For Ye of Some Faith

    “Recipes for a Sacred Life” may sound like one of those self-help books that will boost your wellness best if bypassed, but in fact it’s a collection of true stories drawn from the author’s life and aimed at a subtle, everyday kind of enlightenment.

    The author, Rivvy Neshama, tells of encounters she’s had that she considers touched by the ineffable — from a Viennese rabbi to an Irish woman from the Bronx, even friends and family. The ingredients include Eastern, Sufi, and American Indian spirituality, and the resultant recipes have to do with living a good life.

    Ms. Neshama, who lives in Boulder, Colo., and Sag Harbor, will talk about the book on Saturday at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.

Changes at Permanent

    Chris Knopf’s relationship with the Permanent Press involves five Sam Acquillo “Hamptons mysteries,” his novel “Elysiana,” and two other crime titles featuring the technologically adept sleuthing of one Arthur Cathcart, the latest of which, “Cries of the Lost,” was reviewed here last week.

    The Noyac publishing house’s dominant author is taking over — really taking over: He’ll be joining the owners, Martin and Judy Shepard, as a partner this year, with an eye to leading the press’s future operations when the Shepherds retire. He will continue, of course, to write.

    Mr. Knopf lives in Southampton and Connecticut, where he runs a marketing and communications firm. His mysteries have won Nero and Benjamin Franklin Awards.

“Nature Wars”

Jim Sterba

Broadway Books, $14.95

    Last September, deer became a deeply personal issue for me, and I crossed over to the other side, where I’d never been before.

    I live in the woods of the North Fork along with an expanding family of deer that I wish I didn’t have to see every day. Ten years ago I would hold my breath and run for my camera on the family’s occasional visits, exulting over my relationship to nature. I felt privileged and honored by their presence.

    More recently, forced to acknowledge that their eating preferences controlled my planting decisions, the exulting waned along with my gardening interests, and I justified my new laissez-faire shoulder shrugs by proclaiming that “they live here too; they were here before I arrived.”

    After a standing-room-only Southold Town meeting in September during which a succession of local and other experts revealed the true extent of what was now being described as a plague, my deer beliefs underwent such transformation that I wondered whether my experience might rival Paul’s on the road to Damascus! I left the meeting utterly clear that only an immediate and radical culling of the thousands of deer in our town would do. To argue for anything less would be sentimental and irrational.

    This clarity was established for me by the second speaker, a botanist, in his description of the deer’s destruction of the understory, the technical name for the forest floor. If the deer were killing my woods, I thought, they could no longer live here. They would have to go. Forests come first.

    This speaker also introduced the audience to Jim Sterba’s book “Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards Into Battlegrounds,” essential reading, he said, if we were to understand the trajectory that had brought us to our current plight. That’s what makes this book so important: It lays bare the inevitability of our deer plague on the East End, demonstrating that it could not be otherwise.

    Mr. Sterba, a veteran reporter for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, brings us a story that is indeed incredible. He tells it meticulously but gracefully, replete with numbers and facts so startling that at times I felt I was reading the back story for a dystopian movie! “Nature Wars,” a history and then a “new arrangement of man, beast, and tree,” analyzes the changes in the American landscape over the past 500 or so years.

    Schoolchildren are taught about the arrival of Europeans in the 15th century and the impact of colonialism on the land’s native peoples, but less familiar perhaps is the resulting 350 years of extensive deforestation and brutal exploitation of wildlife that precipitated the conservation, rehabilitation, and renewal movements of the late 19th and 20th centuries. These attempts to reverse centuries of depletion led not only to the regeneration of forests and the renewal of wildlife, but also to what Mr. Sterba shows has become a dangerous overabundance, not least because of a “species partisanship” focused on saving the wolves or the cats or the trees without reference to the greater ecological system of which each is part.

    This imbalance would not have happened without the postwar development of the automobile industry, interstate highways, and the migration of urban populations to the suburbs, to the sprawl between cities and farms, the “geography of nowhere” where, according to the 2000 census, the majority of Americans now live. Designed by humans for their own comfort, the sprawl territories have proved just as desirable for wildlife, providing them with not only food but also shelter and protection from predators. Wildlife, it turns out, likes what we like!

    Mr. Sterba grew up on a farm in rural Michigan in the 1950s, learned how to kill, clean, and eat birds and animals, and enjoys hunting — and venison — today. From this perch, he laments the “denatured” people that today’s Americans have become, locked into climate-controlled houses, experiencing nature at a remove through car windows or as cartoons and staged documentaries on electronic screens. We now live what Mr. Sterba calls “a denatured life” where nature is feared or disliked and wild animals are perceived in unrealistic ways as “adorable pets” rather than the wild creatures they are until the time that they inhabit our habitat, proliferate, and end up demonized.

    He traces our culture’s anthropomorphizing of wild animals to Walt Disney and “Bambi” in 1942 and, further, to the beginning of the 20th century, when writers such as Jack London and William J. Long “took liberties” writing their best sellers about the natural world and were dismissed as “nature fakers” by the conservationist President Theodore Roosevelt.

    Here on the East End we are focused on deer, a parochial view if we look through Mr. Sterba’s expanded lens to this country’s overpopulations of wild geese, beavers, nutria, coyotes, wild turkeys, black bruins, and, yes, feral cats. The sheer numbers he cites are astounding: Hunters and other predators kill 12 million deer each fall, and 25,000 wild geese reside in the New York metro area. Sixty million to 90 million feral cats are said to kill 500 million birds each year in this country. Describing bird feeders as “wildlife aggregators” and characterizing highways as “wildlife magnets,” Mr. Sterba cites daily road-kill estimates of as many as a million birds and animals. (Road ecology has emerged as a new academic field to study the relationship between roads and the environment.)

    These numbers encourage macabre reflection on abundance and challenge us to parse our prevailing notions of culling, wildlife management, and species and wilderness extinction. Mr. Sterba deepens the provocation by blaming our ills on the consequences of “too much of a good thing” rather than a “narrative of loss.” It’s the excesses of the rich man’s burden we carry, excess measured in terms of the car-wildlife collisions we have on interstate highways and then repair, our blithe discarding of edible deer meat and hides, the $50 billion we spend on pets, and the $5 billion to feed wild birds.

    Recognizing we cannot easily undo what we have wrought and that changing our nature is not a trivial undertaking, Mr. Sterba avoids prescriptions while encouraging us to “understand and accept the need for human oversight” so we can ponder: How much of nature is in fact our business and how much should we leave alone? To what extent has our personal denaturing left us with a misplaced compassion that conflicts with stewardship of our complex ecosystems?

    But be prepared when you read this bountiful book to question and rearrange your closely held beliefs. I did. I also discovered that the birds of my feather did not necessarily share my new fervor and that we may not so naturally flock together — at least for the moment. Be prepared for challenging encounters when you discuss your town’s deer management plans and what it means to feed wildlife and to have gardens, landscapes, mulch, composts, bird feeders, and cats. But first read this book!

    Hazel Kahan lives in Mattituck, hosts two radio programs on WPKN, and writes about growing up in Pakistan. Her website is hazelkahan.com. 

    “Nature Wars” was recently released in paperback.

“Almost Rain”

Simon Perchik

River Otter Press, $12.99

    Anyone who observes the weather can see how nature transforms things into other things; rain turns dirt into mud. Similar processes have their effects on human lives, only we take them more personally; the seasons feel as if they correspond to our actual beginning and end. In the poetry of Simon Perchik, this elemental realm merges with individual consciousness, in careful and courageous language, to bring polymorphic awareness to life.

    At first, “Almost Rain” seems to come out of nowhere. The poems are nonchalantly titled according to their first lines. The voice of the poet is immediate, familiar, and grasps for meaning without regard for the usual rhetorical distances. There is a vibrant sense of implied understanding in the work, exemplified by the recurring use of a second-person narrative style, an intimate address to you. These are not poems about a soul confessing itself to the world, rather, suggestions shared with the reader, about a mystery that happens in broad daylight, and the poignancy of an absent presence.

    You return with the pieces

    the way each rock

    needs more time, a place

    close, almost your breasts

    still heating the Earth

    that asks what day it is . . .

    “You return with the pieces” begins the collection. It resonates with raw feeling and an almost brutal sensitivity to the erosions of time. Change is a palpable theme, and practically a character, in “Almost Rain.” Mr. Perchik deftly maneuvers his imagery to accommodate the rhythms of an invisible force, permeating existence, indifferently marking some things for obsolescence and others for regeneration.

    There is a noticeable lack of subjective premises, which saves the poetry from being enveloped by obscure, abstract nothingness. Mr. Perchik unquestionably uses the real to describe what seems unreal.

You strap this watch in place

as though it inherited the wobble

that grew into sunlight

then darkness, then wear, then

you set the time years ahead

the way dirt unravels . . .

    “You strap this watch in place” turns the physical world around so that its mystical side becomes more visible, showing how tangible experiences relate directly to the spiritual, as the magic of imagination returns us to childhood again. Mr. Perchik’s sense of play, his fascination with hard subjects, allows for some of the most pleasant surprises in “Almost Rain.” He writes like a master of some secret art, using words to indicate both the specificity of passion and the ultimate ambiguity of reason. Try as you might to put a finger on the text, the words shift shape, like simple questions with open-ended, metamorphic answers.

    And yet these are poems that positively relate, and define themselves in the world, without fail. A glance to the back of the book shows that most if not all of the poems in “Almost Rain” were originally published in notable journals and reviews in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. Add to that Mr. Perchik’s impressive résumé of published volumes over the past 50 (yes, 50) years, and we encounter what can seriously be called a prolific career.

    “Almost Rain” is not just any new collection of verse, but perhaps the crowning achievement of an American poet, living in Springs, whose reputation and legacy will continue to spread.

As if for the last time you let go

the way the sun looks back in sadness

and circling down — without a sound

you make a pile from the discarded

and with the warmth in your hands

you stare at the sky without blinking . . .

    I had the honor of reading poetry with Simon Perchik at the East Hampton Town Marine Museum a few summers ago. He was gracious and demure, to the point of having a good friend read his work to the large crowd in attendance. He sat and listened with the audience, an absent presence, enjoying the great beauty of his art.

    Lucas Hunt’s most recent collection of poems is “Light on the Concrete.” The founder and director of Hunt & Light, a new poetry publisher, he lives in Springs.

Chaskey on “Seedtime”

    Scott Chaskey, who, depending on your view, looks like Michelangelo’s vision of the Almighty or else a McCoy-hating Hatfield, has a new book out from Rodale, “Seedtime,” which comes with the explanatory subtitle “On the History, Husbandry, Politics, and Promise of Seeds.” Mr. Chaskey — need it be said? — runs Quail Hill Farm in Amagansett, but also, less famously, lives in Sag Harbor, and he’ll remain at home in that village for a reading and book talk at Canio’s on Saturday at 5 p.m.

Elaine’s: One Last Course

    Isn’t it about time for an ode to Elaine’s, the Manhattan restaurant that attracted the literary crowd — Plimpton, Vonnegut, Woody Allen, you name ’em — across a half-century until it was shuttered in 2011? Amy Phillips Penn thinks so, and she has begun work on a book about Elaine Kaufman’s storied Upper East Side establishment, “Elaine’s: Celebrating New York’s Celebrity Restaurant,” which is due out in the fall of 2015 from Skyhorse Publishing.

    Ms. Penn, a onetime East Hamptoner and former society columnist for The New York Post, is wondering if any Star readers might have tidbits they’d like to share about Elaine’s. They can be sent to [email protected]. And in case you didn’t know, there’s a new restaurant where Elaine’s was. It’s called the Writing Room.

    What follows is an excerpt from the poet Philip Schultz’s new “novel in verse,” more than 10 years in the making and due out from W.W. Norton in February. In it, a young man hides from the Vietnam draft by changing his name ever so slightly and going to work in obscure drudgery in the basement office of a Bay Area social services agency. He keeps himself busy, in part, by translating his mother’s diaries having to do with a 1941 slaughter of Jews by their Polish neighbors.     

    Mr. Schultz, who runs the Writers Studio in New York and lives in East Hampton, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his collection of poems “Failure.”

‘The Wherewithal’

By Philip Schultz

1

    Upstairs,

It’s San Francisco 1968 April 17

and every day the world spins faster on its axis,

a little more off-kilter,

a little less in its right mind,

bursting at its seams with desire for variation,

while everyone everywhere around me

appears to be fornicating

in doorways and on rooftops,

in spiraling parks under transplanted palms

beside rhododendron beds,

marching and waving fists

in wheels of sweltering air,

hurrying in every direction

possessed of an overflowing innocence

and furious resolve

and revolutionary zeal — indeed —

hurling themselves

against barricades of forlorn ideals

and ancient decrees,

throwing off rusty shadows

and leafy inane inner beings,

singing unholy penitential psalms

full of righteous sorrow . . . yes,

forgiving nothing

while remembering everything . . .

while I, one

Henryk Stanislaw Wyrzykowski,

Head Clerk of Closed Files,

a department of one,

work,

for the time being,

in a hole in the earth

hiding from the US Army,

from a vast personal history

of defeat and occupation,

of anger and despair,

among other things,

work,

in a forgotten well of ghostly sighs,

where, more often than not,

it’s Poland 1941 June 25

and in the town of Jedwabne

a great massacre is taking place

and the world has stopped in its tracks.

2

I wish I could say I possessed the wherewithal

(like Ludwig Wittgenstein) to regard

my thoughts as mere remarks

that can be condoned and trusted,

rather than footnotes,

or facsimiles of actual thoughts,

which when pushed

“against their own inclination”

become the scattered dependents

of an orphaned mind,

who, basically,

want nothing more to do with me.

In other words,

despite enjoying a mere half-life —

no wife, girlfriend, family or friends —

I remain (to myself at least)

somewhat “interesting,”

more than a quickly passing blur

blending lizard-like into the gray air

as I sneak down hallways,

hiding in the frayed inside pocket

of a nervous suit jacket,

my wallet and keys,

avoiding those whom only recently

I was counted among,

the odious odiferous crowding the halls,

offices and urine-stained lobbies

of this mercy depot,

this fortress of dolor,

whom I’m now employed to serve,

and who therefore see me

for what I am — guardian of nobody,

solicitor of nothing,

unnatural ferryman lugging a cargo

of dissolute souls

from one hostile shore to another

for no reason other than

to sustain myself to the next paycheck . . .

3

Leaning all the way back

in a swivel chair, cradling my aching head,

my recycled cowboy boots crossed

on a small mountain of files assigned

for further procrastination,

further dubiousness,

in a clearing wide enough for a desk,

two chairs, a rancid water cooler,

four phones, three battered filing cabinets,

a splintered two-fanged coatrack,

and a poorly framed etching

of the spectacular dungeon gloom

of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Carcere,

with Arches and Pulleys

and a Smoking Fire in the Center,

nailed to a cinderblock wall,

all of which now is swaying

under the cracked illumination

of a dusty street window

that permits a paltry sliver view

of mostly fancy shoes heading west

along Bush Street in posh downtown San Francisco,

not to mention, ten hissing fluorescent lamps

clinging to angry ceiling shadows

like metallic arachnids casting

a sulfuric gloom over a forest

of 1,000 sq. miles of floor-to-ceiling

metal shelves stuffed to bursting

with 700,640 inactive files

recording every sort of grievance,

indignity and plea for sustenance

suffered in the Bay Area between

September 23, 1968 and July 15, 1959

when such documentation was first evaluated,

filed, and quickly forgotten

in this branch of

the California Department of Social Services,

in whose bomb shelter of a basement

I now sit snug as a bug,

my pulse a strong breeze,

a steady 15 knots

on the Beaufort Wind Scale.

“In Pinelight”

Thomas Rayfiel

TriQuarterly, $18.95

    “In Pinelight,” the sixth novel by Thomas Rayfiel, is narrated by an old, crotchety man living in a home for seniors. The novel is essentially a continuous reminiscing monologue. There is an interrogator who remains nameless and faceless throughout. We never hear his voice. What we do hear is the narrator responding to, or repeating, the interrogator’s questions.

     “That’s the sound of shoveling. Cecil he takes his job seriously. Well, to see us through to the other side I guess. Other side of what? I never thought of this as a side.”

    The tone of the book is that of an old man, rambling, recollecting, philosophizing, and chewing over the significant moments of his life and those of the people around him. In support of that tone, there is very little in the way of punctuation other than infrequent periods and question marks. No commas, absolutely no paragraphing, and lots and lots of run-on sentences.

    The old man has lived most of his apparently long life in and around Conk­lingville, a small town in upstate New York that at some point was depopulated and intentionally flooded by the state in order to create a dam. I looked this up online, and the dam was built in 1930. This leaves him pondering what things are like deep below the surface of the water, an excellent metaphor for his attitude about everything he encounters.

    “The funny thing is now I see it every day town through the waves. Yes Conk­lingville buried underneath the waves although you can’t really be buried in water can you? Drowned I suppose but no not drowned either because there was nothing left no one living so if it’s not living it can’t be drowned. Submerged I see it every day submerged.”

    William had a rough start in life. When he was young his mother died, his older sister soon ran off with some stranger, and his father drank himself, if not exactly to death, then he drank himself into the front of the car that killed him. All of which left the young boy living alone and having to fend for himself. He made his living by becoming a carter, driving a delivery wagon behind two horses he loved, the willful and choleric Allure and the more placid Firebrand. To supplement his income he took on other odd jobs whenever he could — manual labor, as a night watchman for the local rich folks’ homes, and selling an elixir made of wild berries that he mixed with sugar and a liqueur of Benedictine and brandy.

    “No I don’t have any more. That was a long time ago. Ray Eggleston he came by one day and told me they’d determined those berries the ones I was using along with the B&B that they were illegal. Imagine that. How could a berry be illegal? I asked. He didn’t really know or couldn’t really say but he also pointed out that I was selling liquor without a license plus it wasn’t really a medicine apparently the state says what is and isn’t a medicine too. The way he made it sound I was breaking about half the laws in the county a regular Al Capone . . .”

    There is a sadness to his talk about his carting, as he was well aware that with the advent of motorized trucks, he was fast on his way to becoming obsolete. “A horse will take on any mood whatever you feel inside that’s what animals are for they show you what you’re feeling. Allure and Firebrand would go at a stately pace.”

    “The milk truck doesn’t have anything to do with local history yes it took away my business but by then I didn’t mind it was all in bottles then the milk and they clinked so much that it drove me and Allure crazy and of course I didn’t have refrigeration . . .”

    There is an intentional dreamy vagueness to the book. The narrator skips around in his storytelling from his present in the retirement home, to his long-ago youth (I am guessing perhaps in the 1920s?), and much of the time in between. We see him lose his virginity to Gabrielle for “a shiny dollar” in the local whorehouse. He gets married to Alice, the daughter of a local lawyer, and has a daughter. He drinks, often too much, and hides it from Alice and others.

    “I wasn’t drinking not most of the time see I never got credit for all the times I wanted to drink but didn’t there’d be three or four times a day when I wanted to take a nip but didn’t but then if just once I gave in it’s not like that made the score four to one in my favor or anything like that.”

    Specific dates are not mentioned, except that there are some scenes with the invading hippies that he informs us take place during the Summer of Love. For those of you who aren’t sure, that was 1967.

    One of the places to which he made deliveries was a kind of odd and eerie and frightening clinic run by Christopher and Cochrane, two gay men. It seems a cross between a spa for rich people and a huckster medical clinic: “. . . they combined science and God. Cochrane he was the preacher of the group the snake oil salesman Christopher he was more the one who gave it its what would you call it its mystery.”

    At one point the narrator spilled the contents of a box he was delivering to the clinic, and it was filled with eyeballs. Human eyeballs. He gathered them up again, and when he delivered the box he said nothing. Turns out they were injecting people with human body parts mixed up in a blender.

    Mr. Rayfiel is clearly a talented writer, and parts of the book are entrancing, but I must admit to being irritated by what I saw as the unnecessary lack of punctuation and paragraphing, which not infrequently made me read, back up, and read again before I could grasp the meaning of a sentence.

    “Everyone said how lucky he was and on the surface well he walked out of this hospital his wife Cheryl I remember Cheryl saying what a miracle it was but then it was like a different person had taken over his body or worse than that that the real him was somehow coming out in a way it hadn’t before like the leaves you know in the fall everyone says they turn colors but really that’s their true color coming out the chloroform that’s what makes them green no I know what I’m talking about I read it in Science magazine the chloroform it knocks unconscious the true color and then when it goes away in the fall everyone says Look at the colors but really they were there all along underneath.”

    I will admit that after many years as a college English instructor, it is challenging for me to read this kind of nongrammatical writing without a mental red pen in mind. Still, there is much to enjoy and admire in “In Pinelight.” Like Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio,” the book builds a picture, or more a collage, really, of a place and time that has disappeared. Small town upstate New York.

    Michael Z. Jody, who regularly reviews books for The Star, is a psychoanalyst with practices in Amagansett and New York City.

    Thomas Rayfiel’s previous novels include “Colony Girl” and, most recently, “Time Among the Dead.” He lives in Brooklyn and Amagansett.

“From Scratch”

Allen Salkin

G.P. Putnam’s Sons, $27.95

    In the age of slow food, cooking reality shows, gourmet magazines, epicurean specialty shops, food blogs, celebrity chefs, and enough blockbuster cookbooks to fill a metropolitan library, it’s hard to believe that there was ever a time when the idea of a food network sounded like pure lunacy.

    “But how on earth do you do twenty-four hours of food?” Robin Leach of TV’s “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” asked. Mr. Leach had been approached to host a show on the newly anointed Food Network as its only and, frankly, somewhat tattered celebrity.

    “That’s the challenge we both have,” said the network’s president, Reese Schonfeld, who had successfully hatched CNN for Ted Turner. “Can you help me?”

    In “From Scratch: Inside the Food Network,” Allen Salkin has done a masterful job of documenting the rise and more recent decline of the network — beginning in 1991, when it was a mere gleam in the eye of Joe Langhan, a former cameraman working in Woburn, Mass., at Colony Cablevision.

    In truth, Mr. Salkin, a journalist for fast-paced publications such as New York magazine and Details, could probably turn the comings and goings of the local post office into a rousing tale. For “From Scratch,” he has tracked down and drawn out virtually every player in the Food Network story. Indeed, so prodigious are his investigative efforts you half expect him to turn up a few nefarious plots and dead bodies along the way.

    As Mr. Salkin tells it, there are essentially two sides to the Food Network legend — the dicey (hmm) business of starting a cable network and the challenge of putting together programming that lures fickle audiences into the fold. Business mavens will be more interested than the average reader in the breakdown of early investor shares in Food Network, which ultimately determined who “got rich” from the enterprise and who didn’t. Suffice it to say that with investors finally in place, the network was launched on Nov. 23, 1993, under the auspices of the media company ProJo (The Providence Journal), by then owner of Colony cable.

    They raced to beat the Discovery Channel, which they feared might be preparing a spinoff channel from its cooking shows. The earlier date of Nov. 22 was rethought when they realized it was the 30th anniversary of J.F.K.’s assassination.

    “In those days, the main requirement to be on Food Network was being able to get there by subway,” admitted Bobby Flay, the grill master who would host “Throwdown,” an in-home cook-off show. And, indeed, as Mr. Salkin points out, “most of America still viewed anyone who worked in a kitchen as someone with about as much status as a lawn care professional.”

    Aside from Julia Child reruns, some of the early on-air line-up included Donna Hanover (the wife, then, of New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani) and a foodie named David Rosengarten doing “Food News and Views,” Mr. Leach’s “Talking Food” (with celebrities), and Nina Griscom, a socialite, and Bill Boggs, a newsman, in a chat segment about New York restaurants. Not wanting to blow her cover, Ruth Reichl, a food critic for The Times, appeared on the network in a red wig, which became her signature. The “Saturday Night Live” comedienne Jane Curtin taped some of the early intros.

    “The production value was so bad” on the early shows, in the words of Tom Colicchio of “Top Chef,” many professionals didn’t want to get anywhere near the network. As a celebrity guest who charmed, Nora Ephron was asked if she’d like to host her own show. “Absolutely not,” she said, horrified.

    Actually, food knowledge seemed to be the least of the network’s concerns. Mrs. (Debbi) Fields — of cookie fame — teetered around her set of “The Dessert Show” with her long red fingernails and “gigantically blown-out hair.” In one episode, she had trouble saying Bananas l’Orange. “I may not know how to say Luh Orange properly,” she intoned, “but it really does taste good.” Food Network made a virtue of her deficits. The print ads asked, “How does Mrs. Fields cook with those fingernails?”

    Then there was Emeril Lagasse, a roly-poly Creole specialist with a pronounced Massachusetts accent — named the 1991 winner of Best Chef in the Southeast by the James Beard Foundation. After watching a five-minute audition tape, Mr. Schonfeld was not impressed: “I’m not interested in Emeril. He’s okay, but he’s not good enough.” However, when a female staffer offered that he was “a hunk,” Emeril was signed as the host of “How to Boil Water.” His signature phrase, “Bam,” was apparently developed in an attempt to keep a sleepy cameraman awake.

    With a series of shows and his line of spices, Emeril would, of course, become the breakout star of Food Network, its name synonymous, in fact, with Emeril himself. Yet the mighty often fall with a resounding thud in “From Scratch.” The book opens with a blow-by-blow description of Emeril’s dismissal in 2007, when it became clear to the network that its celebrity chef was not keeping up with the food revolution he had helped set in motion.

    Mr. Salkin keeps his ear to the ground for the good story; typically no more than a few pages pass before one unfurls. The network ran into trouble with the F.C.C. on a show called “Too Hot Tamales” when one of the tapes turned up spliced with porn. “You’ve got to pound the meat,” said one of the chefs to another. As Mr. Salkin reports, the mysteriously sabotaged tape then cut to a naked man and a woman, well . . . pounding the meat enthusiastically.

    As a visiting guest, the comedian David Brenner claimed that his father thought his mother’s cooking was so bad, he nailed a piece of sauteed liver to his shoe to make the point. A “chef” wrangled a show out of Food Network called “Dinner: Impossible” with the claim he had prepared inaugural dinners for both George W. and George H.W. Bush and had served “dignitaries” aboard the royal yacht Britannia. It turned out he hadn’t even attended the food and nutrition school listed on his resume.

    “From Scratch” is at its best when Mr. Salkin sticks to Food Network’s creatives. It’s genuinely interesting to hear the back story on a familiar celebrity such as Rachael Ray — a former shop girl in Macy’s food emporium who warned the network that it had been duped, calling herself “beer out of the bottle” to the network’s “champagne.” Or the humble origins of Bobby Flay, always the gentleman.

    Unfortunately, the urban legend that Ina Garten twice turned down a dying child’s request (through the Make-a-Wish Foundation) to cook with her is true, though her representative called the episode an “old story” not worthy of further comment for this book.

    As Mr. Salkin notes, it’s the difficult people who often make good TV, and the tales of woe make interesting copy here. The story of the downfall of the comfort-food queen Paula Deen, revealed to have diabetes, is a page-turner, even if you’ve heard it all before. Ms. Deen’s brief resurgence as the spokeswoman for a diabetes drug prompted Anthony Bourdain’s tweet, “Thinking of getting into the leg-breaking business, so I can profitably sell crutches later.” Hilarious. You wouldn’t want to follow Mr. Bourdain down a conversational dark alley, where he’d surely slash you down to size, but Mr. Salkin certainly knows how to use his wit to sharpen his narrative.

    As he moves through the 20-year history of Food Network, Mr. Salkin faithfully tells the back story of its ownership, starting with Colony, to ProJo, and on to Scripps in Knoxville, Tenn., and, finally, its sale to Belo Corporation. The network’s early days sound like the Wild West, even though its seedy offices could be found on 33rd Street near the Lincoln Tunnel in New York, a veritable “hive of prostitutes.” Robin Leach reported seeing rats both outside and inside the studio and had the tapes to prove the latter.

    In those early days, a former stripper did the books, and a new staffer found herself working from a desk fashioned out of an overturned cardboard box. Budgets were so sparse office supplies were a luxury. Yet, through these descriptions, you can just feel what a thrill it must have been to be part of such an ambitious, if seemingly harebrained, enterprise.

    “Start-ups are fun,” Joe Langhan told Mr. Salkin recently, “but really only if you succeed. It’s not as much fun if you fail.”

    Where the narrative falters is in Mr. Salkin’s sometimes overly involved descriptions of Food Network’s revolving cast of executives, who are not nearly as interesting as the celebrities you feel you know. Corporate hirings, firings, and territorial disputes read a little like an account of someone else’s office politics: entertaining at first, familiar, but ultimately tiresome. Mr. Salkin introduces these “characters” by their full names and titles only briefly. Thereafter, Joe, Ken, Erica, Eileen, Brooke, Jack, and Dave start to feel interchangeable. One exception is Reese Schonfeld, whose genius and volcanic temper are an impressive force.

    The making of Food Network, from scratch, is replete with all the “Big Personalities, High Drama” promised on the cover of the book. In 1992, Mr. Schonfeld wrote ProJo, “I am absolutely convinced that the Food Channel is a business that will be worth between $250,000,000 and $500,000,000 on the day that it is carried in 40,000,000 cable homes.”

    Twenty years later, the network was in nearly a 100 million American homes, worth roughly $3 billion, and had entirely changed the culture of food in America.

    Ellen T. White is the author of “Simply Irresistible,” about the great romantic women of history. She lives in Springs.

    Allen Salkin spends summers in Amagansett.

    When James Whitfield Thomson hemmed and hawed in describing just what his new novel, “Lies You Wanted to Hear,” was about, his daughter challenged him to think in terms of what would go on a movie poster. His answer: “What could make a good man do such a thing?”

    The “thing” is to abscond with two children, disappearing into the Middle American vastness, adopting new names and making new lives in a kind of self-fashioned witness-protection program. They hide from a mismatched marriage, a court system stacked against fathers, and a woman deemed an unfit mother — she lets a relative drive drunk with the kids, she cheats, she smokes pot and leaves cigarettes to burn into the sofa. She is abruptly, harshly left bereft. For 16 years.

    Mr. Thomson based the story on a late-1990s account in The Boston Globe. In that case, the two daughters involved grew into successful women, stood by their father, and refused to see their mother. Here, the whole point is that nothing is cut-and-dried.

    “Lies You Wanted to Hear” is told from the points of view of the two antagonists, Lucy and Matt, in alternating chapters rich with psychology, rationalizations, and their interior lives.

    “There are complicated motivations at work,” Mr. Thomson said from Natick, Mass., where he lives most of the year, spending part of each spring and fall at a house he and his wife keep in Amagansett. We come to see some of Matt’s irrationality through his own words, while Lucy’s greatest crime may be that she never truly loved him and isn’t exactly cut out for motherhood. And yet for a decade and a half her answering machine plays the same heartbreaking message seeking information about her children and begging them to come home.

    “It was important that there isn’t a major villain. These are essentially good people who got in a bad situation. I’ve said my goal was to start fistfights in book clubs: ‘He . . .’ ‘Yeah, but she. . . .’ ”

    The debut novel, released by Sourcebooks in November, has been remarkably well received in publications ranging from People and Redbook magazines to Publishers Weekly. Which is all the more remarkable because the debut novelist was 67 when it came out.

    “It’s been called compulsive, which connotes plot-driven,” he said, while the book in fact involves detailed character studies, “though I do use story to keep it driving forward.”

    For five years Mr. Thomson took a workshop in the Massachusetts home of Andre Dubus, the late short-story writer and master of all subjects domestic. “That’s where I got my love of writing and my training. A lot of great writers went through there — George Packer, for instance, the New Yorker staff writer.”

    He learned “how to go more deeply into my characters and make them real. Andre said to make no outline, just start with some scenes and see where they take you . . . follow your nose. That’s what I did with Matt’s family background,” he said of the Boston cop from a Pennsylvania coal-mining family. “I didn’t know where it came from, but I had fun exploring it.”

    Although the novel is very much a debut — Mr. Thomson had a story in the journal AGNI, but precious little else — he has been at the writing game for a couple of decades. Whether that’s dispiriting or encouraging is in the eye of the beholder.

    “This is my third novel,” and, four or five years and three drafts later, “my first to get published. Over the years I’ve received 250 rejections — through agents,” not in response to over-the-transom submissions.

    His bookish interest, however, is longstanding. He wrote his dissertation on Raymond Chandler and taught literature at the University of Miami in Florida for a time, memories of which can elicit groans. “The tenured professors just seemed very unhappy. It was set up so that the students were ‘them’ and the faculty was ‘us.’ It was extremely political. I like to describe it as a lot of really, really smart rats fighting over a really, really small piece of cheese.”

    So he went for easy cheese hiding in plain sight, helping found what he called a specialized computer company in 1978. “We controlled photocopying machines in law firms and accounting firms — places that charge for time and expenses.” A quotidian but profitable enterprise, long since gobbled up by a bigger corporate player.

    Now, as writers know, revising can be endless, and Mr. Thomson isn’t fighting it. He’s going back to a 15-year-old novel, “The Jukebox King,” set in 1962 in his hometown of Pittsburgh — a “rock ’n’ roll novel” with an autobiographical touch.

    In the meantime, there are rounds of readings to be made, where if bibliophiles are lucky they might land his preferred inscription: “I hope the lies you want to hear all come true.”

“Cries of the Lost”

Chris Knopf

Permanent Press, $28

     A smartphone is a useful tool, although, say, reading a novel on one might leave something to be desired. How about reading a novel about one?

    Chris Knopf has attempted a brave or foolish thing in his latest thriller, “Cries of the Lost,” maneuvering as he does proxy IP addresses, data mining, security camera video feeds, phishing, email exchanges, and Google searches to the fore of the action. The tracking is by GPS coordinates, not shoe leather, and while the sentence “She took off in the Fiat, and I followed her on my smartphone” may make you wonder if crime novels have really come to this, it can conceivably be taken as a kind of experiment, an “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” admission of the way we live now — surveilled and eavesdropped upon and data-ed up.

    But is it tongue in cheek? Early on, our man in the digital ether, Arthur Cathcart, a researcher by trade, forever lugging around electronic equipment only an engineer could love and cozying up in nests of cables, tells us, “As in all things today, the solution began with the Internet.” You can almost hear the author’s sigh. “I searched for ‘codes and cyphers’ and settled in for a lot of reading.”

    Later, “But I searched on . . . my eyes watering and my wrists and fingers literally cramping up.” (Been there! And all I was doing was perusing an online New York Times Magazine profile of John McCain.)

    Mr. Knopf seems to be of two minds. He strives mightily to make the computer sleuthing gripping. “To me,” Arthur relays in his first-person narration, “a major data center that’s been around for a while is like a vast ancient ruin, wherein the fundamental structure is filled with tangled debris, crumbling walls and overgrowth. A fantastical painting of a 10,000-year-old city, beautiful yet decadent, equal parts order and chaos, and nearly infinite in scale.”

    Yet at the same time — specifically, 35 pages later — through his protagonist he delivers a withering assessment of what we’ve done to ourselves: “It was an affliction of the age — too much information, not enough wisdom to make sense of it.”

    The story involves millions skimmed from insurance carriers and clients and parked, in the manner of plutocrats and presidential candidates, in an offshore account, the subsequent dollar chase, an F.B.I. mole, the Basque-separatist ties of the Marxist parents of Arthur’s dead Chilean wife, and a smattering of what’s left of Spain’s fascist sympathizers.

    The motivations driving the characters are various, often murky, but with Arthur it’s clear, and it’s not about the money. An “obsessive” in the face of a puzzle he can’t solve, an enigma he can’t crack, he’s willing to risk his life for mere curiosity: “I had a very hard time sharing the planet with an unanswered question. . . .” 

    When the expected gunplay erupts, it’s memorably at an outdoor European cafe where tables are gleefully shot up, the espresso flies, and the chic crawl for cover.

    But not Arthur. Formerly wonkish, he fears not death, having been through the liberating experience of taking a bullet to the head (in Mr. Knopf’s previous book, “Dead Anyway,” a story this one continues). Roused from the resulting months-long coma, Arthur finds the head wound actually left him more interesting, more empathetic, more intuitive, more daring. Thinner. A couple of rakish scars on his slick-bald pate.

    “There’s something intriguing about a man with scars,” his sidekick and love interest, Natsumi, of the glossy black hair and “Asian reserve,” reassures him. “Suggests an adventurous past.”

    “Really. I have a big nose and wear glasses,” Arthur answers.

    “So does Woody Allen. The nose suggests virility and the glasses intelligence.”    

    The book, heavy on exposition and at times description, could have used more of this, more dialogue, more sex, more of Mr. Knopf’s ear and wit.

    “My mother once told me fear attracts evil forces,” Natsumi says.

    “She learn that from a Zen master?” Arthur asks.

    “Wes Craven.”

    Chris Knopf lives in Southampton and Connecticut.

Bulova Unbound

    “In 2013, a decrepit, abandoned former watchcase factory in a small, seaside town is undergoing an extreme renovation, to be re-imagined as a luxury apartment building.”

    Sound familiar? That’s right, you’re far from alone in wondering what the heck is going on at Bulova — and why. One Sag Harborite, Erica-Lynn Huberty, has gone so far as to self-publish a 42-page story with the imposing brick pile at its center. “Watchwork: A Tale in Time,” to continue the description above, tells of “Ben, an out-of-work local,” who is “only too happy to be hired for the partial demolition, never imagining how much of the past the building still holds.” The past referred to here is 1896 and exemplified by Jenny, a young factory worker enduring the daily grind to help her family.

    To find out how the stories and time periods interweave, you can stop by Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor tomorrow at 6 p.m. for Ms. Huberty’s reading.

Poems of Montauk

    The windswept landscape of that rocky promontory known as Montauk dominates the poems of one city transplant, Audrey Morgan, in her recent collection, “The Heron,” which also features her sketches. She’ll read from her work on Sunday at 10 a.m. for Sunday Mornings at 56, a bookish new series at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons in East Hampton. (The 56 being the address of the building where the series is held, next to the center’s main one.) Each week a member of the congregation discusses her or his experiences with writing and publishing.

    Ms. Morgan has taught art in a public school and worked in interior design. Bagels and lox will be served.