“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.

    The East Hampton Library’s Authors Night keeps growing, but then, it’s a fund-raiser, so who’s complaining? Saturday’s mammoth and tented event, which starts at 5 p.m. at the Gardiner Farm at 36 James Lane in the village with cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, boasts more than 1,000 expected attendees, untold mountains of books for purchase, and over 100 writers ready to sign them and chat.

    The complete list of authors, among other details, can be found online at authorsnight.org, but there’s surely something for everyone, from new literary fiction (“& Sons” by David Gilbert) to baseball (“Summers at Shea” by Ira Berkow) to politics (Eric Alterman’s “The Cause”) to the beautiful people (Kelly Killoren Bensimon’s “In the Spirit of the Hamptons”), on down the line to cooking (“Lidia’s Favorite Recipes” by Lidia Bastianich), and even murder (David Berg’s “Run, Brother, Run”).

    At 8 that night, book enthusiasts can repair to various dinners hosted at private homes around East Hampton. Attending them will be top-flight authors, including Robert A. Caro, Jay McInerney, Mark Mazzetti (whose book is reviewed on this page), Janet Wallach, Eric Fischl, A.M. Homes, Robert K. Massie, and Mac Griswold, among many others.

    Tickets to the cocktail party, reception, and book signing cost $100. Tickets to the dinners range from $250 to $2,500. There are $20 raffle tickets, as well, with prizes including a tour of Stieg Larsson’s Stockholm, home furnishings, and a 40-pound cheese wheel.

Mark Doty on “Writer’s Almanac”

    Mark Doty, the Springs poet who won a National Book Award in 2008 for his collection “Fire to Fire,” will have one of his poems, “In the Community Garden,” read on Saturday on American Public Media’s “The Writer’s Almanac,” given voice weekly and richly by Garrison Keillor of “Prairie Home Companion” fame. It can be heard locally on WPPB 88.3 FM.

    The day is, by program tradition, Mr. Doty’s birthday.

Cuba Si, College . . . Also Si

    Just as the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church’s regular outreach entourage returns from Cuba, Stony Brook Southampton is announcing its own, albeit writerly, mission there. The college’s M.F.A. program in writing and literature is offering a Cuba writing workshop in January, in which participants will “spend eight days in one of the most coveted cities in the Caribbean” — Old Havana — studying the essay with Robert Reeves, a novelist, professor, and associate provost.

    Excursions to museums and a cigar factory, among other places, are part of the deal. The deadline to apply is Sept. 7. Information about applications, costs, and housing is at stonybrook.edu/southampton/mfa/winter.

Fortune in His Eyes

    It’s a long way from escorting Elizabeth Taylor at the Broadway opening of Richard Burton’s “Hamlet” to mediating a prison riot at Attica. But David Rothenberg has not only lived it but written a memoir about it. “Fortune in My Eyes,” from Applause Books, recounts how one of the more successful publicists in theater (later a producer) went on to accompany former Attorney General Ramsey Clark to investigate how Nicaragua’s Sandinista government was treating captured Contra rebels in the 1980s. Among much else in a varied career in civil rights.

    Mr. Rothenberg will discuss the book on Saturday at 1 p.m. at the East Hampton Library.

Poems of Wellness, Fish of the Table

    The Poets of Well-Being will give a reading tomorrow at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor. The group is made up of Maggie Bloomfield, Susan Grathwohl Dingle, and Nina Yavel, therapists who use poetry in their practices. Guest readers will also be on hand to share their own work.

    For Saturday, Dock to Dish, a community-supported fish cooperative in Montauk, has joined Canio’s in sponsoring a talk by Paul Greenberg about his book “Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food,” which was a New York Times notable book of the year in 2010. Starting at 5 p.m., Mr. Greenberg, inspired by Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” will talk about the four kinds of fish that dominate people’s menus — cod, salmon, sea bass, and tuna — along with overfishing, the farming of fish, and the entire process these fish go through to get to our dinner tables.

“My New Orleans,

Gone Away”

Peter M. Wolf

Delphinium, $24.95

   “Don’t you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn’t just an hour — but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands — and who knows what to do with it?” —Blanche DuBois, Scene 5, “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

   Over and again, the land planner Peter M. Wolf’s stories of growing up in that extraordinary city, of leaving, then returning, then leaving and coming back again, and again, remind us of that little piece of eternity. Reading his memoir, “My New Orleans, Gone Away,” we feel the warmth, the charm, the exuberant confusion of this unique place. Not unlike the ebb and flow of the Gulf tides, Mr. Wolf pulls himself away from New Orleans in order to pull himself back. And back. And back. . . .

   What else could this book be but an odyssey? Mr. Wolf goes to a New England boarding school, the same one his father had attended, only to come home, then go off to Yale. Back in crusty New England’s New Haven he meets a wonderful cast of characters his freshman year, including Calvin Trillin, who is honing his own observational skills as a writer and humorist.

   There is an endearing moment essentially the first day of freshman year in the dormitory when Mr. Wolf takes Mr. Trillin to the correct store so that he Midwesterner can be decked out in proper preppie garb. During their years at Yale, that very same Midwestern Trillin and some of their other New York City friends indoctrinate Mr. Wolf on all matters Jewish. (As a boy, Mr. Wolf had dabbled in Hebrew school — his family was perplexed by his initial interest — but soon he found other ways to occupy his time.)

   Nonetheless, serendipity abounds for Mr. Wolf. At one point in the memoir, when he is in graduate school, the philanthropist and art supporter Dom­inique de Menil telephones him to ask him to present lectures to a special group she has created. She adds in private air transportation so that he can maintain his student life. The experience for him is both illuminating and touching. De Menil and her husband shyly come to Mr. Wolf’s door in their home at the end of the lecture series to present him with a painting to thank him for his hard work, proof again that in Mr. Wolf’s search for place he is grateful to those who surround him with art and beauty.

    Throughout, Mr. Wolf is looking for his identity. His search is for his Southern roots, as well as for his Jewish roots. And, yes, there is that confusion that many Americans experience. Mr. Wolf writes beautifully about his family, grandparents, parents, and other relatives. They were cultivated, fascinating characters. In one scene, Mr. Wolf writes of the time his father taught him to repair the lighters that sat in every room of the large house. He mastered the task so well that his mother allowed him to repair even the very fancy lighters — a moment of great accomplishment for a boy.

    Oh, and by the way, what book about New Orleans does not include important information about food? Mr. Wolf writes about the finest French Quarter restaurants where his forebears had, essentially, standing reservations, where he eventually acquired the great honor of a house charge. He also writes about taking Bud Trillin and other pals to a place, seemingly out in the swamps, where New Orleans mafia presided. (Right — New Orleans and mafia in the same sentence? Believe me, you’ll be convinced it was true and desperate to discover a hole-in-the-wall eatery as splendid as this one.) Mr. Trillin wanted to return tout de suite. A food writer was clearly born in this episode.

    “Gone Away” in the title of course connotes Hurricane Katrina. And although Mr. Wolf does indeed visit the city after the hurricane, that section is not at all a focal point. In truth, the “Gone Away” figure is really Mr. Wolf, who has taken the lessons he learned in his birthplace and used them throughout his land-planning career, figuring out what is important and what should recede.

    After all, New Orleans was founded in 1718 by the French because the area was on relatively high ground given the fact that the lower Mississippi was flood-prone. The inhabitants were a wild bunch: riffraff, fortune hunters, and gold diggers. In 1722, a massive hurricane struck, blowing down most of the city. After that destructive event, the administration enforced a grid pattern dictated by earlier city planners.

    Even when Mr. Wolf writes about sections of New Orleans that are less than all right, the city glows. Place, place, place — that’s what Mr. Wolf has thought about his entire career as a planner of communities. Reading this memoir we think about where we live, what these places mean to us, what they meant to our ancestors, and, of course, what they will mean to our progeny.

    In his career, Mr. Wolf has parlayed (ouch — given the way that word has evolved from French to English) his understanding of place in many delightful ways. He was a trustee of the New Orleans Public Library and the fledgling New Orleans educational television station soon after his graduation from college — even then he was focused on the importance of the area. He has been a chairman of the board of fellows of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York. He has taught at Manhattan’s Cooper Union, has received a Fulbright, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as grants from the Ford Foundation and the Graham Foundation. He has also been an artist/scholar at the American Academy in Rome. But back to that place we were focused on. . . .

    Lafcadio Hearn once wrote about New Orleans: “Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become a study for archaeologists . . . but it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.”

    What American place is more exotic than New Orleans? None could be more outré. Less tight-lipped, bodice-tightened, finger-pointing. Laissez le bon temps rouler. New Orleans: In the palms of our hands we have that eternity. What should we do with it this afternoon?

   Laura Wells is a regular contributor of book reviews to The Star. She lives in Sag Harbor.

    Peter M. Wolf lives in East Hampton.

    This weekend Peter M. Wolf will be making the rounds thrice over with his new memoir, “My New Orleans, Gone Away.” First, tomorrow at 5 p.m., he’ll read from the book and field questions about it for this summer’s iteration of the popular, shaded, and wet (with libations) Fridays at Five series at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton. Tickets cost $15.

    On Saturday at 5 p.m., it’s due north to Sag Harbor and the venerable Canio’s Books, and then on Sunday, he’ll stop by East Hampton’s friendly neighborhood bookshop, BookHampton, for a 2 p.m. reading.

    Mr. Wolf is, among much else of note in his long career in architecture and planning, the founder of the Thomas Moran Trust. His books include “Hot Towns: The Future of the Fastest Growing Communities in America” and, most recently, “Land Use and Abuse in America.”

    Not only is The Southampton Review’s new and loaded summer edition out and about to be celebrated with a couple of readings, the fledgling TSR Editions is unveiling its first effort, a book of photos by the playwright Joe Pintauro, with a reception and gallery show — all tomorrow, all at Stony Brook Southampton.

    First up is a reading by contributors to The Review from 2 to 4 p.m. at Duke Lecture Hall, inside the Chancellors Hall building on campus. At 7:30 that night over in the Avram Theater, two other contributors (and professors), Billy Collins, the poet, and Roger Rosenblatt, the memoirist and novelist, will read new work, in Mr. Rosenblatt’s case, from his forthcoming book, “The Boy Detective: A New York Childhood.”

    Then at 9, it’s on to the exhibition of Mr. Pintauro’s photographs, from his book “Nunc et Semper,” made in collaboration with Scott Sandell and the Almost Beachfront Print Studio. Venice is the subject, “montaged in 20-foot-long pullouts and his lyrical text, all comprising a love song to the city,” a release said, highlighting in particular the Piazza San Marco and “one of its oldest tea salons.”

    The new Southampton Review, it should be noted, has the theme of “Why Memoir Matters” and, in addition to Mr. Rosenblatt’s excerpt, contributions along those lines from Elena Gorokhova, Arlene Alda, Sally Susman, and the college’s Robert Reeves and Ursula Hegi.

    Also inside you’ll find fiction, cartoons, an interview with Eric Fischl by Terrie Sultan of the Parrish Art Museum, and nonfiction by Sven Birkerts and Zachary Lazar.

    Reservations and more information about the launch and readings are at stonybrook.edu/Avram.

“The DiMaggios”

Tom Clavin

Ecco, $25.99

    When I told my wife I was reviewing a book titled “The DiMaggios,” she asked me, “There was more than one?” There were, in fact, three — the brothers Joe, Dom, and Vince, all big-league ballplayers of varying skill levels and fame.

   But it’s the subtitle, “Three Brothers, Their Passion for Baseball, Their Pursuit of the American Dream,” that’s the problem, identifying the book as a document in the long literary history of this country’s animating vision, of which baseball, of course, played a part. The DiMaggio parents, Italian immigrants who worked hard to give their children a better life in San Francisco than they could have had in Sicily, had a version of the American Dream in their minds that corresponded to the classic narrative that has shaped the fiction of Horatio Alger, Nathanael West, John Updike, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Arthur Miller.

    The problem is that none of these three brothers was Jay Gatsby (though perhaps Vince, who ended up selling Fuller brushes door to door, was a kind of Willy Loman). Dom, the one with the brains, always underrated and in Joe’s shadow as a ballplayer though he was voted American League M.V.P. in 1947, at least found a successful career in business. And Joe, after Marilyn Monroe’s death, became even more reclusive, bitter, and paranoid than he had always been. None of them was a hero, least of all Joe, who just wanted “an excuse to get away from the house.”

    The fact that Joe was lionized by the press and the fans was the product of America’s conflation of athletic skills and character. Undoubtedly, the cult that surrounded him was enormous: Paul Simon’s lyric “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? / A nation turns its lonely eyes to you” testifies both to the size of the myth and to the absence of the man, and Joe reveled in his fame, using it as a screen to keep everyone else out. He was from the start vain, not very bright, suspicious to the point of paranoia — a loner who seldom spoke to his teammates and ended up estranged from both brothers.

    Here’s what he told Gay Talese in 1966: “There are . . . personal things that I refuse to talk about. And even if you asked my brothers, they would be unable to tell you about them because they do not know.” Clavin quotes Charlie Silvera, a Yankee teammate, as saying that Dom and Joe “each in his own way was a great guy and a great ballplayer.” But Clavin makes it abundantly clear that Joe was anything but a great guy. Vince was the affable one; Joe was, as Gay Talese put it, “a kind of male Garbo.”

    Telling the story of these three lives involved, for Clavin, a prodigious amount of research; he seems to have read every book, every article, every news story written by, for, and about the brothers, their family, and about baseball itself in the  ’30s and ’40s — he stops just short of including box scores. And this is a problem: He doesn’t really tell a story. “The DiMaggios” is something of a cut-and-paste job, an immense amount of data arranged in chronological order, but with no overarching idea to serve (not those in the subtitle, at any rate). Too much space is taken up by meaningless factoids (a friend of Joe’s, serving in Korea, was promoted to sergeant; Ted Williams had fun learning how to fly; Lefty O’Doul died on “the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor”).

    And it isn’t only facts that Clavin’s research turns up, but opinions as well: Whenever things get pulled together in a meaningful way, it’s Roger Kahn or David Halberstam who’s doing the pulling. Clavin seems to have interviewed several members of the DiMaggio family and scene, but the only one he quotes extensively is Vince’s daughter, Joanne DiMaggio Weber. And she’s good for an anecdote every few pages. But as a family member, she’s not necessarily a reliable witness (though I believe her when she says that her favorite baby sitter was Phil Rizzuto). The “as told to” autobiographies produced by each of the brothers are, as Clavin rightly calls them, formulaic, self-serving, and unreliable.

    But there have been many biographies of Joe, one of the best being Richard Ben Cramer’s “Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life,” an excellent and juicy book that probes into all the sordid, interesting crannies of “the hero’s” stunted personality. Where Clavin tells us that after his divorce Joe “wasn’t looking for another wife, just companionship,” Cramer reveals that between and after his marriages, virtually the only women he met were prostitutes, one of whom still marvels at Joltin’ Joe’s physical attributes: He was “bigger than Milton Berle,” she said, Uncle Miltie representing the phallic paradigm of the ’40s and ’50s.

   This is juicy stuff, and it’s what’s missing from Clavin’s version. It’s not that “The DiMaggios” is sanitized, just that it’s plodding and literal, lacking narrative style and telling details. The brothers’ personality quirks are mentioned regularly but Vince’s affability, Dom’s shyness, and Joe’s sullen grudge-holding get lost among endless reiterations of what happened in Cleveland, in New York, in Boston on summer afternoons 70 years ago, when Joe went 3-for-4 and won a game that won a pennant that led to yet another World Series. In 1950, “The gutty Red Sox did not fold. On July 18, their 12-9 win over the Tigers at Fenway Park brought them to .500 at 39-39. In the next 59 games they went 47-12.” There must be baseball fanatics who will lap up all these stats and replays, but for most of us, a little more than a little of that is much too much.

    When the book gets interesting, predictably, is when Joe meets Marilyn. Clavin observes that they slept together on their first date, though I think it would be bigger news if they hadn’t; “dating” doesn’t seem like what these two were up to. Yet Clavin, in defiance of all evidence that their marriage was a liaison between two damaged, narcissistic, sex-addicted celebrities, tells us that their wedding was “a fairy-tale event for gossip lovers,” attended by none of Joe’s family. The marriage lasted less than a year.

    “He had loved her deeply. He always would,” writes Clavin. But Joe really was incapable of love, and didn’t want a homemaker and child-rearer for a wife; he’d tried that once before and gotten burned. Neither had any idea who the other really was. Returning from a promotional tour of Japan, Marilyn told her husband, by now retired, “You never heard such cheering.” He replied, “Yes, I have.” The people closest to him probably shared Toots Shor’s opinion of her: “Joe, what can you expect when you marry a whore?”

    The last few chapters of “The DiMaggios” are painful, as the brothers’ relationship deteriorates and one after another they sicken and die. Joe seems in his later years to have fallen under the spell of a sleazy lawyer named Morris Engelberg who made his money on the memorabilia circuit impersonating, as it were, Joe DiMaggio, and who, as Joe lay on his deathbed, may have pulled his World Series ring off his finger and then tried to pull the plug on his ventilator.

    The kid who just wanted to get out of the house ended up hoarding money and, except for a moocher, alone. If this is the American Dream, it’s a sad one.

   Richard Horwich, professor emeritus of English at Brooklyn College, writes regularly for this and other publications. He lives part time in East Hampton.

    Tom Clavin lives in Sag Harbor.

    Tom Clavin will discuss “The DiMaggios: Three Brothers, Their Passion for Baseball, Their Pursuit of the American Dream” on Saturday for the Amagansett Library’s Authors After Hours series.

    He has been on a baseball biography tear in recent years, this book coming hard on the heels of two others about stars of the New York City scene, Gil Hodges, of the lamented Brooklyn Dodgers and later the often lamentable Mets, and the Bronx Bombers’ Roger Maris, dubbed in that book’s subtitle “Baseball’s Reluctant Hero.”

    The reading starts at 6 p.m. and is free, but reservations in advance have been requested.

“The Art of Steampunk”

    “What is Steampunk? In three short words, Steampunk is Victorian science fiction.” So writes G.D. Falksen in his introduction to “The Art of Steampunk” by Art Donovan, just out in a revised second edition from Fox Chapel Publishing. Victorian is here meant as an evocation, referring to a heavily decorative look, an aesthetic, wholeheartedly and enthusiastically influenced by early industrialization.

    Mr. Donovan, who lives in Southampton, curated the movement’s defining moment, a famous 2009-10 show of ornate devices, contraptions, inventions, garments, breathing apparatuses, and field glasses at the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford University in England. He’ll speak about the book, the artists and craftsmen of the Oxford exhibition, and the increasingly popular movement in general at the East Hampton Library on Saturday at 1 p.m.

On the Fate of the Lit Mag

    So how are those book groups and workshops going? Vital to your creativity? And what about that small literary journal you came across at the coffee shop? Crucial among the diminishing outlets for fiction?

    Yes and yes. Such topics and a lot more will be chewed over next Thursday at a gathering led by Carol Muske-Dukes at BookHampton in East Hampton. At 8 p.m., Ms. Muske-Dukes, a poet, novelist, professor at the University of Southern California, and summertime resident of Springs, will be joined by Eliot Weinberger, a critic and translator, Cynthia Zarin, a poet, and Jean McGarry, a novelist, in reading from their work and getting down to brass tacks about “the little magazine and literary community in writing life today.” A flier calls the event “Little Star by the Sea,” referring to a new literary magazine, Little Star, edited by Ann Kjellberg, who will also be on hand.