After the Poultry Carnage

If you don’t happen to get enough reading in during your extensive Friday morning purgation following the Turkey Day indulgence, you could always visit a bookstore. To wit, there’s venerable Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, where on Saturday at 5 p.m. Ava Chin, the author of “Eating Wildly: Foraging for Life, Love and the Perfect Meal,” will read from it and give a talk called “Writing the Artful Memoir: Three Secret Questions Every Writer Who Wants to Be Published Should Be Asking.”

Ms. Chin formerly wrote the “Urban Forager” column for The New York Times. She teaches journalism and creative nonfiction at CUNY’s College of Staten Island.

John Jermain Author Lunch

If it’s a lit lunch you’re looking for, there’s a good and fund-raising one in store at the well-bricked, writer-frequented American Hotel on Sag Harbor’s Main Street, where Arlene Alda will clink the china on Dec. 6, a Sunday, from noon to 2:30 p.m. (Morris Dickstein, previously scheduled to appear with his new memoir, "Why Not Say What Happened," will not be attending.)

Checks made out for $55 must be received by Chris Tice of the Friends of the John Jermain Memorial Library at 6 Overlook Lane in Sag Harbor by Dec. 1. She can be called at 725-3803 or emailed at [email protected] to reserve a space.

Ms. Alda, a Water Mill homeowner, will attend with her latest, “Just Kids From the Bronx,” an oral history of that relatively overlooked borough, whence came a number of (now) South Fork residents of note, Dava Sobel, Jules Feiffer, Mickey Drexler, and Neil deGrasse Tyson, in particular, all of whom tell their tales in the book. 

Copies will be available for purchase and signing at the three-course lunch. 

Anthony Minardi has such an extensive résumé he needs a spreadsheet to keep track of it all, which he does across more than three pages at the back of his latest endeavor, “The Wetlands Field Guide,” just published through Xlibris.

If it seems the East Hampton resident has been around forever, you could say “around” really began with his 1968 master’s degree in marine science from Long Island University. He went on to get a Ph.D. at Fordham and work as a field investigator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, but for our purposes his 1969 to 1996 tenure at East Hampton High stands out. He taught biology and marine science, he coached tennis, he chaired the science department, and, near the end of his spreadsheet, under Awards, we see he was named the outstanding biology teacher in New York State in 1986.

The teaching continues. Mr. Mindari’s field guide is clearly written and logically laid out, from watery things that crawl, like the arachnid horseshoe crab, which “has recently become a favorite of scientists, who have discovered several medical applications” sourced from the prehistoric creature, to the variety of plants to be found growing in the marsh, the charming bayberry bush, for one: “It prefers poor or sandy soil and usually survives well on the leeward zone of the marine beach zone. . . . In the manufacture of candles, the berries are boiled in water, and the wax is skimmed off when cool.”

More from the horse’s mouth: “It is hoped that this publication will be useful to teachers, laymen, and students so that they may be aware of the genetic adaptations” undergone by flora and fauna to survive the marine environment’s “adverse, abiotic conditions, including wind, soil conditions, temperature, and salt spray.”

The book, slim enough to be tucked into cargo pants without impeding a hike, is anything but dense, the brevity of its descriptions leaving plenty of eye-pleasing white space for field notes or scribbles. Better yet, every other page features a captivating Francesco Bologna pen-and-ink illustration.

“A Cape Town Boy”

“From the ages of two to five, my life was spent in a Japanese concentration camp outside Shanghai.”

So begins Brian Clewly Johnson’s recently self-published “A Cape Town Boy: A Memoir of Growing Up, 1940 to 1959.” And if that line calls to mind J.G. Ballard’s “Empire of the Sun,” Mr. Johnson acknowledges as much, qualifying his “scant memory” of life in the camp “with fifteen hundred other civilians, mostly British, and many children,” by noting that Ballard was 12 at the time of his internment. He was left, however, with an arm permanently bent, the result of neglectful setting of a break and a lousy cast — a lifelong physical manifestation of his captors’ mistreatment.

Mr. Johnson’s father had been posted to China as an officer on a Royal Dutch Shell tanker before the start of the second Sino-Japanese war in the late 1930s. “My parents lived well in Shanghai, certainly much better than they had done in Britain.” His Irish Catholic mother, who until her arrival in China had been a hairdresser, had five servants under her — “two gardeners, a driver, a cook, and an amah for me.”

“In my view, that fact still holds true for most British expatriates; life abroad is always better than life ‘back home.’ ”

It was quite another world back then, well explored by Mr. Johnson in this engaging, internationalist tale, which, though focused on his early years, frequently jumps forward chronologically to comment on the past — on professional and personal regrets, for example, and not infrequently on the ghost of his father, who abandoned the family when the author was an infant.

His father, who eventually settled in Brooklyn Heights with his second wife, turned geographical distance into an emotional one, at one point upbraiding his 16-year-old son through the mail for failing to write back swiftly enough, asking with something less than self-awareness, “Does not your mother instruct you in your filial duties, or teach you to have respect and politeness?”

His mother, to her credit, had turned peripatetic. To start a new life, in 1949 the two boarded a steamer bound for the southern tip of Africa. “Cape Town lay before us in blinding sunlight.” He was 9 years old.

In a bildungsroman at times Dickensian in its characters and eccentricities, the chapter titles alone can speak volumes: “Senior School Torments,” “Creepy Teachers,” and, let’s not forget, “Canes and Christ.”

“Seen in hindsight,” Mr. Johnson writes in one of his interludes, “Cape Town in 1953 was a gorgeous, boring city. And South Africa was a doggedly fascist society.”

“In my teens and twenties, I had no political consciousness. Apartheid punctuated our lives. That Afrikaner euphemism, ‘separate development’ — later coined to camouflage racial segregation — was all I had known since my arrival in the country. . . .”

That would change. Mr. Johnson, who lives in Amagansett, wrote in The Star earlier this year about a return trip to Cape Town, during which he assessed the post-Mandela state of affairs and the struggles of the African National Congress to deliver on its promises. The piece was titled “Oh My, the Beloved Country!” — a nod to Alan Paton’s 1948 novel, which, though sadly out of vogue, despite the beautiful, nearly prose-poem quality of its writing, still has a lot to say about race relations, and in a way that is particularly pertinent to America.

Mr. Johnson would later find success as an advertising executive, but here he ends his story on the cusp of his 20th birthday. His portraits, self and otherwise, are indelible, but none more so than that of his mother, who never accepted his father’s absence: “For years afterward, until his death at age 51, Peggy encouraged me to end my bedtime prayers with ‘And please bring Daddy back to us.’ ”

When Morris Dickstein talks about “the art and challenges of memoir writing” at Temple Adas Israel in Sag Harbor on Nov. 15, the eminent culture critic and professor will more than know of what he speaks, he will be speaking from his own recent history and recent work — his well-received “Why Not Say What Happened: A Sentimental Education.”

The book begins with his Orthodox Jewish upbringing on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, study at the Jewish Theological Seminary and Columbia University, and his path, generally speaking, to his more than 40 years as a public intellectual. Mr. Dickstein, who has a house in Sag Harbor, is distinguished professor emeritus of English and theater at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Sunday’s free workshop, which starts at 11 a.m., marks Jewish Book Month. “Everyone is invited to learn more about Dickstein’s intriguing life story and how to create your own captivating memoir,” a temple release said.

In another such celebration, on Dec. 4 at 6 p.m. Rabbi Daniel Geffen will lead a discussion of Rabbi David Wolpe’s “David: The Divided Heart,” a National Jewish Book Award finalist in 2014.

“Cop Job”

Chris Knopf

Permanent Press, $29

One useful framework for classifying the protagonists of mystery novels, as Agatha Christie’s devoted readers well know, is that there are Poirots and there are Marples. Hercule Poirot, of course, is the professional detective with highly honed skills, engaged by private clients, and occasionally even by Scotland Yard itself. Jane Marple, on the other hand, is not a professional, operates more on instinct than on skill, and insinuates herself into a situation, once a crime has been committed, usually as a favor to a friend, and generally to the consternation of the local constabulary.

Sam Acquillo, the protagonist of Chris Knopf’s “Cop Job” (the sixth installment of the author’s Sam Acquillo Hamptons Mystery series), falls squarely in the Marple category, though he is hard-boiled and obstreperous where Christie’s Miss Marple is polite and genteel. Then again, Sam is not a little old lady living in a quaint English village. 

An M.I.T. graduate with a degree in engineering, Sam is a former prizefighter and corporate troubleshooter who has returned home to Southampton, where he supports himself as a skilled cabinetmaker. (Not an ordinary career path, to say the least.) As he himself summarizes his backstory, “It wasn’t until I exchanged my marriage, suburban house, and corporate career for full-time drunkenness that I was reacquainted with rank-and-file law enforcement.”

Sam inhabits a largely blue-collar Southampton, not at all the village or town portrayed in glossy lifestyle magazines. (Certain readers may even experience a kind of schadenfreude from a novel set nearly entirely in the seamy underbelly of so swanky a community.) In previous books of the series, which I have not read, he has apparently helped solve an assortment of crimes, in the process ruffling the feathers of the local law-enforcement establishment — police and prosecutors alike.

So he is taken aback somewhat when he and his pal Jackie Swaitkowski, a smart, savvy, and witty defense attorney, are invited to discreetly look into the apparent homicide of a local character, Alfie Aldergreen. That invitation, in fact, comes from Ross Semple, the Southampton Town police chief, and from Edith Madison, Suffolk County district attorney. The body of Alfie, a severely disabled Army veteran of the Iraq War who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, is hoisted from Hawk Pond on the novel’s first page, imprisoned in his electric wheelchair by duct tape.

Once they begin looking into the hapless Alfie’s demise, Sam and Jackie inadvertently open several Pandora’s boxes. Among other things, they discover that Alfie was one of three confidential police informants (CIs in law-enforcement parlance) to have been murdered recently, a revelation that leads them to wonder about corruption in the local force (as obviously the CIs’ covers had all been blown). Moreover, unsavory shenanigans in local political circles also receive scrutiny.

And even though it takes a long time to connect all the dots, Sam understands instinctively, when his 20-something daughter is savagely attacked in her Manhattan apartment, that it is not merely a random urban crime.

“Cop Job” is essentially all plot-driv­en; there is little character development (except perhaps for Sam) and even less specific local color. Nevertheless, Mr. Knopf knows how to keep a story going. The dramatic climax, aboard a sailboat in Little Peconic Bay, is memorable. By the time the story resolves itself, a great many seemingly loose threads have been wound into a neat and satisfying conclusion.

Sam Acquillo has the makings of a classic mystery-novel franchise. He is idiosyncratic — he drives an ancient Pontiac Grand Prix and his faithful dog is named Eddie, after rock star Van Halen — and he speaks in the blunt, colorful style of the great fictional detectives of yesteryear (“I saw her standing near the crane, wearing a summer suit with a hem an inch or two above the entirely professional”). Here’s hoping that Mr. Knopf will continue to expand that franchise in years to come.

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

Chris Knopf lives in Southampton and Connecticut.

How do the hummingbirds survive the storms?

At our feeder again when all is blasted and down, 

oaks and hickories twisting even now. The birds

yet come to feed before the long trip they must take.

Here on our anniversary, their dancing bodies, hovering,

remind us of our own journey to who knows where.

Buffeted by bankruptcy, flayed by cancer, torn

by arguments reddening the breast, we still feed

on this sweet food seeping from the air between

our bodies, holding us captive to the other. We must

journey together, the rhythm of our impossible wings

lifting us into other tropics of our own devise.

From “Neuron Mirror” by Virginia Walker and Michael Walsh. Ms. Walker, who lives on Shelter Island and teaches English at Dowling and Suffolk Community College, will read from her work at the Unitarian Universalist meetinghouse in Bridgehampton tomorrow at 7 p.m. along with Rosalind Brenner and other poets.

“Hole in My Heart”

Lorraine Dusky

Leto Media, $11.98

In 1979, Lorraine Dusky, a journalist, published “Birthmark,” a memoir about relinquishing a child — her daughter — to adoption. The book detailed Ms. Dusky’s sense of loss, gave voice to a perspective not yet widely heard, and established Ms. Dusky’s role as a writer of adoption literature and figure in the adoption reform movement.

Her current memoir, “Hole in My Heart,” recaps some of the material from the earlier volume and then takes up the story of her search for her daughter 15 years after the child’s birth. The book is an exploration of the complexities, pitfalls, revelations, and power of Ms. Dusky’s relationship with her daughter, Jane, through Jane’s suicide at age 42. In some ways, the two volumes together offer a cultural history of adoption in America, from the 1960s to 1990s. Ultimately, “Hole in My Heart” sketches out the wages of adoption from Ms. Dusky’s strongly held perspective.

Ms. Dusky is particularly lucid in outlining the ways in which, for her, relinquishing her child was not truly a choice, but an action in the absence of real alternatives. In 1966, when she was pregnant, abortion was a remote option that did not materialize for her, and her resources — psycho/emotional and otherwise — were nil. She fully addresses the “Who do you think you are?” stance toward mothers (language is sensitive and tricky here; birth mother, biological mother, first mother, natural mother? — an understanding of who’s who gained through context is perhaps the best course to steer in general) who wish to search for children they gave birth to, or offer themselves for further contact.

That is, she identifies herself as a person who did not feel she had a choice. Yet, somehow, she does not rationalize: “The right thing would have been to keep her. I did what I did, and I have had to live with the consequences. The justifications might repeat in my brain — it was the times, it was the shame of it all, I was alone without anyone to turn to — but none of it reaches that damn hole in my heart.” Fifteen years later, Ms. Dusky expresses a sense of renewed opportunity in the choice of searching or not searching for her daughter, offering contact or not offering contact.

The reader will find that Ms. Dusky communicates a driving need to give her child the opportunity to know her and to have an understanding of her genetic roots. She feels, categorically, that children have a right to know their biological origins and that parents as well as the state have a responsibility to make that information available. This was not the case with closed adoptions, where the original records of births were sealed and inaccessible.

Ms. Dusky is thorough in her discussion of this as a historical phenomenon that she feels has not altogether vanished, lingering in less-than-open adoptions.

And she is impassioned, likening closed adoptions to the condition of slavery: “Other than slavery, there is no instance in which a contract made among adults over another individual binds him once he becomes an adult. It takes from him full autonomy as a free person; it makes him subject to the whims and preferences of another, and it does so indefinitely and for all time. Anything other than full autonomy — which surely includes the right to know who one was at birth — is wrong morally, wrong legally, wrong any way it can be interpreted.”

Although the book, arising from Ms. Dusky’s perspective and need to tell the story, is largely focused on her own experience and expressive of her own personality, a portrait of her daughter, Jane, emerges as well. Jane lived with epilepsy that onset at age 5, was learning disabled, and suffered from depression as well as low self-esteem, stemming from many factors, and PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder). She was deeply troubled.

Ms. Dusky is careful, respectful, and loving in her treatment of Jane — yet there is more than a hint that her daughter was a drama queen and manipulator with an uneasy relationship to the truth: someone not always easy to love, or accepting of love. It is clear, also, that Ms. Dusky loved Jane abidingly, taking delight in the physical similarities between herself and her daughter, and in the biological imperative that seemed to bind them, often expressed in similar tastes and through fashion.

The notion of being bound by genetics is of great importance to Ms. Dusky, and she finds evidence in abundance that may not always seem significant to the reader. It is perhaps impossible to fully comprehend the fabric of any person’s bond with another. However, Ms. Dusky falls short of making a case for the ties that truly bind being necessarily genetic in nature.

"Hole in My Heart” is compact, readable. Ms. Dusky’s writing is both catchy and absorbing. Although her enthusiasm for detail sometimes runs to the extraneous, she turns a phrase extremely well. She summons her command of the language and adds a healthy dose of humor to corral her emotion around the issues into a cogent, well-paced narrative. A journalist with an excellent sense of story, she plumbs the depths of her investment in this material. Readers will be carried along.

The book’s mission, however, is not to simply tell this story or even more broadly to preserve a personal and also historic record. “Facts & Commentary” sections are interspersed to punctuate the second half of the narrative and act as mini opinion pieces, serving to highlight and extend the ideas about adoption Ms. Dusky explores throughout the book. Here the reader is asked to face the volume quite baldly as a polemic against adoption, particularly but not exclusively closed adoption. Ms. Dusky writes, “Open adoption is a step forward, but it is not a panacea for the myriad issues that stem from relinquishing a child to someone he or she does not have a strong genetic connection to.”

Ms. Dusky’s perspective is specific and strongly stated. It will be embraced by some, with the power to clarify and comfort, and it will be rejected bitterly by others, with the power to undermine and rankle.

The parent/child bond remains mysterious and miraculous.

Evan Harris is the author of “The Art of Quitting.” She lives in East Hampton with her husband and two sons.

Lorraine Dusky lives in Sag Harbor.

In “Refuge,” her most recent book, Nanci LaGarenne, an East Hampton author, has delved deeply into difficult issues faced by many women, including more than one might think here on the East End.

But, Ms. LaGarenne believes, she has come up with a story that readers will find inspirational. Released in July, “Refuge” follows “Cheap Fish,” a fanciful Montauk-based tale of a commercial fisherman, a floating bordello of mermaids, and a murder, and an as-yet-unpublished story called “Promised Land” about a circle of women in Amagansett’s Lazy Point.

In the newest book, her characters have left abusive marriages and childhoods behind and banded together as they create new lives. The author was inspired both by events in her own life and her time at the Retreat, the domestic violence agency in East Hampton, where she worked as a child-care coordinator and covered the hotline at night.

“That really changed me in a lot of ways,” she said, calling the stories the women told her “heartwrenching.”

“It was very eye-opening for me. It was tough work, and very fulfilling.” She became passionate about spreading the awareness of domestic violence and abuse issues.

When she and her sister were molested as children, Ms. LaGarenne said, “no one talked about that stuff; no one had the tools.” Her sister had implored her to address the topic of child sexual abuse in a work of nonfiction, but she decided that a realistic but fictional story would be the way to go.

“Refuge” is dedicated to her sister and to “all the brave women who escaped from abuse,” whom the author calls “beautiful warriors.” It tells the tale of Dr. Rain Taylor, a therapist and a volunteer at a women’s shelter who, at a crossroads in her own life, buys and renovates a brownstone and takes in four female boarders.

“They become sort of this little family, and they are all healing from different things that happened to them. In that, a lot of things happen,” Ms. LaGarenne said.

One of the women was abused as a child. “The character is not my sister, and it isn’t me, but that part of the story is dead-on. . . . I think there are so many people who will feel validated by it.”

The book deals with blind faith, forgiveness, guilt and shame, loyalty, redemption, friendship, and sisterhood, she said. “One bad person can change your life, and one good person can restore you and uplift you. I guess the theme is finding solace and happiness again, and having faith that the bad people don’t win.”

“There’s justice and there’s validation. The women move on and do well,” the author said. They “trade in the cards they were dealt, and it’s a whole new game.”

The latter chapters take place in Ireland, where two of the women travel and connect with another female friend. It’s a country Ms. LaGarenne knows well and loves. She talks of the “history there, and all the magic and beauty,” and evokes all of those things and a strong sense of place in that section of the book.

To self-publish “Refuge,” Ms. LaGarenne founded a publishing company, Blue Bottle Press. While the book can be found on Amazon, she has made sure it is available at local independent bookstores, including Canio’s in Sag Harbor, Burton’s in Greenport, BookHampton, and Montauk’s Tale of Two Sisters bookshop, where she will read from “Refuge” on Dec. 12 at 6 p.m.

Bernie Sanders, the Democratic-Socialist candidate for president who has a house on Lily Pond Lane here . . .

Let’s start over. There’s a book just out from Skyhorse Publishing, “Bernie Sanders: In His Own Words,” that not only compiles “250 Quotes From America’s Political Revolutionary,” in the words of its subheading, but also features the political cartooning of Walker Bragman of East Hampton, known in these parts and on these pages for his work with the advocacy group East End New Leaders. The illustrations are cute, they’re pen-and-ink, they get their point across.

The book is in essence a campaign document, and, to be frank, there’s a fair amount of boilerplate here: “We need to educate, organize, and mobilize the working families of our country to stand up for their rights.” That’s a July 29 Twitter post.

But you do get a sense of the man. On Nafta, for instance, a signature piece of legislation from the Clinton administration: “Unfettered free trade has been a disaster not only for Americans but for the working people of Mexico and Canada as well. Our difficult but important job now is to build a new coalition of trade unionists, environmentalists, small-business owners, and manufacturers who put the people in their communities ahead of corporate America’s reckless search for profits.” (From a 2004 article in The Nation.)

“The Rival Queens”

Nancy Goldstone

Little, Brown, $30

If women ruled the world, begins a contemporary theory, war would become a relic of the past — chiefly because women would never put anything as petty as dominance at the top of their governing agenda. If so, what should we make of Renaissance queens such as Elizabeth I of England, her sister “Bloody” Mary, and the wayward Mary Queen of Scots — or more pointedly, gazing across the channel to France, Catherine de’ Medici, who would appear to have kept a well-thumbed copy of Machiavelli’s “The Prince” on her bedside table?

Whatever reputation for enlightened leadership Catherine may have acquired in the last 500 years, Nancy Goldstone has handily snatched it back in “The Rival Queens: Catherine de’ Medici, Her Daughter Marguerite de Valois, and the Betrayal That Ignited a Kingdom.” Catherine was, in fact, a short, fat, grasping, power-mad hausfrau, frustrated by her husband’s egregious infidelities. “She almost never planned ahead,” writes Ms. Goldstone, in her epilogue, “but reacted moment by moment to varying stimuli.” Catherine lied, cheated, and schemed her way into fiscal and moral bankruptcy. No mere victim of the ruthless time in which she lived, Catherine was the perpetrator of the wars that rocked her country.

Ms. Goldstone has demonstrated her fascination with powerful historic women in books such as “The Maid and the Queen: The Secret History of Joan of Arc,” “Four Queens: The Provencal Sisters Who Ruled Europe,” and “The Lady Queen: The Notorious Reign of Joanna I, Queen of Naples, Jerusalem, and Sicily.” Unwieldy subtitles aside, the author has an impressive talent for turning complicated history into a gripping story — no modest feat in the Valois reign, plagued as it was by the constant struggles between Protestants and Catholics.

The idea of religious tolerance that we have today, notes Ms. Goldstone, didn’t exist during the Renaissance. Trying to understand the tensions, which routinely claimed thousands of lives in battle, can feel like being presented with a complicated algebraic equation with no solution. Who was Protestant and who Catholic shifted, in some cases, as quickly as a tropical storm. Catherine was no great believer herself, though nominally a Catholic; her sympathies usually lay where money, troops, and land could best help her realize the astrologer Nostradamus’s prediction for her sons that “the queen mother will see them all kings.” And, indeed, her sons Francis II, Charles IX, and Henri III would rule France from Francis’s ascension in 1559 (and brief one-year reign) to Henri’s assassination in 1589.

As its title suggests, however, “The Rival Queens” is not about the men. Catherine’s challenger, at least for Ms. Goldstone’s purposes, was her daughter Marguerite de Valois, or Margot — the youngest of her seven children and the only looker. “No, never do I wish to see such beauty again,” said a transfixed Polish envoy who claimed he would willingly burn his eyes out, like the pilgrims to Mecca, at a sight so fine — though history does not record whether he was taken up on the challenge.

Notably, Margot was also a trendsetter, an “It Girl” of the Renaissance. “Is it not you yourself who invent and produce these fashions of dress?” observed Catherine. “Wherever you go the Court will take them from you, not you from the Court.”

As was true for most royal daughters, Marguerite was her family’s pawn — useful to her mother’s ambition to rule France, even as opposing family forces claimed greater legitimacy. When Marguerite’s name was romantically linked with her rabidly Catholic cousin Henri, the Duke of Guise, her mother and brother beat her out of the attachment. “It took nearly an hour . . . for the queen mother to calm her daughter down and fix her appearance,” reports Ms. Goldstone, “as Margot’s clothes had been shredded where they pummeled and scratched at her.”

Catherine’s goal was to marry her daughter to the Protestant Henry, future King of Navarre, heir to the French throne after Margot’s own brothers. In doing so, she hoped to settle the kingdom’s religious and succession issues.

You would be hard pressed to find a more reluctant bride and groom than Princess Marguerite and Henry of Navarre. Nonetheless, “The Rival Queens” turns on their Paris wedding, held on Aug. 18, 1572. Ever ready with a cloak and a dagger, Catherine used the nuptials to put out a contract on Gaspard de Coligny, Admiral of France and leader of the Protestant Huguenots. The first assassination attempt was botched; Coligny’s uncomfortable new shoes, which he leaned over to remove, saved him from taking the hit dead on. Catherine’s efforts to cover her tracks, however, led, on Aug. 24, to a bloodbath of epic proportions. With the slaughter of 5,000 Protestants, “the Seine was choked with bodies,” writes Ms. Goldstone, “the gory remains of disembodied limbs, trunks, and even heads lay strewn in the gutters or piled high in carts.”

The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, as the event came to be known, turned France’s tensions between Catholics and Protestants into the Wars of Religion. The newly married Marguerite de Valois was damned whether she cast her lot with Henry, the indifferent husband who was deeply suspicious of her, or with her mother, who could not be trusted under any circumstances. Margot saved Henry’s life, repeatedly, only to find herself cast off in favor of his mistresses. Catherine’s notion of motherly love didn’t impede her from conspiring to murder her daughter when their interests collided. The “tragic designs” for Marguerite, reported an ambassador, “would make the hair of your head stand up.”

In this dramatic history, Marguerite de Valois is the Katniss Everdeen figure — the beauteous, seemingly highminded, often hunted innocent. Her flighty reputation, the author believes, stems from Margot’s only surviving correspondence — love letters to Jacques de Harley, seigneur de Champvallon, which make her “look ridiculous.” Margot’s role as an important political figure in France, Ms. Goldstone notes, has consequently been overlooked. While the author puts forward an excellent case for Margot’s level head in matters of diplomacy, the evidence is still also great that her romantic heart frequently ruled her head to her detriment.

You’ll find no dense paragraphs seemingly designed to obscure the truth with scholarly interpretation in “The Rival Queens.” Ms. Goldstone outlines her story in clear prose. She sees her characters as utterly human and their reactions at least explainable, if extreme, under the circumstances.

The conversational asides are refreshing: Margot “was getting the hang” of the espionage game into which she was thrust. A legendary mistress is described as a “patrician bombshell.” However, the platitudes offered up from pop psychology are a little jarring. Do we need to be told that, “even among the most loving and well-adjusted siblings, family dynamics can be tricky”? Or that “there is nothing so hurtful as the realization that a parent loves one child more than another”? In the context of the Valois reign, lines like these come off as jokes.

Ms. Goldstone navigates the history with confidence, occasionally poking fun at its complications. In introducing the young Duke of Guise, another Henri, she adds, “to the despondency of many future historians.” Between Henry of Navarre, later Henry IV; Henri, the Duke of Guise, and Henri III of France, there’s no rest for the reader. But those who keep the story straight will be more than rewarded with enough romance, murder, torture, possible incest, and mayhem to launch a mini-series. Within the Valois family, betrayals are piled upon betrayals, twisted, bludgeoned, and occasionally served with heaping excrement. It’s apt, if sometimes overworked, that the author starts each chapter with a quote from Machiavelli.

The title “The Rival Queens” gives Marguerite more than her due. Margot was no match for the treacherous Catherine — but then who was? Even as kings, Margot’s brothers quaked in their mother’s presence. In the battle between mother and daughter, Catherine won hands down, stripping hedaughter of her husband, family fortune, and the French throne, to which Henry of Navarre ultimately rose as the first Bourbon king, Henry IV.

Still, Ms. Goldstone leaves her readers satisfied. Queen Margot found her happy ending in ceding power gracefully. “I have no ambition and I have no need of it,” she apparently wrote, “being who and what I am.”

Ellen T. White, former managing editor of the New York Public Library, is the author of “Simply Irresistible,” an exploration of the great romantic women of history. She lives in Springs.

Nancy Goldstone lives in Sagaponack.

The Pushcart Prize’s 40th

It’ll be big doings for the Pushcart Prize’s 40th anniversary and the official hailing of the release of the new Pushcart anthology, “Pushcart Prize XL: Best of the Small Presses.” Dig, in other words, the literary lineup of readers set for Friday, Nov. 13, at the Village Community School in Manhattan: Colum McCann, Sharon Olds, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Galassi, Mary Karr, Ben Marcus, and Philip Schultz of East Hampton, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who runs the Writers Studio, which is co-sponsoring the evening.

Bill Henderson, who lives in Springs, the Pushcart founder and the editor of the anthology, will handle the introductions. The start time is 7 p.m., and the cost is $10 at the door. The school is on West 10th between Greenwich and Washington Streets.

From Adoption’s Fault Lines

Lorraine Dusky’s new book, “Hole in My Heart,” is called a “memoir and report from the fault lines of adoption,” coming in the wake, though somewhat distantly, of “Birthmark,” published in 1979, in which she explored the difficulties of a mother’s having given up a child for adoption. In brief, Ms. Dusky, a resident of Sag Harbor, saw her daughter adopted in the 1960s and then sought reunion with her in the 1980s, when successfully doing so was rare. For the daughter with two families, complications, to put it mildly, followed.

Ms. Dusky will discuss it all on Nov. 7 at 3 p.m. at the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor, which has said that the author, who “became an outspoken leader in adoption reform and adoptee rights,” will also “touch on the political issues surrounding adoption today.”