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.   

“The Letters of

William Gaddis”

Edited by Steven Moore 

Dalkey Archive, $34.50

   Among postwar American novelists, no one was more elusive, and thus engendered more curiosity, than William Gaddis (save Thomas Pynchon, of course). In an era when authors like Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Gore Vidal used media to their great advantage, Gaddis sat for few interviews, fewer pictures, and, by my counting, only one television appearance.

   Even more frustrating to Gaddis fans is the sketchy biography: kicked out of Harvard senior year, a brief stint at The New Yorker, the extensive travels through Europe and South America, followed by the domestic Gaddis — family man and copy and speechwriter for various corporations. Then, at last, awards and modest fame. This is an abbreviation, but barely so — details are desperately lacking.

    There are the novels, of course: “The Recognitions,” “J R,” “Carpenter’s Goth­ic,” “A Frolic of His Own,” and “Agape Agape” — those brilliant, prolix, maddening novels, the second and fourth of which earned him National Book Awards for fiction.

    But that’s the art. Where’s the life?

    Clearly this obfuscation was exactly what Gaddis intended, having stated his ethos way back with his first novel, “The Recognitions.” “What is it they want from a man that they didn’t get from his work?” asks his painter protagonist. “What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology.”

    Well, Bill, since you asked, I would say that there is a natural inclination for readers to be curious about the artists who thrill them. Writing fiction — indeed art in general — is a mystery to those who enjoy it, and often to those who make it. The seemingly mystical connection between an artist and his or her art has been an endless source of fascination and study, and the relation between the two does not seem, to me at least, a superficial or meaningless pursuit. We want to know where it came from!

    So there was, for some of us, a sense of excitement when we learned that the Dalkey Press had put together “The Letters of William Gaddis,” culled from nearly 70 years of the writer’s correspondence. Now, finally, we would know something (anything) of Gaddis’s childhood; would find out the incident for which he got kicked out of Harvard; would finally understand how the anti-corporate writer reconciled a working life in the corporate world; would divine just how autobiographical some of the writer’s characters were (such as Jack Gibbs and Oscar Crease, whom we long ago took for Gaddis stand-ins). At last we would have some meat to fill in the flimsy biographical skeleton of one of the more intriguing literary enigmas of the last century.

    Or mostly not. For everything you learn about the author in “The Letters of William Gaddis,” there are three things you don’t. This is no fault of the editor, Steven Moore, who assembled these letters and who has been a champion of Gaddis through thick and thin; his footnotes are lavish, if sometimes desperate to fill in the biographical gaps. But in the end, the Gaddis letters are what they are, and what they are is a correspondence of a highly thoughtful, erudite, and occasionally cranky man who was obsessively reticent on the subject of himself and his life. This is of course entirely respectable, not to mention dignified — and frustrating to future biographers and Gaddis fans alike.

    What we get instead are dozens of pages of Gaddis thanking his mother, yet again, for money. “Thanks so much for the check — and now if I can collect from my roommate I can see Sylvia Sidney in Pygmalion this weekend too!” This is interesting only insofar as we see how deep into his 20s Gaddis — perhaps already believing himself a genius — is willing to accept cash from Mom.

    There are the dozens of letters of Gaddis asking about foreign rights to “The Recognitions” (most of which prove fruitless), dozens more fending off blurb requests from hopeful authors, and more than a handful denying to critics that he was influenced by James Joyce. These letters are polite, if somewhat arch, and after the first two or three, uninspiring to read. Of course this is a writer’s life and we are to expect this sort of thing, the mass of literary dross — but then there is so little of the other. I can’t readily think of a book of letters that — for the first half, at least — reveals so little of a subject’s inner life.

    What there is of it mostly comes when the cranky, full-throttled, unpunctuated Gaddis — the Gaddis of the novels — is unleashed through anger or despair. The prepartum of his behemoth, captalist-takedown novel, “J R,” 20 years in the making, gives us a few such nuggets. “. . . I’m doing the same God damned thing all over again with this book & will be 70 for the same idiotic reward, get your God damned picture in the Times and $5500 royalty on it while just your God damned teeth are threatening $8000. . . .”

    Here is Gaddis, relieved that he is at the finish line of “J R” because “I’LL NEVER (except for galleys) HAVE TO READ THE INFERNAL BOOK AGAIN! Boy I can’t wait hey. Also maybe I can learn how to talk like an intelligent adult again.”

    Then there are the attacks on critics, most of which are shared privately with friends (“Michiko Kamikaze” is a personal favorite) — until he directly takes on Rochelle Girson of The Saturday Review, who foolishly speculates that Gaddis was a rich kid who actually paid to have his first novel published. “Is there, here again, some personal motive?” the author fires back. “If there is not, I do not understand your fraudulent advertisement of my way of living; while yours becomes more embarrassingly and pitifully apparent.” What you get for messin’ with the Man.

    With a few exceptions, it is not until the author’s third act that we see Gaddis in a reflective mood and willing to write openly about himself. More often than not, this is conveyed through the lens of regret. By now, the books, the drinking, the breakups, the frustration and lack of success have wreaked their havoc on Gaddis and his family, and the author is not without his insights into his own failings. There’s this to his then-estranged wife, Judith: “I’ve wondered how much your reading J R after all these years of it dwelling in the back room there suddenly exposing itself and myself, has had to do with dormant problems abruptly stepping forth.”

    There are passing but sincere mea culpas about the years of drinking. And then, almost unexpectedly, many tender missives to his children, including a glowing review from Dad of the first novel by his daughter, Sarah, “. . . never a bit of self indulgence, so clean, so certain of itself & underivative of others’ styles so full & entirely itself in its haunting sense of desolation utterly uncluttered by sentimentality especially those very last lines which are so spare & simply stunning.”

    Probably “The Letters of William Gaddis” is exactly the book we should have expected. “Certainly I was reclusive for years and for damned good reason,” the author writes his daughter. How can anyone buck such dogged reticence? Certainly there is enough of the author here for fans and scholars to weed through and savor, undernourishing as it can sometimes be.

    Perhaps, in the end, Gaddis was right (again). You want the author, go to the books. “J R” would be a good place to start. You’ll laugh, marvel at its construction, grow bored and put it down for a month, and, finally finishing it, will feel you’ve experienced more and been taken farther than any interview or “revealing” letter ever could.

   William Gaddis lived in Wainscott for many years. He died in 1998.

    Kurt Wenzel is the author of the novels “Lit Life,” “Gotham Tragic,” and “Exposure.” He lives in Springs.

“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.

    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 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.

    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.

    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.”

“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.

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.