“Art in America

1945-1970”

Edited by Jed Perl

The Library of America, $40

Fast-paced changes in the goals of American artists during the quarter-century following World War II were all passionately felt and widely debated, with many creative voices participating in the effort to define modernity.

Jed Perl’s broad, perceptive selection of material reflecting these voices in “Art in America 1945-1970” makes this hefty anthology an illuminating reference to its era. All the major shifts in sensibility are present, so it is fairly easy to pick up the many ways in which contemporaries were addressing the validity of Abstract Expressionism, then Pop, and then Minimalism.

To best capture the spirit of the dialogue, and to suggest what was in the air, Mr. Perl includes material from well-known and now lesser-known periodicals, and also from exhibition catalogs, books, lectures, letters, and artists’ statements. It is a special pleasure to find the carefully weighed language of poetry appearing here too, in the context of its inspiration. Examples include Howard Nemerov responding to an iron sculpture by David Smith and Frank O’Hara responding to a painting by Mike Goldberg.

As might be expected, chronology propels the anthology along. The pattern adjusts, however, to group together multiple selections by an individual author. This allows a fuller view of an often influential figure. Mr. Perl gives every writer a headnote, which is usually a succinct and pithy career assessment. These interpretive and welcome background over­views stem from Mr. Perl’s long career as a respected art critic and art historian. A considerable amount of the documentary research for this anthology seems to relate to his book “New Art City” (2005), a narrative celebrating New York’s history as a magnet for artists.

Mr. Perl is thorough in presenting the era’s intellectuals, who tend to bring in social circumstances or psychological issues as they address the creative process and analyze artistic content. Four essays offer insight into Clement Greenberg’s influence on taste. Another four provide a view of Harold Rosenberg’s important contributions, including “The American Action Paint­ers,” which points to the viewer’s engagement in the artist’s creative act, and “Mobile, Theatrical, Active,” published a dozen years later, which considers emerging developments.

The selections representing Meyer Schapiro’s probing critique — particularly “The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art” — underscore his role as a champion of the human imagination and his timely fit into the 1945-1970 psyche. Here, too, is Leo Steinberg’s “Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public,” which gave Harper’s readers a keener understanding of Jasper Johns and much else. Susan Sontag discusses materials, objects, and the treatment of time in her significant contribution, “Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition.” There is also piercing commentary on the social impact of the Museum of Modern Art in Dwight McDonald’s New Yorker profile of Alfred Barr, the museum’s first director.

The breadth and probing spirit animating the selections frequently reveal the way differing ideas launched, then developed further within the popular culture. In photography, for example, six writings, dating from 1946 to 1965, divide between either encouraging audience response to the subject depicted, or encouraging response to the design extracted from the original source. James Agee, in an introduction to Helen Levitt’s photography of children on the streets of New York, emphasizes her way of seeing and understanding a face or an emotion; Jack Kerouac’s essay for Robert Frank’s “The Americans” cites Frank’s way of finding “the everythingness of America,” and Truman Capote, writing about Richard Avedon, notes “the blood-coursing aliveness he could insert in so still an entity as a photograph.”

Among authors intent on emphasizing the invention of new art, there is Robert Creeley’s appreciation of the subtle forms in Harry Callahan’s photographs; Harold Rosenberg noting that he finds Aaron Siskind’s photography has “the dual picture planes, calligraphy, the post-Cubist balances, the free strokes and aerial perspectives, the accidental landscapes, galaxies hinted in stains, of half a dozen vanguard styles,” and Siskind himself writing that when he photographs an object, “it is often unrecognizable; for it has been removed from its usual context, disassociated from its customary neighbors and forced into new relationships.”

Artists’ statements, often originally published in conjunction with an exhibition, appear throughout as primary sources. It is easy to feel the passion and conviction. Some have great resonance, such as Robert Rauschenberg’s comment on trying to act in the gap between art and life, and Ad Reinhardt’s statement on purity, “No confusing painting with everything that is not painting.”

Other artists’ statements are especially treasured for the way in which they bring out sources of inspiration. Anni Albers, for example, wrote of the significance of pre-Columbian textiles, and Jackson Pollock’s reference to Indian sand painting is now legendary. So, too, is Willem de Kooning’s discussion of the old masters and their handling of pictorial space.

It is the carefully reasoned essays illuminating new directions that are likely to be frequently consulted. Barbara Rose’s “ABC Art” is highly prized for its treatment of Minimalism’s shift to a new sensibility and its rejection of the emotional content of Abstract Expressionism. Donald Judd’s “Specific Objects” also adds significantly to the material forming a core reference for Minimalism.

Authors of writings on Pop’s ascendancy frequently establish links between America’s growing materialism and the artists’ celebration of society’s icons. Michael Fried notes that “an art like Warhol’s is necessarily parasitic upon the myths of its time, and indirectly therefore upon the machinery of fame and publicity that markets those myths.” Gene Swenson is especially perceptive, too, in “The New American ‘Sign Painters,’ ” and in “Junk­dump Fair Surveyed” John Bernard Myers connects money, fashion, vanguard art, and the changing social scene in a way that also relates to the earlier days of the struggling Abstract Expressionists.

Anthologies can be a great convenience. Content here from numerous short-lived midcentury periodicals, including It Is, The Tiger’s Eye, Possibilities, trans/formation, and Black Mountain Review, is impressive, and of course extremely useful due to limited availability. For the most part, this content reflects not only the openness to change that prevailed at the end of World War II, but also the dialogue among members of the Abstract Expressionist generation. In an attempt to accurately capture what was in the air, Mr. Perl is careful to direct attention to all sides in this discourse. Bias becomes historical fact.

Criticism itself became a subject of study in the ’60s, as Mr. Perl reminds us in his introduction. “Art in America 1945-1970” is likely to be regarded as a thoughtful and useful product of this development. It highlights issues, and it demonstrates how insightful writings about the visual arts are contributions to the continuous sorting of America’s cultural history.

Phyllis Braff is an art critic, curator, and retired museum administrator who lives in East Hampton.

“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.

Let’s face it, the publishing game is a tough nut to crack — now more than ever, economically speaking. Thus the explosion in self-publishing and the potential interest in a panel charged with examining “What’s New in Self-Publishing and Small Presses,” which will convene on Wednesday at 7 p.m. as part of Stony Brook Southampton’s Writers Speak series.

Among the participants is Kamy Wicoff, the author of “I Do but I Don’t: Why the Way We Marry Matters.” She is a co-founder of She Writes Press, a “curated” self-publishing outfit for women, and she’ll be joined by two of the press’s South Fork authors: Sande Boritz Berger, a graduate of the campus’s M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature who recently came out with “The Sweetness,” a semifinalist for Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel award, and Celine Keating, whose second novel, “Play for Me,” is forthcoming. Judy L. Mandel, the author of a memoir, “Replacement Child,” rounds out the panel.

The meeting place for the free talk is the Radio Lounge, upstairs in Chancellors Hall.

“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.

The Quotation Game

Spurred by a not very Long Island-like deep cold and unusual masses of snow — in short, a long winter indoors — your friendly neighborhood bookseller has started a diverting game, a “literary treasure hunt” called SmartyPants. Every day BookHampton will post a quotation on its website and Facebook page, and then the stabs at identification of both it and the book it’s from can begin.

“Everyone who identifies the quotation wins a prize,” a release said. No strings attached, though players do have to stop in at either the Main Street, East Hampton, or Hampton Road, Southampton, shop to claim winnings — maybe a book, maybe a gift certificate, maybe chocolate.

More Than a Chance to Suck Up

Wednesday brings the Faculty Five to a frozen Stony Brook Southampton campus to read from their work — new, old, whatever they please. The speakers are: Lou Ann Walker, the editor in chief of The Southampton Review and the author of the award-winning memoir “A Loss for Words,” Susan Scarf Merrell, the fiction editor of that journal, whose latest book is “Shirley: A Novel,” Roger Rosenblatt, the esteemed essayist just out with “The Book of Love: Improvisations on a Silly Little Thing,” the novelist Ursula Hegi, and Julie Sheehan, the poet who directs the M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature.

That program, of course, sponsors the Writers Speak series, which happens most Wednesdays through May 6 in Chancellors Hall starting at 7 p.m.

“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.

Deadline for Scribes

Hot, crowded July may seem far off, what with a winter for the ages upon us, but March 1 is not. That’s the scholarship deadline for this year’s Southampton Writers Conference, sponsored by the M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature at Stony Brook Southampton and running from July 8 to 19.

“Workshops are filling up,” a mass email warns. Teachers range from Billy Collins on the poetry front, to a master essayist, Roger Rosenblatt, to Meg Wolitzer, the novelist, to Masha Gessen heading up creative nonfiction. More information is at stonybrook.edu/mfa/summer.

Soffer Starts Writers Speak

At that same campus, the spring iteration of the college’s Writers Speak series begins Wednesday with Jessica Soffer stepping to the lectern, or something like it, with her debut novel, “Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots.” Published in 2013 and out in paperback last year, it’s a food-rich coming-of-age story of a young woman of Iraqi-Jewish ancestry. Ms. Soffer, who has spent much of her life calling Amagansett her part-time home, as her father, the late sculptor Sasson Soffer, lived and worked there, teaches fiction at Connecticut College.

If you can’t make that one, there’s the following laundry list to consider: March 4 brings a faculty reading by Susan Scarf Merrell, Roger Rosenblatt, Lou Ann Walker, Ursula Hegi, and Julie Sheehan, followed on March 11 by a panel discussion of what’s new in self-publishing and small presses. On April 1, it’ll be Alice Fulton, with Patricia McCormick and Mitchell Kriegman on April 15, Roxana Robinson on the 22nd of that month, Laura Lippman interviewed by the college’s Daniel Menaker on the 29th, and then a reading by M.F.A. students on May 6.

All begin at 7 p.m. in the Radio Lounge, upstairs in Chancellors Hall.

“The Book of Love”

Roger Rosenblatt

Ecco Press, $22.99

Attention, lovers, hop out of bed! 

Valentine’s Day is upon you. Time to dig up a gift for your beloved, who will surely not be your beloved if you forget.

You have only a matter of hours to fix this. But in your haste why not skip the usual chocolates or flowers or Hallmark card (yawn) and spin over to Canio’s or BookHampton and pick up a copy (or more) of Roger Rosenblatt’s just published in the nick of time “The Book of Love.”

And by the way forget about ordering from Amazon on your bedroom computer. It’s important that you get out of bed for this one. Besides if you and your computer and your beloved are all in bed together, your beloved will know what to expect on V-Day and what’s the fun of that? Forget about an e-book too. You can’t inscribe that with pretty words.

But what about this book, Mr. Rosenblatt’s latest? Is it any good? He writes essays for Time and “PBS NewsHour” and has won a Polk and a Peabody and an Emmy and written six Off Broadway plays and 16 books including national best sellers like “Making Toast” and “Lapham Rising” and he was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and is professor of English and writing at Stony Brook University and . . . you get the idea. They all say he’s pretty good. But what about this book? Well, here’s what they all say.

O, The Oprah Magazine — “This year’s ultimate Valentine’s Day treat.”

Vanity Fair — “A symphony of amore.”

Kirkus Reviews — “. . . like Coltrane at the Village Vanguard.”

Booklist — “Rosenblatt — wittily, urbanely, wholeheartedly — is in love.”

But what do I think? Well, where to start? In the middle of the book maybe, or maybe at the end, or maybe it makes no difference. Mr. Rosenblatt is all over the place on love.

We used to call this sort of literature “stream of consciousness” — think of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Or how about a smorgasbord? Or maybe the Coltrane remark is on the mark? Or how about a handful of lit firecrackers? In fact, one can’t really precisely review Mr. Rosenblatt’s book or his mind. Both book and mind are moving at light speed in short paragraphs and long, in quotes and quips and puns and poems. It’s about love — all kinds of love — of family, friends, home, country, work, writing, solitude, art, nature, self — indeed of Life. And sexually induced love in all its variations — romantic love, courtship, heartbreak, fury, confusion, melancholy, hysteria, delirium, ecstasy — you name a nuance and Mr. Rosenblatt has it covered.

Here are a few of my favorites —

On married love: “People sometimes get married for the same reasons poets sometimes write sonnets. Form rescues content.”

On statistics: “Of the six marriages announced on page eighty-three of the Sunday paper, 2.2 will fail, 2.3 will last, 1.5 will fail and last.”

On friendship: “Love is hysteria. But friendship is a peaceful little thing.”

On God’s love: “Before you tell me God is love, let me tell you, Mike, too, is love. So are a dozen other friends whom I can think of, off the top of my head. I can count on the love of my friends. But the love of God? . . . too flighty for my taste.”

On his father’s love: “He showed no affection for his parents, who showed no affection for him. . . . I was never sure if he loved me or some of the things I did.”

On J.F.K. and Bill Clinton: “This is the way of the unloved child. You can make up for practically any other deficiency, but that particular omission runs through you like a spear. . . . They could never get enough, because early on, they got too little.”

The list of Mr. Rosenblatt’s ponderings and pirouettes is simply amazing. There is no valid way to review a collection as wacky and wonderful as this. Hurry off to your independent bookstore. Your beloved will think more highly of you and your sex life might improve too. Statistics prove it.

Bill Henderson’s latest book is “Cathedral.” He is publisher of Pushcart Press in Springs.

Roger Rosenblatt lives in Quogue.

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.

“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.