“Max Baer and 

Barney Ross”

Jeffrey Sussman

Rowman & Littlefield, $36

Jewish boxers? Somehow, Jews as boxers sounds like a contradiction in terms, or a comical misprint, perhaps a racist joke. Jews, generally, are depicted as a gentle people who would choose to resolve a conflict with wit and tongue rather than with brawn and a right cross. 

But this is a flawed reading of history. The bravery and tenacity of the Jewish people, especially as heroic warriors, are renowned throughout the centuries. A sturdy, proud people, their past is well populated with courageous warriors: Moses, Joshua, Samson, Saul, David, the Maccabees, and Bar Kokhba, to name a few. 

From ancient times to the present, the fighting spirit of the Jews has been unquestioned. The many Jewish boxing champions and contenders celebrated in Jeffrey Sussman’s “Max Baer and Barney Ross: Jewish Heroes of Boxing” exemplify this great fighting tradition. Jewish dedication, perseverance, and intelligence have set fine examples for those who follow in their footsteps. 

When I think of Max Baer, the Jewish heavyweight champion of the 1930s, I think of a man with raw, Tarzan-like strength. In the ring, he was a man of polished muscle, and when he hit you, you stayed hit. 

Was Max Baer actually Jewish? Well, you decide. . . .

He was born in Omaha on Feb. 11, 1909, to a Jewish father and a mother of Scots-Irish descent. His family moved first to Colorado and then to California, where he dropped out of school after the eighth grade to work with his father on a cattle ranch.

Max Baer proudly wore the Star of David stitched on his trunks when entering the ring. He was boxing’s most colorful world heavyweight champion until a brash Muhammad Ali rolled around 30 years later. 

Baer, a 6-foot-4-inch mountain of muscle and movie-star handsome, could have been such a star instead of a boxer. But Mad Cap Maxie just loved to fight. And fight he did, racking up an impressive knockout streak in California. 

As Mr. Sussman points out, Baer had one of the hardest punches in heavyweight history. Early in his career, Frankie Campbell died after his knockout loss to Baer. Years later, the heavyweight Ernie Schaaf died following his defeat to Primo Carnera, but most people say it was Ernie’s savage beating at the hands of Max Baer only a few months before that resulted in his death. 

As Mr. Sussman accurately points out, Baer loved to fight, but he loved the nightlife more. He was famous for dancing and drinking the night away with beautiful women instead of training. In 1934, however, the eccentric Max got serious enough to deliver a brutal beating to Primo Carnera to win the world heavyweight title. 

Unfortunately, his total disdain for training caused him to lose his title to a 20-to-1 underdog, James Braddock, less than a year later. Mr. Sussman quotes Jack Dempsey regarding Baer’s lackluster performance, staged at Madison Square Garden: “Max Baer’s dilly-dallying and clowning caught up with him in the ring. There was not a dissenting voice raised when the long shot was declared the winner. Braddock won clearly on aggressiveness and clean hitting.”

This battle was popularized in Ron Howard’s 2005 drama, “Cinderella Man,” starring Russell Crowe and Renee Zellweger.

Baer’s next bout was three months later — a controversial knockout loss to the future heavyweight great Joe Louis. Louis gave Baer a horrible beating, and Baer was counted out on one knee. While many experts felt that Baer simply quit, Mr. Sussman sheds additional light on the fight: “At the time, no one knew that Baer had put up a noble fight with a broken hand.” 

As is the case with most prizefighters, Baer launched a comeback, going on to shock the experts with an upset knockout victory over a top contender, Tony Galento. But, Mr. Sussman writes, “Baer no longer loved the sport that had elevated him to the status of national celebrity. He was tired of hitting opponents and tired of being hit.” 

Baer, at the age of 50, checked in to the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Upon his arrival, he experienced chest pains. He called the front desk and asked for a doctor. The desk clerk said a house doctor would be right up.

“A house doctor?” he replied jokingly. “No, dummy, I need a people doctor.” Shortly thereafter, he slumped on his left side, turned blue, and died within a matter of minutes. His last words reportedly were, “Oh God, here I go.”

Mr. Sussman also recounts the exploits of Barney Ross, another Jewish champion. 

The word “champion” can be spelled with a small “c” denoting what a man does in a sports arena. Or it can be spelled with a large “C” to cover the things he has done in life. Barney Ross was a Champion who is entitled to the largest capital letter any printer can print. 

“Dov-Ber (Beryl) David Rosofsky was a tough little kid. A street fighter. Pugnacious, stubborn, afraid of no one. . . . Beryl, as he was known” before becoming the world lightweight champion, “ran with an informal gang of other teenage delinquents” in “the Jewish ghetto on Maxwell Street in 1920s Chicago. . . . The atmosphere of the Maxwell Street ghetto molded tough young men, for they felt they had to be tough to survive.”

Beryl was a boy weaned on poverty. Furthermore, a “flame of anger” was ignited within him after his father, Isadore, a religious and modest storeowner, was murdered in a robbery.

“While Beryl’s anger boiled inside of him like lava waiting to erupt . . . he could not satisfy his need for revenge. . . . Religion was no longer for him. He gave up attending Hebrew school and never went to synagogue. When his rabbi asked why, Beryl asked what God had done for Isadore, a holy man, a good man gunned down by a pair of lowlife punks who escaped their punishment. Yet, every day, for 11 days, Beryl said the Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer for the dead.”

The street became his “universe and his university,” a place where — with resolve and heartfelt passion — he learned to fight with his fists. Mr. Sussman’s chapter “Fists of Fury” explains how Beryl Rosofsky became Barney Ross, the great lightweight and welterweight champion who staged scintillating performances with other boxing greats: Jimmy McLarnin, Tony Canzoneri, and Hammerin’ Henry Armstrong. 

Decades later, Nelson Algren, the author of “The Man With the Golden Arm,” was so smitten with reading about Ross’s illustrious career that he went out and had a pair of boxing gloves tattooed on his arm. 

Ross’s boxing afterlife found him enlisting in the U.S. Marines. He won a Silver Star for having saved Marine buddies and killing 22 of the enemy on Guadalcanal despite suffering serious injuries. His addiction to the morphine administered to him during his convalescence, his humiliating slide into addiction, and his subsequent rehabilitation were dramatized in the well-received 1957 film “Monkey on My Back,” starring Cameron Mitchell. 

In recounting the exploits of these two fighters, the pages of “Jewish Heroes of Boxing” are full of fascinating cameo appearances by Al Capone, Jack Ruby, Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Myrna Loy, Benny Leonard, Abe Attell, Adolf Hitler, Damon Runyon, and Budd Schulberg.

The sport of boxing could surely use another Barney Ross or Max Baer today.

Peter Wood is the author of the books “Confessions of a Fighter” and “A Clenched Fist.” He was a middleweight finalist in the 1971 New York City Golden Gloves and selected to represent America in the Maccabiah Games in Tel Aviv in 1977. He lives in East Hampton.

Jeffrey Sussman lives in Manhattan and East Hampton. He will read from “Max Baer and Barney Ross” at the East Hampton Library on Dec. 3 at 1 p.m.

I first heard it when a friend

sat me down and said, “You don’t

even need a joint.”

After listening to Side One

I asked if Side Two was just

as good.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Side One

goes so high, I never got to the

other side of the mountain.”

I did. Found All Blues and 

Flamenco Sketches. And thought

Kind of Blue

was just about the best American 

music I ever heard. Nothing has

changed my mind since.

Bruce Buschel is a writer, producer, director, and restaurateur who lives in Bridgehampton.

“The Summer  

Before the War”

Helen Simonson

Random House, $28

In high school American history class, we spent so much time on the American Revolution and the Civil War that as the school year drew to a close, World Wars I and II were hurriedly crammed in, a hodgepodge of battles and treaties. I only recently learned that the Veterans Day celebrated this week in the U.S. originated as Armistice Day, proclaimed by President Woodrow Wilson to mark the end of World War I. So I’m grateful for novels that not only incorporate this era, but bring it to life on an intimate scale — history writ small. That’s what Helen Simonson has done masterfully in her novel “The Summer Before the War.”

Set in the English village of Rye, the novel’s action begins in 1914 with the arrival of the local school’s new Latin teacher, Beatrice Nash. She has been sponsored by one of the more illustrious citizens, Agatha Kent, who, upon learning that Beatrice is younger and prettier than she imagined, is a little anxious about the experiment of hiring a woman to teach such a serious subject (though apparently at a bargain price compared to a man).

Agatha has put her reputation on the line in hiring a female Latin teacher, but she is no suffragette, as she makes clear upon her first meeting with Beatrice:

“Mrs. Kent, am I to suppose that you support the cause of women?” said Beatrice. 

“Good heavens, no!” said Agatha. “Such hysteria in the streets is impossibly damaging. It is only through such sober activities as school boards and good works, done under the guidance of our most respected and educated gentlemen, that we will prove our worth in the eyes of God and our fellow man. Don’t you agree, Miss Nash?”

Beatrice was not at all sure she did agree. She rather thought she might like to vote and to have been admitted to a university degree at Oxford, her father’s alma mater.

Now throw into the mix at the Kent manor Agatha’s two attractive nephews: Hugh Grange, in training as a brain surgeon, and Daniel Bookham, a poet and gadabout. But where would a Jane Austen scenario be without the impediments to romance? Hugh is courting the daughter of the pre-eminent surgeon with whom he’s interning; Daniel refers quite frequently to his close male friend, Craigsmore, and following the recent death of her adored father, an academic with whom she traveled the world, Beatrice has declared herself a spinster. As she explains to the young maid at her rented lodgings:

“I think you’ll find most women in pursuit of a husband share an interest in appearing less educated than they really are,” said Beatrice. “It is why I have a low opinion of them.”

“Of women, miss?” said Abigail. 

“No, of husbands,” said Beatrice.

One of the delights of this novel is Beatrice’s wit and her complexity as an early-20th-century woman. She is caught between respectability and liberation, an independent woman (with a small trust), finally free of her father’s influence (but still hoping to tend his reputation by bringing forth a collection of his writings), determined not to marry (yet clearly falling for Hugh Grange), and mocking various proprieties (yet ultimately obedient to them).

The novel’s setting, however, is unchanging. The village of Rye as depicted in “The Summer Before the War” may be familiar to residents of the East End’s hamlets despite the remove of over 100 years and 3,000 miles. A coastal town with a fishing fleet, it’s also home to writers and artists attracted by the salt air and the salt of the earth. 

In reality, Rye’s famous residents included Henry James, E.F. Benson (whose “Mapp and Lucia” novels are set in the village), and Paul McCartney. Helen Simonson herself lived in Rye as a teenager, and now spends time on the South Fork. In fact, you might have run into her finishing the novel at the library in Southampton. “I believe the whole world can be explained in a small town,” Ms. Simonson said in an interview with BookPage. 

Fans of her first novel, “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand” (which, despite the title, had nothing to do with war, unless you count class war), will find in this one the same scenes of village life and skewering of the small-minded, balanced by compassionate portrayals. In Ms. Simonson’s depiction, Rye is aswirl with civic duty, committee meetings, and gossip. It is also enlivened by uncomfortable brushes between locals and newcomers — not only Beatrice, but also Alice Finch, a photographer recently moved from London to live with Minnie Buttles, the vicar’s daughter (an arrangement that no one comments on openly). Alice is criticized by Agatha under her breath for speaking at a town meeting — “. . . a little forward for such a newcomer,” Agatha whispers to Beatrice, who observes to herself: 

“The smaller the town, the more decades one was likely to be viewed as a newcomer; though in a town like Rye, newcomer was considered a step up from being a summer visitor and totally disregarded by all.”

After a few chapters, I could have been relaxing into the comforting rhythms of a BBC mini-series featuring cobbled lanes, a vicar, and tempests in a teapot were it not for the novel’s title. The heart of the book is Rye in the early months of the war, as the Germans invade Belgium and the British prepare to enter the conflict, but it follows a number of the main characters to the battlefields of Flanders, and then the survivors to 1920. “The Summer Before the War, the War, the Postwar” isn’t as catchy a title, nor would it capture the predominant spirit of the book, which is anticipation. This slowly anneals into dread as the realities of the war creep in, brought in part by a group of Belgian refugees that the village shelters.

Wars are like hem lengths in literature. These days World Wars I and II are in. Martha Hall Kelly’s “Lilac Girls,” a World War II book I edited, has been riding that fashion. But another author with whom I work whose book is set in 1970 was rejected by a prospective agent because, she said, the Vietnam War wasn’t selling well. 

But whatever the war, the tendency is to read these as parables of our own times, and any illumination is welcome in this era of constant nebulous warfare. “The Summer Before the War” includes other themes that still resonate a century later: The arrival of refugees trailing the horrors they’ve undergone; barriers faced by ambitious women; discrimination against minorities and gay people, including in the military. But this isn’t just a morality play. It’s leavened by humor and a satisfyingly tortuous love story, as well as three fascinating father-daughter relationships in which the fathers subsume their daughters (and with which Freud would have had a field day).

Ms. Simonson’s depictions of the preparations for war in this one small town are detailed, entertaining, and, ultimately, chilling. First there’s the general conviction that the saber-rattling in the wake of the archduke’s assassination in June will blow over “before everyone’s summer holiday,” as Aunt Agatha says, quoting her husband, John, who works in the Foreign Office. 

Then, once the inevitability sets in, the inhabitants of Rye respond with a mixture of innocent enthusiasm and purblind fervor. Among a certain set, the impending entry into the war is seen chiefly as an excuse for a patriotic extravaganza; for others, it’s a career opportunity.

Hugh is convinced by his surgeon boss to enlist to further his training thanks to “an unlimited supply of wounded offering us the opportunity to catalog every possible type and severity of brain injury!” Daniel enlists in a drunken stupor after being rebuffed by Craigsmore, joining the Artists Rifles, whose mission will be, as he puts it, “to limn new forms of bravery and construct, with sonnet and brush, a new brotherhood of artist-soldiers.”

One of the most endearing characters in the book, the half-Gypsy schoolboy Richard Sidley, is motivated to enlist by that ancient poet of war, Virgil. He has just overheard the school’s headmaster telling Beatrice that though he is her star Latin pupil, he can’t compete for a scholarship because “such a boy could never adequately represent our school.” He vows to prove them wrong: “He would turn soldier, and like the wandering Trojan warriors of the ‘Aeneid,’ he would seek his destiny on a grand adventure in foreign parts.”

The village organizes itself to support the war effort and host Belgian refugees following Germany’s invasion. In reality, Britain’s harboring of refugees is a largely forgotten chapter of World War I that Ms. Simonson has said she only discovered as she researched Henry James, who was involved in relief work. “Britain took in 250,000 Belgian refugees and hosted them, fed them, clothed them, and took care of them for four years, entirely through private charitable efforts in multiple cities and towns across the country. It was one of Britain’s finest hours,” she said in an interview on “The Diane Rehm Show.”

But her admiration doesn’t stop Ms. Simonson from gently lampooning the flurry of meetings and fund-raising activities, led largely by the women of Rye. Of the first planning meeting at Town Hall, Agatha comments: 

“I assume that the good burghers of small German towns are at this very moment holding similar hot and crowded meetings. . . . Apparently, we must attempt to create more committees and official titles than the enemy.”

The efforts of the Belgian Relief Committee to raise money culminate in a Grand Fete and Parade that “had grown into an undertaking not unlike a small war of its own.” It is only slightly marred when the mayor’s wife, playing Britannia attended by young women representing Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and Belgium in the parade, unleashes a fake German horde to attack their float, which causes the actual Belgian refugee, Celeste, to become hysterical. As the tone of the novel turns darker, the atrocity that Celeste suffered during the German invasion is revealed and then compounded by the reactions of the villagers to the taint this has left on the teenage girl.

One other sobering note in the parade is the appearance of the local Colonel Wheaton’s clearly unprepared unit, a description that echoes an earlier one of boys in the schoolyard playing war with sticks for rifles:

The men straggled somewhat, some limping in boots that looked hastily gathered. They carried wooden models of rifles, as official ones had yet to arrive. 

“Don’t Daddy’s men look marvelous?” asked Eleanor Wheaton. “Quite the real soldiers.”

Meanwhile, Daniel and his fellow Artists Rifles soldiers have built a cozy model trench that is so far from what we now know they would encounter that the description alone is heartbreaking. It’s furnished with poetry books, a vase of wild poppies, and a Rifles officer smoking a pipe and painting on a watercolor pad.

Oddly, it’s the American living among them, Tillingham, the writer character based on Henry James, who has a premonition of what’s to come. When Beatrice encounters him on the promenade staring toward the sea, he recalls the Civil War, “the great American conflict of my youth”:

“Most of all I remember that what begins with drums and fife, flags and bunting, becomes too swiftly a long and gray winter of the spirit.”

“It is hard to imagine war on such a glorious day,” said Beatrice. 

“Yet it is ablaze just beyond the rim of the horizon there,” said Mr. Tillingham, gesturing with his stick.

Ms. Simonson, who took this observation from Henry James’s essays, has noted that “This war was taking place across the Channel, 12 miles from the shores of Sussex. And I think that proximity brought the war home to everybody.”

Toward the end, the novel moves to the battlefields of Flanders. You would think that amid the carnage and chaos of the war, the niceties of the British class system would fall away, but in Ms. Simonson’s depiction, they’re merely relocated. She intersects the lives of her Rye soldiers as Colonel Wheaton’s regiment, not far from the front lines, is preparing for the gala regimental dinner (which is to be followed by a firing squad), a macabre echo of the village fete. When the bomb falls, however, it makes no distinction between the earl and the Gypsy boy.

The book ends with the summer after the war. The surviving central characters, including Beatrice, Aunt Agatha, and Mr. Tillingham, have traveled to visit a cemetery on the Continent where the British war dead are buried. “It was all the rage to visit the dead. . . . In London, as in Rye, the talk was of new guidebooks and of finding just the perfect little pension, from which to tour the battlefields.”

In a way, the book ends on an apologetic note about itself, the limits of the enterprise of writing a novel exposing the toll inflicted by war. Beatrice observes the writer Mr. Tillingham as he watches Aunt Agatha’s grief: 

His face was as greedy as that of a glutton before the feast. She knew then he was thinking of how to use Agatha’s secret tragedy, imagining a famous story to gild his reputation and surround himself with a new aura of exquisite compassion. . . .

She walked away from him to stand and mourn alone, in a scene she knew no writer would ever capture well enough that men might cease to war. . . .

“The Summer Before the War” ends with Ms. Simonson’s potent mix of comedy, romance, and tragedy. Life begins anew with marriage and birth, and those symbolic red poppies “nodded again in fields of wheat.” If the happy ending is tarnished, it’s with the irony provided by a 21st-century reader’s hindsight. These fictional characters mistake what turns out to be the interwar period for an enduring peace following the war to end all wars — the same hope implied in President Wilson’s declaration of “Armistice Day,” as if it would be the last. 

Alexandra Shelley is an independent book editor and professor of fiction writing at the New School. She spends summers in Sag Harbor.

Helen Simonson has a house in Westhampton Beach.

(Keats Observes the Last World Series Game of the Year)

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake,

And no birds sing.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

So haggard and so woe-begone?

The squirrel’s granary is full,

And the harvest’s done.

To Oriole and Cardinal

And Blue Jay

The Dame exclaims, “Fly home, fly home!

Fast as you may!

Tarry not at branch or base or grassy lie:

There will be NO GAME TODAY.”

Dan Marsh is a native Long Islander with roots in Springs. He lives in Garrett Park, Md.

“Supremely Partisan”

James D. Zirin

Rowman & Littlefield, $28

Election Day is right around the corner. Thank God. Most people I talk to can’t wait for it to be over. The bottomless pit of unprecedented rancor and nastiness playing out over 24/7, wall-to-wall news coverage is enough to drive even political junkies to despair. I’m counting the days until the ugliness ends. But will it? 

Not necessarily, according to James D. Zirin. In his latest book, “Supremely Partisan: How Raw Politics Tips the Scales in the United States Supreme Court,” Mr. Zirin asserts “the irrefutable fact that, despite protestations to the contrary, the court has become a supremely partisan court, rapidly making policy choices right and left on ideological bases that have nothing to do with law or the Constitution.” What’s the culprit for this politicization? In Mr. Zirin’s view, personal ideologies are to blame. He finds the court rife with identity politics. 

And, Mr. Zirin predicts, the outcome will be dire. “The court’s dramatic polarization in recent years is a recipe for uncertainty, governmental dysfunction, and declining confidence in . . . the greatest of our institutions.” 

In his introductory comments, Mr. Zirin sets the stage with the drama of current events. He opens with the unexpected death of the conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, followed by President Obama’s shrewd appointment of the highly qualified Judge Merrick Garland, which was met by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s refusal to begin the confirmation process. The court is now shorthanded, with only eight justices and the strong likelihood of many tie decisions. One can almost feel the founding fathers rolling over in their graves. 

“Whether Garland is approved or not, 2016 will be a defining year in the court’s history,” Mr. Zirin writes. Most every politician — on the left or the right — is making the same point in these final days of the presidential campaign. Our New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand agrees and is reported to have said, “Whenever anyone asks me why the 2016 election matters, I tell them the same thing: The future of the Supreme Court hangs in the balance.” The media is already pontificating on how a Clinton or Trump presidency would shape-shift the Supreme Court. The stakes are high.

In Chapter 1, Mr. Zirin explains how the court was intended to work, and then how it has faltered in recent years. Despite a soaring number of petitions, the number of cases actually heard and decided has declined significantly. “What explains the court’s dwindling docket?” he asks. Partisanship is his answer. In the following chapters, the author details the roots of his thesis, namely that “the Supreme Court is afflicted by identity politics.”

Mr. Zirin goes deep with chapters that detail the rise of “reserved seats” — for a Catholic, a Jew, a woman, and an African-American. “Modern presidents have flavored their appointments with justices representing ethnic and religious minorities as part of the particular president’s perceived need to accomplish ‘balance.’ It is a reflection of how politicians think about the world.”

In a chapter on the “female seat,” Mr. Zirin writes with admiration and affection for Justice Ginsburg. He acknowledges that “Ruth Bader Ginsburg was not the first female justice. That was Sandra Day O’Connor, appointed by Reagan in 1981. Nor was she the last. That was Elena Kagan, appointed by Obama in 2010.” Yet, one feels that Mr. Zirin sees Ms. Ginsburg as the female icon of the court, and it’s a bias I share. Her life and contributions to the court are chronicled beautifully and with relevance. 

“In Ginsburg’s view, her crowning achievement on the court has been in a case she lost, the Lilly Ledbetter case. . . .” Mr. Zirin continues, “In her dissent, Ginsburg invited Congress to rectify the decision as it has done in other instances of gender discrimination decisions by the Rehnquist court that were, in her view, wrongly decided. Congress acted quickly to reverse the decision. In 2009, just nine days after taking office, President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.” 

Each justice has a distinct historical and political backdrop that could lead to stereotypical portrayals, but Mr. Zirin nuances his argument. “Many share the cynical belief that the Catholics or African-Americans or Jews or women on the court may vote too predictably on certain issues. The evidence, however, does not fully bear this out,” the author writes, providing numerous proof points, including Justice Clarence Thomas’s opposition to affirmative action. 

In the final chapters, Mr. Zirin reviews the impact of a partisan court on recent cases: Hobby Lobby, Obamacare, gay marriage, and the death penalty. Here Mr. Zirin brings the court to life with contemporary concerns. He speculates about Chief Justice Roberts’s motivation in salvaging the Affordable Care Act and quotes Justice Kennedy’s “eloquent and sentimental” opinion in support of gay marriage.

Unfortunately, “Supremely Partisan” has a frenetic pace, as if the author were talking too fast or, at times, yelling (lots of exclamation points). There is plenty of analysis and many details are deeply researched, but this reader often felt on a merry-go-round as storylines and examples weave back and forth across the pages. These are important matters: the history and future of the court, the giants who have served on it, and the society-shifting issues that have been heard. This reader longed for deeper reflection and a more focused narrative.

Books about the Supreme Court fall into several genres: bios like the highly acclaimed “Becoming Justice Blackmun” by Linda Greenhouse, memoirs such as the gorgeous “My Beloved World” by Justice Sotomayor, retrospectives on specific cases like “Gideon’s Trumpet” by Anthony Lewis, or classics for the modern lay readership including Bob Woodward’s “The Brethren” or Jeffrey Toobin’s “The Nine.” “Supremely Partisan” defies this taxonomy and does not quite fit on the same shelf with any of these.

Still, Mr. Zirin has put provocative ideas on the table in a timely way. He has rung the bell for citizens to consider the highest court in the land and choose carefully when they head into the voting booth on Tuesday. 

While reading “Supremely Partisan” I dreamt of a doomsday scenario: The current deadlocked Supreme Court being called to resolve a dispute in the current presidential election (similar to Bush v. Gore in 2000) and being hopelessly unable to do so. Let us hope that this is not the bloody outcome of this campaign’s bruising battle.

Sally Susman, a regular book reviewer for The Star, lives part time in Sag Harbor.

James D. Zirin is the author of “The Mother Court.” He has a house in East Hampton.

“Wild Girls”

Erica Abeel

Texas Review Press, $24.95

Erica Abeel’s “Wild Girls” follows Brett, Audrey, and Julia, friends who meet at Foxleigh — an amalgam of Barnard and Smith — as they negotiate the changing landscape of a woman’s place in America from the 1950s through the early 2000s.

Ms. Abeel, a master of the sardonic voice, sets a scene in which coeds are clustered in a “dorm’s common room for a bull session on the meaning of life. . . . Someone produced, to a chorus of groans, a box of Sara Lee brownies, and discussion shifted to the nature of despair in Kierkegaard’s ‘The Sickness Unto Death.’ ”

Brett, Audrey, and Julia are disparaging of girls “with careful hair and careful bodies,” girls like Lyndy Darling, who viewed marriage as the ultimate goal:

“Brett sometimes thought of Lyndy’s crowd and her own trio as two distinct species peaceably co-habiting the same savannah. She and the friends were warriors pitted against everything the [Lyndys] wanted; everything the world insisted you want: marriage, three weeks after graduation to a fellow who worked at General Motors, end of story. [Brett’s] little band would not fall into line so fast, oh no; they’d flex their talent in some gleaming, if amorphous future almost certainly involving the arts.”

Of course, in the world of fiction, anyone who sets out with such good intentions is bound to veer off course.

Ms. Abeel’s prose is snappy, full of wit. The sentences, even when the characters aren’t speaking, read like the quick back-and-forth dialogue of movies such as “The Apartment” and “How to Marry a Millionaire.” The book is peppered with wry observations about the hypocrisies of men, of women, and of the consequences of attempting to carve out a career as a woman in a man’s world. Audrey, an aspiring author who’s just sold her first book, comes to the conclusion that “Men . . . used language as a kind of test drive to see how things might play out, but with no commitment to making them actually happen. That’s why there were no female Einsteins, Audrey thought irritably; women wasted their best years trying to decode male language. She knocked off an article for Mademoiselle called ‘Manspeak.’ ”

After the three graduate, Brett goes to Paris to ingratiate herself with the Beats. The intimate way Ms. Abeel writes about this time period speaks to the author’s personal experience: She was there. At first, Brett worships Allen Ginsberg — whose sexual fluidity gives Brett hope that he might, one day, worship her back — but gradually her reverence is tempered by reality. “Actually, Brett had more than once wondered how, exactly, a few writer friends — Allen, Gregory, Burroughs, Kerouac — comprised a ‘generation.’ They seemed more a group of loyal buddies than a literary movement. In fact, they seemed like each other’s wives. Allen came on like a den mother, hawking their manuscripts, tending to meals.”

In Ms. Abeel’s telling, the Beats are mortal: men who bungle their way through life like the rest of the population; men who, in Brett’s interpretation, treat women as nothing more than “footnotes . . . Gregory and Cassady screwed them, Burroughs shot them in the head. And Allen? In his roll call of all that was holy women hadn’t made the cut. Only by an act of concentration worthy of Rodin’s Thinker could Allen remember women existed at all.” Brett leaves Paris, loses touch with Allen, and moves on, as one does when one has tried something and found it not to her liking. 

The women enter their late 20s with a sense that they haven’t fulfilled the promise of their younger, idealistic selves. Brett says to her performance artist roommate, “Listen, I know you think I’ve, well, sold out — but not everyone has the guts to be an artist. I don’t have your vision, your drive, your . . . tenacity. Maybe I did once, but then it dissipates, like with most people. I no longer have dreams — I have a game plan. Get my Ph.D. and pay my way by living in books.” While not the most stirring proclamation, it’s a raw and true admission. People don’t want to give up on their dreams, but sometimes it’s necessary in order to survive.

Over the years there are jealousies and disagreements among the three friends, but through it all they stick together. “Wild Girls” is a realistic portrayal of the lives of women who don’t become trailblazers, who instead persevere, adapt, and remain whole. 

Late in life — following deaths, divorces, misguided affairs — they find themselves hard at work on their individual creative pursuits. They have the flat in Paris, the apartment in Manhattan, the summer house in the Hamptons complete with lunches at Bobby Van’s. Their rewards. In the 1990s, the trio find themselves living in a world that Allen Ginsberg “would scarcely have recognized when he set out, hungry-eyed and geeky and desperate to be loved. A world [Brett] and her friends now inhabit like immigrants lacking language skills, but gamely winging it.”

The novel is written in the close third person, but shifts perspectives among all the women. The book begins and ends with Brett’s point of view, but nearly equal time is given to Audrey and Julia. Ms. Abeel plays with the chronology when, in the later third of the novel, she skips ahead 18 years to find the women middle-aged. A smart choice — the technique livens the narrative as we meet the characters older, wiser, with more disappointments in their rearviews. 

Another jump comes at the very end. The women, now in their 70s, are gathered at Audrey’s cottage in the Hamptons. Summing up the moral, Brett says, “I’ll take humdrum happiness. . . . And the compromises, and petty self-seeking, and all that life that must go on. Audrey, what a luxury, d’you realize? To have to worry about fixing the roof. Isn’t it marvelous?”

Emily Smith Gilbert teaches creative writing at Stony Brook University. She lives in East Hampton.

Erica Abeel lives part time in East Hampton, where at BookHampton on Main Street she will read from “Wild Girls” on Nov. 5 at 5 p.m.  

With bright eyes

we look out from photos;

beautiful and strong

beloved mother, sister,

wife, friend.

Why do you cry? 

Were we really here?

You remember our warm breast

our soft lips.

The altar is laden

with sugar cakes

skulls with sequin eyes,

four-foot candles,

sentinels guarding

your memories —

the folly of attachment.

We leave behind

a whimsical smile,

a tender gaze. 

Like tea from a broken cup,

seeping into the carpet,

we are absorbed again

into the universe.

Carol Sherman has just come out with a new collection of poems, “Adios, San Miguel.” She lives in East Hampton.

So How Beleaguered Is It?

The publishing business. How’s it faring in these constrained and digitized times? Well, a chance to ask someone in the know will present itself on Wednesday at 7 p.m., when John Knight, an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, makes an appearance at Writers Speak on the Stony Brook Southampton campus for a chat, his interlocutor being Emily Smith Gilbert, the managing editor of The Southampton Review, the college’s literary journal. (And, lookee here, she’s The Star’s book reviewer this week.) 

Mr. Knight, formerly with McSweeney’s and The New York Times and who has written for New York magazine, will also address the craft of editing itself. The free talk happens in the Radio Lounge (once the studio of WLIU), upstairs in Chancellors Hall. A reception starts off the evening at 6:30. 

All Hallows’ Eve — the Readings

Long Island is haunted by many things — the vanished aeronautical manufacturing base and long-departed affordability come to mind. But what about the spectral kind of haunting, courtesy of the dead? 

Kerriann Flanagan Brosky is certainly a believer. You might even say she’s a documentarian of such phenomena — see her 2015 book on the subject, “Historic Haunts of Long Island: Ghosts and Legends From the Gold Coast to Montauk Point,” which she’ll talk about today at 11 a.m. at the Southampton Historical Museum’s Rogers Mansion. (Regarding her research, she conducted it with a medium and paranormal investigator by the name of Joe Giaquinto. Judge for yourselves, skeptics.)

Looking for a more fictional kind of ghost story? The lights will be dimmed and costumes donned at 5 on Saturday evening at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor for a reading of tales by that singularly spooked genius of American letters, Edgar Allan Poe, paired with a more contemporary strain by Val Schaffner, once a writer for The Star. The eight stories in his 2003 book, “The Astronomer’s House,” are in fact set in Sag Harbor, at least one involving a preservation-minded haunting of a historic structure — a specter we could cozy up to, for a change. 

“Drive!”

Lawrence Goldstone

Ballantine, $28

Lawrence Goldstone has come down to earth. Following his 2014 book, “Birdmen,” a history of early aviation, he has now presented us with “Drive! Henry Ford, George Selden, and the Race to Invent the Auto Age.” (Dare we speculate that his next topic will be submarines?)

“Drive!” is a highly readable melding of business history and cultural history, focusing on a brief period of time, around the turn of the last century, when the advent of the automobile changed the American scene forever.

Although the emphasis is clearly on America — and ultimately on Henry Ford and the company he founded in 1903 — Mr. Goldstone enriches the study of his subject by including chapters on the scientific development of the internal-combustion engine, dating back to the 17th century, and on the development of the automobile in Europe, which began slightly earlier than it did in the United States.

The parallels on both sides of the Atlantic are striking. They include a great deal of trial and error. At first, the horseless carriage was assumed to be a frivolous fad that would soon pass. The invention was initially a plaything of the wealthy. The notion of speed, however, engaged the popular imagination. Automobile races, in Europe and in America, were immensely popular events, despite their tendency to produce gruesome injuries and fatalities among participants and spectators alike. The attention-grabbing Vanderbilt Cup race, underwritten in 1904 by William K. Vanderbilt II, a racing enthusiast, was originally to cover a course from Sag Harbor to Brooklyn. 

“By June, Willie K. was finally resigned to the route he had chosen not being approved, so — reluctantly and with some irritation — he shortened the course to a 30-mile triangle, which would be traversed ten times. . . . The roads on the triangle were almost entirely within Nassau County, just east of the New York City line, but one corner spilled over into Queens. . . .”

The passion called “automobilism” swept across Europe and America, and it was not destined to be short-lived.

Though much about Henry Ford’s actual accomplishments is enshrouded in uncertainty — he is portrayed as perennially quick to take credit for things without acknowledging the contributions of others — it is indisputable that he was among the first Americans (possibly the very first) to see the widespread potential of the automobile across the wide swath of both urban and rural sections of the country. Thus, “while most of his competitors vied to make a more prestigious automobile, a more luxurious automobile, a more unique automobile, Henry Ford set about making an automobile that was plain, dull, and precisely the same as every other, right down to the color of the paint. But his car would also be supremely functional, simple to operate, and built not to impress but to get its passengers reliably from one place to another. . . .”

That is how Ford became the wealthiest man in America.

At the heart of Mr. Goldstone’s book (though I am not convinced that it is the best part of the story he has to tell) is an event that occupied newspaper headlines at the time but has been relegated to the footnotes of history books for probably a century now. In 1895, George B. Selden, a patent attorney from Rochester, obtained a United States patent on a gasoline-powered automobile, although he never produced a single working specimen of the invention. When others did begin to produce motorcars, in the early 1900s, Selden asserted his patent rights and demanded the payment of royalties. 

Several leading manufacturers — including Winton, Cadillac, Locomobile, Peerless, and Olds, among others — acquiesced, paid royalties to Selden, and formed the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers. Others, including the staunch individualist Henry Ford, did not. And not just because they didn’t want to. Ford and others disputed the relevance of the Selden patent on substantive grounds.

While it lasted, the conflict was intense. Selden placed advertisements threatening not only unlicensed manufacturers with lawsuits for patent infringement, but threatening also their dealers and the purchasers of their vehicles. (Ford was quick to indemnify his dealers and all purchasers of Ford automobiles.) Mr. Goldstone’s description of the simultaneous automobile shows in New York in 1906 — one sponsored by Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers, the other by the competing Automobile Club of America — captures the ethos of the moment. “The dual — or dueling — auto shows were, to that point, the most significant public display of the rift among automakers.”

The Selden patent dispute amounted to a kind of American archetype playing out, pitting the inventor, the son of a prominent judge who was one of the founders of the Republican Party, against the plainspoken son of a farmer from Michigan. Ultimately, the matter went to trial. The decision was appealed. One can infer the outcome from the fact that George Selden’s name has been widely unknown until the publication of this volume.

While car buffs might revel in the plentiful detail provided by Mr. Goldstone, the greatest pleasure in this book is due to the colorful cast of characters, the amusing anecdotes, and what I can only describe as fun-to-know trivia. Consider the number of recognizable automobile names that receive first names here:

John and Horace Dodge (who worked with Ford until they left to begin their own auto company), Louis and Arthur Chevrolet, Ransom Olds, James Ward Packard, Armand Peugeot, Gottlieb Daimler, Karl Benz, Louis and Marcel Renault — we are well reminded that these were people (often quite interesting ones) before they were cars.

It makes sense that the automobile was originally marketed to doctors, as a time-saving (and thus a lifesaving) device. Personally, I was pleased to learn exactly how the name Mercedes-Benz was arrived at. And another longtime mystery was answered for me: Among my early childhood memories, in a Midwestern suburb, was that the family across the street, in the early 1950s, drove a Hudson. It’s the only one I ever saw or heard of. It seems that, in 1908, the Detroit department-store magnate Joseph L. Hudson (if you’re over a certain age, you will have heard of his emporium) bought a failing automobile manufacturer and began producing low-priced cars. “Never an immense success, Hudson was sufficiently profitable to remain in business until 1954.”

A last bit of good trivia: Ford’s first car was the Model A, in 1903. Each time changes were made or a new prototype developed (not all went into production), the letter changed. The Model T, the car that “made” the Ford Motor Company, was produced from 1909 until 1927. Counterintuitively, it was followed by another Model A, from 1927 until 1931.

Finally, Mr. Goldstone deserves credit for his handling of Henry Ford himself, a prickly subject, at best, for a historian to take on. The author’s treatment is balanced. He gives the automaker credit for his iconic accomplishments but does not shrink from describing his shortcomings. Ford was a misanthrope, a cruel player of practical jokes, and a terrible father (Mr. Goldstone’s contrasting descriptions of Henry and Edsel Ford, his only son, are particularly touching). 

Even though the elder Ford was not the sort of person you would invite to your next party, there is no denying the significant place he occupies in the annals of American business.

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

Lawrence Goldstone lives in Saga­ponack.

Look what wonders a change of scenery can bring. For her latest children’s book, Susan Verde of East Hampton has left behind art museums, yoga, leisurely bicycle rides, budding friendship among felines, and every other conceivable bourgeois nicety for the desert sands and dirt-floor huts of West Africa.

In “The Water Princess” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, $17.99), she tells the story of the fashion model Georgie Badiel’s childhood, dominated by daily trips with her mother to a distant well for water for drinking, cooking, and washing. Gie Gie imagines herself a kind of sorceress with powers over the natural world — the swirling winds, the tall grass, the wild dogs. But not the water. That she cannot conjure or entice closer. Pot on head, she must walk.

Relayed simply, even beautifully, before sunrise every morning mother and daughter begin their trek, one not without its pleasures, what with the singing, a stop for a snack of shea nuts under the spread of a karite tree, a brief frolic with other children at the well. But still Gie Gie dreams nightly of a day when the water will not only be plentiful and readily at hand, but free of befouling mud.

All this is illustrated by Peter H. Reynolds in broad swaths of ochre and shades of rich purple for the evening sky. The watercolors fill every square inch of every page. Good luck finding a more eye-pleasing picture book this year.

The lessons for spoiled North American children are self-evident, but the book also gets across the idea of helping others in far-off places — through the Georgie Badiel Foundation, for instance, which works to bring clean water to the people of Burkina Faso.

“Attitude of Gratitude”

Back in the States, the stakes may be lower, to put it mildly, the hum of the earth distant and all but drowned out, and yet a girl can still make a difference and have a good time doing it. 

Gerry, the sprightly, tiara-wearing heroine of the “Very Fairy Princess” books by Julie Andrews and her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton of Sag Harbor, and illustrated by Christine Davenier, is back in “Attitude of Gratitude” (Little, Brown, $17.99). Once again we see our schools gamely trying to stanch society’s disintegration by stepping in where distracted or economically beleaguered parents can’t or won’t. In this case, with a day designated for giving compliments and expressing thanks. 

Gerry is more than up for it, but then the challenges come — a friend out sick, a jar of sprinkles dumped, the disruption of a fire alarm, and, last but not least, the insult of seeing her artwork displayed sideways. In a wry comment on modern art, however, her cornucopia is deemed an improvement when seen as a clown face. 

Naturally each setback presents a chance to turn the proverbial lemons with their circling fruit flies into a cool, refreshing drink — sweet, not too bitter. Battle through the adversity, kid. Grab that single can of beans from the shelf and hand it over for the food pantry. It’s the least you can do.

“Naughty Mabel Sees It All”

A truncheon’s a bit much. Instead, another princess of sorts, of the canine variety that is, Naughty Mabel, makes me think of a tall glass carefully selected from a kitchen cabinet, slowly filled to the brim with tap water, carried just so to avoid spilling a single drop, and briskly dashed full in the face of this inane, unfunny creature. 

The actor Nathan Lane and his husband, Devlin Elliott, a Broadway producer, who are East Hampton part-timers, have just come out with the second in a series, “Naughty Mabel Sees It All” (Simon and Schuster, $17.99), with Dan Krall, a veteran of film and television animation, handling the artwork. In it, the mansion-dwelling doggie sickens herself by downing a bowl of potpourri and starts seeing double, going on to imagine all manner of monsters lurking in every corner, called forth by the shadows cast by overstuffed armchairs or a neighbor’s dinosaur bones — you name it, she destroys it. 

Turns out Mabel needs contacts.

My own sight fails when it comes to discerning the point of laying out the backstory of the retired paleontologist neighbor or introducing Mabel’s two friends, Smarty-Cat and Scaredy-Cat. Though I admit that may be absurd to say in the context of a children’s book. Because digressions, kids do seem to dig ’em.

“The Great Spruce”

It’s not even Halloween yet, but Christmas these days is on little kids’ minds practically the year round. Besides, as Loudon Wainwright III once put it in a mocking singsong, “Christmas comes but once a year . . . and goes on for two months.”

Coming out next week is a book that fully deserves to be a classic of the holiday. “The Great Spruce” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, $17.99) by John Duvall, a native Long Islander who works with a tree farm in Jamesport, and Rebecca Gibbon, a British illustrator with a winning midcentury style, is a conservation story to warm the cockles.

“Alec loved to climb trees,” the opening sentence reads. But his favorite, “the most magical of all the trees, tall and strong and spreading ever upward,” stood in his own backyard, planted there by his grandfather.

Each Christmas the two decorate the giant spruce, one year drawing the attention of a man with a clipboard who convinces Alec’s parents to let him take it to the big city for display. Just before the chainsaw teeth start to bite, however, a little civic disobedience by Alec saves the day.

The result? The tree is taken, yes, but with its roots wrapped in a huge burlap ball for replanting whence it came. “We’re just visiting,” Alec tells a curious little girl.

An author’s note explains that such a practice is precisely what held sway in regard to the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree during the Depression years. No better time than now to turn back the clock.