“Spinglish”

Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf

Blue Rider Press, $27.50

A new book by two part-time South Fork residents is a shrewdly amusing screed that George Orwell, whom the authors acknowledge, might have written if he’d grown up amid the quick-witted irreverence of The Harvard Lampoon, as the co-authors did in their undergraduate days.

The title titillates: “Spinglish: The Definitive Dictionary of Deliberately Deceptive Language.” The cover satirically promises “How to succeed in business (and politics and everything else) without really lying.” Mostly an up-to-date compendium of misleading euphemisms, the book also has a 30-page bilingual dictionary so you can easily look up a euphemistic replacement for, say, budget cuts (“savings”).

Henry Beard has written or co-written some 50 humorous books, like “Poetry for Cats” and “The Official Exceptions to the Rules of Golf.” His equally prolific collaborator, Christopher Cerf, was an early colleague on The National Lampoon and a producer of the PBS literacy education program “Between the Lions”; he is the son of the publisher and punster Bennett Cerf.

With a distinct liberal bias, the book updates the apparently universal human tendency to “spin” the truth that Orwell famously analyzed in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” and illustrated in the propaganda slogans of “1984” (“Ignorance Is Strength,” “Freedom Is Slavery”). The authors freely acknowledge their place in a long line of Orwell heirs, also ironically tipping their toques to Edward Bernays, the legitimately recognized founder of modern public relations, and to Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist who, they say, advised candidates to prettify oil drilling as “energy exploration” and capitalism as “free market economy.”

The variegated entries bespeak a savvy, sophisticated interest in near-falsification. “Capital punishment” mutes “death penalty,” “challenge” puts an optimistic spin on “problem,” “client” is “mortuary workers’ term for corpse,” “coercive diplomacy” has been substituted for “bombing,” “nonperforming asset” for “bad loan.” The book defines “bloc” as “an alliance or coalition of nations of which the speaker or writer disapproves,” following with a quote from a 1991 scholarly publication reporting that “Western leaders commonly characterized the group of countries allied with the USSR as the ‘Eastern Bloc’ or the ‘Communist Bloc’ but almost never as the ‘Eastern Alliance’ or ‘Communist Coalition.’ ”

The dodges are documented in 98 pages of citations often drawn from the work of other candor cops. “Business manager” for “pimp” was reported in a 2014 Slate article on how “Sex-Work Bosses Attempt to Rebrand”; “bangalored,” meaning “fired after your job was outsourced to India,” comes from an earlier Beard/Cerf confection, their 1993 “The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook.”

In an era when “most newspapers don’t have foreign staffs anymore,” the phrase “by our foreign staff” frequently means “we lifted this from the newswires,” according to “a jargon connoisseur” named Robert Hutton. For real-estate watchers, when an ad says a property is “tranquil,” the authors cite the translation of a San Francisco real estate agent named Tara-Nicholle Nelson: “not near anything you care about.”

Even sending up conventional reference books, the text is peppered with illustrations carrying chortle-inducing captions, like a photo labeled “Count Leo Tolstoy, author of the nineteenth-century Russian classic ‘Kinetic Military Action and Permanent Pre-Hostility.’ ” The last entry in the “English-to-Spinglish” dictionary is a deft thrust at anti-abortionists. “Zygote,” the authors say, can be twisted into “pre-born baby.”

But all is not liberal-leaning current affairs. Mr. Beard and Mr. Cerf cheekily award themselves a gold seal, embossed on the dust jacket, signifying the book as “Winner of the Bullitzer Prize in fiction and nonfiction.” The seal bears a portrait of a long-nosed, 18th-centuryesque Pinocchio and the mock-Latin motto “Stercus Tauri” (manure of bulls).

Henry Beard has a house in East Hampton, and Christopher Cerf is a part-time resident of Springs.

Christopher T. Cory blogs and contributes to The Star from a house behind the East Hampton Library.

“Out of Line: The Art

Of Jules Feiffer”

Martha Fay

Abrams, $40

One of the most incisive Jules Feiffer quotes Martha Fay uses in this generously illustrated biography gets to the core of the artist’s culture-shaking genius:

“I wanted to put the essence of my reader on the page . . . to move him out of his genteel, benign, suburban WASP landscape. I wanted to circumcise the sucker and transplant him from the Jazz Age from whence he came to the Age of Anxiety, from Babbittry and Dale Carnegie to Sigmund Freud. . . .”

Mr. Feiffer was talking specifically about the ’60s and his strip “Sick, Sick, Sick” in The Village Voice, but the combination of societal insight and creative aggression reflected in his remark has been the booster rocket of all his work and why, for more than 50 years, we have hung on the fence of his deconstruction site watching the work of this nervy kid who can say the things we wouldn’t dare and probably couldn’t think of in any case.

The hard cover underneath the dust jacket of “Out of Line” is a facsimile reproduction of Mr. Feiffer’s art class binder. It is an endearingly clunky lettering job spelling out JULES FEIFFER ART 330 SEC. 5.14 along with a determined drawing of a palette and brush. In faint pencil lines all over the cover are Jules’s doodles of superheroes, boxers, and math computations. In the drawings’ obvious fervor in which the young Jules proclaims himself an artist and its establishment of two of Mr. Feiffer’s main themes (minus the math), the cover sets up the charming and witty tone of the whole book.

The first chapters show drawings Jules’s mother saved from his childhood and the family photographs from the same period. The drawings, youthful as they are, establish an attitude, vigorous and pugnacious, that we can recognize in Mr. Feiffer’s early comics, the breakthrough strips in The Village Voice, and even the plots of his plays and movies that followed. That’s one of the things the many illustrations in the book establish, that with all of the false starts, the moving into new territory, the experiments with style, there is a core confidence in Mr. Feiffer that never really wavers.

Ms. Fay’s fluid and urbane writing gives the sociological context that the story needs given how much Mr. Feiffer was reacting to the times, and she uses quotes from Mike Nichols, Hugh Hefner, Ed Koren, and this one from Art Spiegelman to reflect Mr. Feiffer’s relationship to his peers: “That’s what made Jules so significant and a real role model. He had to reinvent comics to take advantage of his subjectivity, his . . . intellectual side.”

In revisiting the many Village Voice strips reproduced in the book I was struck by how time-defyingly brilliant they are. The characters he invented seem like friends from my youth whose anxieties and pretensions are forever current — the modern dancer celebrating spring and her personal angst; Bernard, the nebbish, agonizing over the meaning of manhood and his failure with women; Huey, the cad, who succeeds where Bernard fails.

Then, of course, the parade of politicians whose words Mr. Feiffer unmasks for the manipulative dissimulations they are. The strip in which President Kennedy checks in with his press secretary for polling on his popularity, for instance, reveals the hungry ego behind the heroic facade. Mr. Feiffer lets Nixon, sitting, stolidly staring out at us, speak for himself in strip after devastating strip. Mr. Feiffer’s satirical provocations probably had the same impact on the young in the ’60s and ’70s as Jon Stewart and “The Daily Show” has had in our time.

Intermittently, during these years of writing and drawing “Sick, Sick, Sick,” Mr. Feiffer had been writing plays, “Little Murders” and “Knock, Knock,” among others, and screenplays, “Munro,” “Carnal Knowledge,” “Popeye,” and “VD Blues.” The stories that Ms. Fay tells of the writing and producing of these plays and films are the most celebrity-filled parts of the book and, along with the popular triumphs of these productions, describe Mr. Feiffer’s difficulties with some of his collaborators and with the critics of the work. Walter Kerr, for instance, first put down “Little Murders” as being “the funniest of Mr. Feiffer’s jaundiced visions,” before seeing it again and giving it his big thumbs-up.

Ms. Fay’s story of Mr. Feiffer’s experience writing the script for the movie “Popeye” is the classic literary writer’s story of being chewed up in the maw of a big Hollywood production, but Mr. Feiffer’s candidness in revealing his interaction with and his feelings about the director Robert Altman give the tale a vividness you don’t usually get in these movie recollections.

Although Mr. Feiffer had illustrated Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth,” the real beginning of his children’s book period began with the creation of “The Man in the Ceiling” in 1993. It started as a failed collaboration with his longtime friend Edward Sorel, Mr. Feiffer to write the story and Mr. Sorel to illustrate it. When Mr. Sorel backed out, feeling the gist of the tale wasn’t right for him, Mr. Feiffer decided to proceed and illustrate it himself. The picture book form released a different kind of fictional writing in him that was immensely pleasurable, led to his doing 10 more books for children, and, in a way, prepared him to embark on the most significant book of his current career.

“Kill My Mother,” a graphic novel, to which Ms. Fay devotes the last 11 pages of the book, is an extraordinary achievement and, as Ms. Fay writes, “might be said to bring [Mr. Feiffer’s] long run full circle.” The novel is a complex story involving all Mr. Feiffer’s favorite noir set pieces from 1940s movies: the tough detective, the mysterious dame, meetings under lamp light, and even a scene in the World War II Pacific jungles with a transgender soldier (Jules, you got ahead of the zeitgeist, again!).

As ingenious as the story is and as satisfying the zing of the dialogue, the art, it seems to me, is an even more astonishing accomplishment. Sixty-three years after the young Jules Feiffer struggled unsuccessfully to match the smooth complexity of Will Eisner’s style in “The Spirit,” the 84-year-old Feiffer broke through to his own way of drawing and painting a much more complex story than he had ever tackled. The rapid, impatient Feiffer line still gets to the essence quickly, but now the artist can use it to describe extremely nuanced body language and the interaction of many figures in a scene. Where once color in his work was a secondary handmaiden to the line, it now becomes a major element, evoking light, atmosphere, and psychology. Whole scenes are dominated by the mood of what the color washes and intricacies set up. I can only imagine the bliss he felt while working on this book.

“Out of Line” is a fascinating visual and literary journey through the multifaceted life and work of a creative icon of our times. The book couldn’t have had a more satisfying ending than to document Jules Feiffer stepping up to the plate once again and, with “Kill My Mother,” hitting an artistic home run.

James McMullan, formerly of Sag Harbor, has painted scores of posters for Lincoln Center Theater and illustrated many children’s books with his wife, the writer Kate McMullan. His latest book is “Leaving China: An Artist Paints His World War II Childhood.”

Jules Feiffer lives in East Hampton. 

Adoption Revisited

Lorraine Dusky’s 1979 memoir, “Birthmark,” was the wrenching account of her giving up her daughter for adoption. Now, 36 years later, the longtime Sag Harbor resident is returning to the story and her critique of how adoption is handled in this country.

The follow-up memoir, “Hole in My Heart,” published through Amazon, explores her reunion with her daughter, the difficulties for a child with two families, and her daughter’s death in 2007. She’ll read from it at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor on Saturday at 5 p.m.

Park Avenue “Primates”

You’ve heard of Wednesday Martin’s new “anthropological memoir,” “Primates of Park Avenue,” involving her experiences raising children on the Upper East Side of Manhattan among the privileged, the gym-frequenting, the blond? Well, she’ll be interviewed about it next Thursday at the Southampton Arts Center.

Her interlocutor, Alex Kuczynski of Southampton, is a contributor to The New York Times and the author of “Beauty Junkies.” The talk, which starts at 5:30 p.m., is part of a series she is hosting at the center, which is in the old Parrish Art Museum on Job’s Lane. The cost is $18. Also of note? There’ll be wine.

“A World Unto Itself”

Ruth Ann Bramson,

Geoffrey K. Fleming,

and Amy Kasuga Folk

Southold Historical Society, $40

It is refreshing that in this age of communication indecision our cousin fork is turning out an impressive number of regional studies that trace architecture, visual arts, and local lore within the confines of paper covers. Not unlike the revival of vinyl records, books seem to keep dodging death.

There is little question that the Southold Historical Society has taken the lead in supporting local history publications with a delightfully eclectic lot of well-illustrated volumes shedding light on many aspects of North Fork history that deserve attention from a much larger audience. Rather than returning to print older writings, the society has focused on bringing us new authors and exciting new research. While I await a full history, written by an academic, of any one of our townships, I am mighty happy to get my history fix through shots rather than a cocktail.

One of the most recent publications from the Southold Historical Society is “A World Unto Itself: The Remarkable History of Plum Island, New York” by Ruth Ann Bramson, Geoffrey K. Fleming, and Amy Kasuga Folk. The “Remarkable” in the title may be hyperbole, but the story of Plum Island is fascinating.

Most of us have met the island only from afar, as we ferry past it on our way to and from New England. It seems oddly close to us as we peer out the ship’s windows at the island’s famous lighthouse. This picture-postcard image is almost a state of Maine cliché. There cannot be anything amiss in such a lobster roll setting, right?

Well, if we look back at what the beach read of 1997 was, you might think differently. Nelson DeMille’s best-selling novel “Plum Island,” with its bad-boy detective, murder, and genetically altered viruses, certainly induced me to look deeper into the windswept landscape of the island for a glimpse of those sinister cinderblock labs filled with Frankensteinian experiments. Later titles for the Plum Island bookshelf have been “Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory” by Michael Christopher Carroll, an exposé of the island’s biological warfare research, and, most recently, “Plum Island” by Mi­chael Williams. Mostly the island gets the Fox News approach to journalism.

Thankfully, Ms. Bramson, Mr. Fleming, and Ms. Folk treat their subject with respect, facts, and a taste for storytelling.

One of Long Island’s early historians, Nathaniel Prime, wrote in 1845 that “Plum Island contains at present about 800 acres, and is inhabited by only three families, including fifteen individuals . . . the surface of the Island is very stony, and has no wood except a small pine swamp.” This is not an inviting description, but the authors have uncovered reams of new primary-source material that introduce the reader to a very detailed and engaging journey. They start us off with prehistory and the geological formation of the island and continue up to last year’s election ousting Representative Tim Bishop, who was active in trying to decide the island’s fate. As history never stops, so goes the story of Plum Island.

Adriaen Block’s 1635 map was the first to delineate Plum Island. Tradition tells us that wild beach plums once grew there in large patches, hence the island’s name. To the Native Americans, it was called Manittuwond, or “the island to which we go to plant corn.” Its transfer from Mammawetough, sachem of the Corchaugs, to various colonial governments and individuals is clouded. By 1648, several representatives of the New Haven Colony purchased lands that included Plum Island. In 1659, Samuel Willis, a Connecticut mag­istrate, made a deed for the island with the sachem Wyandanch, facilitated by Lion Gardiner on Gardiner’s Island.

The Town of Southold claimed the island’s ownership in 1665. To clarify the matter, the governor of the New York Colony, Edmond Andros, granted Willis a patent that made the island a manor in 1675. The governor, the year next, gave Southold Town the right of civil jurisdiction, but the manor was still owned by Willis. Willis sold Plum Island after 10 years. Just about 1700, the island was divided by two buyers, Samuel Beebe Jr. and Isaac Schellinger.

The story of the island continued as a progression of farmers raising cattle, sheep, and hogs. Players like the Gardiners of Rhode Island and the Tuthill and Truman families all had their roles to play. Chapters on significant events like the American Revolution and the War of 1812 enrich this portrait of the island by reminding the reader of the local importance that national and international situations presented, even to an area that might have seemed remote.

After the Civil War, Plum Island real estate began to beckon those big-city investors who are always looking for the next gold mine, oil well, or resort property. Through inheritance and purchase, several islanders had increased their land holdings, and by 1883 the entire western end of the island had been purchased anonymously. It turned out to be a partnership named the Plum Island Company, led by Abram Hewitt, a former mayor of New York City. His representative was Edwin Bedell, a New Jersey merchant who worked out of New York City. Through some clever foreclosures, Hewitt had rid himself of his other investors and most of Plum Island was ready for groundbreaking by 1889. But, oddly, Hewitt did not start a resort; rather he continued to lease farmland for grazing.

The United States declared war on Spain in 1898, but the government had started acquiring land the year before for the construction of Fort Terry on Plum Island. The first purchase was for 150 acres (it later turned out to be 193) for $25,000. In 1901 an additional 647 acres was bought for $64,700. The government owned the island.

There are many chapters — on rum-running, shipwrecks, the lighthouse, the history of Fort Terry, the Maj. Benjamin M. Koehler court-martial case (involving the sexual harassment of over a dozen of the men in his command), and the transformation of the island into an Animal Disease Center.

This book is richly illustrated with period photographs, engravings, and works of art. The three authors have created a seamless narrative that speaks in one voice.

This is definitely a book for historians, but because of the wealth of the material and the fact that the narrative is confined to one small island, it can certainly be read for pleasure. And since we don’t know yet what might happen to Plum Island in the next few years (will it be sold, will it be given to Southold, or whatever), this book is history at its most current. It is also about the only way you’ll get to see what is on the island without being arrested!

Richard Barons is the executive director of the East Hampton Historical Society. He lives in Springs.

Geoffrey K. Fleming is the director of the Southold Historical Society, where Amy Kasuga Folk is collections manager. Ruth Ann Bramson is a historian who lives in East Marion.

The hamlet of Bridgehampton may have been settled in the middle of the 17th century, but it was forever changed with the arrival of the Long Island Rail Road in 1870, as stepping off the iron horse, of course, came the summer visitors.

The story of this transformation is told through numerous photos and captions in a new book in Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series, “Bridgehampton’s Summer Colony,” by Julie B. Greene, the curator and archivist at the Bridgehampton Museum and the local history librarian at the Hampton Library.

The photos range from one of the bridge across Sagg Pond that gave the hamlet its name, to the mansion haunts of the likes of the coal magnate John E. Berwind of Ocean Road, to spectators in their Sunday best eyeing a circa 1915 racecar send dirt flying as it rounds a curve in one of Bridgehampton’s famous road races. There are newspaper advertisements for “sea-side board” offering “piano, croquet, pleasant drives,” portraits of the Quimbys and other influential families, images of sailing, bicycling, and picnics, and houses, houses, houses of the summer colony, among them exemplars of the Shingle Style.

Ms. Greene will give an illustrated talk about the book on May 16 at the Bridgehampton Museum’s Corwith House at a time to be announced.

“Montauk”

Robin Strong

Arcadia, $21.99

Robin Strong, the Montauk Library’s tireless archivist, could not have picked a better time to compile the photographic history of Montauk just published. Why? Because word has it Montauk has been “discovered.”

As we know, “to discover” is a relative verb, often, and myopically, applied to the European settlers who bullied their way onto this continent only a few hundred years ago. It’s the nature of human existence to look forward rather than backward, and it seems that once a place in one’s own time is discovered, that which came before tends to evaporate from memory. It’s only due to our stewards of the past that we maintain some semblance of perspective.

Ms. Strong’s “Montauk,” part of the Images of America series published by Arcadia Publishing, serves as a fascinating witness to what has come before. Montauk’s Indian history is outside the scope of this book. It’s primarily a photographic history after all. The library’s archive houses our pre-colonial history, as does the Montauk Historical Society’s Lighthouse Museum.

Montauk has been discovered many times: by the Algonquians thousands of years ago in search of high ground, by English cattlemen in the mid-1600s, by the military from then until the end of the Cold War, by Big Apple swells, by the Long Island Rail Road, by Carl Fisher, the man who would have turned Montauk into the Miami Beach of the North if the Great Depression had not saved us. It’s been discovered by waves of fishermen, artists, surfers, and latterly by new, swollen waves of summer visitors.

It’s safe to say that Ms. Strong’s collection of photos, memorabilia, and in-depth research into Montauk’s history has been, and continues to be, a labor of love. The book’s dedication reads: “In memory of my great-great grandfather Capt. James G. Scott, keeper of the Montauk Lighthouse from 1885 to 1910, and to my great-grandmother Emily Scott Strong.”

William Wallace Tooker took the first photograph we see, in 1883. There’s a post-and-rail fence and gate in the foreground. Beyond it, Montauk’s treeless pastureland stretches east. Inhabited by Montauk’s proprietors, or caretakers, First House, the first — and about the only — house cattlemen came to after driving their herds across Napeague from Amagansett and East Hampton for a summer of grazing in the 17th and 18th centuries, can be made out too.

I love this photograph. Except in a few places, it’s nearly impossible to imagine that Montauk was almost entirely covered by maritime grasses until well into the 20th century. When I first arrived here in the early 1960s, most all of the land on the east side of East Lake Drive was a rolling hillside blanketed by tall grass. You can still get a feel for this if you walk up behind Third House at Montauk County Park and look east.

Fortunately, it was not development alone that has changed Montauk’s natural state. It was Nature, herself, and the fact that gone are the annual grass burnings that used to eliminate the growth of brush, and eventually trees.

The fact is, due to the dashing of Fisher’s best-laid plans, and the forward-looking attention of conservation-minded officials and citizens, over 70 percent of Montauk remains protected parkland, now forested, but protected.

Ms. Strong’s book gives Fisher his due, of course. The man had taste, and the early photographs of the Tudor-style houses, Montauk Community Church, Montauk Manor, Playhouse, Yacht Club, and Montauk Harbor, which he created by opening landlocked Lake Montauk to Block Island Sound in 1927, depict the scale of the man’s vision.

This review cannot possibly touch on every aspect of “Montauk.” A picture is worth a thousand words, after all, but speaking of words, the captions that Ms. Strong provides are substantive, a great guide to those with little knowledge of our history.

I love the photos of the old Montauk Village on Fort Pond Bay, long gone due to the ’38 Hurricane and its takeover by the Navy during World War II. We visit Alma Baker’s Luncheonette in 1922, Jake Wells’s grocery store, the Long Island Rail Road terminus, the rail siding that stuck out into the bay to take on fish bound for the city. The Perry B. Duryea and Son lobster dock on the east side of the bay is the only remnant of the old village left.

Readers can use Ms. Strong’s book as a tour guide too. Not everything has disappeared. Trail’s End restaurant used to be located in the old village. Now you can find it downtown on Edgemere Road, where it was moved after being booted by the Navy.

Same with the East Deck Motel at Ditch Plain, whose cabins were also moved from the old village. It’s impossible to miss the Tudor homes, the Fisher buildings (Montauk’s original theater) on Main Street, with the Montauk Tavern (now the Shagwong) across the street, and, of course, the Tower condo, built to serve as Fisher’s administration headquarters. Look east up on the hill east of Ditch Plain. You can see the Association Houses designed by Charles McKim and Stanford White in the 1880s.

A lot is gone, of course, except in photos carefully culled by Ms. Strong. The Lighthouse when it had nearly 300 feet of bluff between it and the sea, photos of Camp Wikoff where 30,000 troops, including Col. Theodore Roosevelt, convalesced following the Cuban campaign of the Spanish-American War, photos of Camp Hero and its massive artillery positions during World War II, dirigible hangars on Fort Pond during World War I, and Montauk’s great old estates.

The book pays tribute to Montauk’s fishing history, both commercial and recreational. There are shots of “Fishangri-la,” a dock and marina on Fort Pond Bay where countless numbers of sportfishermen departed after running across the tracks from the Fishermen’s Special cars for a day on the water. Ms. Strong’s caption informed me that it was none other than Milton Berle who coined the marina’s name.

I also learned that it was Kay Topping, wife of the Yankees owner Dan Topping, who caught the first giant bluefin tuna, 587 pounds, to be brought into Montauk after being angled using rod and reel. The year was 1949.

Capt. Frank Mundus, Montauk’s “Monster” shark fisherman, is in the book aboard his Cricket II charter boat, and Frank Tuma’s Tackle Shop — the book is stuffed with photos that take us back in time, before Montauk was “discovered.”

Robin Strong’s “Montauk” belongs on the bookshelves and coffee tables of all local residents, and those of visitors who want to carry a bit of Montauk’s magic back home.

Robin Strong will give an illustrated talk about “Montauk” on May 23 at 7:30 p.m. at the Montauk Library.

“It’s as hard as it looks, you gotta read ’em dumb books,” Loudon Wainwright sings in “Bein' a Dad,” one of his inimitable explorations of family life, “and you end up despising Walt Disney.”

How often I’ve thought of those lyrics as a parent reading children’s books, their often graceless pages self-indulgently dense with too many words. Forget the hair-raising intimations of mortality in “Goodnight Moon,” or the humbling unconditional love of “The Giving Tree.” It’s kid stuff. Anybody can do it, right?

Susan Verde’s got the idea. The East Hamptoner’s latest, “You and Me” (Abrams, $14.95), simply and clearly communicates a tale of friendship and life-altering chance. “If that day had chosen a different way to unfold, ours is a story that might not have been told,” an orange tabby thinks one day while dusting his furniture.

He’s a traditional sort — he pads about in slippers, a teapot and the morning paper adorn his breakfast table — and, above all, he’s thoughtful: “What if I had slept in, covers pulled up to my chin?” and a stuffed toy mouse by his side. “What if my bicycle had a flat? Or,” he wonders, getting to the plot device that brings him to his “forever friend,” a cat of a purplish hue, “if I hadn’t gone back to fetch my hat.” (It blows off in a gust, requiring a certain someone’s retrieval — in other words, “Serendipity, perfect timing, all the stars aligning.”)

What if? The implications are profound, in anyone’s life, and usually best not dwelled upon — the wrong turn, the missed connection, the chance meeting, the decision unmade that results in an unalterable trajectory. In this case, it’s one of feline felicity.

“You and Me” is deftly illustrated in ink, gouache, and watercolor by Peter H. Reynolds, whose ample use of white space complements his wordsmith counterpart’s concision.

“A Duck’s Tail”

The Flanders Big Duck. What a happy thing.

Rose Nigro of that fine hamlet — bounded by green parkland and glittering waters, dotted with repair shops and hard times, it contains multitudes — has put together a tribute worthy of the roadside attraction. “Have you heard the story?” she writes. “It’s been whispered far and wide. There’s a Duck in Flanders. It’s so big, you can walk inside!”

As some of us remember doing — for the purchase of eggs, don’t you know.

“A Duck’s Tail” (Reeves Bay ArtWorks, $26.95) is history as much as it is a story: The history of a 1931 landmark now on the National Register of Historic Places, 10 tons of reinforced concrete with a Model T Ford’s taillights for eyes, and a story of its banishment in the face of encroaching development to a stretch of road where only hunters and a few tick-addled hikers tread.

Its tail may have drooped in sadness those years, but after sufficient civic outcry the Duck came back to its old duck farm roost, and we’re lucky to have it — novelty architecture as iconic as the giant deep-fried confection atop Randy’s Donuts in Los Angeles, and better for you.

The illustrations by Tom H. John, a designer in the film and TV biz, have a midcentury whimsy, and he’s included a search game for kids involving, yes, hidden eggs.

The book is available in the Big Duck’s body cavity gift shop and at BookHampton. The formerly decrepit outbuildings behind it on Route 24, by the way, have been refurbished and transformed into exhibits on the history of duck farming on Long Island. Which is swell news. The Duck deserves all the creature comforts it can get.

“The Contender”

Michael Shnayerson

Twelve, $30

As soon as “The Contender,” Michael Shnayerson’s biography of Andrew Cuomo, was released, I hurried to my neighborhood bookstore to buy a copy. Failing to see it among the new nonfiction on the front table, I inquired at the information desk. I was sent up to the third floor to search in the biography section and, unable to locate it there, asked again for help from a salesperson. She suggested I go to the fourth floor and check the Current Affairs stacks. No luck there, either. Frustrated, I was leaving the store when the book, with its unmistakable cover photo of Mr. Cuomo wearing a cheeky grin, caught my eye. It was on the very table where I’d first looked.

The governor’s biography had been hiding in plain view — much like the governor himself. For me, Mr. Cuomo is an ever-present but somewhat unknowable figure on the political landscape. Mr. Shnayerson has undertaken, with exhaustive research and dazzling writing, to reveal this elusive leader to us. With scenes that transport us from Mr. Cuomo’s childhood in Queens through his governorship in Albany, Mr. Shnayerson paints a highly nuanced portrait of Andrew Cuomo, shaded with vibrant detail.

“The Contender” follows closely on Mr. Cuomo’s memoir, “All Things Possible: Setbacks and Success in Politics and Life,” which was released last summer. Despite a title that promised humility and honest reflection, not to mention a full-scale launch from HarperCollins, the autobiography landed with a thud in sales (only 945 copies purchased the first week) and received scorching reviews. Nick Confessore, a New York Times political reporter, dismissed the book as “a long press release.”

“The Contender,” by contrast, reads like a novel and opens with the story of the governor’s personal involvement in passing the same-sex marriage bill in 2011, near the end of his first legislative session. The episode was political theater at its best — a gamble staked on a controversial cause, extensive arm-twisting of holdout members on both sides of the aisle, and a dramatic victory, right down to the midnight bill signing. Mr. Shnayerson shows Mr. Cuomo operating at the height of his power, with a keen eye for legislation of true significance. “Same-sex marriage is at the heart of leadership and progressive government,” Mr. Cuomo is reported to have said to his father. With this bill’s passage, Mr. Shnayerson reports, Mr. Cuomo managed to “tip the national balance on marriage equality.”

According to the author, Mr. Cuomo also understood the marketing implications of these actions. The governor takes credit for renaming same-sex marriage “marriage equality,” thus repositioning himself from a hard-core pragmatist to one with a liberal’s heart. There is some argument over who truly changed the legislation’s name, but there can be no dispute over the governor’s central role in passing a bill with life-changing impact to many New Yorkers, this reviewer included.

The next several chapters root Andrew Cuomo in his primary and most enduring relationship: the one he shared with his father, Mario, the original liberal, the man against whom he measured himself and against whom he weighed his accomplishments, the man he both sought to please and rebelled against. The relationship between the two has been a source of fascination for pundits for decades. At the end of the book, Mr. Cuomo scoffs at “the dime-store psychoanalysis of our quote-unquote complex father-and-son relationship,” add­ing that it was “all a lot of hooey.” He continues, “And it’s this simple: I was devoted to my father. . . . My dad was my hero, he was my best friend, he was my confidant and my mentor.”

As for Mr. Cuomo’s relationships with others, they leaned much more to the Machiavellian, according to Mr. Shnayerson. Throughout “The Contender” the governor is always calculating how he will be perceived, measuring his popularity, meting out punishment to his enemies, and rewarding his inner circle. “Andrew was his own worst enemy: no one who knew him, friend or foe, believed he did anything without considering the politics involved,” Mr. Shnayerson writes.

Even Mr. Cuomo’s marriage to Kerry Kennedy is portrayed as more about politics than romance. Mr. Shnayerson gives ample evidence to support the idea of a loveless marriage and a fundamental mismatch between the scrapping, brawling, New York-centric Cuomos and the patrician, high-minded, Bostonian Kennedys. Kerry Kennedy runs out of patience with her husband after his first failed attempt to run for governor, Mr. Shnayerson reports. The famed “Cuomolot” marriage ends in divorce.

Mr. Shnayerson appears to believe the governor is aware of his popularity problem and political clumsiness. His first gubernatorial bid in 2002 finished dismally. Mr. Cuomo was unable to beat Lt. Gov. Carl McCall in the primary after a damaging gaffe about former Gov. George Pataki. During the next campaign, Mr. Cuomo treaded far more cautiously. One campaign aide was quoted as saying, “Andrew knew it would work against him to be in public, so he preferred not to be.”

With that 2010 victory, Mr. Cuomo joined the pantheon of powerful New York governors: John Adams, Martin Van Buren, Grover Cleveland, and the Roosevelts, Theodore and Franklin. Yet, in Mr. Shnayerson’s telling, Mr. Cuomo has never managed to reach the heights his lofty predecessors achieved, because he wallowed instead in petty, backroom Albany fights. Mr. Shnayerson details deals cut by “three men in a room,” referring to the governor and the leaders of the state’s two legislative chambers. These scenes — full of seedy horse trading, backstabbing, and broken promises — will likely make East Enders grateful that Albany is more than 240 miles away.

The questions regarding Mr. Cuomo’s presidential ambitions and his future chances run throughout “The Contender.” Mr. Shnayerson doesn’t seem to like the odds. He describes a leader who micromanages and is unable to recruit and retain top talent. If you’ve ever been on the wrong end of a bully, the portrayals of Mr. Cuomo berating underlings are chilling. One Cuomo staffer is reported to have said, “He wasn’t a screamer. But he was a prick . . . his way of dealing with staff or things he doesn’t like is to play mind games with people and make them feel small.”

Mr. Shnayerson repeatedly describes Hillary Clinton as a political boulder blocking Mr. Cuomo’s path. I read “The Contender” the same week Mrs. Clinton launched her campaign with a video titled “Everyday Americans,” her way of portraying herself as an authentic, of-the-people candidate. Mr. Shnayerson explains that some of Mr. Cuomo’s centrist policies are a reaction to Mrs. Clinton’s tactics and an attempt to triangulate the electorate in his favor. “I think his positioning is Clintonian. The irony is: who is more Clintonian, Hillary or Andrew?” Mr. Shnayerson asks.

Innumerable adjectives — many clich­éd — are used in “The Contender” to describe the governor — some positive, most negative. “There’s that nagging question of character,” Mr. Shnayerson writes. “Andrew was commanding, pragmatic, hardworking, personally incorruptible (so far), fierce in defending his policies — and willing to compromise when absolutely necessary. In short, a strong leader. He was also vengeful, bullying, meanspirited, conniving, not always true to his word, and very secretive.”

Mr. Shnayerson goes deep into the Cuomo psyche. He notes the unique speaking style of both Andrew and Mario Cuomo, both of whom sound as if they are reasoning aloud, as if they ask and answer their own questions. Following a recent scandal in the State Assembly, Mr. Cuomo is quoted as saying, “Is the governor to blame . . . ? No. Will you ever stop people from doing venal, stupid, criminal, illegal acts? Not in government, not in politics, not in the military.” One can almost hear Mr. Shnayerson undertaking the same Socratic monologue: Can one fully know Andrew Cuomo? Yes. Is the portrait a pretty one? No.

Wherever the reader lands on the question of Mr. Cuomo’s character, it’s hard not to enjoy Mr. Shnayerson’s rich storytelling and the dishy details he offers up about members of our state’s political elite. Even for those who have no interest in politics, “The Contender” is still a worthwhile read. As its title promises, it’s a timeless tale of a filial drama, the tyranny of expectation, aspiration, and struggle.

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

Michael Shnayerson is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair whose books include “Coal River.” He lives in Sag Harbor.

“Killer, Come Hither”

Louis Begley

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $25.95

After a successful career at the white-shoe law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton in Manhattan, Louis Begley took up fiction writing at the age of 57. He then went on to produce 10 highly praised works, including “Wartime Lies” (1991), which won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, and “About Schmidt” (1996), which became a film of the same name starring Jack Nicholson.

“Killer, Come Hither” is Mr. Begley’s first venture into the genre of legal thriller. It is the story of Jack Dana, 26, a young man who has trod a golden pathway through life. Dana has gone to the “right” boarding school, following which he has become a stellar student of ancient history at Yale. His intellectual gifts have won him a scholarship to Balliol College at Oxford, and on his return, he has gone to Harvard to pursue his graduate studies. There, he is elected to the Society of Fellows, which involves a stipend that will cover his living costs.

True, there are clouds that have darkened Jack’s college years: his mother’s death from cancer and his father’s death following a stroke. But there is a beloved presence who is always at his side, and who becomes his surrogate father. This is Uncle Harry, Jack Dana’s only living relative.

The tragedy of 9/11 calls a halt to the peaceful academic life that beckons. Dana is the son and grandson of military men, and he joins the services. No longer the scholar, he becomes Capt. Jack Dana, Marine Infantry officer and Force Recon platoon leader — until his time in Iraq is cut short by a sniper’s bullet. It is while he is recovering in Walter Reed Hospital that the ever-solicitous Uncle Harry supports Jack in his writing about his wartime experiences and what they had done to himself and to his men.

Harry, a hugely successful lawyer with infinite connections, is the first reader of Jack’s finished work, and he puts Jack in touch with an agent and a publisher. The novel’s an immediate success; two subsequent novels and film options follow. Jack has found his groove. But suddenly, in the wake of an extended vacation in the Brazilian Outback, he returns to civilization and the news that Uncle Harry is dead.

Not only is Harry dead, he has killed himself. “It is so awful, Jack,” he is told by Kerry, his uncle’s closest associate. “He hanged himself, in Sag Harbor, in that beautiful studio in back of his house.”

Was Harry’s death really a suicide — or was it murder? While Jack surmises the latter possibility, the reader never doubts it, for Harry’s secretary was killed by a subway train on the very day after her boss was found. We also know that Harry has brought huge profits to his law firm by deftly managing the affairs of Abner Brown, a reclusive and eccentric Texas billionaire whose extremist views Harry has described as “to the right of Attila the Hun.” Had Harry stumbled on some of Abner Brown’s illegal transactions, and was the “suicide” a “hit” ordered by Brown?

While the motive and the guilty party are never in doubt, the real fun of this book is the painstaking gathering of evidence, the tracking down of the deadly mobster (a Serb named Slobodan), and Jack’s careful preparation for his vengeance upon Harry’s killer. Working alongside him are his uncle’s protégée Kerry (with whom Jack is soon sharing a blissful love affair) and a longtime pal, Scott Prentice, who works for the C.I.A. It is Prentice who supplies some of the special gear requested by Jack: a gun that blows up on impact and causes a bloody open wound, and a poisoned dart whose tip is laced with curare.

Although the ending is foretold early in the novel, the unexpected plot twists and the inevitable showdown are what drive the narrative forward. The meeting between “Slobo” and Jack Dana is as ugly as might be expected, but the final surprise is the way in which Jack’s triumphal revenge is compromised.

Maggie Scarf is a fellow at Yale’s Jonathan Edwards College and the author, most recently, of “The Remarriage Blueprint.” She lives in Sag Harbor.

Louis Begley lives in New York and Sagaponack.

“Radical Descent” — Digitally

Linda Coleman’s memoir, “Radical Descent: The Cultivation of an American Revolutionary,” published by the Pushcart Press of Springs in the fall, is now out as an e-book for Kindle, Google Play, and similar formats.

It chronicles the political travails, emotional confusion, and wrenching aftermath of her actions as a radical leftist from a privileged background in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Ms. Coleman, who lives in Springs, is a longtime nurse practitioner and an ordained Zen monk. She led writing workshops for women in Suffolk County jails for 10 years. An interview with her can be seen on the “One-to-One” show on cuny.tv or YouTube.

In the “Neuron Mirror”

Sales of the poetry collection “Neuron Mirror” go to the Lustgarten Foundation’s research into a cure for pancreatic cancer. Furthermore, the book, a collaborative effort of Virginia Walker and Michael Walsh, is dedicated to three South Fork poets who died of the disease: Siv Cedering, Antje Katcher, and Robert Long, who was an editor at The Star.

Mr. Walsh and Ms. Walker, who teaches at Dowling and Suffolk Community College and lives on Shelter Island, will read from the book on Saturday at 2 p.m. at the East Hampton Library.

Clare Coss on Du Bois

The publication of Clare Coss’s 2014 play, “Dr. Du Bois and Miss Ovington,” will be hailed with a book party at, appropriately, the Drama Book Shop in Manhattan on Tuesday at 5 p.m. Two of the original production’s principal players, Kathleen Chalfant and Timothy Simonson, will give a dramatic reading, and there will follow a reception, book signing, and question-and-answer session with Ms. Coss, who lives in Springs.

The play follows a clash between W.E.B. Du Bois and Mary White Ovington, two founders of the N.A.A.C.P., in 1915, at a critical juncture for the future of civil rights in this country.