director to God. The author’s conclusion at this contrast? Advantage Spielberg.

Ms. Haskell’s book does pull off a nifty trick, however, consolidating the life’s work of a prolific genius into a tidy 200 pages. Ms. Haskell breezes through Mr. Spielberg’s youth with a deft touch, hitting all the significant biographical flashpoints without getting bogged down in tiresome minutiae. She tells of the lonely boy with a workaholic father and a restless mother who was having an affair with a neighbor. Young Steven endures numerous phobias and anxieties, along with incidents of moderate to severe anti-Semitism. 

Soon, though, Boy Wonder is given an 8-millimeter camera and discovers an uncanny facility. A subpar student, he nevertheless is able to enlist large contingents of teenagers from the neighborhood into ambitious amateur film productions, and a few of these are even shown at a local theater.

He arrives in Hollywood as a studio gopher, soaking in the atmosphere and chatting up anyone who will talk. (He also develops a long memory: Charlton Heston, who spurned the young Spielberg during this period, will later come knocking to play Indiana Jones. We know how that turned out.) He eventually starts working in television, directing episodes of “Night Gallery.” He falls in the with the “movie brats” of Malibu — Brian De Palma, John Milius, and, most significantly, George Lucas, with whom he would later collaborate. 

Two early directing tours de force, “Duel” and “The Sugarland Express,” were mostly overlooked by audiences but legitimized Mr. Spielberg enough to get him hired for the helm of “Jaws.” From then on, he never looked back.

Ms. Haskell goes through Mr. Spielberg’s canon film by film, acutely assessing the financial and artistic merits of each and introducing biographical interpretations of some of the director’s imagery. Her theory is that Mr. Spielberg’s films are wrought with leitmotifs from his childhood longings and phobias. Most of these assertions are convincing, especially with Ms. Haskell’s take on “Poltergeist,” which particularly seems to resonate with some of the director’s more explicit childhood peccadilloes, such as his aversion to the swaying trees outside his bedroom window, and the sense that the family television was talking directly to him.

Not all this psychoanalyzing hits its mark, however, and there are times when it feels that Ms. Haskell is straining to connect dots that aren’t there. Early on, for example, the author explains how the young Steven felt (as do many Jewish children) that he was missing out on the holiday of Christmas. Later, she tries to connect this to some of his more iconic imagery. 

“Consider the otherworldly savior E.T. The blinding light at the door in ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind.’ What is this sound and light show, this ethereal song, this luminous ship from outer space but a Jewish child’s fantasy of Christmas?” 

That sure seems like a stretch, and the hopped-up language doesn’t make it any truer.

And the author’s suggestion of Mr. Spielberg’s omnipotence is a little much. In her introduction, she recounts her subject’s double duty as director of “Schindler’s List” by day and editor of “Jurassic Park” by night: “The juxtaposition — as if dread and anxiety could thus be halved, one film allaying the stress of the other — seems almost inhuman as well as superhuman.” 

Later the author states that Mr. Spielberg has “touched more lives and boosted more careers than the Almighty. . . .” I was ready to take this as irony until it was echoed in a later chapter on “Jaws.” There she recounts, with off-putting esteem, how two youngsters lost their arms to sharks just before the 2015 re-release of “Jaws.” “Once again Mr. Spielberg had surpassed God in his mastery of mis-en-scene.” Rarrr. Down, girl.

Better is Ms. Haskell in identifying the director’s failure to create a single memorable female character and his inability to invoke romantic or erotic love in any of his films. The female characters, especially in Mr. Spielberg’s earlier work, tend to be tomboys or shrills (think Karen Allen in “Raiders” or Kate Capshaw in “Temple of Doom”), and there is not a romantic comedy in his oeuvre. 

She is also not averse to hinting at a touch of greed in her subject, recounting how after the success of “E.T.,” the director was raking in a million dollars a day but still felt the need to produce movies like “Gremlins” and “The Goonies,” both of which seemed like nothing more than cash cows. (In the next two years, incidentally, audiences will be treated to “Raiders of the Lost Ark 5” and “Jurassic Park I’ve Lost Count.”)

So no, Mr. Spielberg is not God, though his talent is, at times, an awesome thing to behold. I wish Ms. Haskell’s biography, slim as it is, explained exactly how this talent works — or at least tried to. What is it like to work with Mr. Spielberg? What makes him so adept with actors? How does he elicit such great performances? The author doesn’t seem particularly interested in these questions, more content to deify her subject and his abilities as something otherworldly.

For readers who don’t share this curiosity, however, “Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films” will satisfy as a keen, if cursory, overview of one of the most gifted practitioners in the history of American entertainment.

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

Steven Spielberg has a house in East Hampton.

“Washington’s Farewell”

John Avlon

Simon & Schuster, $27

“You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose,” Mario Cuomo once famously quipped. But in rare moments of American history, our leaders have provided us with words more akin to Scripture, inspired texts that have outlined the nation’s principles, affirmed its commitments, and articulated its deepest purpose.

George Washington’s Farewell Address, the subject of John Avlon’s absorbing new book, stands as one of those texts, a foundational document of our political system and “the most famous American speech you’ve never read.” In “Washington’s Farewell: The Founding Father’s Warning to Future Generations,” Mr. Avlon, editor in chief of The Daily Beast, hopes to rescue Washington’s last words as president from their recent obscurity so that an American nation now riven by excessive partisanship and existential anxiety might rediscover its wisdom.

Mr. Avlon’s book could hardly have come at a more opportune time. After the ugliness of the 2016 campaign and the unsettling first weeks of the Trump Administration, Washington’s Farewell Address seems the prescription especially needed for the ills that plague our nation. Yet as unremembered as Washington’s last words now are for most Americans, for more than 100 years after its publication in 1796 the Farewell Address stood as the most revered and trusted document in the nation. Schoolchildren memorized passages, ministers incorporated it into their sermons, and presidents regarded it as the touchstone for all their decisions in office. Little did any of these people know that Washington had been working on his address for five years or that others had helped him draft it.

Washington hadn’t wanted to be president, desiring instead a quiet life at his beloved Mount Vernon after his time leading the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. But he accepted the call of duty to the nation’s highest office with reluctance. He was right to be reluctant. As adored as he had been as general, Washington as president faced vicious critics, a deadlocked Congress, and an unruly cabinet that splintered into warring factions. Bitter divisions between North and South and urban and rural regions grew heated. 

“By the end of his first term, Washington had enough,” Mr. Avlon writes. He secretly asked James Madison to begin work on a valedictory address to mark the end of his presidency. But persuaded that the country would fall into civil war if he didn’t stay in office, Washington accepted a second term as president. The Farewell Address would have to wait.

In his second term, Washington passed the drafting work from Madison to Alexander Hamilton. John Jay, governor of New York, also had a hand in writing the Farewell Address. In the final weeks before publication, Washington furiously finalized the text, paring down Hamilton’s flowery language for his own plain style that, as he described, the “yeomanry of the country” would understand.

The Farewell Address, 6,088 words spread across 54 paragraphs, appeared in the Philadelphia newspaper Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser on Sept. 19, 1796, and was republished in newspapers across the country in the months following. The address shocked its readers, serving as it did to announce Washington’s retirement from public life.

That announcement provided the address’s most immediate effect, establishing the precedent of the peaceful transfer of power and creating the tradition of a two-term limit to the presidency. (The 22nd Amendment, ratified in 1951, would turn tradition into law after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s four-term presidency.)

But what of the address itself and the guiding principles it set forth? Mr. Avlon outlines the document’s six “pillars of liberty”: national unity, political moderation, fiscal discipline, virtue and religion, education, and foreign policy. Each grew out of the political circumstances of Washington’s presidency, lessons the president had learned and warnings for the future. Mr. Avlon presents the stories behind each pillar, what he calls an “autobiography of ideas.”

Washington’s plea for national unity reflected his concern with the growing factionalism in Philadelphia, evidenced by the emergence of political parties and the nation’s worsening regional divisions. But it also owed to his knowledge of the history of ancient republics that had fallen apart. Like many of his contemporaries, Washington owned a copy of Edward Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” and read it as a dire warning for his own young nation. In his Farewell Address, Washington stressed that the independence and liberty Americans so cherished was dependent on their unity and would be threatened by any acts of division. Tellingly, the two words Washington used most in his address were “citizen” and “Union,” appearing eight and 20 times in the text, respectively. Washington was writing the unifying power of a national identity into the American consciousness through his Farewell Address.

For Washington, the call to national unity also depended on political moderation. While Washington lamented the rise of political parties, what he really feared was the extremism and hyper-partisanship those parties could unleash, thus destabilizing the republic. In advocating national unity based on a shared sense of citizenship, Washington believed the temptation to political extremism could be constrained, tempered further by a devotion to reason over emotion.

On foreign policy, the Farewell Address’s most cited maxim forbidding “entangling alliances” actually never appears in the document. Those were Thomas Jefferson’s words in his first inaugural address. The Farewell Address, instead, advocated neutrality. Mr. Avlon stresses that Washington meant this as a policy of independence rather than isolation, a view shaped by the bitter fights between Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans and their support for England and France, respectively. Washington believed 20 years of neutrality would allow the United States to become powerful enough that its independence would be secure. But he did not intend the U.S. would never act on the global stage.

Still, the isolationist interpretation of Washington’s words prevailed until the 20th century. In the closing section of his book, Mr. Avlon demonstrates how succeeding presidents drew on the Farewell Address to understand and articulate their leadership. Like other influential documents, including the Bible and the Constitution, the Farewell Address was no instruction manual, but instead a statement of principles that were always subject to interpretation. 

Leaders picked and chose from the document, lifting out passages that they believed spoke to — and justified — their approach to the issues of their day. On the brink of civil war, Abraham Lincoln called on the Farewell Address’s appeal to national unity. Woodrow Wilson twisted the logic of Washington’s foreign policy prescription to propose nation-building and the creation of the League of Nations. Dwight D. Eisenhower copied the Farewell Address’s warning to future generations in his own farewell that cautioned an overgrown military-industrial complex threatened democracy.

What might President Trump make of Washington’s Farewell Address? Mr. Avlon’s book provides no thoughts, as it was likely completed before the election in November. Certainly, the history that Mr. Avlon provides shows that nearly all presidents have looked to the Farewell Address for wisdom and guidance. Yet whether or not Mr. Trump ever turns to Washington’s words, Mr. Avlon compellingly argues that the Farewell Address — printed in full in the book’s appendix — is not a document only for presidents but rather for all Americans to read and know, “providing a useful lens for assessing our own decisions as we face the future.”

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

John Avlon lives part time in Sag Harbor.

“The Curse of Beauty”

James Bone

Regan Arts, $26.95

In a hundred years will the lives of high-profile models such as Heidi Klum or Cindy Crawford make engaging biographies? 

“The Curse of Beauty: The Scandalous & Tragic Life of Audrey Munson, America’s First Supermodel” by James Bone raises the question: Is beauty inherently interesting? Or is it simply that beauty arouses a kind of insatiable curiosity? It’s what we don’t know about the reality star Kim Kardashian that keeps us all intrigued. Readers of the future would, I suspect, not only marvel at our standards of beauty but also wonder that we hung on every syllable from a woman with so little to say. 

Only the most energetic students of Beaux Arts architecture will know the name Audrey Munson. Yet from the Gilded Age into the early 20th century Munson was as ubiquitous as Cindy Crawford’s mole and as sought after by gossip columnists as any celebrity today. Audrey was the artist’s model of her time, famed as “the most perfectly formed woman in the world.” 

The image of her flawless breasts and profile are forever enshrined in public works found most prolifically throughout New York: sculptures flanking the entrance to the Brooklyn Museum and on top of the Municipal Arts Building, as well as at the Frick Museum, the New York Public Library, and the Pulitzer Fountain outside the Plaza Hotel. If you live in New York, chances are you pass Audrey all the time.

“The Curse of Beauty” promises “glamour, passion, and ultimately tragedy” straight off the jacket. At the start, Mr. Bone unfurls a tantalizing story. When Audrey was a girl of 5, a “bronze-faced” Gypsy predicted that she would be “beloved and famous” — an auspicious fortune, were it not for what followed. The “Dead Sea fruit” would “turn to ashes” in her mouth: Audrey would throw thousands away for a “caprice” and “want for a penny” and fail to marry any of the seven men who fell in love with her. 

That, in a nutshell, sums up the life of Audrey Munson. Whoops, spoiler alert. Whether the Gypsy’s prediction for Munson’s future was clairvoyance or self-fulfilling prophecy is anyone’s guess, says Mr. Bone. Either way, “The Curse of Beauty” makes for tedious reading, though the author rallies every available historical factoid to bring his subject alive. 

Munson cruised through her life — much like the sculptures for which she posed — with an uncanny ability to be entirely unmoved by it. Paranoid, poor, and unemployable at 40, she ended up in an upstate “lunatic asylum,” committed by the embittered stage mother who had banked on her daughter. There, Audrey lived happily as an exiled queen, the role that seems ultimately to have suited her best, dying at the incredible age of 104.

What, what, I asked myself again and again, could have possessed Mr. Bone to choose Munson as his subject? He is a former New York bureau chief of The Times of London and has covered everything from mafia trials, Wall Street frauds, and terrorist attacks to art sales and celebrity weddings. He hails from “generations of artists,” many of whom were active at the same time as those in the book and must certainly have been more interesting. 

As a subject Audrey adds fuel to the old idea that models are dim bulbs — “simple, sweet, homelike,” in the words of a reporter. She was the first woman to pose nude in a film, named, without irony, “Purity.” This did not make her a feminist, as Mr. Bone proposes, but a gal who had a pretty good idea of how her bread was buttered. In the four films Audrey made in total, critics found Munson’s acting ability seriously wanting.

Munson lived in unusually interesting times, working with notable artists such as Isidore Konti, Daniel Chester French, and Adolph Weinman. Mr. Bone so vividly chronicles this context that it’s disappointing when he returns to his subject. To her credit, I suppose, Audrey took her work seriously, eschewing alcohol, late nights, and distracting romantic entanglements. 

She came to see herself, grandiosely, as an artist as well, though the import of Modernism escaped her entirely. After sitting for Francis Picabia, Audrey called the famed Cubist “one of those hangers-on at the fringe of art. . . .” She ended up on the “wrong side of history,” admits Mr. Bone, in damning contemporary artists as “crazy persons capitalizing on their insanities.”

Audrey’s undeniable beauty gave her access to people not only of talent but also of phenomenal wealth. She was fleetingly engaged to Hermann Oelrichs Jr., son of a Newport, R.I., society scion and heir to a silver-mining fortune. That he was gay would hardly have mattered to Audrey; she appears to have been averse to sex, reading between the lines. Nonetheless, her ambitious mother listed her daughter as “Audrey Oelrichs” on a New York State census, claiming she had married Hermann in a secret wedding. As for that Gypsy curse: Of the many men who came knocking —       none stuck. 

The great scandal of “The Curse of Beauty” comes midway. “What took place on the brick walkway outside the Wilkinses’ cottage . . . at exactly ‘9:28 1/2 pm’ on Thursday, February 27, 1919, changed Audrey’s life forever,” begins Mr. Bone, portentously. Dr. Harry Wilkins — Audrey’s landlord and doctor — bludgeoned his wife to death with a club, claiming an intruder had surprised them outside their house. A photo of Audrey found among his possessions fueled very public rumors of an affair; as the murder trial raged, Audrey was nowhere to be found. In fact, the evidence was disappointingly slim that Audrey’s acquaintance with Dr. Wilkins was much more than nodding. 

That Audrey was beautiful, clueless, and misused is an age-old story, calculated to arouse a reader’s sympathy. But as Audrey fell into obscurity, she became a wacky caricature. She nursed a host of conspiracy theories — offensively anti-Semitic — that erupted into letters to the State Department demanding its help in retrieving profits due on her films. Virtually destitute, Audrey finally parlayed what little fame she had left into a “Bachelorette”-like contest to find a husband of “pure race.” She chose a phantom; his name was an alias leading to no one at all.

The story of Audrey Munson makes a great footnote, a diverting article, and a Wikipedia entry sure to delight someone browsing the internet. With all due respect to Mr. Bone’s formidable research and reporting skills, “The Curse of Beauty” is more information than most readers will ever want or need. Remember Audrey Munson simply as the muse who launched a host of sculptures, representing what is best and noblest in public creativity.

Ellen T. White, former managing editor at the New York Public Library, is the author of “Simply Irresistible,” a book about history’s great romantic women. She lives in Springs.

James Bone lives on Shelter Island. “The Curse of Beauty” will be out in paperback on April 18.

“Brilliant Beacons”

Eric Jay Dolin

Liveright, $29.95

“Brilliant Beacons” by Eric Jay Dolin illustrates the history of American lighthouses that played a role, perhaps not widely known, in the economic success of this country. If you’re looking for a comfortable description of lighthouses, from their construction to modern-day automation, this is the book for you. Mr. Dolin’s style of writing makes you feel as if he’s sitting in the room with you and relating tales of long ago.

While his approach is easy to digest, at the same time he takes you on an adventure across the country to isolated locations where lighthouse keepers kept steady vigils, ensuring safe passage of vessels in surrounding waters.

From the inception of the Lighthouse Service in 1789, and despite the obvious necessity of having them, lighthouses encountered opposition, both from outside the organization and within. Regardless of the persuasiveness of the arguments for a lighthouse — the number of shipwrecks in a certain area, or simply to guide vessels safely into ports — they were sometimes denied for fiscal or other reasons. Mr. Dolin notes that on some occasions Congress delayed construction until additional maritime mishaps convinced lawmakers of the need.

And once a lighthouse was built, there were the challenges of maintaining the beacon in an isolated, desolate location, especially in times of war. Mr. Dolin relays the stories of a number of towers that were damaged or darkened, even destroyed, during the American Revolution, probably the most famous being the Boston Lighthouse, which was blown up by retreating British forces in 1776. During the Civil War, numerous towers in the Southern states were deactivated by the Confederates so as not to aid the Union cause, and some of them were destroyed as well. During World War II, with the threat of enemy submarines, lighthouses were rendered ineffective by dimming or darkening their lights to avoid aiding the enemy.

Over the years the Lighthouse Service was not always supervised very well. Mr. Dolin points out the particularly inept and penny-pinching approach of Stephen Pleasonton as head of the service for 30 years in the early 1800s. What is remarkable, he writes, is the continual failure of Congress, even in the face of inferior tower construction and poor lighting equipment, to make changes to the system, especially the installation of the much-superior Fresnel lenses, which were already in use in many European lighthouses.

In the early 1850s, lighthouse management changed abruptly with the inception of the Lighthouse Board, which removed policies previously in place under Pleasonton and led to the immediate installation of Fresnel lenses in all lighthouses. Mr. Dolin notes the difference in the effectiveness of lighthouses under the new administration, which, in military fashion, repaired, replaced, and improved the quality of lighthouses around the country and standardized construction of keepers’ quarters and overall lighthouse procedures.

He goes on to give examples of some extraordinary lighthouse construction projects that seemed insurmountable given their perilous locations, particularly those on tiny wave-swept islands, such as Minot’s Ledge near Boston Harbor. He vividly describes the collapse of the first skeletal tower and the loss of two keepers in 1851, as well as the challenges of building a more formidable granite tower, completed in 1860 (it still stands).

Then there are more unusual stories, such as in the Farallon Islands off California, where common murre eggs were found to make for a lucrative business, and those involved resisted efforts to have a lighthouse built there.

Mr. Dolin also devotes a chapter to the daily lives of the keepers, some of whom were hailed as heroes after they assisted in the rescue of mariners from shipwrecks, though these keepers would be quick to say they were just performing their duty. He writes of the success of women keepers at a number of stations, many of whom took over when their husbands died. Of note are Abbie Burgess at the Matinicus Rock Lighthouse in Maine and Ida Lewis at the Lime Rock Lighthouse in Newport, R.I., whose acts of bravery have become legendary in the history of lighthouses.

Facing the daily challenges of maintaining the light and property, making log entries, and enduring threatening storms form the fabric of a lifestyle unimaginable today. In one extreme example, a band of Seminole Indians attacked the Cape Florida Lighthouse on Key Biscayne in 1836, which led to an extraordinary fight for survival by the keeper and his assistant. The keeper survived, despite his attempt to blow up the tower when all seemed lost.

The immense destruction of the hurricane of Sept. 21, 1938, which affected eastern Long Island and New England lighthouses, has a chapter all its own. The efforts of keepers to maintain their stations in the face of torrential waves and winds exceeding 120 miles per hour (one gust was measured at 186 miles per hour), in some cases with loss of life, were heroic.

With progress comes change, namely the takeover of the nation’s lighthouses by the Coast Guard in 1939 and their subsequent automation. Unfortunately many lighthouse stations were neglected after that, since with automation personnel were no longer needed, and some beacons were vandalized or started crumbling.

One chapter, “The New Keepers,” is dedicated to private organizations and individuals who have stepped forward to preserve and protect America’s lighthouses. A number of historical societies have opened museums at stations (the Montauk Point Lighthouse is one) to illustrate the history of these noble sentinels. The Fire Island Lighthouse is one where such an organization successfully restored the light itself.

Many of the country’s remaining lighthouses have earned inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places, and 12 have been honored on a higher level as National Historic Landmarks.

As a reader of numerous volumes on lighthouses, I found “Brilliant Beacons” both exciting and enriching, and difficult to put down. The challenges faced in establishment of light stations, the keepers’ lives, and the ultimate rescue of these valuable parts of America’s maritime history are all presented in a manner that will not fail to stir the imagination.

Henry Osmers is the tour director and historian at the Montauk Point Lighthouse. His latest book is “A Legacy of Valor: A History of Lifesaving and Shipwrecks at Montauk, New York.”

“Brilliant Beacons” will be out in paperback on April 25.

“One of These

Things First”

Steven Gaines

Delphinium, $24.95

A brief bit of history as prologue: The pathologizing of homosexuality is one of the great shames of psychiatry (and all other mental health professions). In 1952, with the publication of the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-I, “homosexuality” was officially and disgracefully classified as a “sociopathic personality disturbance.” It was not until 1973, more than 20 years later, that the American Psychiatric Association finally removed homosexuality from its official DSM-II and started to treat it as other than a mental disorder.

Steven Gaines is the author of several books, including the 1998 best-selling “Philistines at the Hedgerow: Passion and Property in the Hamptons.” “One of These Things First” is his memoir. He was born in Brooklyn in 1947 and grew up there. Suffice it to say that in the 1950s and ’60s Brooklyn was not a wonderful place to grow up gay. I very much doubt that 50-some years ago there was a terrific place to grow up gay, but Brooklyn sounds, from his memoir, like a particularly challenging one.

It was unbearable enough that just a few pages into the memoir, when Steven is 15, he decides to end his life, and not in the take-some-sleeping-pills-and-slip-gently-into-a-sweet-oblivion kind of way.

I stepped back and considered myself in the mirror. No strapping high school freshman here. I was pale and pudgy, and I had tortured my mess of wavy strawberry blond hair into a perfect inch-high pompadour, hardened in place with thick white hair cream, like plaster of Paris. I had meticulously doctored an inflamed whitehead under my bottom lip with Clearasil, so I wouldn’t be embarrassed when they found me. . . .

Like a conductor about to give the orchestra a downbeat, I raised my clenched fists and then with all my might I punched through the two lower windowpanes of glass, one fist though each, one fist, two fists, except I ruined it because I had to punch the left one twice to get my fist through it. I sawed my wrists and forearms twice back and forth across the shards that held in the frame.

“The fairy is dying,” Steven thinks as he fades on the ground, predicting what Arnie and Irv, owners of a local luncheonette and two of his many tormentors, will undoubtedly think when they hear of his suicide. The police take him to Brooklyn Doctors Hospital. The doctor gives him a sedative injection and “whoosh I was numb all over. I vomited, probably wonton soup from the Great World that I had chosen as my last meal. . . .” And then he feels himself slipping into unconsciousness, “and the bus came by and I jumped on it just as graceful as Gene Kelly hopping on a trolley.”

Despite the grimness and gravity of the beginning of his memoir, Mr. Gaines employs an ironic and droll tone in viewing and portraying himself and his supporting cast of characters. There is zero self-pity here. No despondence or moping. The young Steven must certainly have felt sorry for himself from time to time and unquestionably was unhappy enough to try to take his life, but Mr. Gaines, the adult memoirist, is unfailingly bright, chipper, funny, and candid. 

Mr. Gaines is a wonderful writer. His prose is crisp, informative, often lovely. He is always unflinchingly direct and honest about himself and those around him. He tends to think in film, by which I mean that he peppers his narrative with abundant references to the films of his youth. This is due no doubt to his grandmother having been chums with Murray, the manager of the Culver Theater, who always let him in without paying. “I went to the movies like other kids turned on the TV set.” 

Because he feels different from nearly everyone he knows, the young Steven often observes his family and his neighborhood from afar, as an outsider. He regularly goes up to the El station on 18th Avenue. 

“It was like a crane shot in a movie where the camera pulls back, revealing an Edward Hopper tableau come to life. I stood on the station platform transfixed for hours watching our little drama unfold below, the people going about their business, the big store [belonging to his grandparents] in the middle of the block with the pink neon Rose’s Bras Girdles Sportswear sign, the salesgirls and customers and shopkeepers, my father’s frightening rages, the tragic secret of my perversion, my grandfather’s shameful affairs, all this marked in quarter tones by the roar of the passing trains.”

As a young boy Steven is isolated by his sexuality and feels like a “freak,” “nature’s mistake”: “They always hated me at Hebrew school, where like a wolf pack they smelled out my homosexuality and expelled me as a weak pup.” 

He hears his parents and their friends talking about Christine Jorgensen (an early trans woman who had been a World War II G.I.), “a homo who went to Sweden and had his dick and balls cut off. . . . I didn’t want to have my dick and balls cut off. So I kept it a secret that I was a homo as best I could. . . .” Michael, the only other neighborhood “homo” he knows, he thinks of as a monster in a science fiction movie “where a man melds with a woman, a creature that didn’t deserve to live.” But he figures that Michael knows about him because all of “nature’s mistakes recognize each other.” 

A discordant but delightfully effective mix of desperate self-loathing and humor runs throughout the memoir. After his suicide attempt, Steven is asked why by his father and Dr. Doris, an adolescent psychiatrist (who, because she sits stiffly in a wheelchair, reminds him of Dr. Strangelove). “I did it because I’m the Frankenstein monster.” They decide to commit him to Hillside Hospital in Queens for long-term care. 

When Steven realizes that Hillside is the dreary and awful facility with bars on the windows he can see from the Long Island Expressway, he is motivated to finish what he started. “Later that night I would slip out of the house and throw myself under the D train, northbound to Manhattan, which I thought was more glamorous than throwing myself under a train headed to Coney Island.” 

But upon consideration that this strategy might prove difficult and painful, he remembers being warned about a man who peed on the third rail. Supposedly the electricity traveled up his urine stream into his penis, killing him. “I could pee myself to death; that would give them something to talk about.” Though funny, the idea of killing himself through the very piece of his anatomy that is causing him such angst is fitting. 

Eventually Steven talks Gog, his wealthy grandfather, into paying for him to stay at the famed and fashionable Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic on the Upper East Side. It is a place where movie stars and famous writers stay for their “nervous breakdowns.” And it is here where, oddly enough, he meets people who share his sensibilities. They are wealthy, educated, well dressed, and artsy. And they are all unusual. Peculiar. Quirky. “She owned a small savings and loan in Vermont and shoplifted at Bergdorf Goodman.”

Steven is the ugly duckling who at last lands among swans. Here he finally feels at home, an atypical boy among atypical people, and here he also meets the man who would become his analyst for many years, Dr. Wayne Myers. 

Even if it was a horrible thing to be a homo, it made me unique. That horrible part of me also made me special. . . . My curse in some ways made me . . . superior. 

Dr. Myers watched my expression as this train of thought played out in my head. Special. Different. Something I’d chew on for a long while. He had managed to pull off a clever psychological sleight of hand by producing epiphanies out of a hat. Self-examination with a good shrink is like an opiate.

During the course of one of these talks, Steven tells Myers that he saw the film “Splendor in the Grass” 11 times. 

He interrupted me, breaking protocol. “She [Natalie Wood] had a nervous breakdown because she wanted to have sex with her boyfriend, but sex is forbidden because she’s a ‘good girl,’ and her mother wants her to be a virgin. And her bottled up desire eventually drives her to a suicide attempt.”

I felt my cheeks go on fire.

Eventually Steven admits to his sexuality. “ ‘I hate myself,’ I whispered. ‘I’d rather die than be one.’ ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Is that why you tried to kill yourself?’ ”

This is the beginning of self-acceptance for Steven, though, this being 1962, Myers tells him, “Homosexuality can be cured, like many other disorders.” (As a psychoanalyst, this part made me cringe in shame and anger.) Despite this misguided bit of psychotherapeutic idiocy, Myers proves to be a pretty good analyst, and when Steven has a session with him decades later, Myers even apologizes: “I’m sorry I tried to change you. I’m afraid that, in retrospect, I caused you more pain.” 

Thankfully, homosexuality is no longer thought of as a mental disorder, so that at least the teens of this generation will not grow up thinking of themselves as sick or freaks and can accept themselves more easily.

Michael Z. Jody is a psychoanalyst and couples counselor with offices in Amagansett and New York City.

Steven Gaines lives in Wainscott.