“The Lost Notebook”

John Canemaker

Weldon Owen, $75

“Don’t park your car there, you jackass!” the recluse in the muumuu would call out from a window of her bungalow near Hyperion Avenue in Los Angeles, where the Walt Disney Studio used to be. Hollywood being Hollywood, naturally she had stashed away in a drawer a notebook that amounts to “a Rosetta stone of animation special-effects cinematography,” unlocking “the secrets of how Disney’s first feature-film productions — among the greatest of animated films — were made.”

So writes John Canemaker, the director of the animation program at New York University, in his latest book of animation history, “The Lost Notebook.” The notebook, actually one of five found in Ethel Schultheis’s house upon her death in 1990, was the work of her husband, Herman Schultheis, a photographer, photographic effects engineer, and lab technician whose tenure at the Disney Studio roughly corresponded with its best and most innovative run, from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” in 1937 to “Pinocchio” and “Fantasia” in 1940, “Dumbo” a year later, and “Bambi” in 1942.

Disney’s early artists and animators have long since been celebrated, the author points out, but not so the technical crews, whose work, if not for Schultheis’s obsessive cataloguing of charts, tables, drawings, filmstrips, and photos of obscure equipment, was simply forgotten as technology progressed. Schultheis worked in the Process Lab and the Special Effects Camera Department, where craftsmen “invented and produced imaginative visual effects to enhance the believability of the films’ character animation,” in essence making it up on the fly and coming up with a vocabulary for the new field as they went along.

One famous sequence in “Pinocchio,” which contains some of the most beautiful animation the Disney Studio, or anyone, ever produced, highlights the technological labors: An elaborate “multiplane camera dolly” through Geppetto’s quiet village starts on a bell tower overlooking it. “The ringing bells disturb a flock of white doves, whose flight leads the camera downward” into the streets, Mr. Canemaker writes, where “townspeople begin their day and children head for school as the camera swoops past trees, over rooftops, under an arch, into the main town square, and down a cobblestone street ending at Geppetto’s toy shop.”

The scene lasts 40 seconds and cost $1.8 million in today’s currency.

“The Lost Notebook” is a big, handsome coffee table book, allowing for a complete reproduction Schultheis’s fifth notebook and his documentation of the painstaking work behind such artistry. The production of “Fantasia” is documented in even greater detail.

Mr. Canemaker describes the notebooks as time capsules, Schultheis’s meticulous scrapbooking as the invaluable work of an unintentional historian. (All of his notebooks are in the Walt Disney Family Museum at the Presidio in San Francisco.) But the book is just as much the story of an immigrant striving to make it in the movie business.

That he was an outspoken and opinionated self-promoter hurt Schultheis, though you might think the opposite in Tinseltown, and so did the fact of his multifarious skills, from the camera to the lab, from lighting to sound recording, in an industry that put a premium on specialization. What’s more, hailing as he did from Germany, in the lead-up to America’s entry into World War II he came to be viewed with increasing suspicion, and any number of times was thought to be a spy.

One of his main jobs for Disney entailed wide-ranging travels to take still photos for researchers and artists to use in their work, and away from the studio he kept the shutter snapping, taking untold thousands of shots, the most lasting of them revealing L.A. as it was in the late 1930s — not the glamour, but the working-class side: picnickers in the shadow of a forest of oil derricks, an Asian greengrocer amid her stacks of produce, stable hands taking a break, a young African-American in a bellhop’s uniform selling hats for 88 cents. They’re now being catalogued at the Los Angeles Public Library, which is making them available on its website.

Whether it was fueled by his outsider’s difficulties in assimilating to America and landing a foothold in its exclusive entertainment biz, or simply by his passion for archaeology, just one of his many avocations, is impossible to say, but Schultheis’s wanderlust never abated. In 1955, a plane deposited him in Central America and, carrying two cameras, a pocketknife, and not much else, he strode into the jungle. His scattered bones were found a year and a half later.

Not a pleasant ending, but the stuff of movies.

John Canemaker won an Academy Award in 2005 for his animated short “The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation.” He lives part time in Bridgehampton.

“Long Island Golf”

Phil Carlucci

Arcadia, $21.99

Phil Carlucci’s “Long Island Golf” is a pleasant outing for golfers, mere fans of the sport, and the history-minded, offering reminders of the way it used to be — “Sag Harbor’s current course dates to around 1915. For a long time, the course sported sand greens, on which players raked their paths to the cup” — and, more often, the surprising tidbit: “ ‘Harper’s Official Golf Guide’ of 1901 lists nine-hole courses close to one another in Bridgehampton, Sagaponack, and Wainscott.” Bridgehampton’s nine-hole course still exists, of course, but “Sagaponack’s clubhouse later became an Episcopal church” — St. Ann’s, on Main Street in Bridgehampton.

Mr. Carlucci is the man behind the website Golf on Long Island, a remarkably comprehensive guide to the Island’s public courses. “Average score: low 90s,” he writes of himself on the site. “Strength: scrambling. Weakness: poor mechanics.”

Dogged research is another strong suit (he acknowledges the help of “nearly 100 librarians, society members, museum curators, historians, photographers, and writers from across Long Island”), and by way of it he takes the reader on enlightening side trips to courses where the average duffer will never set foot, like the National, overlooking Peconic Bay in Southampton, next door to the grande dame that gets all the ink and glory, Shinnecock Hills.

In a chapter titled “Golf’s Big Boom,” focusing on the 1920s, he writes, “The game changed, however, with the creation of the National Golf Links of America. C.B. Macdonald sized up the state of domestic golf and decided that American golfers needed a true taste of British-style play.” Opening in 1911, “National set a new standard for golf architecture and strategic design.” Described in one newspaper account of the day as “trap-sprinkled, bunker-bedecked,” it is considered, Mr. Carlucci writes, “the earliest example of strategic golf in America.”

More democratically but equally groundbreaking, Bethpage State Park, with its world-renowned Black and nationally acclaimed Red courses designed by A.W. Tillinghast, opened in the 1930s, “the product of a Depression-era public-works project that turned the former Benjamin Yoakum estate into a playground for golfers from all walks of life,” Mr. Carlucci writes. “The average player making an average living could spend a day playing 18 holes, just as a wealthy industrialist with a summer estate could play at one of his clubs.”

“Long Island Golf,” photo-dominated, proceeds chronologically, from Shinnecock, “America’s first incorporated golf club in 1891,” through the war efforts of the 1940s, when “on Shelter Island, the Manhanset course was used to grow lima beans” and the “Amagansett Golf Club sprouted potatoes,” and on to the go-go ’90s and the Tiger Woods craze, which brought with it suddenly extended tee-time waits.

Whether the courses are public or private, the history is sprinkled with eccentricities — take the mogul and castle aficionado Otto Hermann Kahn’s Seth Raynor-designed Oheka course on his 443-acre estate in Cold Spring Harbor, or even relatively humble Indian Island in Riverhead, built circa 1964 where once stood “the world’s largest duck farm,” followed by a “shantytown housing migrant workers.”

And then there’s Montauk, where in one photo we see that a pro-am competitor has landed his biplane on a Montauk Downs fairway in 1929 in his rush to get at the little white ball.

“Nature fashioned the Montauk peninsula in the mold of a gargantuan golf links,” The New York Sun enthused. And thanks to the developer Carl Fisher and the English course designer Capt. H.C. Tippett, the paper went on, “Montauk now boasts of the sportiest eighteen-hole links in the metropolitan region. Nature’s promise has been fulfilled by man.”

That’s golf for you.

Phil Carlucci lives in Massapequa Park. “Long Island Golf” came out on June 1.

“Bookmarked”

Wendy Fairey

Arcade Publishing, $25.99

A blurb for Wendy Fairey’s new book might read as follows: “Bookmarked” is about a professor who remains endlessly passionate about her reading of English literature and who skillfully shows how her thoughtfully lived literary life is surprisingly the stuff of novels.

But in the beginning of this book Ms. Fairey talks about her struggle finding the backbone for this work. In 1992 she’d published a memoir, “One of the Family.” (More about that in a moment.) The book helped her move into full professorship at Brooklyn College. In 2002 she’d published a collection of linked short stories, “Full House.” All of her life she’d written a great many academic treatises. In this book she wanted to write about her love of reading. The only problem was the plot was eluding her because she didn’t want to go back to “repurposing” the material from her first memoir.

She started off focusing “on my genealogy of fictional prime movers — the orphan, the new woman, the artist, and the immigrant — still interested in the ways these figures are both marginal and representative and create a historical line. But impersonality, it turned out, was not the best mode for me. As I went along, I found keeping to it hard — it seemed too dry, and perhaps I wasn’t done yet with my own story. The personal seeped back into my project and transformed it to ‘an odd mixture.’ ”

As she goes on to write: “My idea became to write a memoir of a life of reading. This would still be a study of literature, but it would document something intensely personal as well. It would be nonfiction about fiction. . . .”

But here were the nonfictional aspects over which she was lightly treading. Her mother was the renowned Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, who’d had a long-term affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald had created a “College of One” for Graham. The books he chose for her included history, art, music, economics, and certainly poetry and novels. Ms. Fairey grew up amidst Thackeray, Henry James, Dickens. Fitzgerald loved talking with Graham about these works as she, an orphan and an immigrant, made her way through them. He died of a heart attack in her living room just before Christmas 1940.

All of this happened before Wendy was born, yet the stories shaped her entire life. In Southern California she endlessly read the books from the “Fitzgerald College.” After Fitzgerald died, Graham flew to England to become a war correspondent, which led to terrible nightmares. But while there Graham became pregnant with Wendy — during an affair with a married man. Graham convinced another man it was his baby, married him, and he never knew he wasn’t Wendy’s father. It was only decades later that Ms. Fairey learned the identity of her true father.

Ms. Fairey’s great caution about not overusing her stories was a result not only of her sensibilities as a student of literature, but also because her mother used the stories frequently in her own books. Sheilah Graham wrote nine books, three based in part on her relationship with Fitzgerald, and another book on “embellished” sexual exploits.

But as Ms. Fairey writes: “Living through all the interesting decades of my life from the forties to the turn of the twenty-first century, I have been, in an important sense, elsewhere.” Marilyn Monroe attended parties at the house — Wendy wasn’t fazed. Hopalong Cassidy seemed to be a bit more interesting. He “posed with my younger brother and me, all of us in black Hoppy outfits, six shooters drawn, under our Christmas tree.” Ms. Fairey, however, found Elizabeth Taylor’s wedding to Nicky Hilton slightly tedious. When she was 13, rather than meet Elvis Presley, she insisted on staying home to listen to a record of “Madama Butterfly.”

But at one point her mother married the tyrannical “Bow Wow,” who Ms. Fairey says hated her. He once kicked the family dog. Something Mr. Murdstone might have done in “David Copperfield”?

In this volume she discusses “the curtailing of licentious male energy,” “extraordinary salutary powers” — yet the observations here are extremely down-to-earth. For example: “Virginia Woolf understands how you might love one person a great deal and yet have good reasons for choosing to be with someone else.”

As I read “Bookmarked” I kept thinking about the “David Copperfield” quote: “My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest.” And an earnest approach is precisely what defines this book.

Wendy Fairey looks unblinkingly at her own life, analyzing, admitting, parsing. “If this volume is intended as an experiment in autobiography, both inner and outer, it’s also envisioned as an exercise in a freer, more personal kind of literary criticism than I was schooled in.”

And herein is the crux of this book. It is memoir. It is an unusual take on literary criticism. But most important of all, it is a book about a person who is an extraordinary educator. She brings every volume alive for us. Only the very best literature teachers and professors are capable of finding newness every time they teach a book. (Of course the same can be said for teachers in other fields.) But the Academy needs the prescient, purpose-creating guiding spirit evinced in this book. This is a teacher who cares. Deeply. Fitzgerald may have created a “College of One” for her mother. Ms. Fairey has created a “College of One” for each of us.

There is the wonderful concept that each time we pick up a book we are different people and the reading experience of that book is different. After reading this book one cannot go back to Becky Sharp, Isabel Archer, Tess of the d’Urbervilles without thinking about oneself and the parallel themes in our lives. The classroom discussions we can have with ourselves once we’ve delved back into “Howards End,” “Daniel Deronda,” “To the Lighthouse,” and “A Passage to India” and allowed ourselves to spend time truly connecting to these works — those are priceless times, moments of revelation. Ms. Fairey gives us the tools to discover the themes within our own lives.

(One small note: A typo that will certainly be corrected in future editions. Early in “Bookmarked” Ms. Fairey, in figuring out where to start her manuscript, decides that the best initial subject would be the Victorian orphan. She discusses David Copperfield, Jo from “Bleak House,” and Jude from Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure.” But alas the proofreader missed the 1985 typo for year of publication of Hardy’s great novel.)

Ms. Fairey’s two moving postscripts underscore the very nature of this literary review cum memoir cum teaching guide: The first is when her two granddaughters, cousins who are both 14, come to visit from France. Each of whom is reading the novels that so intensely captivated Ms. Fairey in the first place — Zoé is reading Austen’s “Emma” in English. Salomé is reading “Jane Eyre,” “Pride and Prejudice,” “Sense and Sensibility” and “Wuthering Heights” in translation. “Eeetcliff,” she calls him.

“I draw closer to Salomé than I’ve felt before in that each of us has been intimate with the same novel. She, too, has paused in the world of the Heights and the Grange, Heathcliff and the two Cathys. Lockwood and Nellie.” How delighted Ms. Fairey is to encounter the passion for these great works in her own flesh and blood.

And then there is the very end note in “Bookmarked.” Wendy and her partner, Mary Edith, were married in East Hampton in 2011. “It’s the marriage plot ending, after all!” Ms. Fairey acknowledges. As literature has always permeated her life, she writes: “Thank you, ‘Jane Eyre,’ for accompanying me to the last paragraphs of this journey.” And, yes, as of the last penning of this book, Mary Edith, already a great reader, was deep into “David Copperfield.”

Laura Wells, a regular book reviewer for The Star, lives in Sag Harbor.

Wendy Fairey lives in New York and East Hampton.

“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.

“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.

“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.

“The Players”

Jill Bialosky

Knopf, $26

Jill Bialosky’s “The Players” captures the essence of Americana in her baseball poems, in her descriptions of the beach, nature, small-town life, motherhood, and parents. Her true subject is the inevitability of loss, which includes children growing up and leaving, the death of a parent.

The introductory poem, “The Lucky Ones,” involves the theme of the much loved son maturing, “ours, the boy of late youth, / of our happiness and our struggles, the boy who made us whole / and broken, was in his room perhaps dreaming / of a girl and sleeping the long, tangled sleep of a teenager.” Nature and its dark underside is introduced through the image of a garter snake, “a comet of danger, serpent of the water” they watch as they sit on the beach.

The son’s maturation is followed up in the long poem “Manhood” that makes up the first section, held together by the masculine American pursuit of baseball. The poem’s point of view, ranging from the players, the mothers, the fathers, girls who were “played,” and the spectators, covers the gamut of the game, a stand-in for emerging male aggression and a rite of passage from boyhood to manhood. The nuances of the game and the boys’ development are shown. Its ultimate reward when “your eye caught hers / and your body exploded into bliss.” Baseball is a symbol for the needs and concerns of all of these groups, all of whom are players even if they are not on the field.

Other American scenes are evoked through landscape, as in “American Comedy,” where “They are tearing up fields where horses graze / for designer mansions,” while the speaker misses “wildflowers, horse dung, and clover.” In these poems the dark side of American life emerges subtly as varied characters who inhabit Ms. Bialosky’s milieu are presented. In “Sonnet for the Misbegotten” there are surfers “in black diving penguin suits,” anorexics “speed-walking the beach,” and a scene at a barbecue. What could be more American? The two ironic titles quietly convey Ms. Bialosky’s critique of the dramatis personae as well as their vulnerability. In “American Pastoral,” for example, “One of us joined a support group / or is leaving the marriage.”

Having wondered many times who owns the flip-flops and shoes left by beachgoers I have to say my favorite poem in this section was “Ode.” I love the way Ms. Bialosky places this seemingly humorous poem in a literary context, tradition being the first hint the poem has a deeper meaning. She goes directly to her omnipresent theme, loss. “Somebody stole my yellow flip-flops.” She speculates, “I guess they needed them more than me,” and tells us, “I bought them / at Kmart for ten ninety-nine.” Her overreaction to this theft — “It makes / me sad. The lack of humanity. The / guts. The betrayal” — is intentionally laughable. Yet underneath the comic surface lies the outrage at losses, large and small.

And the larger losses appear in poems in the section called “The Players,” having to do with what happens after a loved one dies when there is the packing up of documents and household possessions: birth and death certificates, the divorce decree, scrapbooks with corsages and ballet programs. “The Guardians,” an apt title for the poem, suggests that those who were once guarded by the dead are now their guardians.

I was particularly drawn to “April Mornings,” a takeoff on Robert Hayden’s “Sunday Mornings,” one of my all-time favorite poems. In Ms. Bialosky’s version it is the mother, rather than the father, who gets up. However, instead of a caring parent, we read of “the dull and sad / pennies of her eyes, / body limp as a fevered / child’s” and “the awful creak / of the iron mail chute” opening before “the knife slit open / the envelopes / of debts unpaid.”

There are many enjoyable poems in this book, with descriptions of creatures such as sand crabs, gulls, and sandpipers, as well as the ocean, a solid tree, a bird’s nest.

She deftly merges the world of birds with the way marriage evolves from first tenderness in “Marriage Nests,” which has the two powerful last lines “I hear him get up, the sound of heavy footsteps. / Birds call. A cry deeper than hurt or love.”

The three poems about literature, in a section slyly titled “Interlude,” cite novels that educate us, such as “The House of Mirth” and “A Tale of Two Cities,” and describe a visit to Jane Austen’s haunts in Bath and the influence of “The Portrait of a Lady.” These poems serve as a counterpoint to the family life in the poems that surround them, a commentary on how reading also forms us.

Most poignant and true are poems about a son who has turned into an adolescent, especially “Perspective,” with its lovely lyrical refrain, “For two days it was cold and it rained.” Its conclusion has the mother remembering the family that was: “Look, that was once us / sailing down the small / sand hill to the beach / with you in our arms.”

The speaker’s inner thoughts, while she observes the ocean, the beach, the sea animals, reveal the essence of her feelings about the anguish of mothers who “must watch their children / thrive and suffer,” in short, life’s impermanence. Through close observation of her world, Ms. Bialosky conveys both the ordinariness and the extraordinariness of life.

Jill Bialosky’s books include “History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life,” a memoir, and “Intruder,” a collection of poems. An editor at W.W. Norton, she lives in New York and Bridgehampton.

Carole Stone’s most recent poetry collections are “Hurt, the Shadow” and “American Rhapsody.” She lives part time in Springs.