“Barbra Streisand”

Neal Gabler

Yale University Press, $25

  Miss Minnie Rosenstein had such a voice so fine

  Just like Tetrazzini

  Any time that Minnie sang a song

  You’d think of real estate seven blocks long

  Some song!

— “Yiddisha Nightingale,” c. 1911 by Irving Berlin 

The New ­York City Board of Education, in its infinite wisdom circa 1955, divided a long-established school district in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn to create banjo-shaped Wingate High. Had it not, I would have gone to legendary Erasmus Hall and been a classmate of the soon-to-be famous Barbra Streisand. But would I have noticed?

As this brief and sometimes rapturous new analysis by the culture critic and author Neal Gabler reminds us, Barbra was then a mostly unmemorable mieskeit — Yiddish for ugly duckling — skinny, slightly cross-eyed, teased and tormented, or so she recalls, despite plenty of other prominent Jewish noses among her peers. 

She was even turned away by the school’s choral club, then stashed in the rear and denied any solos, though singing on the stoop of her apartment house had gained her applause from neighbors since she was a tot.

The closest I got was a few years later, in the early 1960s, at a small Greenwich Village restaurant, sitting just a table away from Ms. Streisand tete-a-tete with Elliott Gould, her castmate in the musical “I Can Get It for You Wholesale” on Broadway, later her husband, and still later her ex, but already outshone by her dynamite debut as “Miss Marmelstein.” 

As she grew more famous, less “notice me” kooky, I bought her records, of course. But my greatest appreciation came 20 years later after dubbing tracks from her “People” album onto a cassette that had space left from the first of three unexpected albums of Great American Songbook tunes by the pop-rock queen Linda Ronstadt with Nelson Riddle (“What’s New,” 1983).

Playing it back for the first time was as close as I’ll likely get to that “Wizard of Oz” moment when Garland goes from black and white to Technicolor. Ms. Ronstadt, wonderful as she was, seemed to sing in mono compared to Ms. Streisand in glorious, full-range, natural hi-fi. 

Mr. Gabler is quite up front about not producing a full-fledged biography, of which there are several, and from which he cites many telling quotes and anecdotes for this study of Ms. Streisand’s transformations from duckling to diva, from self-doubt to determination to domination of stage, set, and studio (for better and worse).

More broadly, he explores Ms. Streisand’s place in, benefits from, and effect on recent tides in American culture. He finds her “part of the American consciousness” as few entertainers before, “validating a new kind of glamour, a new kind of star, a new kind of power.” Wrote the social critic Camille Paglia: “Streisand broke the mold, she revolutionized gender roles,” though some activists complain that she actually did little to aid their feminist movement.

Along with the social context, at which Mr. Gabler is always so adept, there are enough basic facts and juicy tidbits to satisfy anyone who has not delved deeply into Ms. Streisand’s story.

There was the young father who died when she was only 15 months old and left Barbra with an endless sense of loss and longing, and fears about her own early demise.

There was the mother, more competitor than supporter, insisting young Barbra had neither looks nor talent for the stardom she dreamed of. Resisting the girl’s first request to make a demo record of her singing, she agreed later when a demo by Mom was part of the deal. 

And there was the stepfather named Kind, who wasn’t very, and persistently heaped greater praise on her half-sister, Roslyn, later a performer herself, though never matching Barbra.

All of which led Ms. Streisand to legendary levels of self-consciousness, self-doubt, then determined self-assurance and aggressive self-assertion, as many who worked with her later complained (the Jewish Woman Syndrome, some called it), though her inherent talent was hard to deny. “Sure she’s tough. But she has an unerring eye,” said the cinematographer for “Funny Girl” after she started telling him where to place the lights.

“Most people are followers. They need you to be sure,” the young star told the Newsweek critic Joe Morgenstern at the time. And this insistence on perfection — as singer, actress, and director — to balance all doubts about her (including her own) seems to have deep roots. “I was like this when I was 12,” she told another interviewer.

Mr. Gabler’s book is part of the Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series, already surveying contributions to society by such co-religionists as Leonard Bernstein, Louis Brandeis, Albert Einstein, Emma Goldman, Lillian Hellman, Groucho Marx, and Leon Trotsky. As such it inevitably highlights quintessentially Jewish aspects of Ms. Streisand’s look, speech, and approach — to her life, profession, later liberal politics — and how they both hindered and helped her. 

Of course the fields Ms. Streisand chose to conquer — Broadway, Hollywood, the popular music business — have long had significant, if not dominant, Jewish influence. 

What Mr. Gabler calls the “haute Jews” then in charge at first doubted Ms. Streisand’s appeal to a broader audience, and some apparently felt personally uncomfortable with the particularly Brooklyn Jewish manner to which she clung. Later there was suspicion that some Jewish entertainment execs came to enjoy redefining American beauty.

For it soon became clear that Ms. Streisand’s actual history and determined image as the Plain Jane outsider who perseveres despite painful rejection — and prevails — was central to her increasing success across ethnic lines. It came through in her singing and acting, the underlying theme in so many of her hit films, although the word “Jewish” itself was often notably absent from reviews.

“Barbra Streisand has changed the bland, pug-nosed American ideal of beauty, probably forever,” wrote Gloria Steinem. After “Funny Girl,” more women were dressing with a Streisand look, even requesting plastic surgery to have noses like hers, Mr. Gabler reports. Not so much lately.

Ironically, Ms. Streisand’s casting as the star of “Funny Girl” — about the earlier iconic Jewish stage, screen, and radio star Fanny Brice — came despite the objection of Brice’s own daughter, Frances, not coincidentally the wife of that film’s famed producer, Ray Stark. She doubted that Barbra could capture her mother’s far more elegant, non-ethnic offstage style, including a nose job that prompted the famous Dorothy Parker quip that Brice “cut off her nose to spite her race.”

(It was, in fact, Irving Berlin in 1909 who first prompted Brice to affect the Yiddish accent that became her trademark, for a song he gave her for Ziegfeld: “Sadie Salome Go Home.”)

Ms. Streisand’s refusal of oft-suggested plastic surgery is seen by Mr. Gabler as being true to her Jewishness and to herself. He also quotes her as fearing the pain. But chapters later, in another context, he touches on what might have been the most important factor of all to a singer he frequently compares with Sinatra — her uniquely powerful, wide-ranging vocal magic. “It’s some messed up nasal thing,” she once said. “It just seems the right sounds come out.”

Ms. Streisand’s hearing was also messed up in a way that benefited her. The buzzing of tinnitus made her acutely aware of all sounds, including her own voice — “a gift,” she called it.

Mr. Gabler also quotes various masters of popular music on the dramatic way Ms. Streisand interpreted a lyric, with undertones of despair, defiance, and determination from her own life, as in her acting. Indeed, “I approach a song as an actress approaches a role,” Ms. Streisand has said.

But she is hardly alone in that approach. I once asked the former TV soap star who became the cabaret queen Andrea Marcovicci if she missed acting. Her answer, cleaned up for radio: “What the [bleep] do you think I’m doing up there?”

Beyond Ms. Streisand’s unique talent and temperament, Mr. Gabler concedes that changes under way in 1960s and ’70s culture, which she came to symbolize, also set the stage and boosted her success: the new feminism, celebrations of ethnic diversity, an anti-establishment spirit.

And she benefited as well from good timing in terms of music and technology. According to Wilfrid Sheed, the late Sag Harbor critic and music historian (“The House That George Built: With a Little Help From Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty”), Sinatra succeeded in large part because the microphones he mastered had gotten so much better, and radio had become a dominant entertainment medium.

Similarly, I would suggest, the ’60s boom in home hi-fi and stereo as Ms. Streisand exploded on the scene served her extraordinary vocal range far better than old AM radio or mono records ever could. And she entered America’s pop music mix just before the rock revolution all but totally banished songs of Broadway, Hollywood, and the Great American Songbook to niche status, though she still managed to score number-one albums in each of the last six decades.

Time also has benefited Barbra personally. With few heights left to climb she has found satisfaction with a less-driven life (relishing home design and architecture) and a love-at-first-sight marriage to James Brolin, a fellow actor but never one of her overshadowed co-stars.

She did no full-length concert for 20 years before her “One Voice” benefit in 1985, and for nine more before her multi-city tour in 1994. In 2006 she announced plans to tour again for a variety of liberal causes supported by her personal foundation, and she launches yet another tour next month, including back-to-back performances back in Brooklyn at Barclays Center.

If, for all her trailblazing, symbolizing, and redefining, it is not exactly a Streisand world we live in today, so be it. “She provided a metaphor — that Jewish metaphor,” Mr. Gabler concludes. “Barbra Streisand showed us, especially the outsiders among us, how to survive. She showed us how to triumph. And, perhaps above all, she showed us how to live on our own terms — just as she always had.”

   Just to hear your cultivated voice good and strong

   I’d serve a year in jail Yiddisha nightingale. 

   Won’t you sing me a song?

Neal Gabler’s previous books include “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood” and “Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity.” He lives in Amagansett.

David M. Alpern, creator of the “Newsweek On Air and “For Your Ears Only” radio shows, now hosts podcasts for the World Policy Journal from his house in Sag Harbor.

East Hampton officials hope to take the battle over control of the town airport to the Supreme Court next year, a matter of unfinished business that tops the town board’s agenda for 2017. The to-do list is long and getting longer every day, but how to effectively limit noise remains a huge and pressing challenge, both locally and for federal regulators.

Opinions differ about the November federal appeals court decision that blocked the town’s 2015 law aimed at reducing aircraft noise. At its core, the court said the town should have obtained Federal Aviation Administration approval before imposing curfews and other measures. Following this setback, serious discussion arose about whether the town should be in the airport business at all and if the time had come to simply shut it down. Where once voices were few for closing the place altogether, an increasing number of sober-minded residents and even some elected officials are now wondering about its very existence. 

Despite threats from pilots and charter helicopter operators, all it would take to tear up the tarmac for good is a three-vote majority of the East Hampton Town Board. As the regional aviation industry and its local supporters continued to fight, this opposition to regulation increased the risk that someday soon there might be no airport here at all other than the modest private strip in Montauk. 

In some ways, the struggle over the airport echoes many other problems facing town officials, among them illegal short-term rentals that eat up available affordable housing and add unwelcome churn to many neighborhoods. Some observers of the real estate scene say the trend toward week or weekend stays, as opposed to monthly or season-long leases, has had a harmful effect on sales. This means that short-termers not only disrupt quiet residential streets but also may be helping to change the South Fork economy in harmful ways. 

Affordable work-force housing is a huge challenge that will continue in 2017. The town’s revised accessory apartment rules may be a good start, but there is reason to suspect that a much more aggressive approach will be needed to have a meaningful effect. 

Noise is also central to the struggle over nightlife, particularly in Montauk. Now, as the town is poised to liberalize rules about outdoor dining, thought must be given to preventing the hamlet’s sidewalks from turning into one long party. For years, loose rules about amplified music have contributed to an unpleasant background thud on weekends. Getting ahead of this before summer should be a priority.

On the environmental front, there is progress. If it is not allowed to become a slush for dubious purposes, the setting aside — up to 20 percent — of community preservation fund income for water quality improvement, okayed by voters in November, could do really good things. Among ideas under consideration is helping to pay for septic waste improvement on private property in select areas. Managed correctly, this could eventually lead to the reopening of off-limits shellfishing areas and other benefits. 

East Hampton town has its own high-minded goals for shifting to renewable energy and signals are promising for a major offshore wind farm that would be plugged into the electrical grid right here. The project would include demand-reduction measures, something the town, guided by recent state rules about residential efficiency, is beginning to promote. One key will be finding and retaining qualified Building Department staff to make the state requirements a reality.

Also ahead is the completion of the so-called hamlet studies for Montauk, areas of East Hampton outside the village, Amagansett, Springs, and Wainscott. Recommendations in the final report will be fodder for heated discussion next year about commercial development and whether zoning changes might be necessary to control growth.

If this year was challenging for town officials, 2017 is likely to be doubly so. Residents should pay close attention to what is expected to be one of the highest-stakes periods ever for Town Hall and the community’s future.

There are readings — and out here in the Hamptons in the summertime you might say a lot of them — and then there are readings out in the famous late-afternoon light of this water-surrounded place, taken in with a plastic tumbler of pinot grigio and soft cheese smeared on a cracker. That would be the Hampton Library’s Fridays at Five series in Bridgehampton, which begins July 8 at the advertised time with Bonnie Grice of WPPB public radio interviewing Samantha Bruce-Benjamin about “The Westhampton Leisure Hour and Supper Club.” 

Intrigued? What could that book ever be about, you’re thinking to yourself? Then maybe you should stop wondering and go. The cost is $20. (It’s a fund-raiser put on by the Friends of the Hampton Library.)

Also in the lineup for July are Joe Nocera on the 15th with “All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis” and Michael Shnayerson on the 22nd with “The Contender,” his biography of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. Roger Rosenblatt will appear with his new novel, “Thomas Murphy,” concerning an aging poet, on the 29th.

For August, it’ll be Richard Reeves reading from “Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II” on the 5th, Steven Gaines and his new memoir, “One of These Things First,” on the 12th, Carl Safina and “Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel” on the 19th, and on the 26th Ray Kelly, former New York City police commissioner, will wrap up the series with a discussion of “Vigilance: My Life Serving America and Protecting Its Empire City.” 

“Paul McCartney: The Life”

Philip Norman

Little, Brown, $32

Fifty-two years after they conquered America and 46 after they played their last song together, the Beatles remain a booming industry, not to mention a cultural force that forever changed popular music, fashion, and attitudes. With innumerable biographies, documentary and dramatic films, a Broadway musical, and Cirque du Soleil’s “Love,” a multimedia show that has run for a decade and counting in Las Vegas, the Liverpool quartet remains the pinnacle pop collective and one unlikely to be matched. 

When the faithful gather in Chicago next month for the Fest for Beatles Fans, an annual confab that also meets in the tristate area and has lived almost as long as the Beatles legend itself, they will have many new books to choose from, among them one documenting a single day in 1968; a “photographic journey” through the group’s 1967 performance of “All You Need Is Love” on the “Our World” satellite broadcast, and one on the Nixon administration’s effort to deport John Lennon in the early 1970s. Clearly, many of us still can’t get enough. 

Alongside these titles will be “Paul McCartney: The Life” by Philip Norman, author of the 1981 biography “Shout!” and the 2008 companion, “John Lennon: The Life.” Mr. Norman, a longtime author and journalist — he enjoyed, before an unceremonious ejection, a backstage encounter with the Beatles as a young reporter in 1965 — has also written biographies of Mick Jagger, Buddy Holly, Elton John, and the Rolling Stones. 

His biography of Mr. McCartney, who has a house in Amagansett, may not have happened at all. Delivered to its publisher two weeks before Lennon was murdered in Manhattan, “Shout!” was thought to glorify Lennon at the expense of Mr. McCartney, his note-perfect complementary collaborator. “Paul himself hated the book,” Mr. Norman admits, referring to it as “shite.” 

Nonetheless, Mr. Norman received tacit approval from his subject, allowing him interviews with people close to him throughout his life, including his stepmother and stepsister, former bandmates in his post-Beatles groups including Wings, and many others who were on the scene at epochal moments. 

Mr. Norman has done his research, and despite the billions of words and endless dissection of the Beatles, he presents new information and delves deeply into most of his subject’s 74 years. Mr. McCartney has certainly obliged biographers: Nearly 60 years after a fateful meeting that led to his joining Lennon’s skiffle group, the Quarrymen, he continues a seemingly perpetual world tour, and has recorded and released dozens of albums since the Beatles’ breakup in 1970. There is plenty to explore. 

It is all here: the modest upbringing in postwar Liverpool, in a tight, affectionate, and fun-loving family for which music was integral to gatherings. The death of his mother, at 47, from mastitis and the devastated 14-year-old’s resolve to carry on. The unimaginable heights to which the Beatles soared, and Mr. McCartney’s determination to be at the center of it all, remaining in Swinging London when the other Beatles had taken to the suburbs and keeping an antenna tuned to the era’s wildly experimental turns in music, film, and art. 

Mr. McCartney’s business acumen, aided enormously by his in-laws Lee and John Eastman, longtime East Hampton residents, is also covered in depth, as his post-Beatles publishing company amassed a profitable collection of songs. Meanwhile, with his wife, the former Linda Eastman, he started anew and, armed with a superhuman ability to create pop melodies, eventually built Wings into a phenomenon that almost rivaled his former act. 

Mr. Norman paints a portrait of a man who, despite ascending to the very top at 22, retained an obsessive drive for more applause, more hits, more adulation. “The very fecundity of his talent brought nagging insecurity,” he writes. “What if he should wake up one morning and find his extraordinary facility with music and words had flown away in the night? As insurance against that awful day, he constantly worked the incomprehensible mechanism in his head, never passing a piano without sitting down and trying out yet another idea.” 

For an equally obsessive biographer, it is Mr. Norman’s ability, however, that is occasionally missing. Hard-core fans will note errors large and small. Some are minor inaccuracies in the lyrics he quotes: It’s “Your day breaks / Your mind aches,” not “The day breaks,” in the opening line of the magnificent “For No One,” from 1966. It is “stepping into shoes,” not “slipping into shoes” in 1971’s “Another Day.” Among the copyrights Mr. McCartney obtained for his own publishing company are the songs from a musical called “Damned Yankees,” the author writes. 

And during the troubled “White Album” sessions, when the Beatles’ heretofore loving relationship began to fray, Mr. Norman writes that “the bad atmosphere finally even got to studio engineer Geoff Emerick, who’d been on every session since ‘Love Me Do’ ” in 1962. Yet in Mr. Emerick’s autobiography, “Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Beatles,” he recalls of his tenure at EMI Studios, “Probably the worst thing about being promoted to mastering was that I missed out on the making of the Beatles’ ‘Help!’ and ‘Rubber Soul’ albums.” 

But one can forgive Mr. Norman for a few inaccuracies among the more than 800 pages of “Paul McCartney: The Life.” Perhaps a larger question is, do we really need to drill so deeply into the professional and personal lives of someone who has already given so much of himself? Would that time be better spent slipping on a pair of headphones and diving into the sonic bliss of “Revolver” or “Abbey Road” or “Band on the Run” or “Tug of War”? 

If not, readers can glean almost moment-by-moment accounts of Mr. McCartney’s 1980 marijuana bust in Japan, for which he was jailed for several days and deported, scotching a tour and effectively dissolving Wings. Ditto for the tragedy of Ms. McCartney’s death from cancer in 1998, and Mr. McCartney’s disastrous subsequent marriage to Heather Mills, particularly the tabloid-worthy divorce proceedings that followed. 

Give Mr. Norman credit for his efforts. Following a library’s worth of books devoted to his subject, he has uncovered yet more material, and tells his story with flair. This obsessive fan, however, was left with a nagging ambivalence. While the world would have loved for the Beatles to continue beyond the 1960s, they left a collection of recordings that sound as fresh and brilliant as the era in which they were made. It is possible, though, that the myriad efforts to chronicle their lives and work has reached, finally, the point of saturation.

“Black Hole Blues”

Janna Levin

Knopf, $26.95

If you read only one science book this summer, this is the one. “Black Hole Blues” is the engaging story of people who bet their reputations and their legacies on a science and technology long shot — the detection of gravitational waves, predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916. I’d be surprised if it hasn’t been optioned yet, because this book would make a great movie, or maybe a weekly television series. I even have a title: “The Game of Waves.” (Just kidding.)

Kip Thorne, Rainer Weiss, and Ron Drever deserve our respect and admiration for their total commitment, their trials and tribulations, their obsessive Moby-Dick-white-whale pursuit of those feeble, ephemeral, space-time-curved ghostly phenomena: gravitational waves. And for their engineering, experimental, and theoretical abilities, their administrative skills, organizing a community of peers from all over, and their gifts of persuasion that got the National Science Foundation and others to part with more than a billion dollars spread over 50 years — with a cast of more than a thousand cooperating scientists worldwide to get this Herculean job done. And done very well.

Gravitational waves are introverts: They interact very weakly, if at all, with almost nothing and nobody. Light waves, radio waves, X-rays, microwaves, and gamma rays by comparison are extroverts: They interact with almost everyone and everything. We can see light. Not only can’t we see gravitational waves, but they alter space-time itself, by distances of one thousandth of the diameter of a nuclear particle, or about a 10th of a quintillion of a centimeter. In other words, their experimental equipment had to be very ingeniously sensitive to a very slight signal, and, furthermore, it had to be unperturbed by many extraneous sources of noise, like trucks passing, thermal motion of the molecules in the mirrors, the curvature of the Earth’s surface, seismic vibrations, random noise, and many more. The experimental apparatus is called LIGO, short for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. 

Janna Levin’s excellent book is a warm human-interest story, with all-too-fallible real-life characters and a bit of easy physics, and it reads like a really good novel. In fact, Ms. Levin, a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University, has written a novel, “A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines,” which won a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for debut fiction. A Guggenheim fellow, she writes truly engaging prose, as if she was born to be a stellar chronicler of stellar events. Here’s how she opens her narrative:

“Somewhere in the universe two black holes collide — as heavy as stars, as small as cities, literally black (the complete absence of light) holes (empty hollows). Tethered by gravity, in their final seconds together the black holes course through thousands of revolutions about their central point of contact, churning up space and time until they crash and merge into one bigger black hole, an event more powerful than any since the origin of the universe, outputting more than a trillion times the power of a billion Suns. The black holes collide in complete darkness. None of the energy comes out as light. No telescope will ever see the event.”

This is gutsy writing by a person in complete command of her material. Chekhov, in his advice to his brother on how to write, said, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glints of silver on broken glass.” 

Ms. Levin says her book is “a tribute to a quixotic, epic, harrowing experimental endeavor, a tribute to a fool’s errand.” But it’s also a tribute to the passionate personalities who quested — with scientific ambition and superior energy — to know something profoundly elusive and ephemeral.

Her timing could not have been better. Her book’s publication date and Knopf’s advance publicity drumroll followed shortly after the announcement this past February of the detection of the aforementioned black hole collision. The announcement took place almost as soon as the two LIGO devices (one in Louisiana, the other in Washington State) began operating.

She introduces us to Caltech’s Kip Thorne, an “iconic astrophysicist, a brilliant relativist” raised as a Mormon in Utah and one of the 46 acolytes (along with Richard Feynman) of the famed John Archibald Wheeler at Princeton. (I would cast Adrien Brody in the movie.) She introduces us to Rainer Weiss: a rebellious kid-gadgeteer and former M.I.T. professor descended from a rebellious, wealthy German-Jewish communist father. (Maybe Mandy Patinkin?) She introduces us to Ron Drever, born in a modest Scottish village to a poor family, whose father was a struggling country doctor; they owned no car and bicycled everywhere. (Not sure who to cast.) 

She adds a dramatic epilogue after she was notified of the first detection: “On September 14 [2015], the two LIGO interferometers recorded a signal consistent with the inspiral and merger of two ~30 solar mass black holes.” These black holes were at a distance of one billion four hundred million light-years. As the “Star Wars” opening has it: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.”

When the news was released in February, I was with the 6-year-old twins in our family. You try explaining relativity to two 6-year-olds when putting them to bed. All they wanted to talk about was a certain body part of Albert Einstein’s.

“Dark Matter 

and the Dinosaurs”

Lisa Randall

Ecco, $29.99

After her earlier very well-received books on astrophysics and cosmology, Lisa Randall, recipient of many scientific honors and awards, has written a bold, provocative, speculative, controversial, and science-oriented book, “Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs,” suggesting that dark matter indirectly triggered a cataclysmic cosmic event that cut loose a comet-like object, killing off the dinosaurs. 

Ms. Randall is an endowed professor of theoretical physics at Harvard, and two of her earlier books, “Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions” and “Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World,” were on the New York Times list of 100 notable books.

Here is how she frames her interesting conjecture: 

Paleontologists, geologists, and physicists have shown that 66 million years ago, an object at least ten kilometers wide plummeted to Earth from space and destroyed the terrestrial dinosaurs, along with three-quarters of the other species on the planet. The object might have been a comet from the outer reaches of the Solar System, but no one knows why this comet was perturbed from its weakly bound, but stable, orbit.

Our proposal is that during the Sun’s passage through the mid-plane of the Milky Way — the stripe of stars and bright dust that you can observe in a clear night sky — the Solar System encountered a disk of dark matter that dislodged the distant object, thereby precipitating this cataclysmic impact. . . .

I’ll tell you right up front that I don’t yet know if this idea is correct. It’s only an unexpected type of dark matter that would yield measurable influences on living beings (well, technically no longer living). This book is the story of our unconventional proposal about just such surprisingly influential dark matter.

Some specialists in the field disagree with her analysis, so it will probably take years for a consensus to emerge. This is the way science moves ahead: from speculation to conjecture . . . to controversy, data, patternicity, and eventually a theory. 

“The greatest discovery of the 20th century,” a remark attributed to Buckminster Fuller, “was that the invisible is more important than the visible.” He was referring to Freud’s work on the unconscious and Einstein’s epic theories of relativity. He could equally as well have been describing Ms. Randall’s bold suggestion. Or that of a brilliant Russian-Jewish theoretical astrophysicist, the late Iosif Shklovsky, who proposed that cosmic rays (my own specialty) from supernova explosions within 300 light-years of the Sun have been responsible for some of the mass extinctions of life on Earth.

The test of a “good” theory is that it be “vulnerable to disproof” or “falsifiable,” according to the philosopher Karl Popper. So the controversy lingers, for Ms. Randall and the followers of Shklovsky, and for us — until data can support or refute these fascinating conjectures.

Janna Levin and Lisa Randall will be signing copies of their books at the East Hampton Library’s Authors Night on Aug. 13 at 5 p.m. and guests of honor at private dinner parties afterward.

Stephen Rosen is a physicist who lives in East Hampton and Manhattan. He is the author of “Youth, Middle-Age, and You-Look-Great! Dying to Come Back as a Memoir.”

You might think that “literary death match” refers to any Tuesday morning staff meeting in the beleaguered publishing industry, but in fact it’s a competitive reading, poetry slam-style, and it’s coming to Stony Brook Southampton’s Avram Theater on July 16 at 7 p.m. Its double purpose? To hail the release of the new Southampton Review literary journal, courtesy of the college’s M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature. 

The match, part of this summer’s Southampton Writers Conference, will take its cue from The Review and “feature a mix of established authors and new talent,” a release said, as the writers “will perform their most exciting work for seven minutes to a live audience and a panel of literary judges.” Humor is the goal as much as anything else, and “contestants will be judged on both their literary merit and their performances.”

The contestants: Helen Simonson, a graduate of the M.F.A. program and the author of the novel “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand,” now out with “The Summer Before the War”; Iris Smyles, whose brand-new book is “Dating Tips for the Unemployed”; Timothy Liu, who has a new collection of poems, “Kingdom Come: A Fantasia,” coming out in the fall, and Tracy King-Sanchez, a screenwriter, playwright, and graduate of the program whose work has appeared in The Review.

The judges: the poet Billy Collins, the novelist Meg Wolitzer, Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker, and Ron Charles, the fiction editor of The Washington Post. 

Heck, even the musical entertainment will have a literary edge, as performed by Altamont, a band led by Zachary Lazar, whose books include “Sway,” a novel of the Rolling Stones. 

Tickets cost $25.

The Other Puzzle Master

If you read The Star's book reviews, chances are you’ve taken a crack at the “Starwords” crossword puzzle, compiled with care every week by Sheridan Sansegundo, the paper’s ex-arts editor, now an expat who cashed in her East Hampton chips to kick it in an artists’ colony south of the border. The puzzle is fun, it’s challenging, it might impart a tidbit of culture or history, and untangling it each week just might ward off a few weeks of dementia at the end of your life.

Now another puzzle master, Stan Newman of Newsday, is offering a 90-minute program at the East Hampton Library on Monday starting at 1 p.m. While part of his talk will cover the expected, communicating strategies of attack in the face of those blank black-and-white-checkered grids, there is also the unexpected: “surprising ways to apply your puzzle experience to real-life challenges,” in the words of a faceless release. If life’s a confounding mess, maybe this brain-teasing activity will help you make sense of it.

And whether you’re a hapless beginner or a wily veteran, be sure to have some questions ready. Sign-up is no puzzle; it’s by phone with the library or at the reference desk.

BookHampton’s Bustling Summer

Reader, on the off chance you haven’t been paying attention to much beyond the clambakes and cheap chardonnay, it’s not only willful ignorance of driving etiquette that’s increased around East Hampton this summer. No, Main Street’s BookHampton shop has upped its game severalfold when it comes to author appearances — to the tune of five or so a week. Considerably more than other “venues,” that is.

There's variety, too. No use for the lighter fare of chick lit and beach reads? Tomorrow brings Andrew Solomon, a psychology professor at Columbia and a contributor to The New Yorker, reading from “Far & Away — Reporting From the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years.” His accounts range from Moscow circa 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union to a culturally resurgent Afghanistan post-Taliban. The reading starts at 7 p.m.

On Saturday, in contrast, in a stylish twofer of a 6 p.m. talk, Isaac Mizrahi, the fashion designer, will shed light on a biography about him as well as a book of fashion photos of him at work in New York City from 1989 to 1993; he will be joined by Maira Kalman, the illustrator of books including “My Favorite Things” and the canine volumes “Beloved Dog” and “What Pete Ate: From A-Z.”

More nonfiction follows on Tuesday at 7 p.m. with Moira Weigel and her history of sex and romance in latter-day America, “Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating,” before, on the fiction front, Jessie Burton alights on Friday, Aug. 5, also at 7 p.m., with her new one, “The Muse,” which follows two women, a Caribbean immigrant in London in the 1960s and a child of Viennese and English high society who arrives in Spain in time for its civil war. 

“Back Lash”

Chris Knopf

Permanent Press, $29

Chris Knopf has left the fabulous Hamptons behind for the browner pastures of the Bronx. In “Back Lash,” the seventh installment in what is the original of his several series of crime novels, the geographically pretentious reference has even been excised from the cover, the billing simply reading “A Sam Acquillo Mystery.”

For the best, it seems. Case in point, what might be most appealing about North Sea, the least “Hamptons” hamlet out here, and which Mr. Knopf describes as “the woody area above Southampton,” is its proudly unimproved rumrunners’ network of dirt roads. Our hero, who keeps a cottage there on Little Peconic Bay, where he likes to sit in an Adirondack chair, look at the water, and think on things, does little more than check in on the place as he shuffles the mean streets, chasing leads having to do with the decades-old men’s room beating death of his father.

That scene not only opens the book, it’s its most vivid, as the short-fused French Canadian auto mechanic of Italian extraction settles in with the usual, a cheeseburger with a fried egg on top, a shot of whiskey, and a Miller High Life to nurse while he lingers over his Daily News, folded in quarters for one-handed reading. By the 1970s this borough bar devoid of all niceties had been darkened with age to the point that its woodwork, “a deep mahogany, soaked up what little natural light got through.” 

In other words, it’s as dark as the Bronx’s Mother of Divine Providence Church, only more frequented. Inside that “giant pile of European architecture” rising from the wrecked neighborhood “like a forgotten fortress,” Mr. Knopf writes, the gloom “was dense enough to cup in your hands.” Deep in its recesses Acquillo finds meaty Nelson Cleary. Bear-like in his priestly black, he stands conflicted at a crossroads of family histories and plotlines, what with one brother on the City Council and another in journalism, and having given shelter and housecleaning employment to a woman who’d started a second, secret family with Acquillo senior. 

But enough of that. These settings become like characters unto themselves — a main reason that readers, or this reader, anyway, are drawn to crime fiction, as with Elmore Leonard’s matchless Detroit novels of the late ’70s, gritty, bare-bones, before Hollywood got to him, or Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder, forever killing time in coffee shops and deserted pews. 

Sam Acquillo by his own admission lacks many of the more admirable character traits, like patience, so he doesn’t exactly sit around as Scudder did, though you can catch him feeling his breast pocket for a phantom pack of smokes, or sipping bitter coffee on his cheap room’s balcony, so small the chair sits sideways, “staring out at the hotel’s cramped parking lot and the ragged storefronts across the street.” 

An M.I.T. grad and former hydrocarbon-processing engineer (hey, someone’s gotta do it), he can also be found pontificating with some insight during his adventures among the cops, perps, accomplices, and informants. On technology, perhaps most memorably, fearing its addictiveness, the “hypnotic pull” of the screen, finally relenting and nagging a librarian into helping with his first Google search of the digital ether, ridiculing his subsequent time spent “messing around on the computer like the rest of the American population” — he considers cigarettes a safer habit.

“You know who’s hard to find on Google?” he’s asked.

“An honest man?” he answers. 

Acquillo’s father was an angry man, known to toss a wrench at his son’s head over a difference of opinion about car repair. So Sam plows into the investigation out of innate curiosity, not affection or vengeance-seeking, and in light of the experiences of his girlfriend, who never knew her father, and his cohort in the cold-cases bureau, whose old man committed suicide when she was 18, he comes to see himself as “caught in a conspiracy, conceived by a cabal of dead fathers, each having left children behind to be tormented by their mysteries, their sins against innocence and adoration.” 

Heavy stuff, Sam, good thing that dead father left you a little refuge by the bay out in the sticks. Pet your dog, kiss your girlfriend. Biology is not destiny.

Chris Knopf lives part time in Southampton. 

“East Hampton”

Richard Barons and Isabel Carmichael

Arcadia, $24.99

Is history soft, malleable, open to interpretation? Or is it stiffly a matter of facts, immutable, regardless of the “perspective” (that overused word, at once inclusive and diminishing) of the beholder?

Call it a stretch, but the estimable chroniclers of American life at Arcadia Publishing have weighed in, in a way, with a new entry in the Postcard History Series that is uncharacteristically hard — not paper — backed. Frisbee it onto the coffee table with a bang or spread its pages there to show off a few of the cheery black-and-whites of better days: It’ll stay open. 

The book, titled simply “East Hampton,” even comes with attractive marbled endpapers, the splash of mauvish color somehow adding to the sense of an idyllic time preserved in amber. 

What’s preserved is what East Hampton Village Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr., himself a collector of postcards of the place, calls in his lucid foreword “a golden era, when a gracious summer colony existed alongside a still-vital farming and fishing community.” He goes on to point out that many of the vistas depicted from early in the 20th century remain remarkably unchanged.

The postcards come from the collection of the East Hampton Historical Society, culled by Richard Barons, described somewhat uncharitably on the back of the book as a “staff member” (he’s the society’s executive director), and Isabel Carmichael, who, as his assistant, is indeed such a one. 

“What is important to realize,” they write, “is that when postcards first became popular just after the turn of the 20th century, they were really just an inexpensive way of communicating via the postal service. For a penny, a person could send a note to a friend in nearby Sag Harbor and be assured that if sent in the morning it would arrive in the afternoon. One of the cards in the collection actually reads, ‘I’m bringing a rhubarb pie to dinner tonight.’ ”

The format is the familiar one for these books — rectangular images, usually two to a page, with captions — and so too are the photos of mansions and tree-lined streets. As the authors acknowledge, visitors to the village writing to their friends “invariably referenced the beautiful trees and the old houses.” (One view of a deserted Main Street, broad as ever and flanked by elms but very much dirt, was signed off with “Whiling away the time in East Hampton.”)

But there are surprises. The frequency with which such vintage photos reveal what George Washington called “a blasted plain” for a landscape, perhaps with a single, monumental structure rising like a mountain within it, is striking. We’re not talking the clear-cutting of wood for construction; anywhere close to the ocean there simply were no trees. The authors put a fine point on it: One postcard of a nearly void Lily Pond Lane “clearly shows that in 1917 the majestic trees now lining the lane had been planted only a few years earlier.”

Not only the village is featured, however. The book is divided into sections like “Wainscott, Georgica, and Springs” and “Montauk,” the latter pointing to one difficulty of such an enterprise, as it leads off with a passage that can send flagging the spirits of a reader at all familiar with the East End, but which might make perfect sense for someone else: “Montauk is often called ‘The End,’ and it is the easternmost point in New York State.” 

Elsewhere, happily, Mr. Barons and Ms. Carmichael show their historical chops, as in “Hotels, Restaurants, and Leisure,” where one postcard of a “rare peek at the Maidstone Inn’s lobby” shows a “combination of Colonial Revival and American wicker.” With some enthusiasm we are urged to “notice the wrought-iron Arts and Crafts lamps, the Colonial sawbuck table, and the crossed swords over the mantel.”

Back to reality, in their introduction the authors cannot refrain from commenting on the East Hampton of today, “bulging with new shingle-covered mansions,” restaurants reserved weeks ahead for a summer Saturday night, celebrity sightings, and so on. On the other hand, they point out, “an enormous amount of East Hampton has kept its architectural heritage, and with more than 40 percent of its land preserved, it is still a place that values its history and offers a rich life.”

Fair enough.

Montauk. It’s all the rage. But there’s cool Montauk, day-tripping Montauk, partying Montauk, and then there’s a somewhat more authentic Montauk, exemplified by the grizzled veterans of the fish-stinking rocky promontory who’ve put their literary heads together to come up with an anthology celebrating the place. 

Hot off the Harbor Electronic Publishing press, “On Montauk” is edited by Ed Johann of the Montauk Writers Group and Celine Keating, whose latest novel is “Play for Me” and who will host a group reading on Sunday at 2 p.m., in situ, as it were, at the hamlet’s A Tale of Two Sisters bookshop. Contributors taking part are community activists like Bill Akin, residents of legendary status like Perry Duryea III, and writers perhaps familiar from their work in the pages of The Star, like Debbie Tuma and Gert Murphy. Dave Davis? Alice Kaltman? David Phenix? They’ll be there. 

But wait. There are 50 or so contributors of essays, fiction, and poetry. What about the rest of them? Take note, more such gatherings are coming down the pike this summer, from the East Hampton Library to Southampton Books to Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, and each will have a rotated cast of readers. 

Stay tuned.