“Pushcart Prize XXXIX: Best of the

Small Presses”

Edited by Bill Henderson

Pushcart Press, $19.95

It is Pushcart Prize time again, and those who await the collection will do well to find a bookmark and a cozy spot. Pushcart editors have dipped into the independent and small magazines as a pool and come forth with a thick, healthy offering.

Looking into the fiction in “Pushcart Prize XXXIX: Best of the Small Presses” is especially gratifying because a unity emerges in the writers’ attention to story. Well, they are short stories, true, so they tell stories in one way or another, but the best in this volume of bests attend to story as a concept, as a theme. In some selections it is explicitly front and center, and in others it waits in corners, in the midst of other subject matter and various backdrops: family, “Madame Bovary,” homelessness, driving, the World Wide Web, divine parentage or the question of it, music, suicide, football, rock climbing, the perspective of the loved one of a stripper, dogs.

I do have to make sure to mention the dogs. There are four stories in this collection in which a dog plays a major role as a metaphor. But not by any means the same metaphor, in case you worried Bill Henderson was slacking in his duties as Editor and Duke of this enterprise. He’s on top of it in this volume, as he has been for the 39-year duration of the series. Thank you for doing this, sir.

One of those dog stories, “Trim Palace” by Alexander Maksik, which was first published in Tin House, is among the finest pieces here. It is carefully and elegantly written, humor subtle, images concrete. In it, Peter, in his 30s, has lost his way in life and is working as a janitor at an airport. On the job, he runs into an old friend with whom he’s lost touch. The friend has a pretty wife, a sleek cellphone, important places to be. His question to Peter is, “I got to ask. Short version, okay, but, what the fuck happened?”

How does a person’s story become so? At what point is the story over with no possibility of a new direction? Peter accepts a house/dog-sitting job from the friend and finds himself taking care of an aged Great Dane, metaphor for fragility and power and the potent but vulnerable force of a life. There’s a tender quality here, an optimism; it is written with rare respect for human potential for regeneration. I read in the contributors’ notes that Mr. Maksik is the author of two novels. So I’ll be looking for those.

In this edition of the Pushcart Prize, story is treated variously as a fragile and complex human drive, a way to brilliantly organize human suffering, as a dot-connecter in an increasingly fragmented landscape of text, blurb, post, tweet. In light of the last, “The News Cycle” by Daniel Tovrov, which first appeared in ZYZZYVA, is an absurdist riff on reporting, reality, and responsibility in the age of the He or She With the Greatest Number of Hits Wins world of news on the Internet. Pacing-wise, the piece takes the shape of the news cycle, revving up, wheeling off, moving on.

It’s fair to say that the fiction in this volume — not every single story, but a critical mass and several of the essays as well — goes meta. A case in point is Maribeth Fischer’s essay “The Fiction Writer,” first published in The Yale Review, which deals with the pull and seductive danger of story in the psycho-emotional sense. Ms. Fischer’s piece is about storytelling in the hands of a pathological liar who inhabited her personal and professional life for a time. A self-avowed successful fiction writer, this person serves in the essay as the nugget around which Ms. Fischer’s ruminations on storytelling and the magnetism of belief swirl and roost. The piece somehow warms and chills at the very same time. Fascinating, and expertly executed.

When it comes to meta and stories, there’s the danger that the going can get clinical, fussy, arch, know-it-all. It can get terribly self-conscious, and one of the volume’s most effective stories examines this very pitfall. The main character of “Unmoving Like a Mighty River Stilled” by Alan Rossi, from The Missouri Review, takes up the case of a semiprofessional rock climber who is having major issues with one of his climbing partners and a piece of equipment called a “helmet cam,” the current tool of his climbing partner’s insistence that all of their adventures be captured on video, to be posted as brag and record and proof that the glory happened.

The story is sunk deeply into the narrative voice of the main character, detailing his discomfort and his self-consciousness in the many other postures of his life, which have somehow come together on the issue of the helmet cam, of representing an event rather than purely living it.

The writers represented in this year’s Pushcart volume share a commitment to the work at hand. As a reader, the experience of immersion is authentic, palpable. For example, and maybe back to the potential pitfalls of meta in fiction, these writers are not messing it up with gimmick or posture.

“By the Time You Read This” by Yannick Murphy, which originally appeared in Conjunctions, maybe verges on that but snatches itself back from the jaws of shtick with rare charm, unexpected innocence, and reality hilariously hosted by absurdity. Ms. Murphy’s story is told in epistolary past tense as a series of fragmented suicide notes to various recipients from an unnamed woman, who is the enraged wife of a cheating husband. The method of suicide shifts from fragment to fragment, and the note-writer’s rage is pure yet totally distracted by the minutae of life (e.g., the dog who needs her second dose of heartworm medicine) and her own frequent digressions. Ms. Murphy’s effort is clever, compact, and really, really funny.

The charm and pull, balm and elixir of story are well represented by these pieces. Pushcart once again makes a good showing of what’s out there, what the independent and small magazines are offering readers. It’s a volume full of work that intrigues, engages, gets you with a good story.

Evan Harris, the author of “The Art of Quitting,” lives in East Hampton.

Bill Henderson’s latest book is “Cathedral.” He lives in Springs.

“The Emotional Lives of Animals & Children”

William Crain

Turning Stone, $15.95

William Crain, a professor of psychology at the City College of New York, has written a controversial book, a clear polemic against mistreatment of animals. “If we believe we have a moral obligation to reduce suffering in the world, we must include animals,” he writes. “To ignore their suffering, and focus only on our own species, is self-serving and prejudicial.”

In his mid-30s, Mr. Crain became a vegetarian. He knew little, then, about the horror of meat animals on factory farms. “The thought just came to me,” he writes, “that I would be a more peaceful person if I didn’t eat animals.”

Mr. Crain’s wife, Ellen, a pediatrician, arrived at a similar position. “She decided, pretty much on the basis of facts alone, that the treatment of animals in modern societies was abysmal.” It seemed self-evident that abysmal treatment included the act of eating them.

Mr. Crain hopes to help his readers develop empathy for animals. To accomplish that, he taps into our own childhood experiences with nature, using observations he has made of children and animals at the Safe Haven Farm Sanctuary, which he and his wife founded in Poughquag, N.Y. He admits these are informal observations, not research, yet he makes some convincing arguments that animals and children share many characteristics.

He lists some. 1) Fear. He describes the sanctuary’s first goats rescued from a live meat market. It took them months to develop trust for their new caregivers. 2) Play. He observed a baby goat jumping off a rock, over and over, with variations similar to the behavior of a 3-year-old child who practices jumping off a step. 3) Freedom. The professor observes that free-range animals seem much happier than caged ones, just as children with outdoor space to play in feel happier. 4) The ability to care about others. If treated respectfully by humans, many different animals care deeply for the human species. They can be both loving and protective.

There are times the author strains to make his connections between animals and humans. He hypothesizes that animals share spirituality with humans, but it does not seem self-evident that a goat standing on a hillside gazing into the horizon is in “a state of deep peace” similar to a human meditative state “on a sacred mountain.”

Do the comparisons between animals and children demean humanity? Many great heroes have maintained their own self-worth by differentiating themselves. “I am not an animal,” Spartacus proclaimed. Well, that’s currently open for more discussion, Mr. Spartacus.

The central point seems to be: Children and animals share many qualities. We don’t eat children, and we shouldn’t eat animals either. The author does not take this intellectual leap in writing, but leads his readers to the chasm and gives us the opportunity to jump across it ourselves if we have the tendency to do so. There are times the book’s message is stated so quietly it seems the professor wanted to avoid any controversy the book might engender.

Darwin proposed that all species are related, that we all belong to one extended family. Mr. Crain points out that current animal behavior research finds increasing evidence that other species share human cognitive and emotional capacities. Of all the points the author asks his readers to consider, this may be the most controversial, especially for the world’s religions. If it is possible that all species are related, then religions must pose the question, “Do all creatures possess a soul?” (Or, do any?)

This could be a timely issue for religions to debate, although lessons from history would indicate a discussion would be insufficient to distract some religious people from killing infidels.

The same week I was asked by an editor at The Star to review “The Emotional Lives of Animals & Children,” a headline appeared in The New York Times. “U.S. Research Lab Lets Livestock Suffer in Quest for Profit. Animal Welfare at Risk in Experiments for Meat Industry.”

If there was ever a piece of writing that could help Mr. Crain and others in the animal rights movement reduce animal suffering, this Times article about a taxpayer-financed federal institution called the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center is that piece.

The Meat Animal Research Center is made up of a complex of laboratories and pastures that sprawls over 55 square miles in Nebraska. The center has one overarching mission: help farmers and ranchers produce more beef, pork, and lamb and turn a higher profit. One of the center’s proponents claims, “It’s not a perfect world. We are trying to feed a population that is expanding very rapidly, to nine billion by 2050, and if we are going to feed that population, there are some trade-offs.”

Those trade-offs at the Meat Animal Research Center include baby piglets being crushed by mothers who have been bred to produce larger litters, and dead lambs piled up as mothers abandon one or more of their multiple-birth offspring and the center’s staff allows the lambs to starve in order to see which mothers will respond to the hungry bleating of their rejected babies. This is a disturbing fact for anyone interested in animal rights. Our tax dollars finance research that causes deliberate, extreme animal suffering.

The animal suffering documented in the Times article is more than an isolated incident growing out of a specific need to meet the demands of world hunger. It is the manifestation of the country’s prevailing attitude that the suffering of animals does not matter as long as it is for the benefit of humans. That this is the accepted attitude and practice is evidenced by how animals are treated within the crowded factory farms that raise commercial beef, pork, and poultry for retail outlets.

Mr. Crain, although admitting knowledge about what goes on within the factory farms, has chosen not to inform his readers, assuming, I imagine, that perhaps enough has already been said. On the other hand, it seems anyone who is concerned about animal suffering should not ignore a chance to speak truthfully about the accepted standard of practice on corporate factory farms, a major cause of animal suffering.

It is to their credit that Mr. Crain and his wife fight the pervasive national attitude about animal suffering through the Safe Haven Farm Sanctuary, with its 70 animals they have rescued, some from live meat markets in the Bronx and some that have managed to escape from a neighboring game farm where birds are raised off-premises, shipped to the farm, and released from cages moments before a hunting party arrives to shoot birds that have barely learned to fly. But the live meat markets and the hunting farms are small potatoes in the struggle for animal rights. The cause Mr. Crain promotes is a badly imbalanced fight against a monolithic corporate factory meat industry, supported by the U.S. government, where there are tens of millions of animals in despicable conditions. And these conditions are pretty much ignored by the general populace of the country.

Perhaps Mr. Crain is far ahead of his time. In this country we hardly seem ready to consider the issues of animal suffering and animal rights. In 1949, we participated in and signed the updated Geneva Convention that forbids the torture of human beings. But we now know our country, after an intricate process of rationalization to justify it by the very highest levels of our government, has continued torturing humans. The recently released Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture was reviewed in an issue of The New York Review of Books. The last sentence of the review reads, “We translated our ignorance into their pain. That is the story the Senate report tells.”

One captive was thought to be a high-ranking Al Qaeda member. He was subjected to 180 consecutive hours of sleep deprivation and waterboarded 83 times. It turned out he was not a member of Al Qaeda, but was their travel agent. He had given interrogators all the information he had long before they began using the “enhanced interrogation techniques” adopted by our country.

It is doubtful that the same country is ready to think seriously about reducing the suffering of other species. I’m afraid we will need many more books about animal rights, and many more animal sanctuaries, and many more vegetarians who speak out, and many more small organic farms, and many more elections before animal suffering enters the national consciousness.

Gary Reiswig is the author of “Land Rush,” a new short-story collection, and “The Thousand Mile Stare: One Family’s Journey Through the Struggle and Science of Alzheimer’s.” He lives in Springs.

William Crain, the president of the East Hampton Group for Wildlife, lives part time in Montauk.

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.

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.

“Remember those great Volkswagen ads?”

Alfredo Marcantonio, David Abbott, John O’Driscoll

Merrell, $65

Over 100 million people watched the Super Bowl. A recent survey found that 78 percent of viewers are more interested in watching the commercials than the game itself. Not surprising, then, that companies line up to pay the exorbitant fees to advertise during the game — $4.5 million for a 30-second commercial.

Americans weren’t always so enamored of advertisements. For much of the 20th century, ads were a humdrum affair. It was only toward the end of the 1960s that ads made people sit up and take notice. A few upstart advertising agencies shook up the white-collar Madison Avenue establishment with irreverent, in-your-face campaigns like Alka Seltzer’s “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing,” Avis’s “We try harder,” and Wisk’s “Ring around the collar.”

The agency leading the pack was Doyle Dane Bernbach. DDB achieved notoriety with a series of print advertisements for the Volkswagen Beetle. The Beetle wasn’t much to look at, nor was it terribly comfortable or speedy. So DDB poked fun at the car’s demerits. Copy like “Lemon,” “Ugly,” and “Think small” sat alongside a simple picture of the car itself. Campaigns for other VW cars soon followed, all of them quirky and as likely to promote the negative features of the car.

“Remember those great Volkswagen ads?” takes us back to this transformative period in American industry. Filled with hundreds of ads for the Beetle, the VW van, and other cars, the book chronicles DDB’s decades of work on behalf of VW.

We don’t normally think of the 1960s counterculture revolution as a time of upheaval within corporate America. But consumers were growing bored with conventional advertising. Advertising campaigns treated the audience as dupes who would respond to simplistic images and slogans. Mostly white men educated at elite schools and colleges were producing homogenous, cookie-cutter campaigns.

Bill Bernbach, Ned Doyle, and Mac Dane saw an opening. Soon, nothing was sacred. They put copywriters and artists in the same room, they made fun of products, and they took pleasure in surprising clients with unorthodox approaches.

“The irony was, the big agencies’ upright Harvard and Yale graduates were increasingly out of touch with the very people they were trying to influence,” the authors write. “Suddenly, it was the streetwise not the book-wise who were best equipped to communicate with the man on the street.”

VW came calling and DDB broke the rules again. In some VW ads, the viewer could barely make out the car, which was small and tucked away in the corner. Other ads made fun of the company or just presented a list of all the reasons not to buy its products. But there was a method to the madness. Viewers came to expect a consistent aesthetic. The simplicity of the ads gave the impression that the company was transparent and honest. If VW wanted to create a connection with the consumer, they found the right agency to lead the way.

“Remember those great Volkswagen ads?” is an art book, not a history of advertising or even a detailed look at DDB. Don’t expect pages of text or lengthy interviews. A brief introduction gives way to chapters filled with smartly produced advertisements. The well-designed layout and the crisp photos will take you back to a time when ads were smart, thoughtful, and entertaining.

Sudhir Venkatesh is a professor of sociology at Columbia University who lives part time in East Hampton. His books include “Gang Leader for a Day” and, most recently, “Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York’s Underground Economy.”

“Remember those great Volkswagen ads?” is out in a new edition. It features the late Julian Koenig of Bridgehampton, the copywriter on the “Think small” ad campaign, voted the best of the 20th century by Advertising Age magazine.

Fifteen short stories by Al Burrelli, a frequent contributor to The Star who died in 2014, have been collected in “Nuggets: Short Story Treasures.” The volume was self-published by his wife, Louise Burrelli, who wrote a foreword to the book.

A retired public school teacher who turned to writing during the last five years of his life, Mr. Burrelli was awarded a literary prize for his first short story, “The Bride Wore Red,” and had a number of stories published by The Star over several years.

“Death by Pastrami,” a short-story collection by Leonard S. Bernstein, another contributor to The Star, who lives part time in Amagansett, received a positive review in a piece on the NPR radio program “Fresh Air” on Dec. 31. Maureen Corrigan called Mr. Bernstein’s stories, which mostly center on life in New York City’s garment district, “both quaint and timeless,” and said the author has “a flair for crafting parables about the comic futility of life.”

The book is a University of New Orleans Press reissue of Mr. Bernstein’s “The Man Who Wanted to Buy a Heart,” from 2012, with the addition of a new story, “Kessler and the Grand Scheme,” which appeared in these pages in November.

“Polishing the Mirror”

Ram Dass and Rameshwar Das

Sounds True, $16.95

I well remember thinking it curious that, having traveled 7,000 miles to Leh, the Himalayan capital city of Ladakh in India’s Jammu and Kashmir state, the instructors in both the meditation and yoga classes at the Mahabodhi International Meditation Center were not tiny, white-bearded Indian gurus but young Englishmen. Nonetheless, they were learned and eminently qualified, and led strenuous and bracing workouts for mind and body. Perhaps it was their Western-ness that made them adept in conveying Eastern wisdom to foreigners like me.

Decades earlier, Richard Alpert, a privileged Harvard professor, had glimpsed an expansion of consciousness and alternate reality through the use of psychedelics. Along with a colleague, Timothy Leary, Mr. Alpert was dismissed from Harvard. He traveled to India in 1966 and became a disciple of Neem Karoli Baba, a Hindu guru also known as Maharaj-ji who gave Mr. Alpert the spiritual name Ram Dass. He returned to the United States the following year, where he began to share what he had learned.

Mr. Dass’s 1971 book, “Be Here Now,” quickly became a sort of spiritual guidebook for Westerners in which he shared the guru’s teachings on attaining God consciousness and identification with one’s soul through meditation, yoga, and renunciation. Subsequent books included “Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita,” “The Only Dance There Is,” “How Can I Help?” and “Be Love Now: The Path of the Heart,” the latter written with Rameshwar Das, a writer and photographer who lives in Springs.

“Polishing the Mirror: How to Live From Your Spiritual Heart” is another collaboration of Mr. Dass and Mr. Das. In it, they recount many teachings and experiences with Maharaj-ji, many of them deceptively simple statements that offer an alternate way of looking at life and its purpose. Many other historical figures, from Jesus and Buddha to Albert Einstein and Mohandas Gandhi, are referenced, and experiences both ordinary and extraordinary are recounted.

“The essential work of developing a spiritual consciousness is quieting the mind and opening the heart,” the authors write. The key is to awaken from ego consciousness, “your limited self,” to “the Self, the universal spirit present in each of us, the God consciousness.” Many pathways are laid out, particularly in the final chapter, in which methods of creating a daily spiritual practice — polishing the mirror — are detailed. Meditation, not surprisingly, along with recitation of a mantra, reflection, chanting, and silence, are recommended and described.

Mr. Dass, who suffered a severe hemorrhagic stroke in 1997, a life-threatening infection in 2004, and a broken hip in 2009, encourages readers to embrace change, including aging and death. He describes extensive experience sitting with terminally ill people in the West and observation of suffering in India that may be impossible for Westerners to imagine, let alone comprehend. He and Mr. Das also offer meditations and other techniques for opening the heart to unconditional love, serving selflessly, accepting fear and suffering, and realizing that you are neither your body nor your ego, but your ever-present soul.

The art of life, the authors write, “is to stay wide open and be vulnerable, yet at the same time to sit with the mystery and the awe and the unbearable pain — to just be with it all.” Mr. Dass has been “growing into that wonderful catchphrase, ‘be here now,’ for the last forty years. Here and now has within it a great richness that is just enough.”

The notions of “I” and “me,” the meditation instructor at the Mahabodhi center used to tell us, inevitably give rise to the notions of “you” and “yours.” This, Mr. Dass and Mr. Das write, is maya, the illusion of subject and objects, of separateness. In a discourse on bhakti, or religious devotion, they explain that “Love has a built-in power to carry us beyond the limitations of our separate being, our ego, to the atman, our higher being,” or soul. “Our personal emotional love gets absorbed into the all-encompassing unconditional love of the One.”

Turn to any page of “Polishing the Mirror” and receive wisdom through the easy-to-comprehend sensibility of Westerners who found it at its source. To our great fortune, they returned to share it freely.

“Polishing the Mirror” is now out in paperback.

The children’s book team of Jim and Kate McMullan of Sag Harbor has branched out with a pilot for an Amazon Original Series that can be seen for free at the website of the retailer turned budding network. Episode one of “The Stinky & Dirty Show,” based on the McMullans’ “I Stink” and “I’m Dirty” books, is a 12-minute excursion into a Utah-like desert landscape a la Chuck Jones’s immortal Road Runner and Coyote cartoons for Warner Brothers, where, as then, towering rock formations figure in the plot.

Repeatedly asking out loud “What if?” Stinky the Garbage Truck and Dirty the Backhoe put their metal heads together to attack the problem of a boulder blocking an intersection. “What if we threw melons at it?” Stinky, a chipper and fun-loving sort despite his trash-hauling lot in life, says more than once.

Short story shorter, the two almost literally reinvent the wheel before bringing in their friend Chip, who hints at his mechanical prowess when he says, “I know the drill.”

“Nothing is just garbage,” as Stinky puts it, and so the giant rock winds up at his personal dump. Where he can throw melons at it.

The McMullans are executive producers on this Brown Bag Films production, which is written, directed, and animated by others. But fear not, the artwork is true to Jim, as it were, with big, bold characters richly textured, resembling paper cutouts.

“Hope: Entertainer

of the Century”

Richard Zoglin

Simon and Schuster, $30

Fred Astaire, it was said, gave Class to Ginger Rogers and Ginger gave Fred Sex. Another song-and-dance man gave the whole nation Hope. And in return the nation gave its heart to Leslie Townes (Bob) Hope. Streets, schools, hospitals, and arts centers all across America are named after him, even a bridge (in Cleveland) and an airport (in Burbank, Calif).

At one point or another in the last century, the British-born, Cleveland-raised Hope was a king of every entertainment medium from vaudeville through Broadway to Hollywood and TV, notably combining the latter two worlds this time of year as the wisecracking host of Academy Awards TV shows for a record 19 times. He was the world’s “most honored entertainer” in the Guinness book of records.

Also like Astaire, unlikely as it seems, through his many Broadway shows and Hollywood musicals, Bob Hope helped introduce many of the popular songs by Kern, Porter, Berlin, Cahn, Loesser, Lane, and others that are now considered standards. Among them, of course, “Thanks for the Memory.” But also “Two Sleepy People,” “De-Lovely,” “I Can’t Get Started,” “Buttons and Bows,” “Silver Bells,” “You Do Something to Me,” and “You’ve Got That Thing.”

Balancing the American cockiness of a George M. Cohan and the kind of studied self-deprecation later exploited by Woody Allen (who admits to studying him closely), the quick-witted (but generally ghostwritten) Hope helped cheer the nation through the Depression’s hard times and war times from Europe and the Pacific to Korea and Vietnam.

His tireless travel to packed personal appearances at home, to support U.S. troops abroad — and to burnish his international brand — may well have led him to be seen live by more people in more places than any other person in history.

So writes Richard Zoglin in his exhaustive — but far from exhausting — biography “Hope: Entertainer of the Century.” A veteran Time magazine writer, Mr. Zoglin considers both Hope’s comedy — often funnier because of his delivery than the jokes themselves, he concludes — as well as contradictions in the man behind the merriment.

Hope also set a new mark for entertainer involvement in causes beyond career, Mr. Zoglin notes, though he would hardly agree with all the antiwar or anti-establishment goals so many activist artists later pursued. In 1941 he was awarded the first of five honorary Oscars as “the man who did most for charity.”

So why are we surprised Hope was so significant so long to so many? Perhaps because unlike other stars of the 20th century whose fame outlived them — Cohan, Marlon Brando, Ethel Merman, Frank Sinatra, and Hope’s “Road” movie screen mate Bing Crosby — Hope had the misfortune to outlive his celebrity while still performing, even in the last decade before his death at age 100 in 2003.

As Mr. Zoglin explains, Hope created or at least perfected the stand-up monologue — with a team of writers crafting timely if gentle zingers. But he began to seem anachronistic as culture and politics changed. Comics and commentators could say practically anything about anyone, and the sharper the better.

Sadder still, the true patriotism that took Hope to the troops — and to the presidents who put them in harm’s way — also made him politically incorrect to many as the nation moved from the Good War to a split over Vietnam and increasingly venomous ideological lines.

Fortunately for Hope, his long life and legend were not seriously shadowed by an ever more bloodthirsty tabloid journalism in print, on screen, and online.

Ultimately one of Hollywood’s wealthiest, through real estate and other wise investments, he downplayed his fortune to retain a common touch and connection to audiences — rarely refusing to sign an autograph, often writing personal answers to fan mail. But “his personality had an essential coldness,” Mr. Zoglin writes.

And he was notoriously demanding of the many writers and image-promoters he employed. “Once you worked for Hope you were his property and just on loan to the rest of the world,” said Hal Kanter, one of his wordsmiths over four decades.

Though married to a former nightclub singer, Delores DeFina, for a remarkable 69 years, Hope also was known to associates as a determined womanizer, including a romance with the actress Marilyn Maxwell so long-running that some around Hollywood called her “Mrs. Bob Hope.”

Of all Hope’s reported liaisons, however, Mr. Zoglin ranks one with Merman as among the unlikeliest. After some distracting shenanigans onstage in their 1936 show “Red, Hot and Blue,” Merman recalled warning the producer: “If that so-called comedian ever does that again, I’m going to plant my foot on his kisser and leave more of a curve in his nose than nature gave it.”

But Mr. Zoglin found an unpublished memoir by Hope’s longtime publicist, Frank Liberman, that reported Bob and Ethel often walked home from the show and made love “in darkened doorways on Eighth Avenue” before going their separate ways.

Of course Hope’s best-known connection was with Crosby, though Mr. Zoglin says they never really socialized. Hope had gotten good reviews on Broadway when in 1932 he was asked to M.C. a two-week show at the Capitol Theatre headlined by the fast-rising young crooner, already a far bigger star with his own radio show and a Hollywood contract.

But the two worked well together, creating vaudeville-style bits between the songs. “The gags weren’t very funny, I guess,” Mr. Zoglin quotes Hope saying, “but the audience laughed because Bing and I were having such a good time.” Not enough to follow him west, however.

Publicly, at least, Hope preferred show business in New York over the lure of Hollywood, where he had failed a screen test some years earlier. But in 1937 he finally gave in to an offer from Paramount Pictures, perhaps only temporarily. “This may not be permanent — probably won’t be,” Hope told a reporter before heading to make his first movie. Ha!

That film, “The Big Broadcast of 1938,” gave Hope a whole new career, and even the infinitely adaptable theme song for it — “Thanks for the Memory” — in a shipboard scene with Shirley Ross that had her in tears after it was shot, along with the song’s creators, Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger. “We didn’t know we wrote that song,” Mr. Zoglin reports them saying.

“Broadcast” also brought Hope and Crosby back together for lunches, golf, radio shows, and a special Hollywood night at the Del Mar racetrack near San Diego where Crosby, a part owner, as master of ceremonies called Hope to the stage for a replay of their Capitol Theatre chemistry. It so impressed the Paramount production chief there that he decided they should make a movie together.

It was “Road to Singapore,” originally planned as “Follow the Sun” for Crosby, then as “Road to Mandalay” for Jack Oakie and Fred MacMurray, and re-titled again for Crosby, Hope, and the darkly beautiful Dorothy Lamour, whom Hope had heard as a singer back in New York.

Once again their off-the-cuff chemistry was king. “Hope and I tore freewheeling into a scene, ad-libbing and violating all of the accepted rules of movie-making,” sometimes talking right to the audience, Crosby recalled.

“The ‘Road’ pictures had all the excitement of live entertainment,” Hope said.

Many more roads followed: six more comic adventures with Crosby, more than 70 features and shorts altogether, plus Hope’s own endless travels around the world and into the homes of millions via radio and television. But after decades of dominating all forms of entertainment, things were not going so well by 1972, when Hope’s final film comedy was a flop, albeit aptly titled: “Cancel My Reservation.”

A maddening mess to make — from a serious Louis L’Amour novel that Hope had optioned — it was “no better than it deserved to be,” writes Mr. Zoglin. “The mix of comedy and murder-mystery might have worked twenty or thirty years before, when Hope could do that sort of thing in his sleep. Now he actually does look asleep.”

“Bob Hope on the Road to China,” a 1978 TV special, “was more of a diplomatic triumph than an entertainment one,” says Mr. Zoglin. But as anti-Vietnam anger faded, Hope kept tending to his brand and drew renewed praise for his body of work. “Oh, go on, highbrows . . . look at what America thought was really funny,” Peter Kaplan wrote in New Times magazine.

By the start of the 1980s, however, age was starting to wear Hope down, Mr. Zoglin writes, though reporting that his dance card for 1983, as he turned 80, included 86 stage shows, 42 charity benefits, 15 TV commercials, 14 golf tournaments, 11 TV guest appearances, and 6 NBC specials.

But his ratings were up and down, and by the late ’80s his increasing deafness (“I can still hear the laughs,” Hope insisted) and other physical decline were evident “even to casual viewers.” And lettering on the cue cards kept getting bigger so Hope could read them.

He got testy with staff and fellow stars. “If I ever end up like that, guys, I want you to shoot me,” Johnny Carson told his writers. After another Hope Christmas special, David Letterman told Rolling Stone, “If it had been a funeral, you would have preferred the coffin be closed.”

After his final NBC special, “Laughing With the Presidents” in 1996, at occasional charity benefits and ceremonial events Hope appeared disoriented. And he was downright disruptive at a New York cabaret show starring his wife and an old friend, Rosemary Clooney. At home there was “Jeopardy!” on TV (with headphones) and a few holes of golf before becoming virtually bedridden.

For his 100th birthday in May 2003, Hope received cards from President George W. Bush, Queen Elizabeth, and more than 2,000 others. Two months later he died peacefully of pneumonia — “officially,” Mr. Zoglin writes (suggesting otherwise). “Even his long, long goodbye was somehow inevitable and fitting. Hope needed to keep performing because he couldn’t stop believing that the audience needed him.” And all those memories.

David M. Alpern, creator of the “Newsweek on Air” and “For Your Ears Only” radio shows, now hosts podcasts for World Policy Journal from his home in Sag Harbor.

Richard Zoglin, theater critic for Time magazine, has a house in Wainscott.