“Without a Claim”

Grace Schulman

Mariner Books, $14.95

   “The land was ours before we were the land’s,” wrote Robert Frost — famously and infamously. Brazenly entitled, bizarrely defensive, Frost’s “The Gift Outright” has been the source of controversy ever since the bard recited his poem at the 1961 presidential inauguration, when his hair was as wintry as his wisdom, and his eyes failed to read the poem he’d actually written for the occasion. Although “The Gift Outright” admits of nuance — such as is contained in the troubling 13th line (“the deed of gift was many deeds of war”) or the magisterial close (“such as she was, such as she would become”) — discerning minds have difficulty accepting its message of America’s manifest destiny.

   In her seventh collection of poems, “Without a Claim,” Grace Schulman swaps Frost’s tenet for that of many Native American tribes (whose dispossession “The Gift Outright” ignores). The title poem openly rebukes all pioneering swagger:

This land we call our place was never ours.

If it belonged to anyone, it was

the Montauk chief who traded it for mirrors,

knowing it wasn’t his.

    Ms. Schulman’s assertion is refreshingly clear, and clarity is her principal attribute. Indeed, detractors will deride “Without a Claim” for the same quality others will admire: accessibility. Perspicuity may be a privilege of her age — Ms. Schulman is 78 — as well as her keen, and comfortable, sense of place. Her poems are rigged with the seascapes and hamlets of Long Island’s East End:

Accabonac, Shinnecock, Peconic, Napeague,

the creek, the bay, the stream, the Sound, the sounds

of consonants, hard c’s and k’s. Atlantic,

the ocean’s surge, the clicks of waves

collapsed on rocks in corrugated waters . . .

    Poets of praise are, I think, often given to litanies. Look no further than Whitman, whose influence on Ms. Schulman came early and has been continual. Albeit quieter than her precursor, Ms. Schulman is also a poet of praise. Even the titles of her poems announce her optimism: “Celebration,” “In Praise of Shards,” “Love in the Afternoon.”

    However, throughout “Without a Claim,” Ms. Schulman seems compelled to answer for her hopefulness, time and again acknowledging the fear, pain, and misunderstanding in the world that trouble hope.

    In “My Father’s Watches,” for example, the poet remembers her father’s Sunday ritual when she was a girl: “he brought us smoked fish . . . then combed files of letters / from his parents in Poland, / hoping they were still alive.” Later in the poem, the young poet tries to assuage her father’s anxiety by reading him her verse. Sadly, she recognizes:

    . . . no words

    could mute the drone

    of planes in his head.

    To which the mature poet responds, unsurprisingly, in the key of prayer: She wishes for time enough to “write lines / [her] father might hear / over bombs and gunfire.”

    If not in its healing power, Ms. Schulman at least seems confident in the permanence of art. In “Chauvet,” she muses on the meaning behind the early cave paintings found there:

. . . Some say the cave was an altar,

the beasts sacred, but I think the task

was to get it right, the horse’s leap,

the faun’s terror, the lion’s charge, knowing

that in a life of change those animals

would stay. They have. . . .

    What Ms. Schulman finds enduring in art — and the imagination — is its sense of unity and wholeness. Reflecting on a broken whelk, she writes:

I see the ruined shell

as I might gaze

at the headless statues

of gods and imagine

their eyes whole.

    The problem, however, is that wholeness is incongruent with our lives. And Ms. Schulman knows this. “Why does the mind reach for completeness when the fragments are all we have?” she asks. As for the permanence of art, there is too much evidence to the contrary. Art can — and probably will — fade. To preserve against the same damage wrought in Lascaux, Chauvet has been closed to the public for nearly two decades. Will the image, as Ms. Schulman suggests, really stay? Does it matter if no one is around to experience it?

    It may be unreasonable to expect poetry to satisfactorily answer these questions, yet these are the questions Ms. Schulman poses in her book. Rather than wallow in doubt, she tends to place her trust in epiphanies, accept that “all work is unfinished by definition,” or elide matters with a wish. Just how convincing her poetry of praise is depends upon a reader’s acceptance of the language of prayer.

   Will Schutt won the 2012 Yale Younger Poets Prize. He is the author of “Westerly,” a collection of poems published in April, and lives part time in Wainscott.

    Grace Schulman, distinguished professor of English at Baruch College, lives in Manhattan and Springs. “Without a Claim” came out on Sept. 10.

A Wainwright Homecoming

    Laura Wainwright of the East Hampton Wainwrights will pay a visit to the East Hampton Library on Saturday, “Home Bird,” her book from a year ago, in hand. Subtitled “Four Seasons on Martha’s Vineyard,” it chronicles the life there of an observant and thoughtful nature-lover — a life not unlike many on the South Fork.

    Much of the book, published by Vineyard Stories, first appeared as columns in The Martha’s Vineyard Times. Here they are accented throughout by finely wrought illustrations by J. Ann Eldridge — and by recipes, too. Ms. Wainwright’s reading starts at 3:30 p.m.

A Quest Renewed

    Nelson DeMille, king of the Long Island thriller writers, will be back at BookHampton on Saturday, reading from “The Quest.” Title sound familiar? Try this blurb: “From the dusty archives of the Vatican to the overgrown jungles of Ethiopia, an unlikely crew of four begins a deadly search for the Holy Grail.” Now you’ve got it: The book is from 1975, but has been revisited, updated, rewritten, and re-released just this week.

    The author will be in the Southampton shop at 2 p.m. and at the East Hampton one at 5.

Writers, Back at It

    Stony Brook Southampton’s Writers Speak series of author appearances, put on by the M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature, resumes for the fall on Wednesday at 7 p.m. in Chancellors Hall with Jean Hanff Korelitz. Her name may have had a buzz about it lately because earlier this year a movie version of her novel “Admission” came out, starring Tina Fey and Paul Rudd. It details the politics and interpersonal hoo-ha of a college admissions office. (That movie will be screened in the Duke Lecture Hall on campus Saturday night at 7.)

    Legal thrillers are among Ms. Korelitz’s previous novels, but “The White Rose,” from 2006 and based on a Richard Strauss opera, stands out as having been well received in The New York Times and elsewhere. “You Should Have Known,” about an author and mother whose life is, of a sudden, wrecked, is due out next year.

    Otherwise, coming down the writerly pike are Marissa Silver on Oct. 2, Meghan Daum on Oct. 9, the painter (and now memoirist) Eric Fischl on Oct. 23, the Times book critic Dwight Garner on Oct. 30, and the poet and translator Richard Howard on Nov. 13. (Want more? Thumbnail bios are on the campus’s Web site.) A reading by students in the M.F.A. program will happen on Dec. 4.

Simon Says

    Not only is Simon Van Booy one of the more talented young fiction writers going, his first published work appeared in this newspaper. Yes, that’s self-referential of us to point out, but we thought you’d like to know. He has written well-received collections of short stories, one of which, “Love Begins in Winter,” won a Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and has just come out with his second novel, “The Illusion of Separateness.” He’ll talk about it on Wednesday at noon for a brown bag lunch at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton.

   The former South Fork resident now may live in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg section, teach at the School of Visual Arts in New York, speak with an ear-pleasing Welsh accent, dress nattily, and look great in a pair of horn-rims, but don’t rush to judgment: He used to slam through the line and break for the open field as a tailback at Campbellsville University in Kentucky. Which lends credence to his writing’s lyricism and his stories’ romanticism. Somehow.

Pintauro’s Pictures

    And speaking of the varieties of artistic experience, please reset your powers of apprehension for the emergence of Joe Pintauro, photographer. The Sag Harbor playwright (“Snow Orchid,” “Men’s Lives”) has put together an art book celebrating that Old World beauty, Venice, in particular Piazza San Marco. Titled “Nunc et Semper,” the limited-edition volume comes courtesy of Stony Brook Southampton’s new TSR Editions and features large-format photos and foldouts.

    Mr. Pintauro will show some of his photographs and talk about the book next Thursday at 7 p.m. at the temporary home of the John Jermain Memorial Library on West Water Street in Sag Harbor.

Who Is Mary Coin?

    Marisa Silver, no stranger to the power of an image, what with her past work as a movie director, has taken one and run with it. She based her new novel, “Mary Coin,” on one of the most recognizable of American photographs, “Migrant Mother,” taken by Dorothea Lange at the height of the Depression. Ms. Silver will read from the book Wednesday night at 7 for Writers Speak at Stony Brook Southampton.

    Ms. Silver, long a summertime visitor to East Hampton, is the author, most recently, of the story collection “Alone With You.” The free reading will take place in the Radio Lounge, upstairs in Chancellors Hall on campus.

“Tomorrow There

Will Be Apricots”

Jessica Soffer

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24

   Very little in this book is what I expected it to be.

   “Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots” the handwriting jauntily promises over a striking early-19th-century botanical illustration of craggy, medieval-seeming lemons hanging off a branch. A quick flip through the pages reveals French and Arabic food names (samoon, shakrlama, bamia, malfuf, poulet roti, chocolat chaud) that, together with the blurbs and the inside cover, signal to me that the book will be full of sensual food experiences shaping the lives of Jewish-Middle Eastern (the word for apricot is “mishmash” in both Hebrew and Arabic) foodie immigrants in New York City.

   Since the father of Jessica Soffer, the author, came from Baghdad and I know that Soffer is a Jewish name, I settled into the first pages of “Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots” with my expectations populated by “Like Water for Chocolate,” “Eat, Pray, Love,” and multicolored memories of a life of Asian, Middle Eastern, and Jewish feasts.

    Not quite! Jessica Soffer’s story is about food but it’s not about eating. Food metaphors abound (“eyes gray and blue like the healthiest sardine pulled straight from the ocean,” “a lump in my throat the size of a bundt cake pan,” “tall and thin like a saffron thread,” hair “shiny like swirled chocolate butter sauce”); she threads the book with names, ingredients, and preparation steps, but they don’t bring with them the joy of cooking, the sensuality of eating, or the conviviality of a shared meal. Instead, the characters turn to food and its tentacles (talking, teaching, scheming, books, recipes) to connect them to those whose love they desperately seek. It’s in restaurants, rather than at home in the kitchen or dining room, where significant encounters occur and relationships take root.

   For Lorca, the 14-year-old girl who comes of age in the book, the recipe for masgouf, an Iraqi fish dish, becomes the Holy Grail that she hopes will secure her mother’s ambiguous love (“she loved me in fits and spurts”) and prevent her from being sent off to boarding school. The quest leads her to the widow Victoria, owner of a now-defunct restaurant where Nancy, Lorca’s mother, herself a famous restaurateur, had once tasted the elusive masgouf.

   Ms. Soffer adeptly plays with our assumptions about inherited traits and family resemblances — we think we know where the story’s going until she reveals the truth, dismantling what we thought we knew. She holds back the revelations until we know the characters well enough to be startled by what they’ve been hiding. Once or twice I wished she had waited longer to expose the truth, I could have gone along for a longer ride, but maybe the author herself felt the hiding was unbearable, that she herself was unable to contain it any longer.

   “Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots” is a lively book, structured on revelations within complex relationships that weave smoothly between the past and present, but it is anything but jaunty. At the heart of the story is an underlying darkness, amplified by the background of unrelenting New York City winter. This is a story about waiting — waiting for love, for approval, for the arrival of a sister, a daughter, a granddaughter, for the bell to ring or the door to open, for redemption to replace abandonment.

   Despite the enormity of the secrets — betrayal, self-mutilation, affairs, lies of omission and commission — we do not judge these secret-keepers: We see them as weak rather than evil, motivated by fear rather than cruelty. Desperate for connection, they imagine rather than actually have conversations, ascribing thoughts to each other because the potential pain of actual encounters would be unbearable. As a result, connections are not established and relationships remain fragmentary and unresolved.

   All this against a background of food! If only, I wanted to say to Lorca or Victoria or Nancy, if only you would actually sit and eat together, if only you could taste how delicious the chocolat chaud or the bamia or the pasta arrabiata actually is, perhaps you won’t have to be as confused as Lorca is when she offers her friend Bolt a dish of bamia: “It was clear he didn’t not like it.” If only you could be as attentive to the people in your family as you were to the diners in your restaurant, I wanted to say to Lorca’s mother and Victoria.

   But what I wanted most of all was to understand the darkest secret of all — why Lorca is addicted to cutting herself. Perhaps cutting is prevalent enough in our society today and other readers know more about the psychology of self-mutilation than I do: I had no idea that behind the jaunty cover and the beautiful illustration of lemons lies a bleak story of a teenager who turns a paring knife, a small kitchen implement used for peeling and coring, against herself. A paring knife of all things!

   Ms. Soffer provides only a superficial understanding of why young girls resort to cutting themselves, but we witness Lorca’s struggle with the “itch” imperative to cut herself, the gratification of seeing the blood emerge, the shame of being discovered, and the punishment of being dispatched to boarding school.

   There were times that I wished the author had been given to a more patient exploration, yet it is Lorca’s story that I am left with, her poignant attempts to connect to her equally damaged, mercurial mother as she turns for comfort to the elderly Victoria, herself unmoored by death and truth. Although I am the first to mock our culture for its excessive “oversharing,” this book reveals how much may lie hidden in the stories we are too afraid to share — or to hear.

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

    Jessica Soffer teaches fiction at Connecticut College. She lives in New York City and Amagansett, where her father, the late Sasson Soffer, was a sculptor.

“The Way of the Knife”

Mark Mazzetti

Penguin, $29.95

   No matter what political policies you embrace, “The Way of the Knife” is a lively, engaging, factual account of our real war against terrorism — and another real war between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon.

    Mark Mazzetti, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and national security correspondent for The New York Times, has given us a vivid portrait and history of the transformation of “a traditional espionage service” into “a killing machine, an organization consumed with man hunting.”

    The United Nations Committee Against Torture prohibits “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment,” yet the Bush-era detention-and-interrogation and outsourcing programs were infamously divisive and morally outrageous strategies that eventually backfired. Forced confessions didn’t work — and the U.S. lost the moral high ground.

    Ironically, President Obama’s apparently ethical pledge to close Guantanamo and to terminate morally abhorrent practices has led us to “killing by remote control . . . the antithesis of the dirty, intimate work of interrogation,” as Mr. Mazzetti tells us. Many Republicans and Democrats favored this surgical approach as a (virtually) “clean” and (relatively) “risk free” way to deal with terrorists. Surgery, however, co-exists with complications.

    In a review and summary of 12 recent public opinion polls, Micah Zenko (Council on Foreign Relations, March 18) reported that averaged together these polls “demonstrate that 65 percent of Americans support targeted killing of suspected terrorists, and 51 percent approve killing of U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism.” Time magazine ran a story on the same day about drone management subcontracts and degree-granting institutions with this headline: “Majoring in Drones: Higher Ed Embraces Unmanned Aircraft.”

    Suicide bombings and religious fanaticism are intrinsically asymmetrical and unfair. “They” attack us with explosives hidden in body cavities and their underwear, using box cutters, pressure cookers, airplanes, and truck and car bombs via scores of public vulnerabilities. As seemingly helpless victims, we initially had a very limited repertoire and puzzling range of responses. Mourning and moral outrage left some of us feeling weak, defenseless, and perhaps even pathetic following 9/11. What was a “leader of the free world” to do? Take the moral high ground? Strike back? Both? How?

    While deploring the torture programs, Mr. Obama chose targeted killings. The internal maneuvering, public posturing, private debates on the pros and cons, and complications make up a large part of Mr. Mazzetti’s richly detailed, evidence-based, and well-documented story of drone warfare.

    In 2003, for example, the White House was planning to commemorate a U.N.-sponsored event dedicated to the support of torture victims by releasing statements like these: The U.S. is “committed to the worldwide elimination of torture” and is “leading the world by example.” (Complication: We weren’t.) George W. Bush had authorized the C.I.A. to engage in what was widely believed to be torture, and these nonsensical platitudes were nixed by the agency before their release out of concern that its officers might be “vulnerable to legal action in the U.S. or abroad.” This was the beginning of the end of the C.I.A.’s “deniable” torture program.

   Enter Blackwater, with its “unilateral, unattributable capability” for terrorist assassinations that would nominally be under C.I.A. control. Once given specific missions, Blackwater had wide autonomy. Much of its involvement with the C.I.A. remains a tightly held government secret. But one former C.I.A. agent in retirement is quoted by Mr. Mazzetti as wondering why the U.S. would make a distinction between killing people from a distance using an armed drone versus training humans to do the face-to-face killing themselves: “How we apply lethal force, and where we apply lethal force — that’s a huge debate that we really haven’t had.”

    Every complaint against the C.I.A.’s torture programs pushed its leaders to a deadly — and perhaps inevitable but uncomplicated — conclusion: “The agency would be far better off killing, rather than jailing, terror suspects.” This was despite the Detainee Treatment Act passed by Congress in 2005 banning “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” treatment of any prisoner in American custody. Was this “in for a penny, in for a pound”? Would our government speak with a forked tongue? Or was this merely another complication?

    Mr. Mazzetti relates how the C.I.A. was concerned that its agents might be prosecuted for their interrogation efforts, especially after the Detainee Treatment Act was passed. The C.I.A. is a paranoid institution (just because you’re paranoid does not mean nobody’s following you). Its director at the time, Porter Goss, then told the White House he would shut down all interrogations. The White House sent Andrew Card, Mr. Bush’s chief of staff, to calm the C.I.A.’s concerns. Mr. Card, who tried to make a joke out of presidential pardons, was unsuccessful in allaying C.I.A. fears of prosecution but suggested that C.I.A. officers might receive presidential pardons after any convictions. The C.I.A. officers were not amused.

    If the interservice rivalries within the U.S. government did indeed amount to a real war, as they sometimes did, Donald Rumsfeld saw a weakened C.I.A. as an opportunity to expand the reach of the Pentagon onto C.I.A. turf — to kill, capture, and spy in more than a dozen countries. The Defense Department’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) had a budget of about $8 billion in 2007 for secret operations and for running their own wars.

    The boundaries between Langley and the Pentagon faded as C.I.A. spies fought like soldiers, and Defense Department Navy Seals and Delta Force operatives engaged in clandestine activities, e.g., finding and slaying Osama bin Laden. The C.I.A. and JSOC did collaborate. Real real wars were taking place in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

    Passages in Mr. Mazzetti’s account read like a complex John le Carre spy novel. U-Turn Media, a small Czech firm that streamed video porn to mobile phones, had a weird program called Czech My Tits. The only people who had the money to pay for the technology were in the porn industry and in the intelligence community. U-Turn engaged in psychological warfare, or “psy-ops,” by creating video games to engage Muslims who disliked the U.S. to influence their perceptions of the U.S. and simultaneously collect information and intelligence about who was viewing these games — a triple-play: “The spies wouldn’t have to go hunting for information; it would come to them.”

    For example, Iraqi Hero was one game that allowed a player to shoot up terrorist insurgents who were killing civilians in the streets of Baghdad; the goal was to reach an Iraqi police station and deliver plans of an upcoming terrorist attack.

    Many colorful personalities profiled in “The Way of the Knife” come to life because Mr. Mazzetti portrays them vividly. Dewey Clarridge, a retired C.I.A. officer, was a freelance operative running his own “shadow C.I.A.” Abdullah al-Asiri was an anti-Saudi who tried to kill Prince Muhammad bin Nayef by offering to surrender and then exploding his rectum-implanted bomb prematurely, which blew him apart but left the prince with minor wounds only. Michele Ballarin, a wealthy heiress and concert pianist, was hired by the Pentagon to gather intelligence about militants in Somalia.

    There are plenty of complex moral (and even Talmudic) questions posed in this fine book, including “What are the new rules of warfare against terrorism?” Collateral damage, complications, and risk accompany all surgical interventions and drone strikes.

   Mark Mazzetti will be signing copies of “The Way of the Knife” at the East Hampton Library’s Authors Night fund-raiser on Aug. 10 and serving as guest of honor at one of its dinners.

    Stephen Rosen, a physicist, was a member of the senior professional staff at a prominent think tank engaged in classified military research and defense policy. He lives in New York and East Hampton.

   Sylvester Manor spawned two books following a seven-year archaeological dig there, conducted under the direction of Stephen Mrozowski, director of the Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts.

   In addition to “The Manor” by Mac Griswold, reviewed here, Katherine Howlett Hayes’s “Slavery Before Race: Europeans, Africans, and Indians at Long Island’s Sylvester Manor Plantation, 1651-1884” was published in April by New York University Press. Ms. Hayes, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, approaches the story as someone who took part in the dig, using the artifacts discovered as well as archival material in what is called historical archaeology to assess the relationship of the Sylvester family with their slaves, and Native Americans.

   Artifacts from the dig were exhibited at N.Y.U. in the spring. Although the dig itself concluded in 2006, a technological exploration of what is estimated to be 200 gravesites at the manor was undertaken recently.

A clothbound copy of Ms. Hayes’s book is $30. It is also available as an e-book.   

   Mac Griswold will speak about “The Manor” at the site itself, Sylvester Manor on Shelter Island, on Saturday at 2 p.m. Blankets and beach chairs are suitable for the free outdoor session, during which the author will read, field questions, and sign copies of the book (available for purchase, naturally). Reservations at [email protected] have been requested.

    “I’m calling my talk ‘Visible/Invisible,’ to help my audience see through the present to recall all those in the past, black as well as white, who have made the manor what it is today,” Ms. Griswold wrote in an e-mail.

    The former plantation is at 80 North Ferry Road.

“The Manor”

Mac Griswold

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $28

   “The Manor” is a fresh and invigorating book reporting on 30 years of Mac Griswold’s search for the truth about the secrets of the manor house located on a creek near the north shore of Shelter Island. In 1653, its builder and owner, Nathaniel Sylvester, owned the entire island and ruled it as a European feudal kingdom — a plantation, as it was politely called.

   But it is more than the story of this one house and its plantation. The author’s investigations provide a window into the fascinating history of the East End in the 1600s.

    As the chairman of the East Hampton Library, I have read (and reprinted) dozens of local histories, and nothing compares to “The Manor,” published this summer. “The Manor,” which has the subtitle “Three Centuries at a Slave Plantation on Long Island,” is not a dry local history. It is not a historical memoir, nor an oral history. Nor is it historical fiction or biography. It is in a class all its own.

    Mac Griswold has created an exciting new style of historical writing, engaging the reader in her quest for what actually happened on the East End as it was settled by Europeans in the 17th century. Contrary to most dull histories, Ms. Griswold’s story is written in the first person. The 470-page book reads almost like a detective novel, following the main character as she uncovers clue after clue to solve the mysteries of the manor.

    “The Manor” is crammed with original research, and Ms. Griswold effectively smashes the stereotypes and myths presented by prior writers of our local history. She debunks and puts to rest the quaint notion that the East End was settled by those who came here primarily for religious freedom to live in an isolated agricultural utopia.

    Now for some details. Ms. Griswold’s investigative report begins in 1984, when, by chance, she finds herself in a small creek on the north side of Shelter Island. Lured by a quiet, stately, and unoccupied yellow manor house on the shore, she tiptoes up the path, peeks in the windows, and is mystified by what she sees.

    From that moment, Ms. Griswold relentlessly pursues the history and family secrets that are entwined in the home, held in the same family for 11 generations, right up to the present. Along the way, she is consumed with revealing its past. Her research takes her to Barbados, London, Amsterdam, Ghana, and many places in between where Ms. Griswold searches private archives and government record rooms to find out how and why this manor house stands where it does.

    It was the manor house of a plantation of 8,000 acres encompassing all of Shelter Island. Nathaniel Sylvester, born of English parents in 1620 and raised in Amsterdam, struck out with his brother to make his fortune as one of the first international traders frequently crisscrossing the Atlantic, supplying goods to and from Europe and Africa and the New World. Unfortunately, African slaves were part of the trade.

    Ms. Griswold documents what many have known for years, but which since the Civil War has been the object of collective amnesia: The North as well as the South had slaves, and some Northerners made fortunes in the sordid slave trade. There are few manor houses in the Northern states, and maybe none other than this one, preserved in the same family with most of its logbooks and records intact (in a secret vault in the manor house, no less!), documenting the interaction among Europeans, the indigenous early Americans, and the slaves ripped from their families in Africa to provide cheap labor in the colonies.

    But what made the Sylvester enterprise so profitable was the second plantation established by his family in Barbados. Sugar and molasses were exceedingly valuable in the Northeast, while fruit, vegetables, and sheep and other livestock were even more profitable in the Caribbean. But only Europe could supply muskets, ironworks, and spices. And only Africa the cheap labor. Thus the “triangle trade” we all heard about in school began. Who knew that the God-fearing East End was a major base for the despicable trade in slaves?

    Ms. Griswold includes story after story of how the owners of the manor interacted with the world around them. In 12 short pages, she brilliantly describes the struggle by the fanatical clergy in Boston to retain its power over all who settled New England, and how the clergymen were defied by Ann Hutchinson and the devoted Quaker Mary Dyer. We are reminded that Dyer was traumatically expelled from Boston for her Quaker beliefs that undermined the power of the Puritans. She retreated for six months to Shelter Island under the protection of Nathaniel Sylvester, who was an ardent Quaker himself.

    But the peace and tranquillity of the manor house was not to last. Dyer decided to return to Boston knowing full well that she would be martyred for her religious beliefs. And the Puritans obliged, hanging her from the big elm tree in Boston Common. To their own horror, the hanging galvanized the attention of King Charles II, who issued a royal writ ordering the Puritans to stop banishing and hanging the Quakers.

    The kernel of the book, however, is Ms. Griswold’s enthralling description of the 17th-century slave trade and its impact on the economy of not just Sylvester Manor but the entire region. She calculates that in 1698, slaves were about 20 percent of the population of Suffolk County. This is where Ms. Griswold is at her best. Her research clearly establishes that Nathaniel Sylvester was an active slave trader, transporting as many as 100 slaves at a time to Barbados. When he died, in 1680, he owned 9 slaves on Shelter Island and 15 other slaves elsewhere.

    Ms. Griswold’s investigation did not stop with merely perusing documents and archives. She enticed historical archaeologists at the University of Massachusetts to painstakingly uncover and document over a nine-year period the remains of early settlement at the manor, including the slave quarters. All of which is vividly described in the book.

    But there is so much more to tell you about, with such little space. But not to worry. The book is so well written and organized that you can read each of the more or less self-contained 20 chapters (about 16 pages each) in separate sittings.

    If her investigations and stories about the Sylvester family are not enough for you to acquire this book for your library, the bibliography alone makes it an exceedingly valuable acquisition. Its 27 pages of primary and secondary source material is a staggering collection of items relevant to the history of the East End, an essential part of any library of books for the amateur or even professional historian.

    What also makes this book so valuable to both amateur and professional historians is the 16-page index, providing quick access to hundreds of names, places, and subjects in the book. Ms. Griswold also includes a timeline of world events to remind the reader what is happening in the world as the manor is built and grows into the future. And lest the fresh style in which the book is written give the impression that this is not a serious history, there are an astounding 80 pages of chapter notes to provide sources for her research. To top off the wonders of this book, there are numerous maps, diagrams, color photos, and artfully inserted illustrations to help bring the narrative to life.

    And for those who think I will now reveal the surprise ending, you are mistaken. You will have to buy the book!

    In sum, if you have the slightest interest in how the East End became what it is today and why you enjoy living here, you must read this exciting book. Its first-person style and flair take the reader on an easy journey that will open an astounding new world.

   Tom Twomey, a local lawyer and former East Hampton Town historian, is the editor of the East Hampton Library’s five-volume East Hampton Historical Collection Series, the latest of which, “Origins of the Past: The Story of Montauk and Gardiner’s Island,” was published in the spring.

    Mac Griswold is a cultural landscape historian whose previous books include “Washington’s Gardens at Mount Vernon.” She lives in Sag Harbor.

Confessions at Canio’s

    Canio’s: the independent gift of a bookstore that keeps on giving. On Saturday, for instance, Joan Cusack Handler, an author of several volumes of poems, will drop by the Sag Harbor shop for a reading from her new book, “Confessions of Joan the Tall,” a lyrical recounting of her Catholic youth in the working-class Bronx of the Eisenhower years. Ms. Handler runs CavanKerry Press in New Jersey and lives part of the year in East Hampton. The reading starts at 5 p.m.

    Looking to liven up a dull Wednesday? Take a final pull from that cappuccino as a nod to the culture we’ve all so eagerly glommed on to in recent years and listen in as a celebration of all things Italian-American commences at 6:30 p.m., having brought in members of the Italian American Studies Association to read from and discuss their work. The group studies, documents, and disseminates information on the nature of the “folk migration” to America and its subsequent cultural influence. On hand will be a novelist, Robert Viscusi, a historian, Stan Pugliese, and a poet, George Guida, among others. Toothsome refreshments are in store afterward.

    Of further note: The owners of Canio’s Books, Maryann Calendrille and Kathryn Szoka, will be the speakers at Fridays at Five tomorrow at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton. Their recent book is “Sag Harbor Is: A Literary Celebration.” Ms. Calendrille has a “Guestwords” essay in this week’s paper, too.

Talkin’ Modernism

    Caroline Rob Zaleski will make two appearances here this weekend to discuss “Long Island Modernism: 1930-1980,” published a year ago by W.W. Norton. The amply illustrated coffee table book has essays on roughly two score architects, from Frank Lloyd Wright to Marcel Breuer. In it, Ms. Zaleski explores why the Island was fertile ground for the spread of modernism following the success of the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens. Locally, houses from Sagaponack to Montauk are featured.

    Ms. Zaleski, who started summering on Napeague in the late 1970s, heads up the Preservation League of New York State’s Seven to Save endangered sites program. She will be at the East Hampton Library on Saturday at 1 p.m. and at BookHampton on Main Street in the village on Sunday at 2 p.m.

    Indie, activist, hip, smart, relevant? Then you will want to know that the Feminist Press, a nonprofit literary publishing house that takes pride in being all that and more, is holding its annual Hamptons fund-raiser on Sunday, and that B. Smith’s restaurant on Long Wharf in Sag Harbor is the place for the like-minded to be.

    The 4 to 6 p.m. event, emceed by B. herself, features a distinguished roster of honorees starting with Edith Windsor, the Southampton octogenarian who, after being compelled in 2009 to pay a $363,000 federal estate tax following the death of her wife, demanded a refund on the grounds that the Defense of Marriage Act — which stated that the term “spouse” applies only to marriage between a man and a woman — was unconstitutional. Her challenge to the act went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which, on June 26, ruled in her favor — a landmark Fifth Amendment victory for same-sex couples.

    “The truth is, I never expected any less from my country,” Ms. Windsor said afterward.

    Also speaking on Sunday will be Blanche Wiesen Cook, distinguished professor of history at John Jay College in the City University of New York, a longtime resident of East Hampton whose two-volume prizewinning biography of Eleanor Roosevelt has become the go-to reference for E.R. scholars. Ms. Cook will offer some thoughts about women in the world today and will read from Claire Reed’s “Toughing It Out,” published by the Feminist Press earlier this year.

    From Amagansett and Bridgehampton, the Lutheran Church’s own Rev. Katrina Foster will be another honoree. Over a 16-year ministry at Fordham Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Bronx, she transformed a congregation in decline through music and community outreach, and she has done the same and more as pastor of the two local churches, Incarnation and St. Michael’s. In 2007 Ms. Foster was among a group of Lutheran ministers who risked defrocking to challenge the church’s policy toward same-sex couples; the policy was amended in 2009.

    The day’s fourth speaker will be the scholar and poet Sandra Robinson, a chaired professor of religion at Sarah Lawrence College who teaches Asian studies there. “Ebonics,” her recent book of poems, is said to be an irreverent response to academia “and other worlds of pretension,” in which she “bundles her linguistic sophistication, honed by Latin, Sanskrit, and Bengali, and takes it for a heady walk on the urban American Street.”

    Sunday’s event was organized by Rebecca Seawright, an East Hampton homeowner who heads the Feminist Press board of directors.

    Among other board members and supporters with ties to the East End are Joyce Whitby, Clare Coss, Helene Goldfarb, Ken Greenstein, Chuck Hitchcock, Merle Hoffman, Judith Hope, Marilyn Lamkay, Flora Schnall, Elaine Walsh and Brenda McGowan, Rita Wasserman, and David Wilt. Tickets, at $50 and up, are available in advance from feministpress.org or at the door for $60.