Lunch With Sheehy

Gail Sheehy’s recent autobiography, “Daring: My Passages,” explores her career in journalism at New York magazine in the go-go ’70s, her hugely popular 1976 book, “Passages,” and her relationship with Clay Felker, the influential editor. She will discuss all this and more as the guest of the League of Women Voters of the Hamptons at a lunch on Friday, April 24, from noon to 3 p.m. The setting is Cowfish, on the Shinnecock Canal in Hampton Bays, where three courses will be served and books will be available at a discounted price.

R.S.V.P.s are due by tomorrow by sending a $60 check — made out to LWV Hamptons — to Gladys Remler, the league’s co-chairwoman of special events, at 180 Melody Court, Eastport 11941. The number to call with questions is 288-9021.

Remembrance at Canio’s

To mark Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 16 and the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps, Sande Boritz Berger will visit Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor to read from her debut novel, “The Sweetness,” on Saturday at 5 p.m. The book, a semifinalist for Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel award, involves two Jewish girls, cousins, one American and one Eastern European, and their differing experiences in wartime.

The author is a graduate of Stony Brook Southampton’s M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature and lives in Bridgehampton.

“The Innovators”

Walter Isaacson

Simon & Schuster, $35

The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms.     — Muriel Rukeyser

“The Innovators” offers you a splendid journey through time and space via personalities, facts, and ideas. It is rich in stories, both personal and historical, easy-to-understand technical details at the intersection of the humanities and technology, and the importance of “human-machine symbiosis.” I recommend it highly to anyone who wants to know how we got to here and now, and how “it” came from “bit” — the striking idea that information sits at the heart of all reality, just as it sits at the core of a computer.

Walter Isaacson has set out to report on how innovations actually happen in the real world. How disruptive ideas became realities. Who made the dozens of breakthroughs that gave us the digital culture we inhabit (and many enjoy) today. How collaborations among peers and between generations emerge in creating the digital revolution. (But not universally — think solo innovators like Newton, Einstein, Godel.) What the ingredients of “creative leaps” are. And how cultural and social forces made possible the “climate of innovation” that led to our digital era. In this ambitious undertaking, he is (happily) very successful.

According to the celebrated physicist John Archibald Wheeler, “ ‘It from bit’ symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has . . . an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of ‘yes-no’ questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.”

On the other hand, the poet Muriel Rukeyser believed that stories trump digits. Can they both be right?

This book illuminates the human stories that drive the technology and science developed by many well-known characters — Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Alan Turing, IBM’s Deep Blue chess-playing computer — and dozens of unsung heroes, such as Ada, Countess of Lovelace (1815-52), a brilliant eccentric. And thereby hangs a beguiling tale, one of many Mr. Isaacson tells.

Ada was the only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron, the famous (and infamous) Romantic poet who was “seductive, troubled, brooding, and sexually adventurous.” Ada inherited her “poetic and insubordinate temperament” from her father and her interest in mathematics from her mother. (Think Rukeyser and Wheeler as a team.) This created a combination Ada called her love for “poetical science,” and she felt comfortable at the crossroads of the hard sciences and the soft humanities.

Mr. Isaacson comes back to this dual constellation of interests over and over again as he discusses the other heroes of the digital revolution, yet she is the most notable woman to play a starring role in this story of digital innovations.

Ada had inherited many of Lord Byron’s eccentricities and passions. While a teenager, she had a liaison with her tutor. She studied mathematics, was enamored of technology, and was impressed with an automatic weaving loom that used punched cards to instruct a single piece of equipment to create varied fabric patterns. These were precursors of IBM’s punch cards that told early mainframe computers what to do.

Ada befriended many talented think­ers of her era, such as Charles Babbage, inventor of the Difference Engine, a mechanical device that calculated trigonometric values and logarithms by breaking the process into “baby steps” that entailed only addition and subtraction. It could even solve differential equations. Babbage later developed the Analytical Engine, which could be “programmed” (as we would say today) and was a century ahead of its time.

In an essay on imagination, Ada wrote that Babbage had been able to do this using a trick employed by many great innovators: a facility for combining ideas from many different fields of activity. Again and again this quality appears to an extraordinary degree among the larger-than-life personalities whose vivid stories appear in Mr. Isaacson’s book, abetted by their ability to work together in teams focused on inspired collaborations.

To some, Lady Lovelace was a computer pioneer and a feminist icon. But she was ridiculed as delusional, gran­diose, and flighty by others. She appreciated, popularized, and even financed Babbage’s pioneering work. She figured out how to “program” a Difference Engine. Sadly, after becoming addicted to gambling and opiates, she died penniless at age 36 — the same age Lord Byron died — and was buried next to her father.

Alan Turing’s story (and that of his universal computer) has been well told in biographies and the cinema, but other major characters who appear are Vannevar Bush (who first described a personal computer), John von Neumann (who built an enormous modern computer at the Institute for Advanced Study), Stewart Brand (who developed the Whole Earth Catalog), Linus Torvalds (creator of Linux open-source software), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (creators of Google), and many others.

Before Google came along, computer geeks avoided anything in their field that might have been considered “touchy-feely” — their pejorative term for human responses to hardware and software, the humanities. Mr. Page and Mr. Brin changed all of that in 1998. Vannevar Bush had said in 1945 that knowledge was expanding at such an astonishing rate that it was virtually impossible to find the proverbial needle in a haystack. Mr. Page and Mr. Brin, in their paper “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” showed how they could “map” billions of Web pages and rank a website according to how often people visited it or other Web pages cited or referred to it (called backlinks), which was roughly congruent to a billion-member crowd’s subjective idea of a website’s importance.

This vision culminated in such an intimate linkage between computers, networks, and humans that we can now search for — and promptly find information on — virtually any subject, from antiprotons to zebras. Searching Google these days begins to feel spooky, like having an infinite IQ . . . something I’ve always wanted!

“The Innovators” contains a valuable timeline that provides a synoptic overview of the innovators and their contributions to the digital revolution, and a brilliant summary of Mr. Isaacson’s theme that diverse teams made this one hell of a revolution.

Stephen Rosen, a physicist, lives in New York and East Hampton. His latest book is “Youth, Middle-Age, and You-Look-Great! Dying to Come Back as a Memoir.”

Walter Isaacson, former managing editor of Time magazine and the author of “Steve Jobs,” has spent summers on the South Fork for many years.

“Deep Lane”

Mark Doty

W.W. Norton, $25.95

Mark Doty’s “Deep Lane” is a book about country, symbolized by gardens and animals, frequently Mr. Doty’s dog, Ned, who accompanies him on long walks, but also birds, deer, goats, sea lions, a mammoth, a white fish, and ticks that enter his Eden. “Deep Lane” is about city in poems that take place on New York’s streets, in bars, gyms, hospitals, and barbershops.

In each of these environments, the poet’s appetite for life and awareness of loss and recovery are omnipresent, particularly when human beings make entrances: the poet’s ex, his present love, his mother and father, painters like Robert Harms and Jackson Pollock, and poets, among them Alan Dugan and Robinson Jeffers.

Poetry, a leitmotif throughout the book, beautifully captures Mr. Doty’s deep connection to his identity as a poet. He shows us, with a touch of irony, Alan Dugan, the “recalcitrant old boho,” and with precise description, Robinson Jeffers, a poet who “who could not be wholeheartedly pleased / with anything human.” His awareness of the art of poetry extends his humanity, as in the poem “ARS POETICA 14th St. Gym,” in which the title equates the precepts of poetry with “beauty that does not disguise the wound” when a one-armed man lifts himself on a pull-up machine.

Another major human connection, of children with their parents, was painful for Mr. Doty. He reveals this honestly as they speak to him from the underworld in poems that evoke their hurtful relationship with him. In “Apparition,” as he trims forsythia at the kitchen sink, his father says, “Mark is making the house pretty.” We learn his father did not speak to him for the last five years of his life, but he concludes that though he has been addressed in the third person, “He did say my name,” and it wasn’t mockery.

His mother, gone for 30 years, similarly is given the benefit of the doubt when her voice in him says, “You’ve got to forgive me,” and for a moment they are at last “equally in love / with intoxication,” after which she says, “I never meant to harm you.” The understatement in these poems is masterful in conveying irony and hurt.

But pain caused by humans can be mitigated by the beauty of nature, as in “Verge,” a poem about blooming cherry trees on the highway in April, which turns into a love poem when the poet, after a party, walks with his soon-to-become lover to his motorcycle, “perhaps a pair / of — could it be — soon-to-flower trees?” Mr. Doty shows his appetite for beauty and for life most clearly in “Hungry Ghost,” where he learns from his teachers that “my desire was a thirst / for something beyond forms.” He wonders, “When I’m gone, will I stop wanting?” He concludes that wanting “is also a form of immortality.”

The poem that to me most fully and poignantly represents the theme of loss and recovery is “This Is Your Home Now,” an elegy in which he describes the closing of the barbershop on 18th Street where the Peruvian barbers for years have been comforting: “I was happy in any chair, though I liked best / the touch of the oldest, who’d rest his hand / against my neck in the thoughtless confident way.” When the shop closes and he feels at a loss, he finds a sign, WILLIE’S BARBERSHOP, down the street. Willie tells him, “This is your home now,” leading Mr. Doty to the recollection of “the men I have outlived” and for whom he still feels grief.

The barbershop metamorphoses into “the kingdom of the lost” as Mr. Doty adds up his present satisfactions, a man who loves him, their dogs, more years together. For those of us who have lost a sense of belonging, this poem strikes a universal nerve.

In other poems home represents life’s difficulties. An example is “Spent,” when the poet, locked out of his house several times as he tries to bring the hydrangeas he cut inside, has to climb through a window, reminding us, almost comically, of life’s unforeseen hazards. And yet, as he shows in the poem that follows, “Amagansett Cherry,” “the con­torted thrust” of the cherry tree, rather than an unbent branch, is what gives it fervor.

Eight of the poems in “Deep Lane” are titled “Deep Lane,” the site of the poet’s Eden with its “crooked house” that exemplifies his human Garden of Eden. This shingled house symbolizes a oneness with nature. This is where the poet picks radishes, walks through paths in a cemetery, pulls up wild mustard.

The city, on the other hand, is a place of more human experience, as exemplified in “Underworld,” “the boy in outpatient . . . has failed to kill himself,” and in a needle-drug addict in “Crystal.”

“Deep Lane” sometimes seems more emotionally invested in the plant and animal world than in the human, most fully in “The King of Fire Island,” where “a buck in velvet at the garden rim” observing the men in “tea-dance light” makes the men “objects of his regal, / mild regard,” rather than he, theirs. The deer becomes “monarch of holly” and “hobbling prince of shadblow grove,” while “the men swayed and danced.”

When a deer’s head is found floating in the bay, the poem resolves its narrative by the poet asking to be guided out of the story and concludes the deer “must have been weary of that form, / as I grow weary of my head.”

What is so compelling in this long narrative is how the buck ultimately takes over the poem, and the island’s men who “stand with cocktails” recede as mere mortals.

Mr. Doty’s projection of himself as one with the deer epitomizes his constant identification with animals and plants, both an escape and a recognition of the mortality of humans. “Deep Lane” is a book of such moments; a paean to the fertility and the tragedy of human, animal, and vegetable life. It is sensitively and subtly written, and deeply satisfying, as the power of love with a found mate merges with the beauty of the natural world.

Carole Stone’s most recent book is “Hurt, the Shadow: The Josephine Hopper Poems.” A professor emerita of English at Montclair State University, she lives part time in Springs.

Mark Doty of Springs won a National Book Award for “Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems.” He teaches at Rutgers University.

Return of the Poetry Affair

National Poetry Month is upon us, and to mark it Rosalind Brenner, a Springs artist, has again organized a Poetry Affair at LTV Studios in Wainscott. This year’s brings 14 Long Island poets to read from their work starting at 7 p.m. on Friday, April 10.

Among those reading with Ms. Brenner, a poet in her own right, will be Carole Stone, The Star’s book reviewer this week, whose collections include “American Rhapsody,” from CavanKerry Press. This year’s Walt Whitman Birthplace Association Long Island Poet of the Year, Graham Everett, who is the founding editor of Street Press, and last year’s, Annabelle Moseley, a Pushcart Prize nominee several times over, will read, as will George Wallace, a past Suffolk County poet laureate.

“They will be short readings of approximately five minutes each,” Ms. Brenner said. “We want to give you a quick taste and leave you asking for more.” A reception will start at 6:30, and books will be available for purchase. Admission is $5 or a donation of food to the East Hampton Food Pantry.

Workshops in Verse and Prose

Beginning on April 16 and running for two consecutive Thursdays at 7 p.m., Marc Perrin will lead a poetry workshop at the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor. Mr. Perrin, an instructor in creative writing and literature at Stony Brook University and the author of two collections of poems, will explore “poetic genres, markets, inspiration, and process,” a release said. The course is limited to 12 participants and costs $20. Registration in advance is required.

At the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton, it’s time for another round of memoir writing classes with Eileen Obser, East Hamptoner and veteran writing coach. Starting on Tuesday at 5:30 p.m., “personal and autobiographical writing” will be examined, involving readings, exercises, and group discussions. “Research techniques . . . and marketing information are included.” All levels of ability will be welcomed. The cost is $65 for five two-hour sessions.

“Spooky Action

at a Distance”

Howard Levy

CavanKerry Press, $16

Do the laws that govern the physical universe also govern human behavior? “Spooky Action at a Distance,” the title of Howard Levy’s new book of poems, was Einstein’s retort to physicists explaining quantum mechanics. In “The Age of Entanglement,” Louisa Gilder explains that Einstein scoffed at the idea that “Two particles that had once interacted could no matter how far apart remain entangled.” Think of identical twins claiming to feel each other’s pain even continents apart.

Or think, as Howard Levy apparently does, about lovers; his title poem, for example, employs quantum mechanics as a powerful metaphysical conceit for love, for the energy that binds two people together. Elsewhere in this collection, however, Mr. Levy decidedly sides with Einstein, who couldn’t fathom that particles were not independent, incapable of acting separately.

Many of Mr. Levy’s speakers feel alienated from the natural world. In these poems, whatever force holds people in love together has disappeared, and Mr. Levy’s speakers try, more often than not unsuccessfully, to feel conjoined to the world through which they move. Readers of “Spooky Action at a Distance” will need to decide if Mr. Levy believes people are subject to the same laws that hold the universe together or if we move independently through the world, striving to feel connected.

In the title poem, the speaker sets readers up for this comparison of love as entanglement (in the quantum mechanics sense) with the first lines:

It is this way: men and women

spin. Hundreds of miles apart, thousands

of miles, the speed of light, it will make no difference.

Mr. Levy establishes lovers as particles, neither of which remains unaffected by action taken toward each other. The speaker details what two people are doing simultaneously “across a continent.” A woman puts on a man’s shirt, and the man is able to see this happen with his imagination. Mr. Levy’s speaker tells us that “Such is the quanta of intimacy,” convincingly establishing this lovely trope of human being as particle that is further explored in the following stanzas.

But Mr. Levy’s poems move the other way, too. His speakers, when not musing on love, appear cut off from the world they inhabit, aware of the disconnect consciousness creates between external nature and mind. In “Why I Get Up Early,” for instance, the speaker walks the beach, taking in the beauty of sunrise and two deer atop a dune:

They watch me as I walk,

their attention has fixed me

into this scene. Here. Now

including me.

I have had such difficulty

ever feeling that.

This speaker admits his psychic distance from the natural world and the difficulties of living in the moment. The poem’s last two emotive lines, quoted above, explode with the force and surprise of something James Wright or Robert Bly might have written.

Other poems of disentanglement in this collection include “Indian Wells, December,” “#9, Again,” “He Wakes Up at Three A.M.,” and “Not Feeling.” All of these poems concern themselves with a sensation of not belonging, of restlessness, of inarticulateness in the face of nature. Mr. Levy’s speakers are Adams, cast out from the garden, unable to return to Eden and to make sense as to why they feel so disenfranchised. Here are the final two stanzas of “Not Feeling”:

Not feeling a single thing about light or splendor,

no extolling of God’s work

and no extolling randomness,

not at all amazed that accident

could arrive at this

but seizing on how emptiness

shapes itself into a roof

and how I remain fixed in shadow

even here

even here in this blazing place.

It’s clear that this speaker, confronted by God’s handiwork, finds himself incapable of praise. We’ve come a long way from the interconnected lovers as particles and arrived at a speaker experiencing a keen sense of isolation, unaffected by nature’s beauty.

This alternation between two meta­phorical takes on quantum mechanics creates the tension in this collection. Mr. Levy is at his best in short poems where he stretches his sentences over many lines, frequently enjambed, creating a rhythmical intensity propelling his poems down the page, as in “Prostate Cancer” and “Divorce: The Improvisation.”

But Mr. Levy exhibits a bit of trouble handling some of his longer poems. In these poems, such as “Questions for Baron” or “Indian Wells Diptych,” he appears to be trying too hard to convince his readers of the validity of his perceptions. For instance, in “Questions for Baron,” he writes:

I remember reading

that the OED says the word “lonely”

first appears in Shakespeare, Coriolanus.

How could that be possible?

Can you imagine this a modern, evolved condition,

an adaptation that enhances the possibility

of survival? I don’t know how

but, if so, what a horrible thought.

Aside from the fact that this passage seems like flat prose broken into lines that resemble poetry, readers may resent the speaker telling them how to feel about the subject matter. This happens perhaps a bit too often in this collection; Mr. Levy’s poems might be even more effective were he better able to preserve their sense of the inexplicable.

Finally, it appears that Mr. Levy too often lapses into use of the pathetic fallacy or strains too hard to create certain effects. “Indian Wells Diptych” features both of these miscues. Examine, for example, these lines:

The sky is all blue signature but the moon

hangs visible, very pale, as if used up,

exhausted, shaken

from the exertion of last night’s shining.

Besides the fact that it is impossible for the moon to be “used up,” note the way Mr. Levy tries to make sure we don’t miss this — he employs “used up,” follows it with “exhausted,” and piles it on with yet another line that means the same thing, “shaken / from the exertion of last night’s shining.” Does the moon exert itself?

Later, near the end of the same poem, Mr. Levy writes of the ducks his speaker is observing that “they can wonder, in their fine duck way.” I’m uncertain it’s a poetic virtue to posit an understanding of the manner in which ducks “wonder,” and if, in fact, that manner is “fine.”

In general, I found much to admire in this collection. Howard Levy writes with great sensitivity about human relationships using strong imagery and some wonderful metaphors. The fact that a few of these poems might have benefited from more careful editing does not diminish or detract from the overall efficacy of “Spooky Action at a Distance.” Perhaps Einstein would have enjoyed it; perhaps you will, too.

Dan Giancola is a professor of English at Suffolk Community College. His collections of poems include “Data Error” and “Part Mirth, Part Murder.”

Howard Levy’s work has appeared in Poetry, Threepenny Review, and The Gettysburg Review. He lives part time in Springs.

Jennifer Senft, an editor and English and writing instructor, is offering two workshops in April — the Art of Fiction, at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, and one on nature writing at the South Fork Natural History Museum in Bridge­hampton.

In the first, the fiction will be inspired by the art that’s in the Parrish, from the museum’s permanent collection to “Parrish Perspectives,” the current show of work by Jules Feiffer, Robert Dash, and Joe Zucker. Explored, Ms. Senft wrote, will be “fiction that you imagine within a piece of art, fiction in the style of the art, or fiction that replicates the medium.” Participants can write prose, drama, or poetry. The work of Oscar Wilde and Frank O’Hara will be among the readings.

The workshop, which costs $100 for museum members or $120 for nonmembers, will start on April 16 and continue on the following three Thursdays from 10 a.m. to noon.

At SoFo, genres including “personal nonfiction, journaling, poetry, fiction, and/or scientific inquiry” will be in play in a workshop devoted to writing about nature a la Annie Dillard, Peter Mat­thiessen, Richard Brautigan, and the poets Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams. Examples of their work will be read and discussed, though the list was still being put together.

“This workshop will also be casual,” Ms. Senft wrote in an email. “We’ll walk outside in Vineyard Field (behind the museum) for prompts and cues. . . .” It will meet on three Saturdays from 10 a.m. to noon, from April 25 to May 9. The fee is $60 for members, $85 for nonmembers.

Registration is through the two museums.

“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.

Rebecca Alexander is a force to be reckoned with. At the writing of this memoir, she is in her early 20s. She is accomplished, vivacious, active, energetic, and derives a great deal of satisfaction from helping others. She has taught in a prison; she has volunteered for Project Open Hand, a nonprofit organization that delivers meals to people living with H.I.V./AIDS.

Ms. Alexander earned a master’s degree in public health and a second master’s in social work, both from Columbia University. In addition, she has trained at a psychoanalytic institute, received a certification in psychodynamic psychotherapy, and works full time as a psychotherapist. She also works as a spin instructor.

She is an extreme athlete who has run with the Olympic torch as a Community Hero and successfully completed a five-mile lake swim and a 600-mile AIDS/LifeCycle bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

As if all of this were not enough (and there is more, much more, far too much to mention in a book review limited to a mere 1,200 words), she has accomplished all of this while becoming steadily deaf and blind. Because of a rare genetic disorder called Usher syndrome, Ms. Alexander is eventually heading toward a condition called deafblindness. Yeah, that’s what Helen Keller had.

At the moment, Usher syndrome is irreversible, untreatable, and there is little, medically, to be done about it, other than await the inevitable decline. This, however, does not stop Rebecca for one instant. She is doing anything but going gentle into that good night.

Her book, “Not Fade Away: A Memoir of Senses Lost and Found,” is nicely and movingly written (co-written with Sascha Alper) and, surprisingly, possesses tremendous cheerful humor. Despite her downward spiral of lost senses, the memoir contains not a shred of self-pity. Not an iota. None. Really.

Rebecca keeps a positive attitude without sounding in the slightest Pollyanna, saccharine, or unrealistic about what she is experiencing. She allows herself deep sadness at her losses — and at her impending even greater and more final losses — but throughout this impressive memoir she manages to maintain a tone that demonstrates her bravery, defiance, determination, and, yes, even humor.

Ms. Alexander had a pretty normal childhood, though she admits to being unusually klutzy, which may have been an early herald of her syndrome, as her hearing may have already been slightly compromised, and one of the hallmarks of Usher syndrome is vestibular dysfunction, which may cause imbalance and spatial disorientation.

Then, at 18, already feeling the beginnings of the decline of her senses, she comes home drunk one night and on her way to the bathroom accidentally tumbles out the window of her second-floor bedroom. She falls “backward more than twenty-seven feet onto the flagstone patio behind our house, landing, miraculously, on my left side, breaking almost everything but my head and neck.”

The fall leaves her needing several surgeries. “Ultimately, the only thing left without a cast would be my right leg and foot.” There follows a two-page description of the difficulties involved in being able to pick up a pen with her foot. Already going blind and deaf, and now this. Can we say “the trials of Job”?

Ms. Alexander describes where she acquired her positive attitude. “When we spend time together now, both with our hearing aids, me with my cane and her with her walking stick, Grandma Faye is a living example of what she taught me then. Nobody wants to hear you complain, so keep the bitching and moaning to yourself. Embrace the world with a positive outlook, and you will get so much more out of life.”

She writes:

. . . I wouldn’t wish what I have on anyone, and would never have chosen it, but it has given me an extraordinary ability to understand profoundly what living in the moment really means and to always try my best to do just that.

I don’t mean living each day as if it were my last. I have been there, done that. I’ve gone bungee jumping and skydiving. There have been times when there were too many guys, too much drinking, a never-ending whirlwind of “let’s grab life by the balls” . . . but never pausing to catch my breath is not the way to appreciate a world that is slowly — and sometimes not so slowly — going silent and dark for me. And while mine is an accelerated decline, one that will leave me with decades of blindness and deafness — many more than I’ll spend with hearing and vision, if I live a long and healthy life — the end is inevitable for all of us. In some ways, I feel lucky to never be able to forget that.

I found myself quite moved when she writes, “Sometimes I can’t help but wonder how it will be at the very end, though I try not to. Will I have a last clear image that I see, before my pinprick of a hole [her vision is blackening inward, contracting toward the center, which is still mostly clear] finally closes up forever? Or will things just blur more and more, an impressionist painting that gets increasingly less recognizable until finally it’s just a swirl of fading color, and then nothing? Will the last authentic sound I hear be a laugh, a cry, a subway rumbling into the station?”

In order to maintain a semblance of normal life, Ms. Alexander has had to learn sign language and Braille. She must use a cane and has three different hearing aids for different environments and a cochlear implant in one ear. Mind you, this does not stop her from being quite active in the New York City dating and singles scene. Talk about valor! Dating is tough enough when you can see and hear most of what is going on.

But as her vision and hearing continue to fade away, she will be unable to see others sign and will at some point be reduced to tactile signing, “the language used by people who are both deaf and blind.” Her description of learning this, and doing it with her best friend, Caroline Kaczor, a 2006 graduate of East Hampton High School, is at once lovely, poignant, intimate, and deeply frightening to me, who is merely facing the normal declines of age.

We’ll lie facing one another, and she’ll take both of my hands and place hers inside them. As her hand begins to take form, I’ll start to sound out the word she is spelling in my hand, listening intently with my palm and fingers, closing my eyes to help me focus. While I hold and follow the movement of her hands, Caroline will bring her pointer finger to her chest, and I’ll speak aloud what she is signing. . . .

At first we were terrible at it, and I would start to giggle at every mistake . . . and though I couldn’t hear Caroline, I knew she was giggling, too, because I could feel the quick little bounces her upper body would make against the bed. . . . Caroline could hear the sound of my laughter loud and clear, but she knew that I couldn’t hear hers, so she would take my hand and place it against her neck right at her vocal cords, so that I could feel her laughing, which made me laugh even harder.

. . . Watching people tactile-sign is like watching two people embrace, an elaborate dance of hands and fingers.

This book, a brave and affecting and funny account of a horrible and frightening illness, made me laugh and cry and feel truly and deeply moved. It does not seem like the kind of book one would enjoy, but I did enjoy it. I also think that I am going to buy several copies and give them to people I know who are facing some tough illness or period in their lives. “Not Fade Away” is a blueprint for handling the ugliest kind of shit life can throw at you, with grace and guts and courage. Bravo, Ms. Alexander!

Michael Z. Jody is a psychoanalyst and couples counselor with a practice in New York City and Amagansett.

Montauk at the St. Patrick’s Day parade: It’s not all beer cups and bagpipes. How about the history of the place?

For those interested in such, Carl Fisher, the visionary prewar developer most responsible for the shape the “Miami Beach of the North” was to take, is the subject of a brick-thick biography by Jerry M. Fisher, his grandnephew. “The Pacesetter,” first published in 1998, is just out in a new edition from the Friesen Press, a self-publishing concern out west.

Born in middle-of-the-country obscurity in Greensburg, Ind., in 1874, Fisher was an entrepreneur from his teenage years, moving from brilliant marketing during the bicycle craze to making Prest-o-Lite automobile headlamps to earning “Mr. Miami Beach” status as a developer. He was a co-founder and president of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home of the Indy 500, hence the book’s title, and the builder of the Lincoln and Dixie Highways, yet partly as a result of declining to name these monumental projects after himself, Jerry Fisher points out in his preface, in 1938 “Who’s Who” didn’t know him from Adam.

Back to the hamlet at hand, in 1925 Fisher bought more than 9,000 acres from Arthur Benson for $2.5 million and two years later built perhaps his most lasting legacy there, the Montauk Manor. Two years after that, of course, came the Great Crash. By 1934 Fisher had declared personal bankruptcy “as the drinking and womanizing continued unabated,” Peter M. Wolf, who would go on to write “Land Use and Abuse in America,” wrote in a 1998 review in The Star. “When he died at Miami Beach in 1939, his estate was estimated at $52,198, far below his peak net worth, estimated 50 million in 1920 dollars. . . .”

A most American of stories.

A Poetry Tete-a-Tete

“Baseball is portrayed in these radiant new poems by Jill Bialosky as a ‘fierce and feral’ rite of passage in which we’re all held hostage to the always surprising vicissitudes of time and change.” So says Philip Schultz, the East Hampton poet and Pulitzer Prize winner, in a blurb on the back of Ms. Bialosky’s new collection, “The Players,” thus hinting at a subject the two might take up in their conversation Saturday at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.

Ms. Bialosky’s previous book of poems was “Intruder.” An editor at W.W. Norton and part-time Bridgehamptoner, she is also the author of the memoir “History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life” and novels including “The Life Room.”

Montauk Thriller

Looking for some fishing action? Or rather action in a fishin’ kind of place? Set at Montauk Point and out in the depths of the Atlantic, “In Secret Waters,” a new novel by Richard Weissmann, involves, for one thing, terrorists (fresh off the ISIS hacking of the Montauk Manor website, no less), but more to the point “a vast fortune in stolen diamonds, lost since World War II,” and said to be somewhere in the wreckage of the sunken Andrea Doria.

Charged with finding it for the purposes of paying restitution to victims of the Holocaust is one Erik Hazen, a charter boat captain and ex-Navy Seal described as “born and raised on the not-so-chic side of the Hamptons” and belonging to a family that for eight generations has made a living “haul seining, trap netting, clamming, and scalloping.”

“Some of the characters were inspired by men I met during the 1980s and 1990s when I was writing feature articles about the local commercial fishing industry for The New York Times,” Mr. Weissmann said. He lives in Bellport. The book is available on Amazon.com.