New From Rosenblatt (et al.)

    Oh sure, it’s a group reading, but there must be privileging. At least when Roger Rosenblatt clears his resonant throat to offer up some new prose — in this case, from “The Boy Detective,” a forthcoming memoir about growing up in the Big Apple.

    The occasion is a gathering of five writers associated with The Southampton Review on Saturday at 5 p.m. at BookHampton’s new digs in Southampton, a little storefront within shouting distance of Sip ’n’ Soda on Hampton Street. Mr. Rosenblatt will be joined by the legendary cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who is finishing up a “comix noir” graphic novel, “Kill My Mother,” and the poet Julie Sheehan, the author, most recently, of “Bar Book: Poems and Otherwise.”

    And, more or less fresh from the M.F.A. program Ms. Sheehan directs at Stony Brook Southampton, come Genevieve Crane (fiction and memoir) and Christopher Byrd (fiction).

Salter Speaks

    Sag Harbor’s Canio’s Books, tried and true, independent and funky, is ushering in its own summer season of literary events with the ultimate writer’s writer, James Salter, reading from his first novel in more than 30 years, “All That Is.” The book follows, enticingly, a Navy officer as he enters the publishing world of postwar Manhattan.

    Mr. Salter, who lives in Bridgehampton, turned 88 earlier this month. He’ll read starting at 5 p.m. on Saturday.

“Dreadful”

David Margolick

Other Press, $28.95

   Soon after the journalist and author David Margolick entered the Loomis School in Windsor, Conn., in the fall of 1966, he became aware of a particularly captivating bit of school lore: A generation or so earlier, a Loomis English teacher, who had already made a name for himself as the author of a celebrated novel set in World War II Italy, had written “a scabrous novel about Loomis called ‘Lucifer With a Book.’ It was . . . filled with thinly veiled caricatures of its teachers, many of whom were still there, the people we saw walking around every day.”

   That the satire was banned from Loomis’s own library only intrigued Mr. Margolick the more and impelled him to find out all he could about the book’s author, John Horne Burns, and about Burns’s life, his literary output, and his Loomis career. The result of Mr. Margolick’s decades-old fascination is “Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns,” published earlier this month.

    A longtime contributing editor for Vanity Fair (before that he was the national legal affairs correspondent at The New York Times), Mr. Margolick brings to this study of a now-forgotten author his considerable skills as a researcher and writer. The 437-page biography reads easily. It is a comprehensive reconstruction of an idiosyncratic life in a peculiar time.

    The two overarching elements of that life, apparently, were Burns’s intelligence and his homosexuality. They defined the arc of his existence. One accounted for his rise; the other, for his precipitous descent.

    He was born in 1916, the eldest of seven children in an Irish-Catholic family in Andover, Mass. Educated at Phillips Academy there, he went on to Harvard, where he majored in English and graduated having earned membership in Phi Beta Kappa.

    Accepting a teaching position at Loomis, an independent boys’ secondary school founded in 1914 (it merged with the nearby Chafee School in 1970 to become coeducational), was something of a compromise for Burns; he had sought employment at more prestigious institutions. Once there, however, he gave it his all, holding his students to high intellectual standards and becoming the sort of sardonic teacher one often finds at prep schools — a type whose combination of brilliance and haughtiness creates a cult of personality that invariably ensnares certain of their pupils and turns them into acolytes.

    One former student recalled a Burns lesson on how to distinguish a major poet from a minor one. “ ‘Now which is Edna St. Vincent Millay?’ he asked. ‘Clearly minor,’ several students replied. ‘No, of course not, you fools,’ he snapped back. ‘Anyone with the name Edna St. Vincent Millay is a major poet! Obviously!’ ”

    “John Horne Burns was the best teacher I ever had anywhere, in anything,” reported another Loomis alumnus.

    What might have been a satisfying life and career for many, failed to engage and satisfy Burns. While at Loomis, he wrote and destroyed several novels and began to leave campus whenever he could, presumably to pursue a clandestine gay social life away from the scrutiny of the school community.

    When the United States entered World War II, Burns had his excuse to escape what had become an oppressive existence at a New England boarding school. He entered the Army as a private and in short order was commissioned as a second lieutenant. His knowledge of several languages was put to use in various noncombat jobs in Morocco, Algeria, and Italy.

    The life of an American abroad appealed to Burns, who applied for work at the State Department following his discharge from the military in 1946. “They’ll take me for my snob value and education,” he predicted with some arrogance. But they didn’t. Turned down — presumably because of his homosexuality — Burns returned to Loomis for a year, during which time he wrote the novel that would bring him fame and, to a lesser degree, fortune.

    Published by Harper & Brothers in 1947, “The Gallery” was a somewhat controversial book. A novel created as a series of portraits of people whose lives intersected during the war at the Galleria Umberto, a Naples shopping arcade, it was considered unflattering to Italians and Americans alike. Moreover, it did not shy away from dealing explicitly with sexual matters (including homosexual matters) at a time when this was considered out of bounds for cultivated literature.

    Though far from universally acclaimed, “The Gallery” earned praise from such cultural and literary lights as Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway, among others. The attention and the royalties that accrued from the book enabled its author to leave Loomis and America for good, establishing himself as an expatriate writer in Florence in the late 1940s.

    His next two novels, “Lucifer” (1949) and “A Cry of Children” (1952), brought increasingly negative reviews and declining income. Burns, who had been drinking heavily for years, was by now probably an alcoholic. His life in Florence revolved around the bar at the Hotel Excelsior, where he became a fixture and held court nightly.

    Following a sailing trip in August 1953, Burns suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died in a Florence hospital. He was 36.

    At first blush, it is difficult to discern the underlying objective of Mr. Margolick’s enterprise here. One might suspect that it is to redirect the spotlight on, and rehabilitate the image of, an author of merit who has fallen into near-total obscurity. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Mr. Margolick argues neither that Burns’s life was exemplary (or even admirable), nor that his literary output deserves rediscovery.

    What we are left with, then, is a description of the corrosive effect of being gay in midcentury America on a person who was evidently intelligent, well educated, and talented. Like so many of his generation, Burns struggled with the overbearing pressure of being homosexual in a pervasively homophobic world, especially in a Roman Catholic family in New England. Although he himself made no secret of his sexuality, he was also self-loathing for it. The book’s very title, “Dreadful,” refers to a Burns code word for gay people; he used it as a noun, referring to himself and his gay counterparts as “dreadfuls.” To this day, some of Burns’s surviving siblings deny that their brother was gay (or at least refuse to talk about it).

    Mr. Margolick creates the unavoidable impression that Burns’s homosexuality contributed significantly to his becoming an increasingly bitter, biting, sarcastic, and unhappy man, and that there was a direct connection to his drinking — all of which short-circuited his innate talent and diminished his success and his reputation.

    On one hand, ultimately all one really needs to know about John Horne Burns is what Hemingway once wrote about him in his characteristically spare manner: “There was a fellow who wrote a fine book and then a stinking book about a prep school and then just blew himself up.”

    All the rest is detail.

    On the other hand, while Mr. Margolick’s biography does not convince me that Burns deserves the attention it affords him, it does illuminate what it was like to be gay at a particular moment in time. And as society moves toward eliminating what some consider to be the last acceptable prejudice, that is a worthy contribution. (Is it cynical to suspect that the book’s publication was timed to occur during Gay Pride Month?)

    Moreover, this book has inspired me to seek out “The Gallery,” if for no other reason than to see what all the short-lived fuss was about, once upon a time.

   A weekend resident of East Hampton, James I. Lader regularly contributes book reviews to The Star.

   David Margolick lives in Sag Harbor.

A Summer of Friday Authors

    There are readings, and then there are readings at which you can wipe your mouth of a toothsome hors d’oeuvre, rise from your folding chair, and direct a question of your choosing at the author in attendance, plastic tumbler of chardonnay in hand.

    Such is Fridays at Five at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton, the popular series known for its book signings, question-and-answer gabfests, and shade courtesy of a massive Norway maple — to say nothing of the traditionally strong lineups. This year’s starts tomorrow at 5 p.m. with the four-time Tony Award-winning playwright Terrence McNally, who will talk about “Golden Age” and other plays. Admission is $15. Books of five tickets are available for $60.

    On Friday, July 12, the series continues with Lily Koppel and her brand-new one, “The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story.” July 19 brings the Southampton crime writer Chris Knopf and “Dead Anyway,” and then on July 26 it’s Peter M. Wolf reading from his new memoir, “My New Orleans, Gone Away.”

    The first four Fridays in August will have Eric Fischl (“Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas”), Morton and Joan Hamburg (“Commitment”), Bridgehampton’s own James Salter (“All That Is”), and MaryAnn Calendrille and Kathryn Szoka of Canio’s Books (“Sag Harbor Is: A Literary Celebration”).

Return of the Poetry Marathon

    Grace Schulman of Springs, the real deal among poets (and one who is profiled elsewhere in The Star this week), will open the season’s Poetry Marathon on Sunday at 5 p.m. at the Marine Museum on Bluff Road in Amagansett. She has a new collection due out in September from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, “Without a Claim.” Joining her in reading will be Sandra Langer, who writes art criticism as well as poetry.

    The series, produced by Sylvia Chavkin and held weekly through Aug. 11, is free and offers refreshments at receptions following the readings. The other poetic duos in store are Carole Stone and Janice Bishop, Alex Russo and Virginia Walker, Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan and Ted Hartley, Patty Noble and Gloria Beckerman, and Monica Enders and Teri Kennedy.

“My Daughter, Myself”

Linda Wolfe

Greenpoint Press, $20

   On a Mother’s Day visit to Texas to see her only daughter, Jessica, mother of two small children, a mother’s worst nightmare begins. Suffering from dizziness and a splitting headache, Jessica is rushed to the emergency room. A CT scan and “every test known to women” are given and Jessica is sent home, diagnosed with a migraine.

    When Jessica calls from the E.R. to tell her mother she’s okay, Linda goes down on her knees, not praying, but wiping up eggs she had spilled in nervous and frantic anticipation of what she might learn when she picked up the phone.

    A day later, however, Jessica is not improving, and after another trip to the E.R., Linda discovers that her daughter had a massive clot in her brain and had suffered a stroke. It turns out that some 800,000 Americans a year are assaulted by stroke, killing about 17 percent and damaging the lives of many who survive. The primary victims of stroke are over 65, and only 10 to 15 percent are like Jessica, who was 38 at the time.

    A searing account of a daughter’s physical and mental rehabilitation, “My Daughter, Myself” reminds us of the fragility of life and the powerful, primal cord that binds a mother to her daughter. Journalist, essayist, and contributing editor to New York magazine, Linda Wolfe charts her experience, and the dizzying foreign maze of dealing with hospitals and doctors and illness, with a reporter’s unsparing attention to detail.

    We discover that if the surgeons went in to relieve the swelling in Jessica’s brain, she’d most likely bleed to death. Although Jessica experienced occasional periods of lucidity, she could no longer perceive anything on her left side, “as if half of her had vanished.” Linda and her son-in-law, Jon, are told by the surgeons that Jessica’s chances of survival are slim, and even if she survives she’s likely to be paralyzed and suffer severe neurological damage. Expecting the worst, Jon begins to think about the time he would need to get his family to Texas for Jessica’s funeral.

    Compelling, heartbreaking, and down-to-earth, Ms. Wolfe reports the hours of agony she and her son-in-law shared as Jessica eventually undergoes high-risk surgery, remains comatose, and doctors offer little hope. To console and give ballast, Ms. Wolfe quotes Maimonides on what constitutes “death,” the time when one can stop all heroic measures — and also from Joan Didion, Michel de Montaigne, and John Donne, all of whom wrote profoundly and eloquently about illness, death, and the loss of a child.

    Divided in two parts, “The Nightmare” and “The Long Road Back,” and with a title that echoes a classic feminist work about the ties that bind mothers and daughters, Nancy Friday’s “My Mother, Myself,” this memoir allows the reader to experience a mother’s intense, unswerving fear and helplessness, and also her abiding love and devotion. The best parts are where we are offered a glimpse into the anxious psyche of a mother who prays every night that her gifted daughter won’t end up in a nursing home, and universal insights and truths about motherhood and a mother’s inability to take away a daughter’s pain.

    “I knew it was good that she was expressing her feelings,” Ms. Wolfe writes, when her daughter begins to slowly recover, “but I was distraught at hearing them and being unable to make things better. Facile encouragements wouldn’t do. Nor would denial. What to do? I just let her talk, let her tell me things I longed not to hear because they made me feel so inadequate but which she now urgently wanted to impart.”

    The best memoirs allow the reader to enter the story and find something universal in the experience portrayed. Though Linda Wolfe does an informative job of chronicling the medical details of her daughter’s stroke and recovery, and her own fear and anger, I wished for a little more breadth and artfulness in the telling, and a chance to get to know Jessica and her family before tragedy hits.

    With that said, the purpose of any work, especially memoir, is to connect a community of readers, and those who have experienced the devastation of watching a loved one suffer and ultimately recover will find comfort and solace in this moving account.

   Jill Bialosky is a poet, novelist, and editor at W.W. Norton and Company. Her most recent book is “History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life.” She lives in Manhattan and Bridgehampton.

    Linda Wolfe’s books include “Wasted: The Preppie Murder” and “The Literary Gourmet.” She is a summertime resident of Sag Harbor.

And Now, Authors After Hours

    Here’s a summer reading series of some note. Authors After Hours starts Saturday at the Amagansett Library at 6 p.m., when Paul Tough, who has been an editor at The New York Times Magazine and Harper’s, weighs in on the importance simple gumption plays in children’s future life outcomes. More so than I.Q., he argues in “How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character.”

    Next up, on July 20, is Tom Clavin, the author of the well-received “Roger Maris: Baseball’s Reluctant Hero,” who will read from his latest, “The DiMaggios: Three Brothers, Their Passion for Baseball, Their Pursuit of the American Dream.” Wither the novel, you ask? For your consideration: Charles Dubow’s debut, “Indiscretion,” with its various romantic entanglements and Georgica setting. It’s the July 27 offering.

    And then August brings Jules Feiffer (“Backing Into Forward”) on the 3rd, Kati Marton (“Paris: A Love Story”) on the 17th, and Talia Carner (“Jerusalem Maiden”) on the 24th. Call ahead for reservations, book fans.

The Long-Lost Hamptons

    After nearly two decades of work, Geoff Gehman is ready to unveil his thoroughly researched, lovingly assembled memoir, “The Kingdom of the Kid: Growing Up in the Long-Lost Hamptons,” published by Excelsior Editions of the SUNY Press.

    The years of the reign? 1967 to 1972. And inside there’s far more than roaming kids on bikes, bouts of rolling down Wainscott dunes, or even troubled family dynamics. Car culture is explored, for instance, from Bridgehampton’s racetrack and drive-in to Henry Austin Clark Jr.’s old Long Island Automotive Museum in Southampton. You want the lit life of the Hamptons? The author explores the writings and character of Sagaponack’s Truman Capote — his “A Christmas Memory” greatly influenced Mr. Gehman, who went on to be an arts writer for The Morning Call in Allentown, Pa.

    There are two chances to catch Mr. Gehman this weekend, on Saturday at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, and on Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Bridgehampton Museum’s Corwith House, where afterward refreshments from Plain-T, a Southampton tea concern, will be served.

Important Authors: a Trifecta

    Hail the heavyweights! And in rapid succession, too. At BookHampton in East Hampton this weekend, the lineup of readers is the legendary James Salter on Saturday at 5 p.m., the 2013 Pulitzer Prize winner in nonfiction, Tom Reiss, at 8 that night, and on Sunday at 3 p.m. the veteran journalist and author Linda Wolfe with her new memoir of her daughter’s stroke and recovery, “My Daughter, Myself.”

    Mr. Salter’s new novel, his first in almost 30 years, is “All That Is,” which follows a Navy officer’s adventures in the New York publishing world of the second half of the 20th century. Mr. Reiss’s book is “The Black Count,” a tale of “glory, revolution, and betrayal” and a history of “the real” Count of Monte Cristo.

Deep Into an Island’s Past

    Remember the plan to build a new John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor? One of the leading opponents and victors, the preservation-minded Mac Griswold, formerly aligned with the Friends of the J.J.M.L., is returning to the battleground, as it were, her major new book of local history in hand. “The Manor” is newly out from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and Sylvester Manor on Shelter Island is the subject, teased with a subheading, “Three Hundred Years at a Slave Plantation on Long Island.”

    Ms. Griswold will be at the library’s temporary home on West Water Street next Thursday at 5:30 p.m. to read, discuss, and sign copies for the 20 lucky souls the event is limited to. That means put in a word in advance to register. (As for the renovation of the old library, all that red brick, recently out from behind scaffolding, looks lovely. Now if the modern addition could just be scuttled before it’s too late.)

“Cooper and the

Enchanted Metal

Detector”

Adam Osterweil

Namelos Books, $18.95

   Goodbye school, hello summer reading. “Cooper and the Enchanted Metal Detector” is a novel for middle-grade readers that takes place over the course of a pivotal summer for Cooper, the 10 (or perhaps 11)-year-old protagonist. A complete epoch can occur bookended by June and August, and Adam Osterweil, who has brought young readers “The Comic Book Kid” and “The Amulet of Komondor,” among others, seems to know all about the arc of summer.

   If it’s hello summer reading, it’s a friendly how-do-you-do to the nonrequired, kids-get-to-pick summer list. Welcome, Cooper. Nice to meet you and your blend of history and personality.

    “Cooper and the Enchanted Metal Detector” takes place in upstate New York near the Chemung River Valley. Cooper and his mom live in a run-down house there and operate an antiques business out of the old barn on their property. Cooper adds to the stock in the barn by riding his bike to garage sales and snapping up finds with a well-trained eye. At one garage sale, a lady takes a shine to Cooper and gives him an old metal detector. Her stories, her Iroquois heritage, and her friendship become important elements in the story of Cooper’s summer.

    Metal detector in hand, Cooper begins poking around the property where he lives and discovers the site of a historic Revolutionary War battle. This is of much import to one Mr. Shepard of the Elmira Museum, who believes the artifacts belong in the museum for all to learn from and enjoy. Mr. Shepard has the history bug and a talent for storytelling, and it’s through his knowledge passed on to Cooper that the reader learns about the Battle of Newtown, its place in American history, and the role of the Iroquois in the conflict.

    Mr. Osterweil delivers history well, with a passion for storytelling and honesty around the not-so-rosy record of war and the colonial treatment of native people. As Mr. Shepard tells Cooper, “Cooper, I know you don’t like talking about these things, but you need to know this. George Washington sent that big army up here to destroy the Iroquois civilization.”

    As the story progresses, the history of the battle weaves in with Cooper’s emotional life so that the elements of the book tie together. And what about Cooper’s emotional life? It is turbulent, curious, imaginative, high volume. The reader learns that he has lost a sibling, that his father has long since abandoned the family, and that his home life is far from conventional. Cooper’s mom sold the car; they use a neighbor’s phone to make calls. Since his mom doesn’t have a bank account, Cooper keeps their money in a coffee tin, and takes charge of most things around the house. It’s just Cooper and his mom, and she’s not in terrific shape for dealing with day-to-day things:

    “The best way to picture Mom is to imagine a rocky cliff riddled with caves next to a pounding ocean. It’s nighttime, and dark clouds cover the moon. The smell of seaweed tickles your nose, and howling wind sends sea spray into your eyes. High up in a cavern lit by glowing crystals, in a pool of sparkling blue water, sits a mermaid with a long tail wrapped around a rock. She has yellow hair that casts a strange shadow on the wall. She never combs it, but somehow it could never be prettier. Her eyes glow like the water, and when she stares straight at a human, her perfect beauty makes them fall to their knees and lose the power of their legs. She’s lonely in that cave, but the tide went out a long time ago and never came back, stranding her up there.”

    All of the writing in the book is not as intense as this excerpt, but Mr. Osterweil gets well inside his main character and spends some time there. “Cooper and the Enchanted Metal Detector” comes right from Cooper’s own point of view in stereophonic first-person narration that includes his secrets, his fears, and his conversations with a host of inanimate objects.

   “Put my face right up against the ground,” Decto said. “A short beam comes out and that senses metal. The closer I am to the ground, the deeper the beam can go.”

   I moved the plastic disc so that it touched the moss. Decto’s face scraped against the ground. He started sniffing the moss like a hound.

   “Now move my face left and right in a big arc.”

   “In a big what?”

   “A big curve.”

   “Oh, I thought you meant one of those things that holds two of every animal.”

    Cooper is especially in conversation with his friends Decto the metal detector and Squeaky the bike, but he’s also in regular communication with the mailbox, the mop, the mirror, and later in the book the Earth itself as well as the Wind (who answers in rhyme). These conversations have internal consistency and sticking power so that they feel perfectly real, and it is uncertain (in a good way) if this fantasy element is part of Cooper’s imagination or part of the actual reality of his world.

    At one point, Decto the metal detector eats an order of McDonald’s French fries. This event seems weird but not unbelievable, so you see what kind of Cooper’s-world immersion Mr. Osterweil has created.

    Cooper’s point of view on things is emotional, sensitive, quirky, zany, even actually odd at times. He’s at once very independent and very needy, a contradiction/combination that is certainly — and sometimes painfully — realistic. But if you want to read Cooper’s story, you’ll have to deal with Cooper’s issues. After all, Cooper is.

    By the end of the book, the arc of summer is complete and Cooper has come a long way. Uncovering the battle site has allowed him to uncover some buried psycho-emotional territory, and it looks as if things will be shifting. He even makes a list of changes he’d like to make: “Cooper’s New Life,” which actually addresses most of the concerns this reader had for Mr. Osterweil’s complex boy protagonist. Young readers will likely appreciate Cooper’s plan of action, too.

    The enchantment of Decto the metal detector, it turns out, lies in the power to begin a chain of events, to put in motion a cause and effect that breaks the isolated spell of Cooper’s home life. And thus Cooper finds fodder for a first-class “What I Did Over My Summer Vacation” essay, and the perspective to write his own history.

   Evan Harris is the author of “The Art of Quitting.” She lives in East Hampton with her husband and two sons.

    Adam Osterweil teaches English at the Springs School.

Claire Reed Toughs It Out

    Claire Reed left behind a privileged life of country clubs and golf outings to wade hip deep into the feminist fights, civil rights struggles, and disarmament movement of the latter part of the last century. She would become a tireless organizer and activist for a number of progressive nonprofits, and the right-hand woman of Bella Abzug leading up to and during Abzug’s Congressional career.

    All of which Ms. Reed documents in “Toughing It Out: From Silver Slippers to Combat Boots,” out recently from the Feminist Press. Ms. Reed, a former East Hampton resident and still a visitor here, will read from the book on Saturday at 5:30 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.

Ashawagh Alights

    There are writers workshops and then there are writers workshops. One of the particularly well-liked and better-thought-of groups in these parts, Marijane Meaker’s Ashawagh Hall Writers Workshop, every year arranges readings for its members at the East Hampton Library on the first Monday and Tuesday of the months of June, July, and August.

    On Monday and Tuesday at 5:30 p.m., writers will be in the library’s Bendheim Room to share what they’ve been working on, from fiction to creative nonfiction, and to field questions.

Real Estate Horrors — Aloud

    Don’t dare show your face in public? Have others show theirs. Anonymous x Two, the ladies who dished the dirt so hard on the real estate biz here they had to remain in hiding, are having a reading of their recent book, “The Hamptons Real Estate Horror Show,” on Saturday from 4 to 5:30 p.m. at the Springs Presbyterian Church.

    Bill Henderson of that hamlet, the master anthologist behind the Pushcart Press, will open and close the proceedings, which involve readings by a variety of friends, compatriots, and sympathizers, among them Judy Long, who is an editor at The Nation, Jackie Dunphy, and Leah Sklar. The event is free and promises copies of the book and refreshments in equal, copious measure.

Authors Night Tix

    Tickets have gone on sale for the East Hampton Library’s Authors Night, a gathering of more than 100 writers beneath tents on the library’s grounds — this year on Aug. 10. Prices range from $100 to $2,500 to attend one of the more sought-after dinner parties that follow the massive book signing and chat-fest.

    Among those attending are perennials like Jay McInerney and Nelson DeMille, new writers like Jessica Soffer (“Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots”), and a perhaps familiar face seen in a new light — Peter M. Wolf, who is soon to come out with a memoir, “My New Orleans, Gone Away.”

“Origins of the Past”

Edited by Tom Twomey

East End Press, $40

    Chroniclers, diarists, and historians often must have felt what East Hampton’s master mechanic Nathaniel Dominy IV scribed on the rear of a metal tall-case clock dial he made in 1788: “Where oh! Where shall I be when this clock is worn out?” Heaven may have been the answer Dominy was suggesting, but to the recorder or analyst of history the perfect solution is to be published and remain a viable source of information.

    Dominy’s late-18th-century clocks are still keeping time — the pendulums swing back and forth, the rhythm of the tick alive and well. And the writings of many of our past regional historians remain a constant resource to understand the very complicated creation of East Hampton Town. Their books are not worn out. Their words transmit many thoughts that have become part of the myths and realities of East Hampton’s past.

    It is to our present historians that the task of sorting and verifying these authors’ works falls. It is a job of sifting through documents that often were not available to past generations and reformulating old information with recent research. Historians are forever rediscovering bits of the past and thankfully startling us with their fresh interpretations.

    The South Fork of Long Island has been well chronicled by several 19th-century historians, William S. Pelletreau, Henry Hedges, and George Rogers Howell in particular. In the 20th century, James Truslow Adams, Harry Sleight, Jeannette Edwards Rattray, and Abigail Fithian Halsey added greatly to our understanding of our communities in earlier days. Today, Timothy Breen, Faren Siminoff, John A. Strong, and David Goddard have produced important books that involved endless research and innovative thinking.

    But East Hampton lacks a comprehensive modern scholarly history. Our last history of East Hampton Town was published 60 years ago. So many important archives have come to light since then; so many ideas have been developed about the Atlantic world and the great migration of the 17th century. We all await the next “History of East Hampton.”

    Luckily a local institution has been compiling volumes of selected writings from both past and present authors to help quench the thirst of those who love the stories of old-time East Hampton. The East Hampton Library has been in the lead regionally in supporting the publication of books on local history. Besides being the keepers of a renowned resource of East Hampton material in its Long Island Collection, it has consistently held public programs that have focused on local history writers.

    Indeed, the library’s first volume of East Hampton historical essays was “Awakening the Past: The East Hampton 350th Anniversary Lecture Series — 1998,” a celebration of scholars and history writers who brought a worldview to local studies. This book was quickly followed by three other compendiums, including the writings of Henry Hedges, Jeannette Edwards Rattray, and a gathering of 19th-century essays by men of letters like Walt Whitman and William Cullen Bryant.

    Today we are looking at the fifth in the library’s series, “Origins of the Past: The Story of Montauk and Gardiner’s Island.” It was a brilliant idea to choose two of the most romantic areas within East Hampton’s borders for examination. Both have had their share of myth and mystery. Just say “Gardiner’s Island” and everyone has a tale to tell, be it of buried pirate treasure or a bit of bragging about once being on the island, illegitimately or not.

    The book is divided into five parts, starting with “The Montauketts: Montauk’s First Inhabitants.” Gaynell Stone and John A. Strong are the pre-eminent scholars of East End native peoples and have consistently ignored the patronizing Eurocentric approaches that most local histories engage in. They offer the reader a well-documented paper that is as vivid as it is factual. Following Ms. Stone and Mr. Strong is a contemporary account of the famous 18th-century Native American missionary, the Rev. Samson Occum, who recorded some of the social customs of the Montauketts. Both of these pieces are very important windows into the First People.

    Part II includes discussions of the role that local wampum making had on the destinies of the Montauketts and the Shinnecocks. Sad destinies replete with European greed and manipulation. Wampum beads were made out of purplish-black or white whelk and quahog shells. The shell fragments were arduously drilled, rounded, and polished. Native Americans used these beads as money, and after white contact some were woven into belts as treaty documents. The essays by Lynn Ceci and Elizabeth Shapiro Pena are vital to our understanding of what wampum meant to the original inhabitants and how it became lusted after as the currency of the coastal colonists.

    The book’s editor, Tom Twomey, the chairman of the East Hampton Library, who spearheads these volumes, next introduces the reader to Part III, where we find several historical fragments that give Lion Gardiner a voice, as well as some useful history of the Pequot War and two rare impressionistic essays relating to the Montaukett Pharaoh family.

    This acts as an introduction to Part IV, “The Legend and Lore of Gardiner’s Island,” in which the individual articles include a mixture of myth and scholarship.

    And how do we escape the legends of Gardiner’s Island — and do we want to? Mr. Strong’s incisive lecture from the 2009 Stony Brook University conference “Worlds of Lion Gardiner (1599-1663): Crossings and Boundaries” is the best writing we have on the personality of Gardiner and his relationship with the great sachem of the Montauketts, Wyandanch. Its illustration of Gardiner’s business acumen may taint their sentimental friendship, which has often been depicted in the past.

   This lecture is a very important addition to this anthology. As is Roger Wunderlich’s “ ‘An Island of Mine Owne’: The Life and Times of Lion Gardiner, 1599-1663,” a clearheaded history of Gardiner’s purchase of the island. Some of the older selections are included to focus on the lore.

    The final section, “Montauk Through the Ages,” includes eight pieces, one a full chapter (over 100 pages) by the noted historian David Goddard, whose splendid “Colonizing Southampton: The Transformation of a Long Island Community, 1870-1900” was published two years ago by the SUNY Press. Mr. Goddard summered in Southampton for a number of years and became intrigued by the history of land ownership, the development of the South Fork’s summer colonies, and the histories of two of its most famous golf courses.

    Titled “On Montauk,” Mr. Goddard’s article is positively the best and most accurate research done on the convoluted story of how this Montaukett land became part of East Hampton. The obtuse twists and turns, the cast of characters, and the fraught relationships between supposed owners is almost operatic. Only a scholar with a sure hand could keep all these players in order. If there is one article you must read, it is this one.

    There are other jewels in this section. Jeff Heatley’s “Col. Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and Camp Wikoff” is sharply written and combines a number of very informative quotes to fully put a face on this almost forgotten war (the Spanish-American) and a rather overlooked part of Montauk’s history. It is entertaining to see Walt Whitman, Henry Osmers, and Jeannette Edwards Rattray sharing these pages of Montauk stories, and what fun to imagine them trading tales.

    I was pleased to see one of my favorite pieces of old-time travelogue writing show up in this last part. First published in 1871 in the New Monthly magazine, the painter Charles Parsons gives us a visual essay on what Montauk looked like in the fall almost 150 years ago. Here, seen by an artist’s eyes, is all the romance that a rustic retreat could rustle up. “Mile by mile we walked by the sea; the beach was a pure clean sweep, free from seaweed, pebbles, or stones. Tiny sandpipers were running along in front of us, following the curves of the incoming and receding waves.”

    This world may be lost now, but it lives on like an old Dominy grandfather clock. The words are here in this collection of writing, ready to seduce or enlighten us. It is the history of East Hampton ticking away. It feels good to have it saved within the boards of a book. These days, could anything be more historic than a book?

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

    East End and New York poets will turn out in force Saturday for one of their own, Harvey Shapiro, who will be remembered through recollections and readings of his work starting at 6 p.m. at Stony Brook Southampton.

    Mr. Shapiro, who lived in Brooklyn and East Hampton, was the author of numerous collections of poems, his most recent being “The Sights Along the Harbor,” from 2006. He was an editor at The New York Times Magazine and, from 1975 to 1983, the editor of The Times Book Review. He died on Jan. 7 at the age of 88.

    Joining family members and former students in the Duke Lecture Hall will be the poets Grace Schulman, Simon Perchik, Kimiko Hahn, Geoffrey O’Brien, Kathryn Levy, Fran Castan, Robert Hershon, and Star Black, among others. Bill Henderson of the Pushcart Prize and Press will read, as will Kathryn Szoka of Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.

    A video will be shown, and there will be a reception after the readings. A tribute to Mr. Shapiro appears on B1 this week.