The Artist in Wartime

    So how many former art school deans do you know who were present when the Allies stormed the beaches at Normandy? Here’s one in your backyard: Alex Russo, once of the Corcoran College of Art and Design in the nation’s capital, still professor emeritus at Hood College in Frederick, Md., and on Saturday alighting at Guild Hall to read from his new book, “Combat Artist: A Journal of Love and War.”

    It recounts his time in the Naval Reserve and with Navy intelligence, serving as a combat artist, among other capacities. His graphic accounts of the landings at Normandy and Sicily are part of that branch’s official records of the war. The book also goes into the life of an artist in postwar America.

    Admission is $7. The event starts at 1:30 p.m. with a reception with Mr. Russo, who will be signing copies, too. The reading follows at 2.

Long Island Reads Griswold

    That pan-county, library-centric, book club-friendly read-in, Long Island Reads, has this year chosen as its title “The Manor: Three Centuries at a Slave Plantation on Long Island,” the recent, heavily researched, and well-received history by Mac Griswold of Sag Harbor.

    In celebration, Sylvester Manor on Shelter Island, dating from the 1650s and in the hands of the Sylvester family for 11 generations, will be the site of a free outdoor reading by Ms. Griswold on Saturday at 2 p.m., with time for questions. “The Manor” was chosen by a committee of Suffolk and Nassau librarians for its “readability and excellence.” A readers’ guide can be found at longislandreads.files.wordpress.com.

    Those who would like to tour the house, in groups of up to 15, have been asked to register beforehand by calling 749-0626 or emailing [email protected].

    And then from 4 to 6 p.m., the property, which continues as an organic farm and educational foundation, will have a free concert, “Back to the Roots: The Scattered Songsters of Sylvester Manor,” with ballads, blues, spirituals, and work songs of the days of yore.

“These Hamptons”

Phillip Andrew Lehans

Schiffer, $50

     A number of years ago, a friend from the publishing world was complaining about the sorry state of the book business. It wasn’t really his spring selection that annoyed him, but rather his audience of readers who most disturbed him.

    At first it seemed that the audience for novels was getting dumber with each year. But after several high-octane Rob Roys (it was some time ago), it seemed that his problem was finding mystery book titles that would appeal to his readers. He said that the only books that sell have “cat” in the title, or “Nantucket.” He said “Hamptons” also would sell a cozy murder tale. So I suggested “The Nantucket Cat Solves the Hamptons Murders” or “Death on Nantucket With the Hamptons Cat.” He told me both of these titles had already been taken and wondered if I ever read the best-seller lists.

    In reality, he was right. Add “dog” or “Venice” to a title and the airport news shops can hardly keep these books on their shelves. And I must admit that since I enjoy visiting beautiful places that other people have already discovered, my bookcases have any number of books with “Paris,” “Martha’s Vineyard,” or “Barbados” on their dust jackets. There certainly seems to be no end to Hamptons books as the summer season approaches.

    So with spring in mind (and sometimes in the air), I visited one of our few remaining local booksellers to see what new titles have been added to the Hamptons section. I didn’t see a Hamptons cat book, but there was a Hamptons dog book. There were many quite wonderful books about windmills, lost buildings, gardens, and cooking — all of these had “Hamptons” in their titles.

    But it was the oversized shelf that seemed to call, as it bulged with new picture books. One stood out because it was from a publishing house that has heretofore dealt with books about antiques and Americana — Schiffer Publishing of Pennsylvania. I had known Schiffer’s founder 40 years ago, so I pulled out the five-pound volume titled “These Hamptons” by Phillip Andrew Lehans to see which Hamptons were his. I have found that often representations of the East End (and in particular the South Fork) are not really the communities I know. And it is such an odd feeling reading drivel about your own village.

    There are times when I feel I could become a curmudgeon (there are those who may think I have achieved that goal), as my tastes and opinions seem to be less elastic than the last time I checked them. But the dust jacket on “These Hamptons” is eye-catching, with its dozen small vignettes, including indigo blue grapes, a gaggle of masts, and the blurry movement of a Bridgehampton polo match, so I was ready for someone else’s visual trip through the diverse communities that have been called the Hamptons since the 1870s.

    You open the book to great endpapers depicting two huge, torn, bright yellow-green ticket stubs from the Sag Harbor Cinema. An eye-popping introduction to a beloved local institution — good start. And then on to the dust jacket flap with its wide encompassing definition of what the Hamptons include.

    Now, we know that there are many compromising expansions to the map of the Hamptons. Some purists say it stops at the Shinnecock Canal, but most local puritans now accept villages as far back west as Westhampton Beach. Mr. Lehans goes farther afield by adding East Marion (that may be because so many residents of Peconic Landing once lived in the Hamptons?), Greenport, and Shelter Island (sorry, not an unHamptons anymore). This is not heresy, but since the photographer/author has lived on the East End for the most part since 2005, it seems a misstep. But let’s get beyond the endpapers.

    The book is certainly a collection of Mr. Lehans’s photographs. It is indeed an exhibition with only two text panels. This pictorial essay starts with winter and ends again in snow. The images are not typical tourist-type, but rather sensuous and often impressionistic. They range from narrative to outright poetic. There is a stream of details (fall leaves that could be anywhere in the Northeast) that glides into abstracted heavy rain on an evening amber-lit shop window in Sag Harbor.

    Mr. Lehans eschews older cliches (the Whalers Church, Home, Sweet Home, and the like) for more timely and fleeting shots. It is one calendar year in and out of focus. Things illustrated are here today and gone tomorrow. There is a wonderful picture of the LKL farm stand on Pantigo Road, East Hampton — the building is still there but enlarged and with a new tenant now.

    One section starts with a full-page shot of phragmites off Gin Lane in Southampton, with a facing image of a mass of sailboat masts in Sag Harbor. This is a lovely and evocative pairing. The next page is a frightful polychromed wide-mouthed tiki idol from the Ronjo in Montauk who faces a Marilyn Monroe imitator (equally wide-eyed and mouthed) from some wild party in Sag Harbor.

    The book is filled with contrasts. It is not all pretty. An eroded dune in Montauk is a mass of disordered rocks and dry clumps of weeds. This dirty dune photograph faces that most boring (and treacherous) stretch of highway at Napeague, with its marching utility poles creating a perspective of endlessness.

    A black, white, and gray centerfold of shells leads to colorful scenes of the Artists and Writers Softball Game and a few pages beyond to the Talkhouse and a vivid spread of a defining Nancy Atlas performance. A few ocean waves, and we turn a page to reveal a Sagg Main Beach sunset with people in an almost balletic pose facing a photo of another salmon-and-mauve sunset with Theodore Syrianos and his dog, Rocco, in their boat fishing at Sag Harbor.

    From Sam’s restaurant to Rowdy Hall, Mr. Lehans catches a theme of work and pleasure. There is a very personal privateness about these pictures. It is almost like being on the train on a Sunday night trip back to the city, looking over the shoulder of someone who is going through his smartphone, editing the weekend’s highs and lows. They are his, but you have done all those things too.

    Some of the pictures remind me of my orgies with my iPhone — clicking here, clicking there, with that freedom that the demise of film created. There is an energy, a freshness, and a feeling of speed that comes only from being digital. Mr. Lehans takes full advantage of this sense of the instantaneous. A canon firing at Southampton’s Fourth of July parade spits fire and blue-gray smoke. The orange-and-yellow fireworks over Sag Harbor or an expressionistic whirl of carnival ride lights at Bridgehampton are all about motion.

    Mr. Lehans went everywhere. From a silent-film presentation at Silas Marder’s gallery to a picnic table at the Hampton Classic, the photographer caught the energy, the fun, and the pretense of much of what we love most about living out here.

    This is the book for the guest room nightstand. This is the book for the reception table at the 1770 House, and the perfect tome to lug back to the city so you can enjoy last summer while cold October rain hits your apartment’s window.

    Some books deserve to use “The Hamptons.” Phillip Andrew Lehans can wear it proudly.

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

    Now that spring is here, Maryann Calendrille, your friendly neighborhood bookseller, is calling all scribes to consider planting seeds of writerly creativity in a six-week workshop. It starts next Thursday at 10 a.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.

    Dubbed Spring Ink, “the small-group workshop will focus on narrative prose. Readings, writing assignments, and constructive critique are part of the course work,” says a related mass email.

    Ms. Calendrille has run Canio’s with the photographer Kathryn Szoka for the past 15 years and has taught nonfiction writing for longer still. She has an M.F.A. from Vermont College, where she studied with, among others, Mark Doty, the Springs poet who won a National Book Award in 2008.

    The bookshop can be called to register. The cost is $125.

“Andrew’s Brain”

E.L. Doctorow

Random House, $26

    The casual reader may be a bit surprised coming to E.L. Doctorow’s latest novel, “Andrew’s Brain,” not to find a story imbued with historical detail. The general perception of Mr. Doctorow is as a writer of historical fiction — even if this is a misleading delimitation — thanks to the sweeping historical canvases found in such works as “The Book of Daniel,” “Ragtime,” or “The March.”

    More often than not, Mr. Doctorow’s primary concern is with his characters’ intersections (a word Mr. Doctorow himself has used) with history, the truer emphasis being on individual struggles for equilibrium within the American experience rather than simply the historical framework per se. We see this in “Homer & Langley,” in which he constructs a story of human frailty, compulsion, and alienation against the evolving milieu of early and middle-20th-century New York City. That struggle for equilibrium, less the overt historical context, is again at the forefront of his most recent work.

    “Andrew’s Brain” has one of Mr. Doctorow’s simpler plotlines. Andrew, who describes himself as a “freakishly depressive cognitive scientist klutz,” is having a rambling conversation, almost a monologue, with another person. This person may be his therapist or a doctor of another sort or, possibly, neither. Perhaps Andrew is really only talking to himself. In any case, locked away at an undisclosed location (whether asylum, within his own head, or still elsewhere) he relates the story of the tragic effects he seems to precipitate upon others as well as himself — divorce, the death of his first child, the death of his second wife, the abandonment of their child.

    Rather than emphasizing the outward struggle with the external world that the historical framework facilitates, “Andrew’s Brain” is more concerned with mapping an intense inward struggle concerned with loss, memory, and identity. As a cognitive scientist, Andrew knows, to a degree better than most, the science of how the brain works. He struggles to understand how his brain reacts to what has happened around him and to him in terms of that science. His own life becomes the subject of his analysis as a cognitive scientist. What is the relationship between what he knows objectively as a scientist about how the brain functions and his own individual experiences?

    His very knowledge of the brain is a burden to him, however, as he tries to come to terms with what he has done and experienced and to find meaning within the resulting chaos. Despite all that has happened to him, Andrew is battered more by the limitations and perplexity of his own mind than the outside world. While trying to understand his relationship to the events surrounding him, he is constantly attempting to accept how his own mind works. How does the brain become the mind? When does it become the me? What is the difference, if any, between the brain, the mind, and the soul?

    His brain is something he cannot escape: “It’s a kind of jail, the brain’s mind. We’ve got these mysterious three-pound brains and they jail us. . . . I’m in solitary. . . .” If he can simply understand and apply the science of it, he believes he can better endure the pains of his life and find some solace.

    The narrative structure reflects his struggle and confusion as Mr. Doctorow places the reader into Andrew’s tormented and self-loathing mind. Andrew spews out whatever is within his head at the time, creating a mixture of memories, visions, and thoughts, so the story jumps from point to point, event to event, and back again. Occasionally, Andrew even shifts to the third person in telling his story, emphasizing the distance he tries to achieve from himself as he examines his own life.

    At one point, he asks his listener if he is a computer, but he knows the brain is more a dynamical system than a computational one. Grappling with the processes that are a part of that dynamic system — memory (and forgetting), perception, reasoning, and understanding — creates a tension within his brain that becomes the story. But that very tension and struggle make everything that Andrew says questionable. What actually has happened and what is real only within Andrew’s brain? Whomever he is speaking to continually asks: “This was not a dream?” “Did this really happen?” “Do you think . . . you may sometimes overreact?”

    History does intrude in the last third of the book — the least successful part of the story — with the 9/11 attacks and, more pointedly, a slightly comic introduction of an unnamed President George W. Bush as Andrew’s former Yale dorm roommate, and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, here named Chaingang and Rumbum. Andrew is appointed head of the Office of Neurological Research in the White House basement in order to have him sign a confidentiality agreement ensuring that there will be no politically embarrassing stories of the president as a Yale frat boy.

    Mr. Doctorow’s prose is lean and honed to the essential, and there are more than a few pleasures found in the writing itself. His description of traveling north on I-95 is evocative and depressing at the same time (as well as somewhat apocalyptic). “I remember coming up the Jersey Turnpike, past the oil refinery burn-offs, and with the growling of the convoying semis in our ears, and away off to the left the planes dropping to the runways of Newark Airport and then the fields of burned grass irrigated by rivulets of muck and with what looked like a buzzard floating over the turnpike risen now on concrete pillars that in their tonnage were holding up the furious intentions of traffic, the white lights coming toward us, the red lights beckoning. . . .”

    And he provides a poignant description of Mark Twain in his later years as he “rages at the imperial monster he has helped create.” “I see his frail grasp of life at those moments of his prose, his after-dinner guard let down and his upwardly mobile decency become vulnerable to his self-creation. And the woman he loved, gone, and a child he loved, gone, and he looks in the mirror and hates the pretense of his white hair and mustache and suit, all gathered in the rocking-chair wisdom that resides in his bleary eyes.”

    There are also a number of small, neat comic touches, such as a scene of Andrew’s former wife’s husband, an opera singer, referred to by Andrew simply as Martha’s “large husband,” drunk in his living room and dressed as the titular hero of “Boris Godunov.”

    Despite these fine moments, “Andrew’s Brain” is not major Doctorow; ultimately, the sum is less than its parts. However, even lesser Doctorow is worth more than the best of many other writers. Andrew’s philosophical, psychological, and scientific ruminations raise challenging questions about the process of knowing and the creation of the self, even if neither he, Mr. Doctorow, nor anyone else can provide satisfying answers.

    After teaching literature at Southampton College for 30 years, William Roberson now works at L.I.U. Post.

    E.L. Doctorow lives in Sag Harbor and New York.

    Whiskers, a triangle of pink, a couple of floppy ears: Nosing into your periphery in time for Easter, yet incongruously attuned to an altogether different ancient teacher, comes “Bunny Buddhism: Hopping Along the Path to Enlightenment” (Perigee, $14), Krista Lester’s book of snippets of wisdom to help get you through your day.

    Snippets: Is it naive to be surprised at a book made up entirely of 140-character-at-a-time tweets? Probably. But then again, it isn’t quite “entirely,” the aphorisms broken up and enhanced as they are by illustrations by Durell Godfrey, The Star’s fashion-attuned photog, an inveterate seeker of any and all things of visual interest.

    Neither is cuteness all there is to it. Consider the bracing opening sentence of Ms. Lester’s introduction: “A few years ago, I found myself facing the familiar feeling that life was pointless and I would always be miserable.”

    Depression and anxiety may be the conditions of the age, but at least she did something about it, racking her brain for what made her smile and coming up with bunnies and the contented face of Buddha, which led her to record her thoughts on a Twitter account, and to this book.

    “There are only two mistakes one can make along the path,” one passage reads, “not hopping all the way, and never beginning to hop.”

    There’s wisdom at the root of the adorable conceit. Can’t get out of your own head? Like the song says, you got to move somethin’.

    Here’s a date to thumb into your e-calendar. Friday, April 25, will mark the first of what is planned as an annual benefit and reading, the Poetry Affair, at LTV Studios in Wainscott to mark, in turn, National Poetry Month.

    The readings, from 7 to 9 p.m., will be filmed for later airing. Participants include a couple of writers with long associations with Springs, Grace Schulman, one of the country’s more admired poets and the author, most recently, of “Without a Claim,” and Fran Castan, named as Long Island’s poet of the year in 2013 by the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association.

    Julie Sheehan of East Quogue and the Stony Brook Southampton M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature, a Whiting Writers’ Award winner and the author of a wild, in-character concept album of a collection, “Bar Book: Poems and Otherwise,” will also read, joined by others ranging from Lucas Hunt to Michelle Murphy to The Star’s Joanne Pilgrim. A meet-and-greet starts at 6:30 p.m.

    Rosalind Brenner, a visual artist and a poet in her own right, is the organizer. Admission is $5 or a food donation for the East Hampton Food Pantry, the evening’s beneficiary.

“Fire Island: Past, Present,

and Future”

Robert F. Sayre

Oystercatcher Books, $24.95

     Robert F. Sayre, a retired English professor from Iowa, had the pleasure of spending his summers from childhood onward at the family house in Point O’ Woods on Fire Island. From this long-term, personal experience, he gained a valuable perspective about this roadless island that is accessed by pedestrian ferry boats from the mainland of Long Island.

     I must confess to being jealous of Mr. Sayre, as I grew up too far from the water’s edge and only migrated to the coast in later years as a coastal geomorphologist. I have had the privilege of conducting scientific studies along the South Shore of Long Island since 1977, with my most recent work being in the Hamptons. I devoted six years of my life to intensive studies of the area from Fire Island Inlet to Montauk Point, which culminated in the production of historical shoreline change maps that quantitatively display five or more shore positions during the past 100 years as well as a 350-page National Park Service monograph, “Geomorphic Analysis of the South Shore of Long Island, New York.”

    I know the area well, having lived at National Park Service quarters at Watch Hill and the lighthouse in Kismet while conducting beach surveys of off-road vehicle impacts and driving vibracores through the sedimentary layers of the barrier island to determine its past changes.

    The front cover of the book shows a new inlet cut by Superstorm Sandy through the eastern section of Fire Island, which has persisted to date. This wilderness area within Fire Island National Seashore is called Old Inlet because of previous inlet breaching in this same locality. Superstorm Sandy certainly heightened the interest of people “living on the edge” as well as mainlanders who fear this new inlet will increase storm tides during future hurricanes. The National Seashore has been under pressure to close the inlet, as was the case for the other two cuts, but wilderness areas are special places (e.g., this is the only one in the State of New York) where nature can take its own course without interference from humankind.

    This slender, oblong book is organized chronologically, with many color and historical black-and-white photos that serve well to illustrate the text. I applaud the author for taking his posters and converting them into such a handsome booklet.

    Most people will enjoy reading this book, but there are many mistakes from the perspective of a coastal scientist, starting with the caption for the frontispiece, where overwash deposits are attributed to Hurricane Sandy. Sandy was not a hurricane on Long Island, as the sustained winds reached only 50 to 60 miles per hour (i.e., far short of the required 74 m.p.h. wind field), and it was responsible for a snowstorm in the Appalachian Mountains — hardly the hallmark of a hurricane.

    Second, there needs to be a map as the first figure with sufficient detail to show the 17 communities on Fire Island as well as other island features. What is finally presented on page 60 is a reproduction and reduction in scale of the National Park Service brochure, making nearly everything illegible without a magnifying glass — something that few take to the beach or carry on airplanes.

    Many of the photos are from Point O’ Woods, which is understandable, but the iconic Fire Island Lighthouse is only briefly mentioned, and one small photo of it is presented on the last page in the reference section. This sentinel was constructed near the western terminus of the island in 1825, and since that time, the island has built westward by longshore currents at the astonishing rate of around 150 feet per year. It was only the construction of the Democrat Point jetty and regular dredging of Fire Island Inlet to keep it navigable that have prevented this downdrift growth of the island as a sand spit.

    In fact, the whole barrier chain along the South Shore of Long Island was doubtless formed over thousands of years as a sand spit emanating from the morainal cliffs in East Hampton. Historical studies have shown that the Montauk Point Lighthouse was constructed more than 200 feet from the cliff edge. The surveyor in charge was George Washington — he wanted to make sure that the lighthouse lasted for several centuries. Our first president and brilliant general during the Revolutionary War was also an astute observer of coastal change.

    Throughout this book there are statements such as armoring the bay shore with bulkheads “tends to increase erosion at other points” along the barrier island. Although localized erosion can occur, there is no generalized increase in bayside erosion rates. The real problem with wooden bulkheads is the poisons used to preserve the wood that leach out and contaminate the adjacent bay bottom. In addition, bulkheads form a sterile interface, rather than the highly productive environment of a salt marsh.

    On page 67, the author repeats a long-disproven theory that the Westhampton Beach groins and Moriches Inlet jetty are responsible for erosion problems on the western end of Fire Island, where the 17 communities are located. The Fire Island Association has been lobbying for decades to make the federal government responsible for their erosion problems so that they can obtain beach nourishment via the Army Corps of Engineers at 100-percent public expense. While it would have been far cheaper for the federal government to buy out the few hundred residents in the area now known as the Village of Westhampton Dunes rather than guarantee them a wide and stable beach for 50 years, there was no denying that the updrift (eastward location of the 15 long federal groins) had greatly accelerated the erosion rate, causing severe losses during the 1992 northeaster. The same case cannot be made for the 17 communities on Fire Island. (My colleague Francis Galgano and I wrote about this in “Beach Erosion, Tidal Inlets, and Politics: The Fire Island Story,” an article in a 1999 issue of the journal Shore and Beach.)

    The Fire Island Association also played a key role in re-electing U.S. Senator Alfonse D’Amato in his very tight race in 1992. Known as the “pothole” senator for bringing the money home to Long Island, he paid back the Fire Island Association for its raising millions of dollars in the final days of this close election — he stopped a Senate vote on a bill, already passed by the House of Representatives, to mandate that the Federal Emergency Management Agency could use erosion rates in their National Flood Insurance Program.

    I certainly agree with the author that deer are a major problem on Fire Island. In addition to impacting the natural environment by eating native plants and exposing the sandy, mobile substrate, they are responsible for Lyme disease, which is a serious illness. The National Park Service should eliminate every deer on the island for the sake of the natural environment because there are no natural predators and deer overpopulation is a continuing problem. During especially cold winters as just experienced, Great South Bay can freeze solid, and the deer can walk from the mainland to the island, but these newcomers can be quickly weeded out by experienced hunters using bows and arrows.

    Over all, this book will probably have a good reception from the general public, especially Fire Island residents. To his credit, the author did consult some of the U.S. Geological Survey reports, but it appears that this occurred in the final stages of writing because the science is not well explained or referenced, whereas the history, especially for Point O’Woods, is quite strong.

    Stephen P. Leatherman, known as Dr. Beach, is the director of the Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida International University and the author of “Dr. Beach’s Survival Guide,” among other books. In 2013 he ranked East Hampton’s Main Beach as the best in the nation in his popular annual top 10 list.

    Robert F. Sayre, a descendant of one of the first settlers of the South Fork, is the author of “Thoreau and the American Indians” and the editor of “Recovering the Prairie” and “Take the Next Exit: New Views of the Iowa Landscape.”

From Hannibal to Steinbeck

    It’s a digital jungle out there, writers, and Ed Hannibal, who recently saw two of his novels, “Chocolate Days, Popsicle Weeks” and “A Trace of Red,” reissued as e-paperbacks through the Authors Guild BackinPrint program, will offer guidance for those seeking to find their way tomorrow at 6 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor. Mr. Hannibal, who lives in Springs, is also heading up a workshop, the ABCs of Creative Writing, on Wednesdays at the Amagansett Library.

    John Steinbeck, once a man about Sag, and moreover the author of a timeless portrait of the place and of small-town life, “The Winter of Our Discontent,” is due for reconsideration, wouldn’t you say, what with the 75th anniversary of the publication of “The Grapes of Wrath” upon us. It’ll come courtesy of Susan Shillinglaw on Saturday at Canio’s at 5 p.m. A professor of English at San Jose State, she ran the Center for Steinbeck Studies there for 18 years and is the author of “A Journey Into Steinbeck’s California” and “Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage.”

Only Obser

    And so the teacher steps from behind the desk to put her own work out there for scrutiny. Eileen Obser of East Hampton, for a couple of decades a leader of writing workshops at Suffolk Community College and lately at the Hampton Library, is now out with a memoir of her own, “Only You,” from Oak Tree Press. It’ll be feted with bubbly, aired with a reading, and serenaded with old-time rock ’n’ roll on Sunday at the Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor at 2 p.m. (The two women met 38 years ago when Ms. Obser did public relations work for the then-fledgling gallery.)

    The tunes, to be performed by Jim Turner, relate to the subject of the book, which, according to a release, is “set in the late 1950s and early 1960s” and relates Ms. Obser’s “personal experience growing up in Queens,” including “her doomed-to-fail marriage at 18 to a 19-year-old boy from their candy store crowd.”

Gabrielle Selz’s “Unstill Life”

    Quite a legacy: Gabrielle Selz’s father, Peter Selz, was chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art from 1958 to 1965, during the height of the Abstract Expressionist movement, which meant the likes of de Kooning and Rothko unwinding in the family living room.

    Her father went on to a number of other marriages and a career at the University of California at Berkeley. Ms. Selz went on to write about her family life in a book to be released by W.W. Norton on May 5, “Unstill Life: A Daughter’s Memoir of Art and Love in the Age of Abstraction.” Now of Southampton, she’ll read from it at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill on Friday, May 2, at 6 p.m. The evening involves a screening of a short film by Ms. Selz and a question-and-answer session with her father. The cost is $10, free for museum members.

    I don’t know what a wipe warmer is, but it sounds like something I’d like to try.  

    Let me start over. Wipe warmer. The humor in those two words is as good an illustration as any of the winning brevity in Lizzy Ratner and Jen Nessel’s “Goodnight Nanny-Cam” (Plume, $14), a send-up of Margaret Wise Brown’s 1947 masterwork, “Goodnight Moon,” itself chillingly concise in its intimations of death. Sure, little bunny, go to sleep, but only after bidding adieu, one by one, to everything known to you in your dimming room, like the terminally ill renouncing the material possessions of the world.

    This “parody for modern parents” targets the helicoptering alphas among them, the oh so concerned and correct, who play Baby Mozart (to scientifically proven no effect), who eschew all toys with phthalates lest their boys become hermaphrodites (though that’d be okay too), who foist yoga poses upon their children (but weren’t they cynically based on the calisthenics of colonial British soldiers?), who love hemp and who chart bowel movements.

    You get the idea. Give up! Genetics is destiny. But what fun there is in the cartoonish illustrations by Sara Pinto, who packs almost as much visual wit into the background of her work as Bill Elder used to in the old issues of Mad — from the already-bricked fireplace gated off to pointlessness to every furniture edge carefully rubberized to the “Let’s Feel Our Feelings” flash cards to, yes, a passing helicopter out the window.

    Ms. Ratner, by the way, is a journalist whose writing can be found in the estimable Nation magazine and known around here, perhaps, as the daughter of Julie Ratner of the Ellen’s Run breast cancer fund-raiser. Ms. Nessel is the communications coordinator at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

    But to get back to the book, it gets even better: Those wipes are edible.

“Fog Island”

    Finn and Cara, the brother and little sister in Tomi Ungerer’s “Fog Island” (Phaidon, $16.95), live “by the sea in the back of beyond,” where their mother tends livestock and their father fishes and builds boats. And where the two kids do what kids do best — explore.

    But they’d best steer clear of Fog Island, they’re warned, from which the foolhardy and fearful don’t return. They naturally don’t listen, although they do approach the mysterious place with open minds and hearts, finding a gaunt old Fog Man, who produces prodigious amounts of the stuff with the turn of a boiler’s wheel, and whose hair and beard are long enough to cover him like a muumuu.

    Of their visit, we are told, “Finn and Cara had never had so much fun.” They survive the return trip to the mainland only by way of a rowboat rescue. Of course no one believes their story.

    Mr. Ungerer, formerly of East Hampton, formerly married to the late Miriam Ungerer, who was a food columnist for The Star, is the author of legendary children’s books — “Moon Man,” from 1967, to name just one. He’s won a Hans Christian Andersen award for illustration and has an entire museum in France devoted to his work.

    Here he’s conjured a shrouded faraway world in which a brother and sister can indulge their wildest imaginings, share secrets, and communicate in their own private language of love. Adults need not apply.

“The Good and Bad Dragon”

    In “The Good and Bad Dragon” (CreateSpace, $9.95), a new fairy tale by Edward Packard of East Hampton and the Choose Your Own Adventure series, with brightly colored art by Beth Ogden, the dragon is a force of nature unleashed upon a village in the Pyrenees after 200 years of slumber, unpredictably rolling in hillside wildflowers like a blissed-out dog one minute, arbitrarily dealing out Old Testament-style destruction the next.

    Jeanne Marie, an ostracized and overlooked old woman left behind when the villagers flee, turns out to be the only one brave enough to stand and confront the dragon. But God smiles on fools and innocents, as they say, and the two discover they’re both lonely, both even share a contemplative love of the landscape. The old woman is rewarded with a magically restorative blast of dragon’s breath.

    Here’s to the misunderstood.

    Russia’s gone blooey? Call in an expert.

    Masha Gessen, a Russian-American who blogs about that country’s culture and politics for The New York Times’s website, will try to make some sense of the turmoil when she speaks at the Stony Brook Southampton campus for the Writers Speak series Wednesday night.

    Want to learn more about human rights abuses and the jailing of the band Pussy Riot? Ms. Gessen has just released the book “Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot,” which she will read from starting at 7 p.m. What’s more, she co-edited “Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories” in answer to the pre-Sochi Olympics anti-homosexual measures in Russia.

    Anxious about the annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and curious about the psychology of the man behind it? In 2012 Ms. Gessen published “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.”

    Dan Menaker, a professor at the college and formerly an editor at The New Yorker, will interview her about all that and more. It happens in the Radio Lounge, upstairs in Chancellors Hall.