Keeping Up With Kundera

Linda Asher, an editor and translator who lives part time in Sagaponack, was last seen in these pages reviewing Ina Caro’s travelogue, history, and meditation “Paris to the Past.” She’s been at work, of course, on, among other things, translating Milan Kundera’s “The Festival of Insignificance.” The new novella was written in French, unlike “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and Mr. Kundera’s earlier novels, which were written in Czech.

This one follows four friends in Paris and philosophically, comically comments on contemporary society and its self-important preoccupations, from sex and death to art and identity. Even Stalin isn’t spared. From an 86-year-old author, then, a kind of summation.

Guess Who’s Back . . .

And now for something completely different: Standing at a confluence of a life summed up (speaking of) and the pages of The Star is one Hy Abady, who is just out with a follow-up collection of “Guestwords” pieces, “Back in The Star Again Again!” An explanatory subheading doubles down, promising “Further Stories From the East End. And Beyond.”

In them we find Mr. Abady most memorably recounting his decades-long career in the advertising biz, which, take it from him, ain’t what it used to be. Elsewhere, he explores the explosion in the use of clichés, picks apart the current state of theatergoing, ridicules his own retail skills, and bids adieu to his beloved Amagansett. All in a trim 76 pages.

Hunt & Light, a poetry publisher out of East Hampton and Brooklyn, is dedicated to advancing the work of young poets. On Saturday at 5 p.m., this will be manifested in the appearance of one Esther Mathieu at Harbor Books, the still-new shop on Main Street in Sag Harbor. She hails from Queens and is young enough to be studying at Colby College in Maine.

And speaking of newness, her debut collection, “Constellations,” is just the second published by Hunt & Light. The outfit’s founder is Lucas Hunt, late of Springs, whose poems and reviews have appeared in these pages previously.

Below is a selection from “Constellations.”

“Dreaming”

I want to have hands

that smell like bread dough and ink from all the things I've made

while the sun is still rising

over warm cups of tea,

water boiled in a bright-colored kettle

and poured into a mug on an old wood table.

I think if I typed on a red typewriter

and lived in a house full of noise I could watch quietly

I would be different.

But probably, all I really want

is to smell like morning,

and wear my hair in a sea-salted braid,

and use my hands to craft small eternities.

“Just Kids

From the Bronx”

Arlene Alda

Henry Holt and Company, $28

The assignment to review Arlene Alda’s “Just Kids From the Bronx: Telling It The Way It Was” left me a bit cranky. “Isn’t she a children’s book author?” I thought. After a quick look at her Wikipedia page, I was reminded that Ms. Alda is the author of 15 children’s books, many of them prize winners and one a best seller.

Ms. Alda’s website cites a chorus of accolades for her latest work from political elites and celebrities, including former President Bill Clinton, who says that “Just Kids From the Bronx” is “an inspiring book about the American promise fulfilled.” Barbara Walters claims these “fascinating recollections . . . run the gamut from surprisingly funny to painfully shocking.”

I was certain the publicity machine was overpromising and that the pages were bound to underdeliver. Before I even cracked the cover, I wanted to disparage this book.

So, I was surprised to find myself laughing out loud before I even finished the foreword. Ms. Alda offers the reaction of one contributor: “I’m glad you’re doing a book about the Bronx. I’m sick and tired of hearing about Brooklyn.” As a New Yorker, I couldn’t help but chuckle. I’ve also had enough with the Brooklyn fever, the farm-to-table foodies and bearded hipsters. I decided to give these oral histories about this unsung borough a chance.

“Just Kids From the Bronx” is 60 conversational interviews deftly edited by Ms. Alda. In fact, much of their beauty and power lies in their brevity. The lineup of Bronxites is carefully curated — individuals who’ve excelled across a broad swath of disciplines, ranging from educators to business people, from athletes to artists and many others. The reader is taken on a chronological journey of compelling memoirs.

Each entry is a snapshot — a slightly faded photograph — a mere glimpse into the life of the storyteller. The chronology of interviewees — the first born in 1922 and the last in 1991 — provides a historical and cultural backdrop as the reader witnesses nearly a century in the evolution of a borough. The Jews, Italians, and Irish give way to African-Americans, Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans.

“Just Kids From the Bronx” opens with an anomaly — the only excerpt not from an interview, a posthumous contribution from an unpublished memoir by Abe Rosenthal, the Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent and longtime executive editor of The New York Times. Mr. Rosenthal’s mother would regularly shout, “ ‘Fresh Air!’ . . . And then from her lips came the command that rang through every apartment in the Bronx neighborhood every day: ‘Go grab some fresh air!’ . . . As other American pioneers and gamblers kept moving west, the Jews of New York kept moving north toward fresh air.”

With this first excerpt, Ms. Alda opens a window into the Bronx — the aspirations of the mostly immigrant residents and the sense that something magical and life-enhancing was in that air.

My favorite interviews have the best-selling author Mary Higgins Clark talking tenderly about the loss of her father when she was just a girl; the prize-winning scientist and M.I.T. professor Mildred Dresselhaus offering anecdotes that reveal the source of her ferocious work ethic; Regis Philbin, the entertainer, admitting that, as a boy, he wanted to be Bing Crosby; former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a four-star general, remembering being the Shabbos goy earning a quarter by turning lights on and off for Jews on the Sabbath, and Joyce Hansen, a children’s book author, recalling how all the action in her world “took place on the stoop. It was our town square.”

The book’s real star is, of course, the Bronx itself, vast and physically beautiful. The reader travels its major thoroughfares and back alleyways. We see then-President Franklin Roosevelt riding down the Grand Concourse in his open car, waving to a crowd. We can practically hear the crack of the stick hitting the ball in the endless games of stickball.

Education and family are themes that run through nearly every story. The Bronx High School of Science is referred to time and again as a transformative institution. Teachers cared and scholarships changed lives. Arthur Klein, pediatric cardiologist and president of the Mount Sinai Health Network, expressed the pride evident in so many Bronx Science students: “When I graduated from Bronx High School of Science, there were twenty-one of us in my graduating class who got into M.I.T. We were the largest single contingent from any high school in the United States going to one of the foremost universities in the country.”

Family mattered most of all. Jemina Bernard, an educator, made the point that she didn’t know the terms “extended” and “immediate” family but benefited from “love and nonstop constant support of my whole family.” Robert Levine, an entertainment lawyer and literary agent, said, “As a kid, I was fat and my mother supported me unconditionally. When she took me to the family doctor who told her, ‘You know your son is too fat and you should do something about that,’ her response was, ‘My son is too fat? Look at your wife.’ ”

Al Pacino relished the stories told by his adored grandfather as they sat on their building’s roof: “And you know — it was beautiful. I mean the world up on the roof. I wish I could describe it to you artfully. It was as close to poetry as I could get.”

Not all tales are sweet, and “Just Kids From the Bronx” avoids saccharine sentimentality. References to the tough and difficult conditions permeate. One woman, identified only as anonymous and a self-described “shy girl and pretty much of a loner,” reveals the pain of her childhood as a victim of incest.

I wondered whether “Just Kids From the Bronx” might not travel well. The same way I imagine people in Ohio don’t really understand a Woody Allen movie. Are there just too many inside jokes and proprietary nuances?

Upon reflection, I believe these oral histories are universal. Together, they form a study of the power place holds in one’s psyche. Between interviews, I found myself pausing to muse on my own Midwestern upbringing. And I asked close friends whom I’ve known only as adults about where they grew up. Ms. Alda’s premise holds true: Our original neighborhoods root and steer us through our lives.

In her own essay, Ms. Alda writes, “We lived in a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment. Mother, father, older sister, older brother, the mutt fox terrier Spotty, and me. We ate our meals, played cards and board games, did homework, and told jokes in a small area adjacent to the kitchen called the dinette.” And of her parents, she remembers her “father’s belly laugh” that “drowned out the punch line” of his favorite joke, and a mother so patient that she could easily wait for “chicken to roast or a cake to rise or clothes to dry on the indoor bathroom clothesline.” Like many other kids from the Bronx, Ms. Alda’s mother was motivated by the immigrant’s dream: “This is America. Your life can be better than mine.”

“Just Kids From the Bronx” is proof that the immigrant dream endures, and the kids make it come true.

Sally Susman, a regular book reviewer for The Star, lives in Manhattan and Sag Harbor.

Arlene Alda has a house in Water Mill. She will speak about her book tomorrow for the Fridays at Five series at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton.

Our daughter had just turned 3 when we applied for admission to the nursery school of the Lycee Francais de New York. At the time, the Lycee occupied one of the Upper East Side’s most impressive buildings, a Beaux Arts mansion on East 72nd Street just off Fifth.

The reception room, with 40-foot-high ceilings and a marble staircase curving away into who knew what nether regions, was daunting enough, but when a pale, thin woman dressed all in black came sweeping down the steps and crossed the enormous room to stop, scowling, before the row of seated infants and their jittery parents, all hell broke loose.

Several children began wailing. After a minute or two, having spoken not a word, she gave a brisk backward wave of the hand, indicating that they were dismissed, not to be interviewed that day and maybe never. The rest were lined up Madeline-like and led away.

Emily was accepted. To this day, I believe that the angry-looking woman was the actual test — that any child who didn’t cry at the sight of her got in. “How come you didn’t cry?” I once asked her (this was a child who cried if a button fell off her coat). “I was too frightened,” she replied.

A few years and another child later, there was this rabbit in a classroom at Spence — but never mind, that’s enough about me and my kids. Let’s talk about Wednesday Martin and hers, and her book “Primates of Park Avenue” (Simon & Schuster, $26), which every Upper East Side mother spending the summer anyplace between Aspen and Amagansett has probably either read by now or is afraid to, lest she recognize herself in it.

Having survived the rigors of apartment-hunting in an unfamiliar part of Manhattan and landed in a building she never identifies but that some Internet troll tracked down as 900 Park Avenue, Ms. Martin looks around her, realizes she’s left all her friends in her old downtown neighborhood, her mother’s back home in Michigan, not a soul on 79th Street or anywhere near it except her investment-banker husband gives a damn whether she and her 2-year-old live or die, and decides to do something to keep away the closet monsters. She’s written one memoir already (“Stepmonster”), so she’ll write another, from inside-out, about the Park Avenue mothers she’s hoping to befriend. Well, outside-in, to start with.

She must have hugged herself when the lightning struck: Tackle this new habitat, and the manners and mores of its female wildlife, within a pseudo-scientific frame, using your college knowledge of anthropology for scaffolding.

When, for example, the predators in the playground fell silent upon hearing that her little son was taking music lessons at “the pedestrian Gymboree” rather than the tony Diller-Quaile School of Music, she approached it as a personal failure. Stay-at-home Upper East Side mommies did have a job, she realized — or, more precisely, “a cutthroat, high-stakes career” — and it came before all else: to ensure the success of their kids. Every step, even the “right” music school for tots, was a rung on the ladder to the Ivies. “I could not help but think of Jane Goodall’s matriarchal chimp Flo . . . whose canny advocacy, sheer ambition, and skillful coalition building on behalf of her offspring . . . catapulted them to the top of the dominance hierarchy of their troop in Gombe, Tanzania. . . .”

(Speaking of dominance, Manhattan real estate brokers, many of them U.E.S. women whose children have grown and gone, get a chapter to themselves, as behooves a tribe within the tribe. The buyer’s broker, who icily informed Ms. Martin that finding an apartment in her desired “quadrant,” Fifth to Lex, 60th to 96th, was “not going to be easy,” turned out to be gelato compared to the seller’s agent.)

What mattered the most, though, and brought out the worst in her “conspecifics,” was the cutthroat competition to get their kids into a top-tier nursery school.

 This is an area where only fools, or people with older children already at the school, rush in; all others rightly fear to tread. Ms. Martin’s descriptions of the pre-K “misery sessions” she and her little boy endured will strike terror into the hearts of first-time parents and shudders of recognition, even many years later, into veterans of the application wars. “One day, holding my hand as we were about to enter yet another ‘playroom’ full of kids he didn’t know, he looked up at me and said, ‘Mommy, I can’t do this,’ and I wanted to weep.”

When her son was accepted, apparently after some string-pulling, at one of the “T.T.” schools, she thought she’d won the brass ring, but it turned out to be iron, cold as the shoulders she was getting from his classmates’ moms. “Aside from a shrinking water hole in the Serengeti during the dry season, there is no place more desperate, aggressive, dangerous, and inhospitable than the halls of an exclusive Manhattan private school at morning drop-off and afternoon pickup.”

They were playdate pariahs, mother and child. Was she not thin enough? Blond enough? Rich enough? Dressed-to-the-nines enough?

Bingo. Not only was Ms. Martin an unknown quantity, she hadn’t yet caught on that “the Upper East Side is a body-display culture,” as she informed a crowd that came to hear her read at BookHampton the other night. Although a self-acknowledged “total fashionaholic,” she didn’t understand that what you wore at the beginning and end of the school day mattered here, really mattered, and jeans with a thermal shirt, a la the West Village, did not.

She eventually found another, less predictable, way in to acceptance, but much of what follows — especially a now-infamous chapter on her obsession with the off-the-charts-expensive Hermes Birkin bag — involves the right clothes; for shopping (never carry plastic), for fitness classes in the Hamptons (start with lululemon), for coveted invites to ladies’ lunches: “The impeccably dressed and made-up group couldn’t have been further from the Efe and Aka people of the Ituri Rain Forest,” where “it is common for a woman to walk up to another woman and demand her beads. . . . Saying no is unheard of. . . . Of course, the fastidiously turned out women at Rebecca’s — elegant, refined, polite, and rich — would have fainted if I walked up to any one of them and demanded, ‘Jane, give me your three Pomellato stacking rings and Lanvin Happy bag NOW!’ ’’

This is funny stuff, and “Primates” is full of it, though plenty of people out there have said it’s full of something else. I cannot ever remember a book attracting such a storm of criticism even before it was published, most of it aimed ad feminam — at the author, not the book. Maybe they’re jealous that “Primates” has been optioned by MGM, or that its author is thin, blond, good-looking, and, surely now, rich. Read it for yourself and decide.

Wednesday Martin, who has a house in Sag Harbor, will be signing her book on Aug. 8 at the East Hampton Library’s annual Authors Night benefit.

It’s summer and the Jitney is packed,

every seat taken, except for the one

across the aisle, in which a man

has barricaded his window seat with

a briefcase and jacket, an act meant

to confront others with his superiority.

Munching chips and guffawing at

a YouTube video of an obese woman

riding a scooter down a country road,

towing a younger obese woman

in a wheelchair, he reminds me

of a neighbor’s dog that would steal

and bury our dog’s bones, then growl

defiantly on his side of our fence.

Pythagoras believed our souls ended up

inside the bodies of animals selected

as rewards and punishments.

The three giggling girls behind me,

stretching their legs into the aisle

every time the shy attendant passes,

forcing him to stutter apologies

in a Slavic accent — Poodles, probably.

Pythagoras also believed the shapes

of numbers symbolize our significance.

Well, sequestered here between work

and family, thought and dreaming,

I’m probably some kind of numinous digit

slowly evolving into, say, an aardvark

hurling down the highway inside a bus

camouflaged as a vodka bottle, on its way

to a barricaded future on the far side

of a fence where all our significance is buried.

Philip Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who lives in East Hampton, will read from new work at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor on Aug. 8 at 5 p.m. with Grace Schulman of Springs, poet and professor of English at Baruch College. “Aardvarks” previously appeared in Slate.

When my 25-year-old grandson Jascha — an Elon Musk admirer and entrepreneur himself (The Dream Lab)  — visited us in East Hampton recently, he was completely engaged in reading Ashlee Vance’s smart biography (Ecco, $28.99). He hoped to see at least one Tesla, and then on his last day here, getting on the Ambassador bus to leave, he spotted two!

As it turns out, East Hampton boasts a handful, and sighting Teslas here is popular. One will be on display at the Authors Night event on Aug. 8; a tour of the Tesla factory is being auctioned then to benefit the East Hampton Library.

“A modern alloy of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, and Steve Jobs, Elon Musk is the man behind PayPal, Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and SolarCity, each of which has sent shock waves throughout American business and industry. Mr. Musk has dedicated his energies and his own vast fortune to inventing a future that is as rich and far-reaching as a science fiction fantasy.”

If this jacket copy seems like breathless puffery, the Elon Musk of this book actually lives up to such positive prose — and supports the notion that he is a force of nature. As of last month, Mr. Musk had an estimated net worth of about $14 billion.

Based on 50 hours of exclusive interviews with the subject and almost 300 people who know, work with, or worked for Mr. Musk, this timely and beguiling biography tells us of a very complex, ambitious man who leads a tumultuous life of world-changing companies, grave disappointments, business resurrections, and massive successes. Mr. Vance has written a valentine to high stakes and high tech.

Fans of the television series “Halt and Catch Fire” will recognize the supercharged business atmosphere and intensely focused lives of computer nerds who yearn to do whatever it takes to change the world . . . yesterday. (See Walter Isaacson’s book “The Innovators,” reviewed in The Star on April 9, to glimpse the types of quasi-nerdy high-functioning world-beaters Elon Musk resembles.)

Mr. Musk designed a computer game at age 12 and was a multimillionaire at age 27. In July 2002, eBay offered $1.5 billion to buy PayPal. Mr. Musk netted about $250 million, and he was off and running. Here’s a synopsis of his entrepreneurial enterprises:

PayPal is a worldwide payments system that provides online money transfers — electronic alternatives to traditional paper methods like checks and money orders. In 2014, PayPal moved $228 billion in 26 currencies across more than 190 nations, generating a total revenue of $7.9 billion.

Tesla Motors is an automotive and energy storage company that designs, manufactures, and sells electric cars, electric vehicle power train components, and battery products. In 2013, Tesla posted profits for the first time in its history. Global cumulative Model S sales passed the 75,000-unit milestone in June. Mr. Musk has said that he envisions Tesla Motors as an independent automaker aimed at offering electric cars to the average consumer, beginning in 2017 at prices starting at $35,000.

Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) is an aerospace manufacturer and space transport services company with its headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. Mr. Musk founded it in 2002 with the goal of creating the technologies to enable humanity to reduce space transportation costs (using fully and rapidly reusable rockets) and eventually colonize Mars.

SpaceX’s achievements include the first privately funded, liquid-propellant rocket, Falcon 1, to reach orbit (Sept. 28, 2008); the first privately funded company to successfully launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft, Dragon (Dec. 9, 2010), and the first private company to send a spacecraft, Dragon again, to the International Space Station (May 25, 2012).

In 2006, NASA awarded the company a commercial orbital transportation services contract to design and demonstrate a launch system to resupply cargo to the space station. SpaceX, as of May of this year, has flown six missions to the station under a cargo resupply contract and plans to transport crew.

SolarCity is a company that designs, finances, and installs solar power systems, performs energy-efficiency audits, and retrofits and builds charging stations for electric vehicles. The company had more than 2,500 employees as of December 2012. The overall U.S. market for solar photovoltaic systems has grown from 440 megawatts of solar panels installed in 2009 to 6,200 megawatts installed in 2014. SolarCity helped found a rooftop photovoltaic power station solar-advocacy organization, the Alliance for Solar Choice.

Elon Musk emerges from this well-researched book as a worthy role model and mentor to my grandson and to a generation of adventurous entrepreneurs.

“Russian Tattoo”

A young Elena Gorokhova marries an American astrophysicist visiting St. Petersburg, comes to the United States to live with him in Texas, divorces, and moves to New Jersey.

She struggles with life in suburbia as a stranger in a strange land, with a new marriage and raising a challenging daughter, and yet portrays her life with charm and novelistic immediacy so feelingly that you experience with her “laughter, sorrow, joy, regret, love, and hurt,” as Alan Alda says in praising “Russian Tattoo” (Simon & Schuster, $26) and her bittersweet recollections.

Often moved to tears, I read this beautifully written and heartfelt memoir because “I felt her pain”; I’m familiar with the resettlement problems faced by émigrés from the former Soviet Union who moved to the U.S. starting in the 1990s, at the end of glasnost and perestroika. Helped by foundation grants and a career in science, I developed a program to teach U.S. capitalism and job searching to very high-functioning and credentialed scientists among those émigrés. Some had double doctorates from prominent Russian academic institutions and were driving taxis when they arrived in the U.S. Many became lifelong friends once they landed safely in careers worthy of their superb training.

Thus I was able to empathize with Ms. Gorokhova’s memoir — her travails of parenthood, of living in a new society, of marriage across cultures, of raising an independent child, and her relationships with her daughter and with her strong mother, who comes for a visit and stays for 24 years. She deserves a medal and a double valentine.

Here is how she describes a job interview with a dean at a college where she will teach language education.

“I saw from your résumé that you’re from Leningrad.”

“The real capital, much more beautiful than Moscow,” I gush, watching the dean half-close his eyes as if he had the image of the Hermitage imprinted on the insides of his eyelids.

“All those free universities and free health care,” says the dean dreamily, and I don’t know if I should say something to qualify the adjective free or keep quiet. I don’t want to tell him about hospital wards without water or sheets, or abortions without anesthesia, or university admissions boards with lists of party bosses’ children in their desks, so I remain silent. . . .

“Congratulations,” says the dean [when he offers her the job]. . . .

I say goodbye and [the dean] probably thinks I am smiling because I have enjoyed his musings on all those free perks I foolishly left behind, but the truth is I can already imagine [my husband’s] laughter when he hears about my new boss, the socialist with a Gucci belt.

This is one example of how her outsider viewpoint is able to make her unfamiliar new experiences resonate with our familiar ones — and make us realize that we share our lives and insights with hers. She helps us “see ourselves as others see us.”

“Shrinks”

Jeffrey A. Lieberman, M.D., is professor and chairman of psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and author of more than 500 scientific articles on mental illness and psychiatry. He is an authoritative guide in his masterful and astonishing new book, “Shrinks” (Little, Brown, $28), a great read, on the scientific origins, evolution, and revolutions in brain science and psychiatry, once considered the “stepchild” of modern medicine.

It was Buckminster Fuller who, speaking of Freud’s and Einstein’s dramatic discoveries, said that the greatest discovery of the 20th century was our understanding that the “invisible” is more important than the “visible.” One can debate the merits of this remark, but Einstein still stands tall and his work has prevailed, while Freud’s work has been diminished by brain research using functional nuclear magnetic resonance, other techniques, and by modern psychopharmacology.

“The Brain is wider than the Sky . . . [and] deeper than the sea,” Emily Dickinson wrote. Whether poetic understatement or poetic license, it partially captures a sense of mystery, complexity, and grandeur we feel when we contemplate the brain.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, one in four persons will suffer from mental illness and will need psychiatric attention more than any other specialty — and many will consciously avoid it even though treatments have been proven effective. Mr. Lieberman’s book attempts and succeeds very well in presenting “an honest chronicle of psychiatry with all its rogues and charlatans, its queasy treatments and ludicrous theories.”

The story addresses what mental illness is, where it comes from, and how it can be treated. The optimistic author believes that modern compassionate psychiatry is finally a true science that can “lead any person out of a maze of mental chaos into a place of clarity, care, and recovery.”

He shows this by dividing the book into three sections: the story of diagnosis, the story of treatment, and the story of psychiatry’s rebirth as a legitimate science. He presents compelling case histories of his patients, such as a schizophrenic daughter of parents who thought she merely needed to shape up, “buckle down, and get her act together.” Nevertheless, she responded well to hospital care, antipsychotic medicine, and cognitive therapy.

He tells us that no one was ever “cured” of homosexuality, even though many psychiatrists (including one whose son was gay) tried to do so from the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s. “Sexual orientation disturbance” was ultimately eliminated as a disorder in 1987. Indeed, Dr. Saul Levin became the first openly gay leader of the American Psychiatric Association in 2013. Sadly, Russia and Nigeria still pass antihomosexuality laws.

One recurring character is Mr. Lieberman’s colleague Eric Kandel, who is both a psychodynamic psychiatrist and a biological psychiatrist. By studying brain structure, he discovered there were no anatomical changes in the activation of nerve cells in short-term memories, but long-term memory produces enduring structural changes in new synaptic connections. In 2000, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his studies of neural circuitry and the biology of memory.

Mental illness still carries a stigma. Patrick J. Kennedy, when diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a member of Congress, said, “We need our families and friends to understand that the 100 million Americans suffering with mental illness are not lost souls or lost causes. We’re fully capable of getting better, being happy, and building rewarding relationships.”

Mr. Lieberman’s superb book helps us understand this as well as his medical specialty, as it matured from a “psychoanalytic cult of shrinks into a scientific medicine of the brain.”

Stephen Rosen, a regular contributor to The Star, lives in East Hampton and Manhattan.

These three books will be featured at Authors Night on Aug. 8, with Jeffrey A. Lieberman appearing at the cocktail reception and Elena Gorokhova hosting one of the dinners. The website is authorsnight.org.

Poetry fans are in for a treat, as Grace Schulman and Kimiko Hahn are the next readers in this summer’s Poetry Marathon, held every Sunday at 5 p.m. at the East Hampton Town Marine Museum on Bluff Road in Amagansett.

Ms. Schulman, distinguished professor of English at Baruch College and the poetry editor at The Nation for many years, is the author of a number of collections of poems, most recently “The Broken String,” from 2007, and “Without a Claim,” from 2013. A part-time resident of Springs, she has written a study of the work of Marianne Moore and edited a volume of her verse.

Ms. Hahn’s latest of her nine collections of poems is “Brain Fever,” from last year. She is a past winner of an American Book Award, teaches English in the M.F.A. program at Queens College, and lives on the North Fork.

The Poetry Marathon continues through Aug. 16, when Carole Stone and Virginia Walker will read from and discuss their work. A reception follows each reading.

“The End of the

Rainy Season”

Marian Lindberg

Soft Skull Press, $15.95

In “The End of the Rainy Season: Discovering My Family’s Hidden Past in Brazil,” Marian Lindberg explores questions that all children eventually ask: How reliable are our parents? How sound is their version of reality? Can I trust their stories about the past?

In Ms. Lindberg’s case, these questions are entwined with personal questions about her romantic life, her health, her role as a parent, and her professional choices, as well as questions of greater scope, such as the impact of explorers on the environment and our responsibility to conserve land. The latter issues are no surprise, as Ms. Lindberg works at the Nature Conservancy. But her book is full of surprises, the most important being that a quest for knowledge can bring the most unexpected results.

Ms. Lindberg weaves together several narrative threads: her own memoir, which includes her struggles with health, right livelihood, and romance; each of her parents’ life stories, which include issues of class and gender roles; the history of the sinking of the Vestris, a ship bound for Brazil, the sinking of which resulted in much loss of life due to the captain’s poor judgment, and the history of explorers in Brazil.

On one hand, such a cacophony of narratives might seem a misguided overreach, but, in the context of Ms. Lindberg’s understanding of ecology, her authorial choice to include so much seemingly disparate material is actually a successful wedding of form and content, as the multiple narrative connections embody ecological thinking. As she writes:

“It occurs to me that those of us who accept scientific theories about the importance of the Amazon rainforest to the planet are a little like Brazil’s indigenous people of the past. We have no land titles, no deeds, no property rights in the conventional sense. Yet we feel our lives and our children’s lives depend in part on this place, and we believe that gives us a natural right to care and demand responsible action by those on the ground in Brazil.”

Ms. Lindberg treads on tricky ground here, emphasizing similarities at the risk of eliding important differences between the “we” of this passage — her target audience, mostly educated via a Western paradigm of knowledge, who still may exercise much choice about how exactly to react to our connection to the Amazon and other endangered places, and native people of Brazil, whose economic position and education gave them less agency when outsiders staked claim to their home. But Ms. Lindberg’s humility as an author and a thinker and her sensitivity to different perspectives allow her to effectively navigate this terrain.

In addition, the multiple narratives create a book that appeals to many readers. Want a medical narrative? You got it. An adventure story? That too. A romance? Sure. A deeper understanding of immigrant experiences? Yes. Her exploration of raising her son, conceived via a donor, and the unique definitions of family that can grow from such circumstances were especially deft and moving.

Of course, these various threads can be disorientating at times. But, again, this seems a deliberate part of Ms. Lindberg’s strategy — to recreate the experience of revisiting foundational stories of our lives as our understanding changes and old and new versions of reality bump into each other.

The title of the book explicitly refers to an actual season in Brazil, but like many moments in this book, Ms. Lindberg imbues it with a number of meanings. When she explains that the hardest rain comes just before the rainy season ends, readers are prepared for both extreme weather and other types of upheaval.

Ms. Lindberg is at her best as a writer when she allows her observations of the natural world to stand for observations of human psychology and society, in the title and many other places, such as her description of Baltimore oriole migration patterns at the book’s close.

In the end, many questions about the past will never be answered with any certainty, which leads to bigger questions: How do we move forward when our understanding is provisional? How do we make choices based on unstable knowledge? Ms. Lindberg’s big, ambitious book traces a path through this disarray, and in doing so she provides a map for the many migrations we face in the 21st century.

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

A senior staff writer at the Nature Conservancy, Marian Lindberg lives in Wainscott.

“Beyond Words”

Carl Safina

Henry Holt, $32

Over the centuries, most scientists believed that nonhuman animals lacked thoughts and emotions. Scientists assumed that other species just automatically react to stimuli — unlike humans, who make plans and experience feelings such as sorrow and joy. A few pioneering thinkers, such as Charles Darwin in the 19th century and Jane Goodall in the 1960s, challenged this traditional view, but without much success. Indeed, researchers who wrote about animals’ thoughts or feelings were accused of anthropomorphism, falsely projecting human qualities onto other species. These investigators’ papers were usually rejected by scientific journals.

Finally, as the 20th century came to a close, animal researchers such as Donald Griffin and Marc Bekoff began to make a dent in the traditional attitude. Their writings created new awareness of the possibility that other animals think and feel. Carl Safina’s new book, “Beyond Words,” will expand this awareness.

Mr. Safina observes that a major reason for denying thought and emotion to other species is that they lack human language. “Because we cannot converse with other animals, animal behaviorists threw up their hands, saying we can’t know if they think or feel, and we should assume they cannot.” But other animals do communicate in their own languages. As Mr. Safina says, they use “scents, gestures, postures, hormones and pheromones, touch, glances, and sounds.” It isn’t easy for humans to decode their communications, but Mr. Safina shows that if we patiently study their exchanges and sensitively observe their behavior, we can begin to understand their mental and emotional lives.

“Beyond Words” covers a wide range of material. Mr. Safina focuses on three kinds of animals — elephants, wolves, and killer whales — but he also writes about numerous others. Mr. Safina tells us about his interviews with scientists who are studying animals in the wild, and he discusses several contemporary research topics, including tool-use in other species and comparisons between human and nonhuman physiology.

The book is beautifully written. Some passages are pure poetry. For example, this is how he describes elephants approaching from the distance:“Finally I saw that the very land itself had risen, that the sunbaked land had taken form as something vast and alive and was in motion. The land walked as multitudes, their strides so utterly of the earth that they seemed the source of the very dust.”

Mr. Safina tells us about elephant memory and other cognitive abilities, such as forethought. For example, nursing mothers need to drink water daily, but before they venture into a marsh they nurse their babies longer than usual. The mothers know that it will be difficult for their babies to nurse in the water, so they make sure their babies are filled up beforehand.

But Mr. Safina gives more attention to elephant emotions, especially grief. When a family member or companion elephant dies, elephants suddenly go silent, and they frequently visit the deceased’s remains, gently touching the body with their trunks. When Eleanor, an elephant matriarch in Kenya, died, others tried to revive her, and they stayed with her body for as long as a week later. Some elephants have been observed covering the deceased with dirt and leaves. When a young elephant dies, the mother may slowly trail far behind the herd for several days. It seems clear that she is depressed. Mr. Safina believes these expressions of grief reflect how much elephants love one another.

Grief reactions are common because so many elephants are killed. As the author explains, the slaughter of elephants for their ivory has been going on for centuries. By the 1500s, Europeans had combined the ivory and slave trades. “Captured humans marched captured ivory to coastal ports, where both were shipped.” After slavery was abolished, elephants fell victim to poachers. Africa’s elephant population dropped from about 10 million in the early 1900s to 400,000 today. At present, “an elephant dies every l5 minutes.”

Elephant life still has its happy side. Like other young mammals, young elephants love to play. Mr. Safina quotes Cynthia Moss, a legendary elephant researcher, who described youngsters “racing about, beating through bushes and tall grass, heads up, ears out, eyes open wide glinting with mischief . . . letting forth wild, pulsating play trumpets.” They sometimes pretend they are chasing lions in the brush.

During mating seasons, mature elephants are in high spirits. Males walk with a swagger; females move in a wiggly, rolling, coy-looking manner. Sometimes mature elephants just act silly, as when they walk on their knees — just having fun. Elephants become happiest after it rains, or when they see babies playing or sleeping. Babies bring them great joy.

But the descriptions of the elephants’ happiness are bittersweet. The threat of hunters is always present.

When it comes to wolves, Mr. Safina says that before the Europeans arrived, there were probably a million in the territory that became our lower 48 states. By 1930, humans had wiped out 95 percent of them, primarily through hunting. Since the 1970s, government protections have enabled populations to recover somewhat, but in the last few years protections have been weakened.

Mr. Safina emphasizes the extent to which wolves care about members of their families, sharing food and going to great lengths to help them. For example, he describes how a young, sickly wolf, seeing his sister being attacked by three hostile wolves, jumped into the fray and managed to save her life.

Killer whales, sometimes called orcas, actually belong to the dolphin family. Mr. Safina explains that there are several types of killer whales and predicts that these types will eventually be classified as separate species. The general public has become familiar with killer whales by visits to marine theme parks, where the animals are held captive.

Compared to wolves, there is less information on the sizes of killer whale populations, but the numbers of several types are clearly dwindling. This is often because humans have overfished the salmon they need for food.

Like elephants and wolves, killer whales are extremely social animals that care for one another. Surprisingly, they also have been known to look out for humans. Mr. Safina tells of people who were out boating and became lost in thick fog. They feared they would drift out to sea. Then killer whales appeared and guided them home. When we hear about these animals’ altruism toward humans, their captivity in marine parks feels all the crueler.

When Mr. Safina turns his attention away from elephants, wolves, and killer whales, one topic he discusses is animals’ sense of beauty. I found this discussion particularly intriguing. He mentions how two chimpanzees separately climbed to the top of a hill, greeted each other, clasped hands, and watched the sunset. Humans, of course, enjoy sunsets as well. Humans also find beauty in the same visual patterns and scents that attract many insects. Mr. Safina points to a fascinating topic for further research.

Running throughout the book is a central question: Just how unique are humans? Mr. Safina recognizes that each species has its own special talents and capacities that have enabled it to adapt to its particular environment. But he believes that commonalities are more fundamental. Beneath all the diversity, we are all kin.

The book includes endnotes that direct the reader to the author’s sources. I think the endnotes could have been fuller. I realize, though, that a longer list might have made the book so large that it would discourage potential readers. Perhaps expanded endnotes could be placed on a website.

But this concern pales in comparison to the impressive quality of this book. It is well reasoned and highly informative. Above all, it is an eloquent call for greater respect for the animals that share the planet with us.

William Crain, who lives part time in Montauk, is president of the East Hampton Group for Wildlife and a co-founder of the Safe Haven Farm Sanctuary in Poughquag, N.Y. His most recent book is “The Emotional Lives of Animals and Children: Insights From a Farm Sanctuary.”

Carl Safina’s books include “The View From Lazy Point.” The founder of the Safina Center on the environment at Stony Brook University, he lives in Amagansett. 

At 40 years old this year, it’s fair to say “Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses” has matured into a powerful voice in American literature. It’s also fair to say WordTheatre, a nonprofit organization founded in 2003 that in its own words “gives voice to great writing” has gained momentum, with its growing list of film and television celebrities and acclaimed authors as partners.

A benefit on Saturday at Guild Hall in East Hampton Village titled Where Words Survive and Thrive will allow WordTheatre to support Pushcart’s efforts as well as kick off the celebration of Pushcart’s milestone. An impressive lineup of actors and actresses, including Amber Tamblyn, Carla Gugino, Ari Graynor, Sarah Wynter, Vincent Piazza, Zack Grenier, Ben Schwartz, and Christopher McDonald, will read some of the best of the best curated from Pushcart’s four decades of anthologies.

“It’s my biggest pleasure to do this. It’s the 40th anniversary, so I said let’s ensure this continues another 40 years,” said Cedering Fox, the event’s producer and a voiceover professional who has, for the past three years, lent her voice to the Oscars.

The Pushcart Prize holds special significance for Ms. Fox, whose mother, Siv Cedering, a poet and longtime Amagansett resident, twice was honored by Pushcart. Before her death, Ms. Cedering read at the first WordTheatre benefit at Guild Hall, held in 2007. Since then, Ms. Fox has returned every other year to Guild Hall to convene the talents of writers and actors in support of Pushcart.

“It’s my gift to my mother, and it keeps me connected to the community,” she said. Referring to the South Fork, she said, “I feel a real affinity for this part of the world. When you think about all the great writers who have come up through here and have been nurtured here, it’s just fitting.”

In addition to the man who started it all, Bill Henderson of Springs, Pushcart’s founding editors include Reynolds Price, Gordon Lish, Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Bowles, Ralph Ellison, and more than 20 other heavy-hitting names in modern literature.

For her WordTheatre performances, which are held in venues from Los Angeles to London, Ms. Fox said she has discovered many fine writers from among Pushcart’s prize recipients. On Saturday, the writers whose work will be featured include A.M. Homes, the author of the best-selling memoir “The Mistress’s Daughter” and a winner of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, David Means, a prolific short-story writer who was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner, and Richard Bausch, a novelist whose book “The Last Good Time” was made into a feature-length film.

The lineup of performers is no less impressive. Ms. Gugino, an actress and model, has appeared in movies such as “Spy Kids” and “Watchmen.” Ms. Tamblyn has starred in films such as “Django Unchained” and “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.” More recently, she founded the Write Now Poetry Society and published the book “Dark Sparkler,” which profiles famous women “who glimmered on screen” but fell to pieces in real life.

Ms. Graynor is an actress and producer who has starred in movies like “The Sitter,” “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist,” and “Mystic River.” Mr. Piazza is perhaps best known for his role as the Italian-American mobster Lucky Luciano in the HBO series “Boardwalk Empire.” Mr. Grenier is a Tony Award nominee of “33 Variations” fame who has more recently been involved in the TV series “The Good Wife.” Ms. Wynter is known for her work on “The 6th Day,” “Lost Souls,” “24,” “American Odyssey,” and “Californication.”

“You laugh, you cry,” Ms. Fox said. “Everybody is a 6-year-old kid when they’re listening to a great short story read by a great actor.”

Tickets to a 6:30 p.m. V.I.P. reception with the actors and writers on Saturday cost $125 and include a signed hardcover copy of Pushcart’s 40th anthology. For the show, which starts at 8 p.m., general admission tickets range from $25 to $65.