“The B Poems”

Simon Perchik

Poets Wear Prada, $15

Simon Perchik explores the underworld in these deeply rich, elemental verses to or about B. Who or what B might be, we may not know. However, it fits the subject of the book not to know. 

Readers familiar with Mr. Perchik’s poetry will already have a sense of the density of his writing. The word “unpack” does not do justice to what must happen for the poems to be understood. Mr. Perchik challenges the very notion of understanding to arrive at something more rewarding and profound.

Slowly you have forgotten how

and after each rain reach out

as if this folding ladder

once skimmed the rooftops

was taught to trust the sky

though rung by rung

you no longer lead the dead

to the dead trapped above you

and what passes for rescue

never leaves the ground

or backs away, shaky, not sure

what headwinds do or don’t

— you have forgotten how to fly . . .

(From the poem B40.)

So much of contemporary language is empty, catchy yet without the full body of something potent behind it. What is being said may be thoughtful, yet its meaning has a shelf life as we face the barrage of message upon message to follow. So much of what is said causes us to flinch, either from knowing the predictable nature of a statement doomed to expire, or from the fatigue of receiving boring lies. The B poems are not only different from how we speak or listen to others speak, but different from other published literature.

It is important to note that Mr. Perchik turned 93 on Christmas Eve and has published more than 20 books of poetry in the last 50 years. (He got a late start.) 

It is equally important to note that the B poems lack all artifice. What may be read as abstraction or an aesthetic technique simply is not. These are raw, visceral, truthful accounts of the world. Page after page is gripping, to the death, of the very essentials that make up life. There is nothing superfluous, unnecessary, or extemporaneous. These are the poems of a master craftsman at his unadorned best, literal gifts to humanity, real doors to discovery.

You can still make out the stars

though it’s noon and the beach

changes — you can tell by the feel

and listening for engine scrap

breaking apart, smelling from smoke

expects you to stand up barefoot

keep struggling with shoreline

— you’re not new to this

will start the grill weeks ahead . . .

(From the poem B59.)

The poems in the collection are numbered from B1 to B63 in ascending order. Whether or not the numerology is significant is insignificant. Every poem is written in unrhymed tercets, three-line stanzas that build a rhythm from poem to poem. Yet again, the power of these poems is not in their formal presence, but in their very naked and awkward insistence to begin again. Forget about understanding the bigger picture and just feel how the words make you feel. Then reread them. 

There is magic in the way we try to wrap our minds around nothing, and Mr. Perchik gets it. He gives time a voice. Flesh becomes dirt. Opposites like rain and stone come to know each other. The ritual rise of daylight becomes a miraculous action again. The fact that anything occurs is cause for wonder. 

These are heartbreakingly beautiful poems about the nature of our suffering. They show us how we are not alone, how things like clouds and mountains are our natural companions. They evoke memories and fantasies and pure love for another person. 

You begin the way shorelines

risk their life this close

though after each funeral

you drown in the row by row

where each photograph is overturned

shaken loose from the family album

— her shoes seem pleased

to be shoes, not walk anymore

or store their darkness for later . . .

standing next to her, eye to eye

without saying a word, would leave

if you knew how to turn away

the blank page, solid black

not a beach, not a breath, nothing

that understands this emptiness. 

(From the poem B38.)

I want to quote a hundred more lines from “The B Poems” for you. It feels as if a thousand pens were dancing all at once. Upon first reading, it seemed the book was all about darkness and death. After rereading, it seems to be all about life and light. I’m sure Mr. Perchik, incredible poet and national treasure, knows it’s about both. 

Lucas Hunt is the author of the poetry collections “Lives,” “Light on the Concrete,” and “Iowa,” which is forthcoming. Formerly of Springs, he is the director of Orchard Literary and the founder of Hunt & Light, a publisher of poetry.

Simon Perchik lives in Springs.

“Rosset”

Barney Rosset

OR Books, $28

If one were asked to name the cultural heroes of the last 100 years, chances are Barney Rosset would not be among the first to roll off the tongue. In point of fact, however, this American publisher and sometime movie producer fought nearly all of the major First Amendment battles of the second half of the 20th century. It may be that no single person has done more to knock down the doors of censorship in art and literature in America than Barney Rosset. 

There’s no doubting Mr. Rosset’s taste in literature. Even the most modest bookcase will have at least a volume or two from Mr. Rosset’s highly influential publishing house, Grove Press, which he acquired in 1951. Judging from his memoir, however — “Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship” — his literary taste did not necessarily translate to literary talent. This memoir is mostly written in a declarative, perfunctory style that lacks the famous vim and vigor of its author. The flesh-and-blood Barney Rosset was by turns irascible, devilish, and highly mercurial, and it is head-scratching that this memoir only occasionally manifests that personality. 

Nevertheless, the story recounted here is a colorful and important one. Mr. Rosset, who grew up in Chicago in between world wars, states that he was never as happy again as he was at the age of 17, when he was the class president, star in both football and track, and (already) a literary provocateur, drawing up a petition demanding the release of his hero, John Dillinger. During World War II he bluffed his way into the Army photographic unit, stationed in China. Following the war, he sank $250,000 of his family’s money into his first film, “Strange Victory,” a documentary that chronicled racial bias in the treatment of black war veterans. The film was a box-office disaster but cemented Mr. Rosset’s penchant for marrying financial risk with provocative subject matter. 

There was the requisite stint in Paris, where Mr. Rosset met Joan Mitchell, the Abstract Expressionist painter, who became his first wife (there were five). She led him back to Greenwich Village, where he fell in with the Beats and the artists at the Cedar Tavern. It was during this time that Mr. Rosset bought the nearly defunct Grove Press (for $3,000!) and when things in his professional life started to get interesting. At Grove, Mr. Rosset published no less than Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Henry Miller, Harold Pinter, Eugene Ionesco, and Che Guevara, among others. 

The first major censorship battle was over D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” in 1957. It was deemed obscene and prompted the U.S. Postal Service to seize copies (the ruling was eventually overturned). Further battles were waged over Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” William Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch,” and the film “I Am Curious (Yellow),” for which Mr. Rosset was the distributor. Ultimately, all of these cases broke Mr. Rosset’s way, and some with a huge payoff: “Tropic of Cancer,” for example, sold well over a million copies for Grove and made Mr. Rosset, and his publishing company, rich. 

But fortune would not last for Mr. Rosset, whose finances rose and fell from year to year. It is interesting to note that at one point he owned more than 100 acres of prime land in East Hampton, only to sell off parcel after parcel to pay for each impending court battle. It is not an exaggeration to assert that the war over censorship in America was literally paid for with East Hampton real estate.

There are, of course, some tasty anecdotes in the book, including Mr. Rosset pulling a raging actor off Norman Mailer, and a number of very tender recollections of his friendship with Samuel Beckett, which lasted decades. In a rare moment of close observation in “Rosset,” the author remembers a breakfast in Paris with Beckett at which diners placed their orders by submitting cards with pictures of food on them. 

“In a funny way, it was pure Beckett . . . you could choose a meal in total silence. In the same vein, Beckett had made increasing use of the stage directions ‘pause’ and ‘silence’ in his work, and had pared down his vocabulary with fewer and fewer words.”

Mostly, though, this is a memoir content to enumerate the varied accomplishments of its author in a flat, monochrome voice that is only occasionally roused. And there is a mother lode of publishing minutiae in “Rosset” that most readers will find esoteric: advances, units sold, book fairs, etc. 

For all of its faults, however, this book does have a cumulative effect, leaving one in a state of admiration as you follow Mr. Rosset decade after decade in his dogged pursuit of artistic freedom. The book is at its best with its chapters on “Tropic of Cancer,” a novel Mr. Rosset loved intensely. He originally encountered it as a student at Swarthmore in 1940, where he read a smuggled copy. Though publishing it ultimately made him rich, the memoir leaves no doubt of the sincerity in his fight to see it legally published in America. 

“. . . there arose from it an almost mystical feeling, a sense of the numinous, which grew stronger as the story went along. . . . Both Miller and Lawrence developed and communicated an intense, freeing belief that we should live the kind of life we desire — and they inspired each of us to believe and do the same.” 

As this imperfect memoir reminds us, much the same could be said of Barney Rosset (who died in 2012). In a different kind of country, he might have won the Congressional Medal of Freedom. As it is, we have simply his legacy, one where the meaning of the word “obscene” — indeed the cultural landscape of America itself — was changed forever. 

Kurt Wenzel’s novels include “Lit Life” and “Gotham Tragic.” He lives in Springs.

OR Books, which this week came out with the hardcover of Barney Rosset’s autobiography, will celebrate the late and legendary publisher and East Hamptoner with a gathering at the Strand bookstore on Monday. That may be on Broadway in Manhattan, but at least one East Hampton author will be there, A.M. Homes, to be joined by other novelists: Dale Peck, Emily Gould, and Lev Grossman. 

Starting at 6:30 p.m., they will discuss “the impact Rosset had in reshaping American culture,” according to a release.

“Citizen Scientist”

Mary Ellen Hannibal

The Experiment, $25.95

“What we need to do is humanize the scientists and simonize the humanists,” C.P. Snow argued in his highly influential 1959 talk, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” which drew attention to the rift between the sciences and the humanities and sparked decades of contentious debate. Fifty-seven years later, obvious signs of this rift continue in the increasing specialization of academic scientific and humanistic inquiry, in the consequent separation of academic and public discourse, and in what some say is rising scientific and cultural illiteracy. 

Yet, visible and encouraging signs of repair sprout and grow in many diverse places: STEM to STEAM projects that incorporate art into science, technology, and mathematics education, National Parks Service artists-in-residence programs that support poetry and art in parks, and a 2014 study in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics that analyzed painting from 1500 to 2000 for evidence of climate change, to name a few.

Mary Ellen Hannibal’s recent book, “Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction,” takes readers on an epic journey that traverses the terrain where the sciences and humanities meet and where hope issues from dialogue between the public and specialists. She reveals the continuing importance of Snow’s argument as she illustrates the imperative for all of us, whether we are trained in the sciences or the humanities, whether we are professionals or amateurs, to use all of the tools — from science and art, psychology and literature, geology and music — available and to fashion new tools when necessary to stave off environmental catastrophe and preserve biodiversity. 

Ms. Hannibal’s primary focus is the contributions of regular people, citizen scientists who volunteer their time to projects that generate data that scientists and other professionals use to try to effect change and preserve life on earth. 

She begins with the work of Tim Morton, a philosopher who has made foundational contributions to the emerging field of posthumanism, an interdisciplinary movement that seeks to redefine human identity in the context of the anthropocene — the scientific name for our era, an era marked by unprecedented anthropogenic impact on the planet and all its inhabitants. This impact, Mr. Morton and other posthumanists argue, results not only from the material consequences of the Industrial Revolution but also from the ideological consequences of modernist ways of understanding that posit humans above other creatures. To respond to current environmental threats, we need to topple this artificial hierarchy.

Ms. Hannibal furthers the work of posthumanists by blending together literary and scientific traditions to create a humbling picture of the role of humans on the planet. Her work, which includes references to Carl Jung, Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, and many others, shows us how literature and myth as well as data collection and analysis are all essential to our understanding of ourselves, the physical worlds in which we live, our neighbors, and our relationships. 

She raises interesting, important questions about how personal stories intersect with family stories, stories from literature, and the stories scientists piece together from data about changes in the natural world. Reading her book makes us consider how our experience of time is shaped by stories, how human experience of time intersects with, registers, and, ultimately, makes an impact upon geological time, and how this alters our understanding of ourselves and our responsibilities as global citizens.

Ms. Hannibal has a direct answer: Participate in citizen science. In doing so, we will not only be active participants in solutions to environmental problems, we will also be engaging in an activity that originated with the founding of democracy in the United States. A growing movement in the 21st century, citizen science was a crucial aspect of colonial American culture, an early yet oft-forgotten element of the construction of democracy, a project largely enabled by the work of colonial women, Native Americans, African slaves, and others who collected specimens that were sent to the Royal Society of London. Their efforts intimately connected scientific work with culture work.

Like any adventure story, Ms. Hannibal’s book includes a cast of characters. In this case, the characters fall into four categories: the author and her family, especially her father, Edward Hannibal, a writer and advertising executive; the teams of scientists whose professional work addresses climate change, habitat loss, and dwindling biodiversity; the citizen scientists whose volunteer contributions allow the scientists to document these changes, and the ecosystem itself, an entity whose fate is uncertain. 

The parallels between Ms. Hannibal’s relationship with her dying father and habitat loss and species decline personalize and revitalize the story of environmental destruction — a story many have become inured to as we are oversaturated with information and emotional appeals.

In many ways, Ms. Hannibal’s exacting attention to detail amplifies her primary message of urgency and hope — the environmental crisis is manifest in a dizzying number of ways. Exponentially growing teams of amateurs and professionals are working to protect the planet. There are so many ways for us to get more involved, to be heroes, to create hope, to save our home — but, at times, I felt these details overwhelming. 

Then I remembered the words of Immanuel Kant, the ethicist and theorist of the sublime, an 18th-century movement that attempted to articulate concepts that move us beyond conventions, who wrote in “The Critique of Pure Reason”: “Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.” 

While Ms. Hannibal’s use of details verges on the sublime, her language — especially her descriptive writing — is unquestionably beautiful, and she punctuates her grave analysis with levity and humor that made me laugh out loud.

Ultimately, Ms. Hannibal reminds us that we are part of something bigger, that we can take concrete steps to preserve biodiversity and planetary health, that our individual work has collective effect, and that this really matters. For these reasons, “Citizen Scientist” is an important book. If we want to ensure the survival of its central character, we ought to heed Snow’s advice, come together, and engage in the projects Ms. Hannibal describes.

Stephanie Wade is assistant professor and director of writing at Unity College in Maine. She spends summers in East Hampton.

Mary Ellen Hannibal grew up in East Hampton. A past recipient of the National Association of Science Writers’ Science in Society Award, she lives in San Francisco.

“The North Water”

by Ian McGuire

A blood-and-guts adventure story about a doomed whaling ship as it heads toward the North Pole. Comparisons to the works of Conrad and Melville are only half true; stylistically Mr. McGuire is a much sparer writer and much friendlier to the modern reader. But the way he explores themes of good and evil by putting men in extreme situations is right in line with the great 19th-century adventure writers. 

This is not a book for the squeamish: The author pours on more gore than an episode of “The Walking Dead.” It is, however, a swift, relentless thrill ride, and probably the best book of fiction published this year. (Henry Holt, $27)

“Mischling”

by Affinity Konar

A deeply troubling and moving novel about Pearl and Stasha, two sisters who are placed in the “Zoo” at Auschwitz, the laboratory where Josef Mengele conducted his experiments. There they submit to Mengele’s tests with the promise that their mother and grandmother will get better treatment from the Nazis. 

Ms. Konar’s lyrical style mitigates some of the material’s grimness, and surprisingly there is plenty of light in this novel of darkness. The rare book that manages to be both harrowing and beautiful. (Lee Boudreaux Books/Little, Brown, $27)

“American Heiress”

by Jeffery Toobin

If you are around my age, you remember those startling television images as a child — the woman in the trench coat moving through a bank holding a machine gun. It became even more startling when you learned that this woman was an heiress to the greatest publishing fortune in American history. Was Patty Hearst coerced into participating in revolutionary activities, or was she acting of her own volition?

Uncovering new documents, Mr. Toobin lets readers decide for themselves, though never fails to keep the pages turning with this riveting account of wealth, privilege, and revolution in what was one of the biggest news stories of the 1970s. (Doubleday, $28.95)

“Hillbilly Elegy”

by J.D. Vance

Mr. Vance’s memoir, about the pain and tribulation of a Rust Belt family, is being touted as the book to help liberals understand Donald Trump’s election victory. Pulling no punches, Mr. Vance chronicles his own family’s life of poverty, violence, alcoholism, and occasional joy. That Mr. Vance himself somehow escaped doom seems a miracle (a cousin pushed him to join the Marines, and from there he attended Ohio State and Yale Law School). 

But the author’s prognosis is dispiriting: A mixture of tribalism, sloth, drug addiction, and antigovernment sentiment, he contends, makes for a cycle of depression and disappointment not likely to be transformed by brash campaign promises. (Harper, $27.99)

“Before the Fall”

by Noah Hawley

It’s just not fair that the author Noah Hawley is also an accomplished screenwriter and producer, with credits that include television shows like “Fargo” and “Bones.” “Before the Fall” is the best thriller of the year, even if it is not a traditional nail-biter. There is a breathtaking prologue in which after a plane crash a man with a broken arm saves a young boy by swimming 10 miles to safety off Long Island Sound. However, as the writer begins to unravel the mystery of who sabotaged the plane, he eschews the usual thrills and chills of lesser books. Instead he aims his focus on the three great American subjects: fame, media, and money. 

The ending isn’t exactly revelatory; the real surprise may be just how good a fiction writer Mr. Hawley is — there are moments when his prose can remind you of midcareer Don DeLillo. (Grand Central, $26)

“Everybody Behaves Badly”

by Lesley M.M. Blume

A biography focusing on the most romantic period of Ernest Hemingway’s life, when he was part of Parisian cafe society, running with the bulls, and formulating his first masterpiece, “The Sun Also Rises.” There are all the familiar stories, including Hemingway’s epic drinking, bullying, and monastic dedication to his craft. But what is fascinating here is Hemingway’s cynical approach to ambition, doing whatever it costs to become both a great and famous writer. With a nearly Machiavellian eye for success, the “good and true” Hem seemed more than willing to forgo friendships or pit people against one another as it suited his purposes.

And for all this, Ms. Blume still makes her subject somehow sympathetic; she chronicles a man of outsized charisma and gusto for life who still fascinates us despite his faults. (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27)

“The Nix”

by Nathan Hill

A story about a failed novelist and college professor who reunites with the mother who abandoned him as a child. Sound less than exciting? Mr. Hill’s writing makes it all worthwhile. In fact, as the protagonist digs into his mother’s past, so does the author dig into America. There are dizzying asides about education, self-entitlement, media, the counterculture, gaming addiction, American sanctimony, and so on, and all articulated in a variety of styles. 

At times Mr. Hill can even resemble the late David Foster Wallace — just when you think he has written himself into a corner, he comes out the other side, winded, but having completely won you over. (Knopf, $27.95) 

“The Underground Railroad”

by Colson Whitehead 

A story of slavery that reimagines the Underground Railroad as real instead of metaphorical. It must be said that this novel — which won this year’s National Book Award for fiction — has disappointed some readers with its uneven narrative trajectory. Momentum is often stalled as Mr. Whitehead employs his elaborate set pieces in an attempt to reconceive history. For all its avant-garde touches, however, Mr. Whitehead manages to anchor the emotional heart of the story with Cora, the runaway slave girl trying desperately to get to the North. She’s a heroine worth rooting for. (Doubleday, $26.95)

“At the Existentialist Cafe”

by Sarah Bakewell

You hear the word “existential” being used nearly everywhere these days, especially by television pundits and political journalists (“America is facing an existential crisis . . .”). This may have something to do with the surprise success of Ms. Bakewell’s book, which put the word back into the modern lexicon. Existentialism was the philosophy that tried to make sense of the world following the Holocaust and the advent of the atom bomb, and the author follows its evolution from the postwar Parisian cafes to the contemporary era.

Ms. Bakewell gives the reader colorful portraits of the philosophy’s progenitors and thankfully isn’t above a little gossip here and there to lighten the intellectual load. (Other Press, $25)

“Evicted”

by Matthew Desmond

Mr. Desmond offers a bleak account of the housing meltdown of 2008 and 2009. The setting is Milwaukee, though it could be almost any other American city, as job loss and predatory lending ravage the lives of the poor and lower middle class. With exhaustive research, the author focuses on a number of families as they face eviction, chronicling the fear and humiliation of losing one’s home. (There is revenge, too, as some tenants decide to go down with a fight.)

The author avoids overt political assertions, though the subtext is obvious: A winner-take-all economy is destroying our country. (Crown, $28)

Kurt Wenzel is a novelist who lives in Springs.

“Eleanor Roosevelt: The War Years and After”

Blanche Wiesen Cook

Viking, $40

Reading Blanche Wiesen Cook’s concluding volume of her three-part biography of Eleanor Roosevelt in the weeks following the 2016 election, one is struck by the parallels between her life and that of another former first lady much in the news this year, Hillary Clinton.

Both women excelled at their academic work and found early leadership opportunities in their school settings. For “ER,” as Ms. Cook calls Eleanor throughout her biography, the British boarding school Allenswood Academy allowed her to escape a painful childhood marked by loneliness and neglect, as she enjoyed great popularity among her fellow students and the doting attention of teachers who recognized her precocious intellect. For H.R.C., Wellesley of the 1960s provided the radical ground for her to leave behind the conventions of her rather conservative Midwestern upbringing for a more liberal path, a course Eleanor had always pursued. 

Both women married young, setting aside a bit of their own personal ambitions for the political aspirations of their husbands, though this hardly represented a surprising sacrifice for Eleanor given the time period. As wives, Eleanor and Hillary endured the pain of their husbands’ infidelities yet refused to let those marital betrayals undo their husbands’ public lives even if doing so came at the expense of their own personal well-being. (Eleanor’s heartbreak over F.D.R.’s romantic liaisons forms a constant theme of the book, although she also pursued her own intimate relationships, including with other women.) 

Far more liberal than their husbands, Eleanor and Hillary both tried to move them to the left while in the White House, with varying effect. F.D.R. often rejected Eleanor’s policy suggestions — and sometimes even refused to hear from her — but his presidency still showed the signs of her influence. “She was his conscience,” Ms. Cook writes, “and she knew it.”

After their time in the White House, both women expanded their political roles. Named by President Truman to the U.S. delegation to the United Nations, Eleanor helped author the monumental Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Hillary’s own political pursuits, of course, are well known, but it seems certain that she would not have been able to achieve — or perhaps even envision — so much of her political career and public influence had it not been for the history-making example of Eleanor Roosevelt. 

Eleanor’s singularity — her unique and original life — stands out on each page of Ms. Cook’s thoughtful and thorough book. Ms. Cook, a distinguished historian and professor at the City University of New York, chronicled Eleanor’s life from her birth through the start of F.D.R.’s second term in two doorstopper-sized books published in the 1990s. Volume 3, which begins in 1939, lands just as heavily, coming in at nearly 600 pages, yet the constant delight of Ms. Cook’s book — and of the whole series — is how page-turning her account remains from start to finish. 

Certainly, few 20th-century figures provide richer and more meaningful material to investigate than Eleanor Roosevelt. Yet the same work in the hands of a lesser biographer might easily have been weighed down by the sheer scope of Eleanor’s life and the relentless pace with which she led it. Instead, Ms. Cook balances her detailed examination of Eleanor’s political life, her active presence in the White House, and her tireless advocacy work, especially for civil rights and poverty causes, with a rich evocation of Eleanor’s complicated and often conflicted personal life, including the many friendships and associations that sustained her during her frequent bouts of depression. 

What emerges is an engrossing and often moving portrayal of one of the most important figures of the 20th century who, as Ms. Cook argues, “changed history.”

Despite her privileged background, Eleanor “identified with, and worked especially for, people in want, in need, in trouble,” Ms. Cook explains. Eleanor’s difficult childhood as the daughter of an uninterested mother and an alcoholic father endured greater pain after both parents died two years apart when Eleanor was only 8 and 10. Orphaned and believing herself unloved, Eleanor channeled her personal hurts into advocacy for others, particularly the poor and African-Americans. 

On matters of helping the impoverished, Eleanor and her husband generally found agreement, but the question of African-Americans and U.S. race relations opened up deeper divisions between the two. F.D.R.’s ability to pass important New Deal legislation, including the creation of Social Security, depended on gaining support from Southern Democratic legislators. The president ensured their votes by agreeing to deny Social Security benefits to domestic and agricultural workers, largely African-Americans, a political bargain that horrified Eleanor. She grew more enraged as F.D.R. failed to revise the Social Security Act to include African-Americans in the years after its 1935 passage. 

But on other issues, Eleanor found her own way, working closely with the N.A.A.C.P. against lynching, pushing the military to end racial segregation, and providing critical support for Marian Anderson’s famous concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. In all things, Eleanor displayed her unceasing passion for the vulnerable, enflamed all the more by the seeming lack of interest of the powerful, including her husband. “No woman has ever so comforted the distressed — or distressed the comfortable,” her good friend Clare Luce Boothe once rightly said of her.

Spanning 23 years over all, the bulk of Volume 3 concerns the war years from 1939 to 1945. Eleanor, attuned as always to the sufferings of the powerless, vigilantly followed the plight of European Jews under the threat of Nazism. Over and over again, she pressed F.D.R. and the State Department to intervene on behalf of Jewish refugees seeking sanctuary in the United States, to little avail. Boatloads of Jewish exiles traveled up and down the East Coast waiting for clearance to dock as Eleanor tried to secure them entry, but most of them were denied, sent back to Europe to face a terrifying fate. 

Eleanor’s frequent frustrations, both political and personal, with her husband structured her daily life. In private, Eleanor constantly pushed her viewpoints on the president, often provoking blistering wrath or chilling silence. (Her letters to friends and her diary entries recorded far darker thoughts, often undone as she was by the strained nature of their marriage.) 

In public, Eleanor softened her criticisms, but she still occasionally used her “My Day” newspaper column — read by millions of Americans six days a week — to voice her disagreements with the administration. More often, however, Eleanor remained F.D.R.’s fiercest advocate, championing the provisions of the New Deal against a vicious assault from conservative legislators and throwing herself into the re-election efforts for his third and fourth administrations. 

Initially she had not wanted him to run for a third term in office, but once she understood that the New Deal was at stake if he did not remain president, she rallied to the cause. F.D.R.’s fourth and final run for the presidency in 1944 was a foregone conclusion, coming as it did deep into the U.S.’s involvement in World War II. He won both elections in landslides, just as he had his first two. 

F.D.R. would not live long into that last presidency, dying in April of 1945 at his personal retreat in Warm Springs, Ga., where he had gone to rest. Eleanor, who remained at the White House, received the news of his death by a phone call. She would later learn that their daughter, Anna, had arranged for Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, F.D.R.’s mistress 30 years before, to visit with him in Warm Springs during his last days. That affair destroyed Eleanor when she had discovered it nearly 10 years into their marriage, but it had also helped set her life on a different path as she realized the relationship’s greatest potential existed in what the pair could achieve together politically. Ms. Cook notes that no historical evidence exists to tell us how Eleanor responded to this last betrayal by F.D.R.

For all the book’s detail, Ms. Cook ends her volume with a swift and thin accounting of the final 17 years of Eleanor’s life after F.D.R.’s death, a disappointing conclusion to an otherwise excellent and thorough series. Those years contained some of Eleanor’s most impressive accomplishments, not the least of which included her work as one of the authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a towering achievement that set the standard for human rights laws in nations around the world. Certainly Cook had to leave out or shorten elements of Eleanor’s life to keep the book a manageable size. But the decision to do this for the time after F.D.R. seems odd considering how much Eleanor accomplished on her own. 

Indeed, if Eleanor Roosevelt is Hillary Clinton’s personal role model, as she has indicated, reading more about how much Eleanor still contributed to significant political change after suffering a terrible loss could serve as an inspiring example not only for the former first lady turned politician, but for all of us who have faced difficult setbacks.

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

Blanche Wiesen Cook has a house in Springs.

“Awakening From

the Daydream”

David Nichtern

Wisdom Publications, $15.95

David Nichtern, a meditation teacher, has written a remarkably useful and succinct handbook of Buddhist practice and psychological concepts. In “Awakening From the Daydream” he brings an esoteric side of Tibetan Buddhism into comfortable vernacular. As a practicing teacher, Mr. Nichtern has a nuts-and-bolts feel for communicating the subtleties of meditation. 

And meditation is indeed a practice, whether a sudden Zen encounter or an incremental change in point of view. The mind is a slippery country that Mr. Nichtern navigates with skill and aplomb. He teaches periodically in East Hampton between tours to Japan and around the U.S., producing online courses, and the musical endeavors that are the other side of his persona.

The Wheel of Life, on which the book is based, is a Tibetan diagram of karma and reincarnation. It reflects a many-layered vision of reality in which a human birth is one of many in a progression. It leads ultimately to a state of freedom not different from the Buddha’s nirvana. Practically speaking, the process is to see through the veil of our desires, impulses, and actions to the truth of the matter. While the wheel traditionally illustrates different heaven, hell, and human realms, it can also be interpreted as Mr. Nichtern does, as different mind states.

Beginning in 1970, Mr. Nichtern studied with the Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. A Rinpoche is an honored teacher and Trungpa was considered a tulku, or reincarnation of a high lama. He was an early émigré to the U.K. from the Tibetan diaspora following the Communist Chinese invasion of that fabled Himalayan theocracy. Because of his monastic training and status, Trungpa was highly educated. He enrolled in Oxford, later moved to Scotland, and then the U.S., where he founded the Shambhala lineage with a teaching center in Barnet, Vt., and Naropa University in Boulder, Colo., accredited as one of the few Buddhist universities in this country. 

A skilled practitioner, spiritual teacher, and writer, Trungpa became widely known for his book “Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism.” He was also a man of excess, intoxication, and promiscuity, which somehow managed not to dilute his spirituality. In 1974, the first season of Naropa, I remember him giving a pellucid lecture on the intricacies of Buddhist doctrine, frequently sipping from a glass he refilled from a pitcher. It appeared to be water but was probably not. Trungpa’s combination of wry humor and deep wisdom was a potent attraction to Westerners eager for an authentic transmission of Buddhism, and enjoying life on the path.

Mr. Nichtern absorbed and permuted Trungpa’s teaching over many years. “Awakening From the Daydream” bridges the rifts of time and heritage between Tibetan Buddhism and contemporary America with clean lines and simple examples. He makes a strong case for Buddhism as a practical toolbox for dealing with the mind.

A primary tenet (or my interpretation thereof) is that reality reflects our mind-set and is a projection of our internal narrative, the thought-story we constantly tell ourselves about who we are and what we think is going on. It turns out who we think we are is not who we are — behind it all we are pure awareness, presence, we are. The mindstuff and the phenomena keep changing; change is the only constant — impermanence! By acknowledging our common situation, our sameness, we build a sense of interconnection with all human experience — compassion! Development of compassion, especially for oneself, is a central building block of this practice.

It’s not easy to see our true situation. As Mr. Nichtern says in “Awakening,” “The mindset of the human realm may be the most transparent and undetectable of all the realms. To become aware of our human realm perspective is like a fish trying to see the water in which it swims.” It takes practice, hence the need for meditation to gain insight into the mind and bring us into the present. He notes, “The awakened state is said to be none other than fully experiencing our life in this very moment.”

About understanding the Wheel of Life, he says, “The Wheel portrays the ways we get trapped in repetitive patterns and imprison ourselves emotionally, intellectually, and in relation to our external life circumstances. In addition to describing the form of our imprisonment, the Wheel also points to a pathway out, to freedom, liberation, true peace, and real happiness.” 

The Wheel of Life depicts the Buddhist view that the material reality we inhabit as individuals is underlaid by a subtler one in which our consciousness transmigrates from one incarnation (literally, “in the meat”) to another, dictated by the subtle traces left by our actions, thoughts, and feelings, our karma. The Wheel is a graphic allegory of how awareness interacts with karma, and the opportunity it presents for liberation and long-term fulfillment. 

Mr. Nichtern explores this dynamic in ways we can relate to in daily life: “Our minds influence the environment, and the environment influences our minds. Through this loop the realms develop tremendous power.” Later he notes, “Our daydream world, with the familiar stories we weave into it, actually keeps us one step removed from vividly experiencing the moment as it occurs.” And further, “Ultimately the Wheel teachings point toward a state of natural wakefulness that transcends the notion of karma altogether.”

Karma and reincarnation may seem a fantastical reality to us — that’s okay. I recall an account of an interviewer who asked a Zen roshi, an accomplished Buddhist teacher, his opinion about reincarnation. The roshi closed his eyes for a moment and said, “Reincarnation is not an opinion,” and he slammed his fist on the table. “It’s a fact!”

Although Mr. Nichtern writes well of Buddhist loving kindness meditation or metta practice, for me as a student who treads the devotional side of the spiritual path, I would like more about transcendent love as a catalyst for liberation. I find the relation between devotion and detachment fascinating, somewhere between falling in love and letting go, or as E.E. Cummings wrote, 

let all go.

so comes love.

“Awakening From the Daydream” is an excellent guidebook to “skillful means,” techniques both for starting out and for pursuing one’s spiritual development. There is deep wisdom here and a functional understanding that we are a point of view immersed in a mystery.

Rameshwar Das co-wrote “Polishing the Mirror” with Ram Dass. He lives in Springs.

David Nichtern, a composer and song­writer, has a house in East Hampton.

“The Kingdom of Speech”

Tom Wolfe

Little, Brown, $26

My problem with Tom Wolfe is that he has too much fun. Are we supposed to take him seriously when he hilariously skewers the greedy class in his “Bonfire of the Vanities,” or the art crowd in “The Painted Word”? Mr. Wolfe specializes in satire sure to offend everybody. We worry that he will be roundly attacked by the humorless. Does he know this? 

Does he know when he attacks mainline Christians in “The Kingdom of Speech” as moo-cows that he will arouse a bit of miff? Has he thought of the consequences of laughing at the godfathers of evolution theory (Wallace and Darwin) and the progenitor of language notions (Noam Chomsky)? One wants to race to our neighbor in Southampton and offer protection to this dapper spewer of raucous observations. 

That said, I’m glad he wrote “The Kingdom of Speech.” Somebody had to stand up and say this whole evolution business is worth a second look. Myself, I prefer the curious Eve with the apple, the dopey Adam who takes her bait. It seems to be true, as only fiction can be — and let’s face it, the Bible is 90 percent historical fiction that needs a good editor. But it is true in a way that nonfiction never can be.

So, what’s this “Kingdom of Speech” all about? Once upon a time there was a self-taught Englishman named Alfred Russel Wallace, the “flycatcher” who labored in distant jungles and came up with a theory of evolution, but Charles Darwin, a gentleman of the top drawer, beat him into print and got credit, or blame, for this most upsetting idea — that we were not created by God but journeyed from lower forms by a procesof natural selection.

Today that popularly means “every day in every way we are getting better and better,” which on the face of it should cancel the theory right off. Think about the natural selection process that delivered the atomic bomb, global warming, the babble of the internet, and Donald Trump.

Then consider my dog Sedgwick, an intelligent fellow who wishes nobody harm and enjoys fellowship at the Springs Dog Park, where every sort of canine — tiny, huge, black, white, brown, spotted, old, young — gets along just fine. Sedgwick is definitely of a higher order than me and my fellow clever baboons that strut around grasping for happiness, renown, and more stuff and consider themselves superior.

That should finish off the theory of natural selection rather quickly. 

But Tom Wolfe has another sharp angle in this evolution business — language, where does it come from? Alfred Wallace could not explain language and renounced natural selection. In the 20th century Noam Chomsky cooked up his idea of “a language organ” that accounts for the unique speech ability of all humans. Poor Chomsky — who is featured in half this slim volume — is obliterated by the howling Wolfe. 

Conclusion: The theory of evolution is “baggy, boggy, soggy, and leaking all over the place,” as Mr. Wolfe so brightly dismisses it. My theory that Sedgwick is better than most sapiens holds up much better. So does the Genesis tale in my church down the road in Springs.

Bill Henderson is the publisher of the Pushcart Press in Springs and author most recently of the memoir “Cathedral.”

“True Believer”

Kati Marton

Simon & Schuster, $27

Why and how does someone come to embrace a compulsive myth and commit totally to a humanitarian cause for achieving worldwide perpetual perfection? Answering this problem requires an understanding of the subject’s historical context. 

Noel Field, the complex “idealist and dreamer” Kati Marton interprets in her forcefully argued new book, “True Believer: Stalin’s Last American Spy,” was affected by injustice and hypocrisy in early-20th-century America. And intertwined with alienating aspects of time and place were individual factors that drove his conversion to Communism, “a faith that imbued his life with meaning.” Personal needs and historical circumstances thus made him a true believer.

Field’s early life foreshadowed this unusual trajectory. He was born in Switzerland, where his Quaker father, descended from antislavery New Englanders, headed a biological research institute. In 1918, father and adolescent son toured horrific battlefields of the Western Front, where “Noel took his father’s unspoken message to heart: Do something to prevent the next one,” by starting a Peace League of Youth at his Swiss school. One of his classmates was Herta Vieser, who would become his wife and continuous political supporter. 

In 1921, the elder Field died suddenly. “How differently,” Ms. Marton imagines, “might Field’s tragic life have turned out had his father lived long enough to harness his son’s idealism to a milder faith?”

He did, however, return to his father’s roots when the remaining family moved to Massachusetts and he enrolled at Harvard, earning an honors degree in 1924. Beyond the classroom, he found a different form of education, the sensational Boston trial, conviction, and execution of two Italian-born philosophical anarchists charged with armed robbery and murder. Protesters raged that the pair had been found guilty because of their radical beliefs rather than the crime.

“The case took seven agonizing years to resolve — seven years during which [Nicola] Sacco and [Bartolomeo] Van­zetti languished in prison and young idealists like Noel Field grew more estranged from their country.”

“True Believer” shows that Sacco and Vanzetti’s electrocutions hastened the Communist International. U.S. history textbooks typically discuss this as an example of President Woodrow Wilson’s post-World War I repression of alien radicals. Ms. Marton demonstrates that Lenin’s propaganda tools seized the opportunity to exploit widespread opposition by influencing public opinion through sympathetic spokespersons globally, discrediting America while extolling Russia. 

Against this background, Field became a Foreign Service officer posted in Washington, D.C. The nation’s capital magnified contradictions not just between Russia and America, but between American ideals and realities. Everyday life in Washington operated according to Jim Crow codes, which the newly married Fields defied. They lived in a racially mixed neighborhood, had friends of color, and denounced segregation. Field was also leaning more leftward in his thinking, succumbing to the “siren song of the Soviet myth: man and society leveled, the promise of a new day for humanity.”

Believing that Russia promised universal amelioration, more than 40 men and women in F.D.R.’s administration established a secret cell — Apparatus A — to infiltrate the government and transmit stolen secrets to Moscow. In 1934, Field “was rated [by K.G.B. operatives] among the rising young men in the State Department,” well suited to become a clandestine agent. 

Looked at from his standpoint, it would be possible to serve the workers’ paradise and stay loyal to the United States. Ms. Marton recounts an evening when Field took a group of comrades to the Lincoln Memorial, where, one of them recalled, he proceeded to sing “the ‘Internationale’ . . . at the top of his voice — in Russian!” Ultimately he could not have it both ways; his spying tied him to Stalin and totalitarianism, and to Alger Hiss and unAmericanism. 

“Field, it appears, was an eager but maladroit spy.” On the other hand, Ms. Marton is adept at explaining his eventful career. During the mid-1930s he was back in Switzerland working for the League of Nations Disarmament Section. He served as a league commissioner assisting refugees from Fascist brutality during the Spanish Civil War, which led to the Fields’ foster daughter, Erica Glaser. (Noel and Herta had decided against having children “for the sake of the great cause.”) 

Another refugee project was the Boston-based Unitarian Service Committee clinic that they operated after the fall of France. During World War II Field accepted an assignment from the Office of Strategic Services, facilitated by the future Central Intelligence Agency director Allen Dulles, to gather Nazi secrets, information that the double agent could pass along to Russia. But it was an American government association that would prove disastrous for him.

In October 1948, the confessed former apparatchik Whittaker Chambers accused Field and Hiss of having been Communists conspiring with the Russians. The next fall, after being lured to Prague to interview for a Charles University teaching appointment, Field was kidnapped, transported to Budapest, tortured by Hungarian secret police, and forced “into confessing that his rescue of Communists was a cover for recruiting them for Dulles and the other archtraitor, Tito.” 

For six terrible years the Fields (Herta had been arrested, too) endured maximum-security prisons. Then, through Washington-Moscow negotiations and C.I.A. use of a Polish defector, they were suddenly released. The Fields did not leave Hungary, though. They gained asylum, moved into an apartment, and he was given a job at The New Hungarian Quarterly. From that position he defended Russia’s use of military power in November 1956 to crush the anti-Soviet rebellion, which killed 20,000 freedom fighters and resulted in mass arrests. 

Soon afterward, he and Herta were interviewed by a Hungarian couple, journalists reporting for American wire services who had been held in the same prison at almost the same time as the Fields, Ilona and Endre Marton.

Ms. Marton is their daughter. Her curiosity about this remarkable meeting provided the germ of “True Believer,” and her sourcing of the book benefited from “many hours of conversation with Endre and Ilona Marton.” Additionally, she was able to gain unique oral history accounts from persons involved with Field. And there is even a bit of insider enhancement from her own recollections of Budapest 60 years ago.

Ms. Marton has researched hitherto unavailable private papers as well as library and archival materials. This highlights the historiographical point that her critical perspective on Soviet subversion references recent scholarship. Since the mid-1990s, declassified files and decoded cables have prompted historians to reassess the “witch hunt” trope concerning the government’s post-World War II zealous pursuit of Communists. Ms. Marton interprets this as coming “long past when the witches were dead. In the early to mid-’30s, however, they were very much alive.” 

Her writing is characterized by sentences of this sort. Much of the narrative about spying involves cold-bloodedness, and her vivid descriptive passages appropriately evoke terror. Moreover, she renders gripping situations such as cruel show trials and gulag interrogation sessions to great effect.

Ms. Marton’s study is rewarding for its accounts of crucial aspects of modern American and European history, but also for its intriguing implications concerning the power of ideology more broadly. Will there be Noel Fields in other places at other times? If so, could there be different outcomes for those true believers?

J. Kirkpatrick Flack is retired from the University of Maryland, where he taught American history. He lives part time in Bridgehampton.

Kati Marton’s previous book was “Paris: A Love Story.” She has a house in Bridgehampton.

“Feminine Products”

Rita Plush

Penumbra Publishing, $11.99

You are in the bookstore and your eye falls idly on the cover of a new book. It is called “Feminine Products,” and the cover shows a wispy female form covered in little flowers, like a Tampax ad. Does it inspire you to grab it? Hell, no! 

But grit your teeth, file your impression in the “What were they thinking?” drawer, and pick it up, because Rita Plush’s latest novel is entertaining and, well, soothing. And we’ve been in need of soothing recently.

If you confess to being a greedy reader rather than a gourmet reader, then you know all about skipping. Your eye effortlessly scans the page, picks out the plums, and leaves the pudding. If you find that you are not skipping, then you may have a writer who, like Ms. Plush, has a spare style — lively, quirky, at times tangential, but pretty much all plums and no pudding.

Rusty Scanlon runs a successful boutique and an unsuccessful love life. She doesn’t trust men, who tend to run out on her, starting with her father, who abandoned her and her mother when she was only 6 years old. Now, nearly 40, she has discovered she is pregnant. With her history, she doesn’t want to raise a child without a father, but her fellow, Walter, although he dotes on her, does not appear ready to take on the role.

Rusty has wounds from the past, including having been raped at 16, but so, she learns, does Walter, who is still crushed by guilt from an accident when he was a teenager that killed his little brother.

With Walter making a serious attempt to leave his past behind and choose to live, Rusty realizes that she must find her father and get over her own hang-ups. The appearance of a smooth-talking con man who is also looking for him may be an opportunity to run him to earth.

Years before, this man seduced Rusty’s mother and stole her savings. One of the hints that Ms. Plush is not going to lead us into the Slough of Despond is that the feisty mother follows him, breaks into his house, steals his checkbook, forges a check, and gets her money back.

I have to say that the parallel story about this con man, Woody or Hank or whatever name he is currently using, is pretty bizarre and does stretch the credulity a little, but as he is a sort of lumbering deus ex machina that keeps the plot rolling, you shrug and move along.

Meanwhile, Jack Paul, the deadbeat dad, has been wandering from town to town, taking temporary jobs, never staying in one place for very long. He is a carpenter, and among the book’s more enjoyable tangents are some marvelous snippets of information about woodworking. A chance job as a substitute shop teacher in a high school, lighting a spark of enthusiasm in a bunch of sullen teenagers, finally allows him to regain a sense of self-worth.

He sets to work to create the dollhouse he once promised his daughter but never made. It will be a copy of the house they were living in when he abandoned his family.

Just him and the house now, he’s gluing rough sandpaper to the plywood walls to get the stucco finish he remembers. It’s exacting work. He has to be careful to spread the glue just shy of the edges so when he presses the paper to the walls, it won’t ooze out between the seams, and measure and fit the paper so he ends up with as few seams as possible.

His fingers move as if without command from his brain. His fingers are his brain, an extension of his tools — tiny precision tools he’s mastered as if he’s never held a full-size wrench or screwdriver. Miniature implements like tweezers, small manicuring scissors . . . a small-scale miter box he made himself. . . .

Then he, too, sets out on the journey to find his daughter.

Disaster looms in various different ways and makes your heart sink, but though it does a lot of looming, it never arrives. It’s not “Gone Girl.” It’s not “The Girl on the Train.” It’s about homecoming and how even the most dysfunctional and wounded people can heal. And for that, thank you, Ms. Plush.

Sheridan Sansegundo, a former arts editor of The Star, lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

Rita Plush, who lives in Queens, is the author of “Lily Steps Out,” a novel, and “Alterations,” a book of short stories. She had a house in East Hampton until last year.