Yes, spring seems far off. And yes, Major Jackson sounds like an important figure in the Battle of Antietam. Neither is the case, however, and both will converge Wednesday for the start of that season’s months-long series of readings and talks at Stony Brook Southampton. Writers Speak happens weekly at 7 p.m. upstairs in Chancellors Hall.

    Mr. Jackson, the poetry editor of The Harvard Review, is a poet in his own right, and he’ll read from his work. His several volumes include “Leaving Saturn,” which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at the University of Vermont.

     The free series continues on Feb. 20 with Robin Desser, a senior editor at Alfred A. Knopf, discussing the book biz with the college’s Dan Menaker, a former fiction editor at The New Yorker. Another talk the following week will involve Bill Collage, a screenwriter, and Annette Handley Chandler, the director of the screenwriting conference on campus. Readings by the authors Alexandra Styron, Benjamin Anastas, and Alice Mattison take place in the succeeding weeks.

    On April 10, Maryrose Wood, who writes young-adult books, will be in conversation with the children’s book author Emma Walton Hamilton. Mr. Menaker will be back after that to talk to Deborah Treisman, a New Yorker fiction editor, and the series concludes on May 1 with a reading by students in the M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature.

“Dead Anyway”

Chris Knopf

Permanent Press, $28

    Meet Arthur Cathcart, a 42-year-old, 40-pounds-overweight freelance market researcher. He is the protagonist of Chris Knopf’s 10th novel, “Dead Anyway.” He describes himself as a “vigorous schlump” and “a Samurai of the Information Age,” though when we first encounter him, he seems more a samurai of snacking, noshing his way through several meals in the first few pages.

   Arthur is married to a lovely woman named Florencia and lives contentedly in Stamford, Conn. Florencia owns a successful insurance agency. In the first chapter, Arthur heads out to do some errands (and gobble some ice cream). When he returns he finds his wife in the living room with a man with a gun. The man wants Florencia to answer a few questions he has written down. To demonstrate his urgent intent, he shoots Arthur in the thigh.

    “He handed the envelope and a pen to Florencia, who picked the items gingerly out of his hand with her long, elegant fingers. ‘You read it and fill in the blanks. Or I shoot you. I already know one of the answers, so if you like risking your life on one in five odds, go for it.’ ”

    Despite the fact that she does precisely as he asks, the man shoots her in the forehead. Then he shoots Arthur in the head as well. Florencia dies, but Arthur somehow survives. Arthur is unconscious for “part of a year.” His sister, Evelyn, realizing that Arthur can identify the killer, puts out for general consumption the disinformation that he is in — and is likely to remain in — a persistent vegetative state. This is not true, but since she realizes that if he regains consciousness he can identify the killer, she thinks it wise to pretend otherwise.

    When Arthur returns to consciousness, he is a changed man. He cannot walk very well, he has lost his 40 excess pounds, his “eyes aren’t working as well,” and apparently he has lost his ability to do math, at which he used to be terrific. He falls a lot, misjudges the location of common objects, and has diminished social affect.

    “The psychiatrist told me and my sister that my cognitive acuity was remarkably intact, but my social affect, empathy and equanimity factors were nearly immeasurable.”

    Arthur decides that the coma story is going to work only temporarily, and a more permanent solution is actually to pretend that he has died. To that end, he uses his computer skills to acquire a new identity. Arthur Cathcart dies and Alex Rimes is born, or at least created. For some reason, though Arthur/Alex is flush with cash from the proceeds of his and his wife’s estate, he decides that the money should be used to purchase a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of rare guitars from a friend of his, which he can use as “a ready source of entirely non-traceable cash” whenever he needs it.

    The newly created Alex is now ready to commence a hunt for the killer of his wife, the destroyer of his health and happiness, and, essentially, his own murderer. He packs up some money and decamps from his home. The first thing he does is to locate, online, a retired F.B.I. special agent named Shelly Gross, who was involved in fighting racketeering in Connecticut. He also discovers the name of a reporter for The Connecticut Post named Henry Eichenbach. Both reporter and agent had, at one time, investigated a thug by the name of Sebbie (The Eyeball) Frondutti. Alex sends an e-mail to Eichenbach, “Looking for the Eyeball?”

    He meets the reporter and now makes a deal with him: “If you decide to help me [locate Frondutti] . . . your agenda will be advanced in ways that might prove the salvation of your book project. . . . Your knowledge of the world will expand exponentially.” The reporter gives Alex a lead to locate Frondutti and they part ways.

    Things start to get pretty complicated from here. On the home front, Bruce, the comptroller of Arthur’s wife’s insurance agency, has told Evelyn that “Damien Brandt’s father, Elliot,” a billionaire investor out of Westport, wants to purchase his wife’s business. He wants to keep all the staff and carry on the business as is in order to buy Damien his job permanently.

    Alex tracks down and contacts Frondutti.

     “I need information from you,” I said in my Clint Eastwood voice.

     “That’s unlikely to happen. I don’t give myself information if I don’t have to.”

     “You have to, or suffer terrible consequences.”

    Frondutti tells him to fuck off, so Alex begins surveillance on him and his family. Eventually he breaks into Frondutti’s home and, as a tacit threat, leaves a photo he has taken of the man’s daughter on his bed, with the phone number of a disposable cellphone written on the other side. The picture turns out to be of Frondutti’s wife, but it does the trick anyway, and Frondutti calls the number and provides Alex with contact information for five local captains of thuggery, one of whom Alex seems to have reason to believe is the person responsible for his wife’s murder and his ruination.

    The trail leads him to a casino where Alex meets, and eventually hooks up with, Natsumi Fitzgerald, a card dealer. She becomes his love interest and his partner in uncovering the culprit, who may be a professional killer who goes by the name of Austin Ott III, or Jason Three Sticks. In order to flush out his killer, Alex must become yet another person, this one a fabulously wealthy precious-metals trader. And to be convincing, he must throw a party and invite the cream of Greenwich society to a party that costs $250,000.

    I must admit that I often found the writing in “Dead Anyway” careless. Mr. Knopf writes, “My heart was spinning hard in my chest.” (Really? His heart was “spinning”?) And then a few pages later, “I felt my heart descend into a snarling wall of irredeemable anguish.” (A “snarling wall”?) A character watches someone “with a face that exuded either grudging respect or uncontainable contempt.” A moment later, “in less time than you can think a thought,” a gun is pointed at him, and then, just as he dies, he says, “I hate gettin’ shot.”

    Still, the sloppy writing shouldn’t be a deal-breaker. Mr. Knopf tells a good story, with a lot of narrative thrust, and the in-depth details of Arthur/Alex’s scams and Internet researching are well done and often interesting. One definitely wants to get to the end of the novel to find out what happens.

    Michael Z. Jody, a regular book reviewer for The Star, is a psychotherapist and couples counselor with offices in Amagansett and New York City.

    Chris Knopf has a house in Southampton.

“Cheating Justice”

Elizabeth Holtzman

and Cynthia L. Cooper

Beacon Press, $26.95

   Elizabeth Holtzman, a Harvard Law graduate and the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, served on the House Judiciary Committee during Watergate and was district attorney of Kings County (Brooklyn). Now, she and her co-author, the journalist and attorney Cynthia L. Cooper, have written a real eye-opener, “Cheating Justice: How Bush and Cheney Attacked the Rule of Law and Plotted to Avoid Prosecution — and What We Can Do About It.” In clear, fact-based prose, they have laid out the basis of possible criminal charges against former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney. Ms. Holtzman believes they are still legally prosecutable for the following crimes:

    Purposeful false statements in the 2003 State of the Union Message.

    Purposeful false statements to Congress in a letter of determination to go to war against Iraq.

    Violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 regarding the right to privacy of Americans.

    Violation of international standards and laws, as well as of the U.S. Constitution, regarding torture.

    Furthermore, the authors add the charge that the Bush-Cheney team and their supporters engaged in actions both nationally and internationally to prevent investigations and to suppress information regarding their illegal activities. The authors charge they systematically set out to modify applicable laws to provide loopholes for their defense in order to keep themselves from being convicted should their acts ever be investigated and prosecuted.

    They were apparently confident in the success of their efforts. Ms. Holtzman and Ms. Cooper document that Bush and Cheney openly admitted that they ordered and approved tactics including torture, or as they put it, “enhanced interrogation tactics,” of detainees held indefinitely without formal charges or due process.

    During the recent presidential election, there was much talk from both parties about upholding the Constitution, restoring America to its accustomed prestige on the world stage, being proud of America and its values, and keeping America strong. If any one of the accusations against Bush-Cheney put forth by Ms. Holtzman and Ms. Cooper is partially true, the country’s integrity has been severely undermined by the former administration. If the charges are mostly or all true, the damage to the country in the long run will extend far into the future.

    “Cheating Justice” was released nearly a year ago. I live among and socialize with people who, I believe, are politically aware and interested in a strong America, and who would tend to be interested in the hypotheses and information contained in this book. After reading the book in preparation for this review, I realized how important its questions are. And the answers to the questions are even more relevant to the future of our country. Since I likely would not have read the book had The Star not asked me to review it, I decided to survey some friends to see if they were more informed. A few thought they had heard about the book. No one I talked to, however, had participated in one conversation about Elizabeth Holtzman or the book.

    Then I checked the World Wide Web and could not find a review of the book done by a major print magazine or newspaper. I found a YouTube video about Ms. Holtzman’s appearance at Hunter College and several Internet news pieces about how important but overlooked the book is. The process has left me shaken, more worried about my country and more vexed about my own lack of participation in what we call “our democracy.”

    During Watergate, the White House counsel John Dean cautioned President Nixon about the spreading of lawlessness from the White House into the whole country. According to the Nixon tapes, Mr. Dean said, “We have a cancer within — close to the presidency, that’s growing.” Ms. Holtzman and Ms. Cooper point out in this book that a new cancer, a milieu of lying, deceit, and abuse of power similar in some ways to Watergate, may be more prevalent than we have admitted. The authors document abuses by the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., and I would add there may be diminishing integrity in military leadership, where bad judgment if not illegal activity has exposed weaknesses in leaders who before were held up as paragons of honesty.

    The authors of “Cheating Justice” document what is, perhaps, the most shocking part of the post-Bush-Cheney years: The international community is now leading the United States in efforts to address the illegal activities conducted during the Bush-Cheney administration. They note that other countries have mounted or are mounting efforts to address the crimes those countries unwittingly became involved in due to the deception of the Bush-Cheney doublespeak. The authors state: “Mounting evidence around the world makes the transgressions of President Bush and Vice President Cheney increasingly difficult to ignore in the United States.” Accountability efforts have already occurred in Spain, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, and in international and regional tribunals. But many others are on hold, waiting for the United States to put its own house in order, although “Italy did prosecute and convict C.I.A. officers in absentia for plucking a Muslim cleric off the streets and sending him to Egypt to be tortured.”

    Former President Clinton’s indiscretions and then his lies about his behavior embarrassed the nation, but not since Watergate has there been so much potential for presidential behavior to endanger the confidence of both Americans and the world in the ability of the United States to participate in a viable international community. Instead of leading the world toward international standards of law, the U.S. has fallen behind, refusing to join the International Criminal Court, which opened at the Hague in 2002 to try individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. As the authors note, “At stake . . . is nothing less than preserving the oxygen that keeps democracy going — and that is the rule of law.”

    Four years ago, when Bush left office, 25 percent of the general population of the United States believed the Bush administration was guilty of war crimes, while 70 percent believed it would be “bad” should top leaders be brought up on charges. These figures partially explain why this book has been largely ignored, although I have to admit the flicker of a conspiracy theory has flitted through my mind. Not one single print magazine or newspaper besides The Star has, at this point, bothered to review a very competently written book by a well-known political figure. (The accuracy of this statement has been verified by Beacon Press.) I am in no way underestimating the importance of any local paper such as The Star. I’m asking, why has our country not taken note of such a competent and important book?

    Barack Obama, for his part, has just duplicated the feat of George W. Bush, having been elected and sworn in for his second term of office. Ms. Holtzman and Ms. Cooper point out that his efforts to address the crimes that may have been committed in the prior administration have been halfhearted at best. The book does not directly address the reasons. Is it better simply to move on and forget the past, as has been claimed by some?

    During an appearance in 2008 on MSNBC, Jonathan Turley, a constitutional lawyer, said, “It is truly amazing because Congress — including Demo­crats — have avoided any type of investigation into torture because they do not want to deal with the fact the president ordered war crimes. . . . I never thought I would say this, but I think it might in fact be time for the United States to be held internationally to a tribunal.”

    “Cheating Justice” implies, without stating explicitly, some disturbing questions. Given the emergent ability of small organizations not officially allied with a specific country to wreak havoc on the general citizenry of the United States, do we, the people, agree to grant our leaders leeway to step over historic rights of privacy and due process in their attempts to provide security? Have we, by our silence, been complicit in acts of torture and illegal detention? Have we thereby helped to advance our country toward “post-democracy,” where our leaders may do what they deem best for us even if their action takes them outside the law as long as that action is in the guise of promoting “a greater good”?

    That was the very reason President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney gave for the behavior that Ms. Holtzman lists as criminal and prosecutable.

   Gary Reiswig is the author of “The Thousand Mile Stare: One Family’s Journey Through the Struggle and Science of Alzheimer’s.” He lives in Springs.

    Elizabeth Holtzman has a house in Orient.

    Two thousand and twelve wasn’t a particularly good year for the literary novel, and I’m not sure what it says that so much of this year’s good reading centered on crime fiction. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that right now the crime genre is fiction’s most exciting and has, in many ways, replaced the social novel for telling us who we are. This 10-best list reflects that shift.

    Still, there are plenty of other goodies here that should satisfy almost any palate, from a Hollywood satire to a rock memoir, and even a book of photographs — a genre that this list has ignored for too long.

    As ever, my hope is that you will find a title or two here that you hadn’t heard of before and, taking a chance, delve into a book that otherwise you might not have come across. And maybe even be moved.

    Happy holidays.

“Dead Stars”

    Hollywood’s foremost satirist takes on the TMZ generation. Nearly the same length as Tom Wolfe’s satiric door-stopper “Back to Blood,” Bruce Wagner’s book is meaner, funnier, and more urgent. The risk of this kind of satire, of course, is that you can end up deadening the reader, and admittedly after 656 pages you may be left wondering who is the abuser, and who is the abused. But the message is an important one: What happens to a generation obsessed with bullshit?

“Rod: The Autobiography”

    A candid, self-deprecating, and occasionally hilarious memoir by a rocker who saw and did it all. Rod Stewart’s story is more fun than Pete Townsend’s ponderous recent memoir, and more self-aware than Keith Richards’s “Life.” While Keith’s book seemed to have a no-apologies rule (even for turning his preteen son into his caretaker during the heroin years), it’s refreshing to see Rod take himself to task for three divorces and various parental lapses. But of course “Rod” is mostly about fun: the limos, the girls, the substances, the parties, the endless laughs. Yes, you’ve heard it all before, but like the man, it never seems to grow old.

“Five Noir Novels of the

1940s & ’50s”

    For those who thought the 1950s were all white picket fences. . . . David Goodis’s novels are populated with loners and frustrated artists who become embroiled in the pestilence of a nasty postwar hangover. There’s more alcohol than guns in these novels, but the violence — when it does appear — carries an emotional wallop. Goodis’s writing leans on a strong psychological component of torment and despair, so it’s best taken with a belt from that Scotch Santa put in your stocking.

“The Oath”

    Though a book about the Supreme Court may not be everyone’s idea of a good time, Jeffrey Toobin comes close to making it so. The book chronicles the politicization of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts, beginning with his botched swearing-in of President Obama in 2008. That this partisan court is a microcosm of our polarized political landscape is probably not news, but Mr. Toobin’s portrait of its members can be revelatory (his reporting on Clarence Thomas, for example, is nothing short of scathing). Also surprising is how much the story of Mr. Roberts’s surprise vote on “Obamacare” reads like a thriller.

“Banksy: You Are an Acceptable Level of Threat”

    Who is Banksy? In this definitive collection of his work, he is described as “an anonymous street artist from Bristol who rose to fame in the late 1990s and the present day chiefly by illegally spray-painting stencil designs across the major cities of the U.K. and North America.” Banksy is a kind of art world Thomas Pynchon (there may be more than one Banksy) whose work has a heavy political element and who was a secret hero of the Occupy Movement.

    Banksy, however, is never ideological, and at his best his images make us ask tough questions about the militarization of Western nations and the building up of police states in the name of “security.”

“Gone Girl”

    A wife disappears on the day of her fifth wedding anniversary: Is she truly missing or has she just had enough? This is the conceit of Gillian Flynn’s new thriller, which is as much a meditation on marriage as it is a mystery. The author stretches her talent here by telling the story in a variety of different voices, and mostly pulls it off. “Hitchcockian” in the best sense, it also sports a jaw-dropping ending. It’s just too bad Sir Alfred isn’t around to film it.

“The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail but

Some Don’t”

    When, in leading up the 2012 presidential election, Nate Silver said that Barack Obama would win handily, he was excoriated by the far right for dispensing liberal “disinformation.” Then it turned out he predicted 50 out of 50 states correctly; in 2008 he got 49 of out 50 right. Maybe it’s time to start listening.

    In “The Signal and the Noise,” he tells us how to sift through the information glut to get to the true data, and as a result has come up with something close to what one might call a “predictive science.” It’s not a book simply for strategic ways to win the lottery — although there’s that too — but also about basic logic, decision-making, and future planning.

“The Black Box”

    When you do roughly a novel a year for 20 years, it’s nearly impossible to hit the bull’s-eye every time, and indeed Michael Connelly’s last few novels have been uneven. But culminating with his 20-year anniversary, Mr. Connelly has put together a humdinger.

    Detective Harry Bosch tries to unravel a cold case from 1992 about the murder of a Danish journalist during the L.A. riots. Harry meets the usual political impediments from the L.A.P.D. (should a white cop solve the murder of a white woman during the riots?), and though his lonely, ex-alcoholic cop is a cliché, Mr. Connelly somehow, even after 20 years, manages to make it all feel fresh.

“Vengeance”

    Benjamin Black is the pen name for the Man Booker Prize-winning Irish novelist John Banville, who writes these “Dubliners”-meets-Raymond Chandler mysteries as a “hobby.” Lucky for us he doesn’t like to fish. His hero is Quirke, a pathologist who sometimes spends more time in the pub than near the operating table, and finds himself embroiled in various whodunits in 1950s Dublin.

    “Vengeance” concerns a possible suicide on a sailboat — or was it murder? Action fans be warned: There is always more atmosphere than violence in these novels. And though the plots of the Black books usually lead to the same place — the nefarious underbelly of Dublin’s “elite” families — line by line there are no better-written mysteries published today.

“Bring Up the Bodies”

    The second book in Hilary Mantel’s planned trilogy on the ruthlessness of Tudor England under Henry the VIII won the U.K.’s Man Booker Prize for fiction, as did the first volume in the series (titled “Wolf Hall”). No mean feat!

    “Bring Up the Bodies” focuses on Thomas Cromwell and the downfall of Anne Boleyn, so you may already know how this ends. But while the story is both fast-moving and cinematically told, fans of the television series “The Tudors” may be disappointed: The soft-porn element is replaced here by historical fact, political machinations, and a superlative prose style that makes history read like fiction.

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

“A Wedding

in Great Neck”

Yona Zeldis McDonough

New American Library, $15

   Is it possible to change the deeply set attitudes of a family all in one day? Can grudges and ancient jealousies be forgotten in a stormy sea of events that culminate in one glorious wedding? Through the pages of “A Wedding in Great Neck,” a delightful novel written with humor and charm, Yona Zeldis McDonough provides the key to the transformation.

    Don and Betsy Silverstein have invited the family to their luxurious home in Great Neck for the wedding of Angelica, Betsy’s youngest of four from her first marriage. In order to awaken fresh for the celebration, they arrive the night ahead at the big house, with its half dozen or more bedrooms and bathrooms, outbuildings, manicured lawns, pool, and rose gardens.

    The novel opens with Gretchen, near 40, the oldest of the four, awakening in her unfamiliar room. She is studying her reflection in the magnifying mirror provided. “Slight puffiness under the eyes — check. Dark circles — check. A gradual deepening of the nasal-labial lines; small, red bump on her right cheek; slightly loosened flesh under the jawline — check, check, check.”

    She dismisses the self-scrutiny as adolescent, wallowing instead in self-pity as she thinks of her younger sister. “Angelica had it all: the looks, the brains, and the attitude. Even the name: how to compare the celestial ‘Angelica’ with the relentlessly earthbound ‘Gret­chen’?” More often just “Gretch”: “It had a most unfortunate resemblance to retch.” She loathed her nickname. Even Don, Betsy’s wealthy husband, dotes on Angelica. And in this respect he is identical to Lincoln, her father.

    But Gretchen is haunted by an even more serious problem. One she’s afraid to confront. Something frightening is happening to Justine, her own 15-year-old daughter (twin to Portia, her sister). She “could feel it, smell it, practically taste it, but the barrier her daughter had erected made it impossible” to locate the pain or do anything to help.

    To top it all, she discovers Ennis, the husband she’s recently left, will show up for the wedding. The thought that he might bring another woman sickens her.

    Besides Gretchen, there are several protagonists for the many dramas and plots woven through the novel. When Caleb, Gretchen’s youngest brother, witnesses his partner, Bobby, passionately embracing Betsy’s muscular gardener, he pays no attention to his father’s advice. The crashes of a brutal brawl and Bobby’s departure before the wedding tell us how it gets resolved.

    As for Lincoln, father of the four, he arrives with a piercing toothache having en route bitten down on a hard candy bar. It doesn’t help his pain when Caleb breezily informs him that “some things never change. Angelica was always your favorite. . . . She still is.”

    He’d loved them all. But had he really been that transparent? Ms. McDonough relays Lincoln’s reaction: “Guilt snaked through the pain, lacing in and out of it like a braid.”

    Through willpower he is no longer the helpless lush he was when married to Betsy. His breath still has a tang — but it is from Coca-Cola. And here in Betsy’s manor house, his status has changed overnight from that of a loser. By dashing into a wild rainstorm in search of the missing 86-year-old Lenore, a feisty pillar of the family, he becomes a hero. He hadn’t really any idea which place to look for Lenore, but through his determination and a bit of luck eventually discovers her, “a crumpled little heap of a person, sopping wet” under the bushes.

    And, of course, she attends the wedding. Readers might well remember Lenore after putting the book down. Admired by the entire family, this octogenarian not only can seize and savor a moment herself, but bring out the best in others.

    Tensions mount when the precariously balanced Justine attempts a demonic plan to stop the marriage. Her furious resentment toward the drop-dead handsome bridegroom, Ohad, once a pilot in the Israeli air force, has no limits. Her idea was to catch him alone and, while chatting, move in closer to him. Swiftly she would pull down her blouse and press her lips to his. Meanwhile she’d be taking a picture of the embrace with her cellphone. Bingo! Angelica would be ashamed and disgusted, the family would be aghast, and the name of Ohad would be mud.

    Justine, however, is shocked by the power of her own whirling desires as she presses against him. “That unfamiliar smell of his: sharp, tangy even. She felt giddy, crazed. Like she was on something. . . . Needing some form of release, she abruptly thrust herself against Ohad’s chest, tilting her face up and pressing his lips with her own.”

   His lips — full but taut, and not soft. . . . Her mouth opened . . . her tongue tried to find his. But Ohad did not open his mouth. . . .

   “Hey,” Ohad had said, breaking the spell. “Easy now.” He stepped back and grasped her upper arms. . . .

   “You okay?” Ohad looked neither angry nor alarmed. . . . He acted as if it were nothing to have a 15-year-old girl grab him . . . no big deal, his look seemed to say.

    His final response is a gem of rationality. He has acted like a mensch.

    In 24 hours Ms. McDonough’s articulate characters have reached out to one another — for help and understanding. Their alliances have strengthened. Even the highly principled Gretchen can forgive her husband’s one-night trespass. Betsy recognizes Lincoln anew — as a dear old friend. And even saddled with his “mother of all toothaches,” Lincoln’s happiness cannot be measured as he holds his exquisite daughter’s hand on their walk up the aisle toward the huppah.

    Glynne Hiller’s articles have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, and The Washington Post, among others. She lives in Sag Harbor.

“The Unkechaug Indians of Eastern Long Island”

John A. Strong

University of Oklahoma Press, $29.95

   The Unkechaug Indians live today on a small reservation along the northern bank of Poospatuck Creek in Brookhaven Township. Although less familiar than the Shinnecock and Montaukett peoples, the Unkechaugs’ history parallels what is known about the native inhabitants of eastern Long Island before contact with early Dutch and English settlers.

    Their more recent history, while in some ways similar to that of their East End Indian neighbors, has been largely overlooked.

    What is known about the Unke­chaugs and other native communities hereabouts comes via the research and perseverance of John A. Strong, professor emeritus of history and American studies at Long Island University and author of “The Montaukett Indians of Eastern Long Island,” “Algonquian Peoples of Long Island From Earliest Times to 1700,” and “We Are Still Here! — The Algonquian Peoples of Long Island Today.”

    Those familiar with Mr. Strong’s earlier works will find his latest, “The Unkechaug Indians of Eastern Long Island,” to be a keystone narrative that brings into focus the collision of cultures that occurred here in the mid-17th century. It further clarifies his earlier portraits of the people themselves, both Indian and settler, and the relationships that formed between them. The book is a tour de force of scholarship that reads like a novel, one that begins in 2007, when the Unkechaugs were sued by Gristedes Foods. The mega-chain alleged the Indians were not authorized to sell untaxed tobacco products over the Internet.

    You’ve got to love it. These were the same people visited in 1791 by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. The secretary of state stayed with the Unkechaugs long enough to learn something of their language and collect a vocabulary. When Jefferson later shipped some belongings back to his home in Virginia, his notebook was stolen. Most of its pages were tossed overboard, but those remaining are reproduced in a glossary in Mr. Strong’s book.

    A preface written by Jefferson reads: “The language they speak is a dialect differing a little from the Indians settled near Southampton called Shinicocks and also from those of Montock. The three tribes can barely understand each other.” A project undertaken recently by a group of Unkechaugs to relearn the tribal language could clarify the statement.

    Mr. Strong brings the reader back to the inshore whale fishery, perhaps the most fundamental relationship between settler and Indian, one that revealed the polar differences in their respective worldviews and formed the template for the commerce, politics, and exploitation to come. The natives had always prized drift whales, those that became stranded on East End beaches, as a food source. They designed a way to kill whales that swam close to shore, a skill that the settlers learned and exploited to obtain whale oil. Indian crews worked for English entrepreneurs. Mr. Strong shows that the whaling enterprise was not only an economic one, but one that forged the important political relationships between settler and native.

    Wyandanch, a young Montaukett sachem, saw the writing on the wall after the English routed the powerful Pequots in New England in 1637. He established a close relationship with Lion Gardiner, the commander of Fort Saybrook at the mouth of the Connecticut River. Gardiner purchased the island named for him from a Montaukett leader. Gardiner and the English were willing to protect Wyandanch in large part to gain access to the wampum made by Indians on the East End. The shell beads were the currency used to purchase beaver pelts from Indian trappers farther north. The English wanted to corner the wampum supply in order to snatch the beaver trade from the Dutch. The Dutch shipped an average of 6,000 pelts to Europe each year between 1624 and 1636, the author tells us.

   With Gardiner’s backing, Wyandanch extended his power base. He became a deal maker between Montaukett, Shinnecock, and eventually Unkechaugs and whale oil merchants. Indians were paid in goods that they became more and more dependent upon. Their growing dependence when combined with a misunderstanding of the English definition of land ownership and law (Indians were forced to compensate the settlers whenever one of their community dogs attacked cattle) led to their slow but steady displacement from traditional lands.

    Mr. Strong’s colorful recounting of the many land purchases, and the questionable finagling that preceded them, is surprisingly complete by virtue of his digging into 300-year-old documents, his comprehensive knowledge of written histories, but perhaps most important through his working relationships with the descendants of the East End’s original inhabitants. He credits the late Lone Otter, Donald Treadwell, for his book “My People, the Unkechaug” and “Turtle People: The Unkechaug People of Spirit Island,” the latter an unpublished manuscript that was made accessible to him along with other archival material.

    The scholar takes us through the reshaping of the Unkechaugs’ world from 1550 to 1800, then the tribe’s later participation in the Civil War and the tribe’s efforts to defend its land from incursions by the likes of William Floyd, the Revolutionary War hero, and its heritage against claims that intermarriage between Unkechaugs and “negroes” nullified the tribe’s cultural identity. The Unkechaugs’ battle with the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs is a book in itself, and fascinating.

    In the end, Mr. Strong’s book is an uplifting account of a strong people who have endured three centuries of trials. Harry Wallace, the Unkechaugs’ current chief, is among 16 others involved in the language revitalization program that was launched last September. One member is Howard Treadwell, grandson of the former chief Lone Otter and a graduate of Stony Brook University, where he majored in linguistics. The committee meets in the tribe’s new community center.

    Chief Wallace wrote of John Strong’s book: “This book is the most comprehensive analysis to date of Unkechaug history. John Strong has provided vast evidence to dispel misrepresentations, distortions, and intentional falsehoods concerning the Unkechaug. He makes the case for why we are still here and why we never left.”

    John A. Strong lives in Southampton.

The Other Matthiessen

    He’s got the same long, patrician face, wavy hair, and, at least in his author photo, the familiar denim button-down. Not unlike a certain Sagaponack nature writer and Zen practitioner. Then, too, his just released debut novel spans “love in the ruins of the Mayan Yucatan” and “landscapes, rivers, and tidal estuaries” of the northeastern U.S., on to “the wayward collision of nature and civilization.”

    To put a fine point on it: Peter Matthiessen Wheelwright, architect, Parsons professor, and nephew of Peter Matthiessen, will read from “As It Is on Earth” at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor on Saturday at 5 p.m.

Lit Lunch

    So just who is this Kati Marton? Beyond, that is, the TV journalism, the occasional hefty work of history (“The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World”), and the new, slimmer work of Francophilia and uxorial loss, “Paris: A Love Story.” Who attracts and marries both Peter Jennings and Richard Holbrooke? Some answers will be available to those in attendance at Sunday’s noontime authors lunch and fund-raiser for the Friends of the John Jermain Memorial Library at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor.

    And joining the din of clinking silverware and rattling ice cubes will be the voice of Michael Shnayerson, the event’s other guest, who took a break from chronicling the questionable behavior of rich Hamptonites for Vanity Fair to help Harry Belafonte write “My Song,” his memoir. The cost of the lunch is $50, and the contact is Chris Tice at [email protected].

“Walking Sideways”

Judith S. Weis

Cornell University Press, $29.95

  Did you know that there are species of crabs that spend their entire lives in freshwater? Or that there are air-breathing land crabs? Or that horseshoe crabs are not true crabs or even crustaceans? Or that the Japanese spider crab can weigh over 40 pounds and sport a leg span of 12 feet?

    An alternate title for “Walking Sideways,” by Judith S. Weis, a professor of biology at Rutgers University, could have been “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Crabs (but Were Afraid to Ask).” This richly informative, illustrated tome may be the most comprehensive storehouse of information, outside of a laboratory, on all things crab. Ms. Weis has exhaustively researched the crustacean, and clearly has a fascination and affection that far surpasses most.

    This interest dates, she wrote, to a childhood spent summering on Shelter Island. Her research has taken her to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts, and the defunct Ocean Sciences Laboratory in Montauk, as well as into the field — specifically, Louse Point in Springs.

    As only about 1 percent of the deep sea has been explored, Ms. Weis wrote, new groups of crabs are still being discovered. Among these discoveries are “four new species of brightly colored freshwater crabs . . . found on the Philippine Island of Palawan” just this year. These newly discovered species, she wrote, “are already under threat from several mining projects.” In 2005, scientists found “a white eyeless crab with long hairy arms and legs living at over 7,000 feet of water near a vent in the South Pacific.” This specimen was found to be a member of a totally new family of anomurans (a group of decapod crustaceans).

    Like most of the Earth’s flora and fauna, crabs are part of an interconnected and interdependent web of life. In the chapter titled “Habitats,” she wrote that, “When blue crabs were moved from a salt marsh, one of their major prey — periwinkle snails — flourished, multiplied, and ate up all of the cordgrass. Without the plants to bind sediment and protect wildlife, the salt marsh ecosystem disappeared and became a mud flat. This suggests that the loss of snail predators such as blue crabs may be an important factor contributing to the die-off of salt marshes in the southeastern United States.”

    Another at-risk habitat, coral reefs, form part of a symbiotic relationship with crabs: “Trapeziid or guard crabs, such as Trapezius sp., only a half-inch wide, make their home in branching corals and remove sediment onto the coral,” Ms. Weis wrote. “When the researchers removed crabs from sections of the branching corals and allowed sediment to accumulate, most of the corals died within a month.”

    There are crabs that live in the open ocean on floating material (the Sargassum or gulfweed crab) and others found on floating species such as sea turtles and jellyfish (the grapsid crab). Ms. Weis wrote about how different crabs are adapted for their particular environment, and takes the reader on an informative tour covering crabs’ evolution and classification, behaviors, unique adaptations, reproduction, and threats to their survival.

    There are chapters devoted to form and function, reproduction and life cycle, behavior, ecology, fisheries, and the relationships between crabs and humans. There is even a chapter devoted to the myriad ways in which crabs are cooked and eaten.

    While there exist “problem crabs” — invasive species and parasites — there are, sadly, far more “crab problems,” as detailed in Chapter 7. Toxic chemicals, pesticides, oil, industrial chemicals, marine debris and trash, and climate change, in addition to natural hazards such as disease, all threaten these fascinating creatures.

    For those interested in these animals — as marine life, as pets, or as food — “Walking Sideways” spans the positive and negative phenomena surrounding and affecting the nearly 7,000 species of crabs.

    Judith S. Weis is the author of “Do Fish Sleep?” She lives part time in Springs.

    It’s a common enough experience. In junior high a kid wakes up to find his body transformed. Or . . . something. How about into an oversized reptile?

    A new novel for young people, “The Creature From the Seventh Grade” (Viking, $15.99) by the actor Bob Balaban of Bridgehampton, is about learning to accept yourself, scales and all, if need be, as adolescence descends, and discovering who your true friends are, in this case, a wonderfully nerdy duo: Lucile Strang (6-foot-1, braces, keeps ferrets) and Sam Endervelt (purple hair, clip-on nose ring, “built for sitting and eating”). Together they are dubbed “the Mainframes.”

    What’s different here is that Charlie Drinkwater’s transformation wins him unheard-of popularity. He addresses his schoolmates at an assembly and learns he has a knack for stand-up comedy. He’s interviewed in the school newspaper. He’s considered for inclusion in the exclusive Banditoes clique. And a particular member of an equivalent group of girls called the One-Upsters, Amy Armstrong (glossy hair, winning smile), not only acknowledges him but takes an interest in him, inviting him to a party in her den. Which is when, incidentally, Charlie first ditches his pals and where, in a scene full of drearily pitch-perfect details (a TV, a bowl of chips, seventh graders slumped on a sofa), the wheels start to come off the cool-kid bandwagon.

    Unlike Kafka’s Gregor Samsa’s, Charlie’s metamorphosis comes not out of the blue but out of a genetic predisposition that skipped a generation. And it’s when his grandmother Nana Wallabird, a nine-foot dinosaur, is described as having “carried herself like she was smaller” that the reader catches a whiff of Woody Allen, from back when he wrote those goofy short stories. (Remember the little “Getting Even” paperback? Black cover, white lettering?)

    One-liners abound. Charlie’s dad manages a sporting goods store: Balls in Malls. Charlie’s social studies essay is “Jose de San Martin and the Liberation of Argentina.” (Though what’s funny about that is a little hard to pin down.) The school shrink is so nervous speaking to groups he “pull[s] out his mustache hairs one at a time” and keeps a “hair in a box” collection in his desk “along with his car keys and a small bottle of something called Xanax. . . .”

    Then, too, Charlie relays how he carries around “fun and unusual local and national news items I call ‘factoids.’ I copy these items onto note cards I keep inside my pockets. I take them out and read them during those awkward silences that occasionally arise in certain social situations.”

    But that’s more affecting than funny, isn’t it. Why? Call it verisimilitude.

“Let’s Go Painting!”

    Two other Bridgehamptoners, Walter and Bina Bernard, have come out with a self-published book that’s at once a loving tribute to their granddaughters, Scarlett and Orly, and a useful, amply photographed guide to encouraging the artistic impulse in your own little one.

    It starts on a rainy Saturday, follows a Grandpa-led, eye-opening trip to an art gallery, and continues back home with Elmo painter’s smocks, a two-sided easel, a watchful Claude Monet doll, and no end of flying pigment. Lessons in how to mix colors ensue, as do discoveries of the girls’ different styles — white space versus a completely covered canvas, painting what you see versus incorporating elements of collage — and what exactly “abstract” means.

    Days later, after cleanup, the girls see that they’ve each completed exactly 22 paintings, all reproduced here in miniature. There’s only one thing left to do, exhibit them against Grandpa’s garage door, sales welcome.

    Scarlett and Orly: They’re small, they’re cute, they’re covered in paint. They’re Margaret Wise Brown’s “Color Kittens” made manifest.

“No Go Sleep!”

    As Jules Feiffer’s sketchy style keeps getting sketchier, his children’s book watercolors keep getting bolder and his eye-candy tastier. The Southampton cartoonist and his daughter, Kate Feiffer, have done it again with “No Go Sleep!” (Simon & Schuster, $16.99). “It” being a picture book as one is supposed to be — light but fetching with its words, big and colorful with its images.

    In the eternal parental struggle to put a kid to bed, the universe itself has been enlisted in the cause. The stars tell a crib-bound baby, “We will twinkle and sprinkle sweet dreams down to you.” A passing car’s “beep, beep” becomes “sleep, sleep.” Inanimate objects are reassuring: “I’m closed until morning,” says the front door. “We’re too tired to walk another step,” the shoes on the floor weigh in.

    This charming sotto voce answer to the hit “Go the F*** to Sleep” has its own quiet wit, thank you very much: “We won’t swim away,” the goldfish report from the confines of their bowl.

“American Rhapsody”

Carole Stone

CavanKerry Press, $16

    Carole Stone’s third full-length poetry collection, “American Rhapsody,” published this year by CavanKerry Press, eulogizes a bygone era in American history, Prohibition. More, however, than a re-creation of that time, “American Rhapsody” is also an attempt to recover and understand Ms. Stone’s personal history, the loss of her mother and father when a child and being subsequently raised by aunts and uncles. This collection, therefore, seems an attempt to expiate traumatic childhood memories — both societal and personal — and, paradoxically, keep those memories alive.

    Two poems illustrate this dichotomy well. In “The Past,” the poet hopes to strip history away “until nothing is left / but yourself.” We’re told that “the past swings / a noose from a tree,” a disturbing lynching image symbolizing our nation’s shameful exploits, but the poet will not “let its rope / tighten.” This revisionist wish is a rejection of our history, preparing Ms. Stone “for a new fiction / possible at a certain age.” History is not viewed here as a set of immutable facts but as a narrative for which the poet may reshape a more pleasant ending.

    With “Inky Heart,” however, we learn it’s never possible to live as stated in “The Past,” with nothing but yourself outside the context of one’s personal and cultural history. Rather, the poet in “Inky Heart” is haunted by her parents, “they who turn up / everywhere.” Long after the era of Prohibition, Ms. Stone’s parents remain real presences. Because Ms. Stone cannot expurgate the memory of her parents, inextricably entwined with the often brutal excesses of Prohibition, she conjures them up, “as an invocation.” I can imagine many readers finding themselves in identical emotional straits — at once both wanting to forget and wanting never to forget.

    Foremost among those alive in her “inky heart” is the poet’s father. He seems the impetus behind many poems in this book, including “Father’s Voice,” “Bundled Hundreds,” and “Homecoming.” Ms. Stone characterizes her father as not only glamorous but indifferent, as not only a financial provider but a philanderer, as both uncouth and suave. These poems reveal the ambivalent emotional connection — an ambivalence that permeates the entire collection — between poet and the memory of her father.

    A bootlegger during Prohibition, the poet’s father is compared to Odysseus, the classic absentee dad. At the end of “Homecoming,” Ms. Stone offers this bitingly cynical appraisal of her father: “Only his dog / knew who he was.” Yet, in the very next poem, “On This Date,” taking a cue from Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Art of Losing,” the poet confesses that in a newspaper photograph of men breaking up a Bund rally, “my father uses his fists against evil, / making this (Write it!) / racketeer’s daughter proud.”

    Some of the best poems here distill tension from the juxtaposition of the poet’s childhood idealism and the realities it confronts within the social milieu. Some of these poems are set in a time after Prohibition. In “FDR,” for example, the president’s death inaugurates a loss of innocence and childhood; in “History,” the poet watches contemporary business news, claiming, “My dream of America, / where no one would be poor, / slipping away into history,” and in “Newark” the poet balances a litany of gang activity and murdered innocents against her own discovery of lifesaving poetry in the library.

    In its entirety, “American Rhapsody” is neither bombastic nor ecstatic. But most of Ms. Stone’s lyrics are deftly controlled. She fixes readers in time, never allowing us to forget the history serving as setting for most of these poems. This ambiance is created through the use of literary allusions as epigraphs. These snippets of song lyrics or quotation tap the zeitgeist, grounding readers in the tumultuous days of Prohibition.

    And what a time: graft, booze, jazz, floozies, Jim Crow, murder, the Great Depression. Ms. Stone’s poems don’t stare these subjects in the eye; rather, they form the backdrop against which the poet carries out her search for “where the dead hide / in their secret clubhouse.”

    Carole Stone is professor emerita of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She has a house in Springs.

    Dan Giancola is a professor of English at Suffolk Community College. He lives in Mastic.