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.

“Toughing It Out”

Claire Reed

Feminist Press, $18.95

   Privileged people “should make use of our security, our seniority, to take risks, to make noise, to be courageous, to become unpopular.”

    Claire Reed quotes that imperative, from the feminist literary scholar Carolyn Heilbrun, late in her just-published memoir, “Toughing It Out: From Silver Slippers to Combat Boots.” It justly sums up the bulk of her life. A frequent visitor to East Hampton and at one point a full-time resident, Ms. Reed gives a poignant case study of an important but little-sung role in the drama of most nonprofit organizations — the relatively anonymous volunteer who raises the money and makes the wheels go round.

    A dervish and, judging from events she organized, a terrific executive, Ms. Reed has played major staff roles in such progressive movements and organizations as disarmament (Women Strike for Peace), civil rights (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), feminist politics (the National Women’s Political Caucus), and, above all, in the successful campaign for Congress and later political activities of Bella Abzug.

    In one of her few paid jobs, Ms. Reed was “in charge of introducing Medicaid to people on the west side of Manhattan,” training staffers and speaking three or four evenings a week at churches, synagogues, and clubs. At the age of 92, she remains active on the boards of the Bella Abzug Leadership Institute, which trains poor and minority women for political roles, and the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative, a legal advocacy organization.

   But first she had to overcome the stifling pull of women’s all-day golf outings at the country club. One of the book’s virtues is its portrayal of how unrelentingly difficult it can be for women to overcome the societal pressures to subordinate themselves to men, especially in their innermost thoughts. Raised in comfort on Brooklyn’s Bedford Avenue by a prosperous men’s clothing manufacturer father and a mother who held the common view that the best college degree for a woman would be an M.R.S., she colorfully recounts her wealthy version of what Betty Friedan dubbed the feminine mystique.

    Early in her first marriage, she found herself at big parties in a gilded neighborhood of suburban Harrison, N.Y. “There was always an orchestra and dance floor. . . . Orchids were the favored centerpieces on each table and the place settings were Spode china, crystal glassware, and sterling silver flatware.” Department store clerks greeted her by name.

    She quickly found that way of life “gaudy, ostentatious, and offensive” and realized she was more fascinated by books, theater, and classical music, but she had a hard time finding an alternative. Her husband, who several times took her to Europe on the Queen Mary (she read Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” in her deck chair), complained that she was so involved in local politics she was neglecting her children, “but when I spent the same amount of time shopping, there was no complaint. That was what women were supposed to do.”

    Even now, Ms. Reed says that in the back of her mind, “It seems I still cannot muffle the constant, irritating buzz that translates to She’s dumb, she’s dull, she’s dense. She’s a first-rate actor, performing as a stand-in for an intelligent woman.”

    Nevertheless, that didn’t keep her from co-chairing the local chapters of the United Jewish Appeal and the Muscular Dystrophy Association and working for the League of Women Voters. Soon she was working against the re-election of Harrison’s Republican supervisor and running the headquarters there of the 1952 Adlai Stevenson presidential campaign. Next came peace marches.

    At a march for disarmament she met “a heavy-set, rather imposing figure wearing a wide black hat, who kept mumbling under her breath. After several minutes, I asked her why she seemed so annoyed and angry. Oh, she answered impatiently, this is all well and good but it’s not enough. As a well-trained member of the League of Women Voters, I answered that we should be demanding action from our legislators and should be lobbying and working in the political clubs. Immediately, she stopped, turned to look at me intently, and said, You are coming with me.”

    In what turned out to be Bella Abzug’s law office, “she handed me a notebook and pen and told me to start writing. Without reading from notes, she listed each phone call she wanted to make, the names and positions of those to phone, and what I was to request of them. Her mind was an express train. Yet she was patient. After I had written several pages of notes, she said, I think that’s enough for now. Call tomorrow when you’re done and report back to me. Tomorrow, I thought, is she nuts?” Yet “I left dazed, electrified, and jumping with excitement.”

    Ms. Reed calls Abzug “an engine of energy and power,” adding that she “was for me what God must have been to Moses when he commanded Moses to lead his people out of Egypt. . . . I discovered I had barrels of energy and loved challenges. . . . I’ve been called a political wonk, a person buried in politics, a political work horse. Those names don’t matter to me; I love every action in the political handbook.”

    I have attended several dinner parties at Claire Reed’s house and can attest that she is still going strong. When a fellow panelist on aging talked about how “younger women and men were oblivious of the older generation,” she writes, “I turned her observations around. Society’s disdain for the aged gives us the confidence to try new things. . . . If you fall on your face, no one is watching . . . so go with it. Be whatever it is you want to be.”

    Christopher T. Cory, a freelance editor, is a former correspondent for Time magazine. He lives in East Hampton.

   Claire Reed will celebrate the Feminist Press’s publication of her new memoir, “Toughing It Out: From Silver Slippers to Combat Boots,” with a reading and discussion at the Bluestockings Bookstore on the Lower East Side of Manhattan tomorrow from 7 to 9 p.m.

   Blanche Wiesen Cook of Springs, distinguished professor of history at John Jay College, will also participate, her biography of Eleanor Roosevelt in tow.

“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.

“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.

    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.

    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.

“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.

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].

“Steinbeck in Vietnam”

Edited by Thomas E. Barden

University of Virginia Press, $29.95

   When I lived in Hong Kong, in the 1960s, I’d met or heard about most of the war reporters who lived there or were passing through. How could I have missed John Steinbeck, one of my favorite writers of all time? As soon as I checked the dates of his dispatches, I realized why. A few months before Steinbeck’s arrival in December 1966, my first husband, Sam Castan, a correspondent for Look magazine, had been killed in Vietnam and I had returned to New York. It would take me far more than a few months to return to the life of the world, let alone the news of it.

   Recently, I’ve spoken to people, in less extreme circumstances back then, who were also surprised to learn that Steinbeck had reported from Vietnam. Two reasons may account for this. First, his columns were published in Newsday; even with its wide circulation and its syndications, Newsday was not a primary source of international news. Second, the Steinbeck family had turned down earlier attempts to collect his Vietnam columns in a book. Apparently, they were reluctant to rebroadcast, in a more permanent format, his ultimately unpopular, hawkish position on the war.

   Steinbeck a hawk! Impossible to imagine when you think of Steinbeck the novelist. I can still feel the cloth cover of “The Grapes of Wrath,” as if my palm were skimming across it, reverentially, right now, instead of half a century ago. How could this man, who chronicled the plight of Dust Bowl farmers and described the natural and human forces sustaining their misery, support a war that displaced, tormented, and maimed Vietnamese peasants? A war that would eventually kill at least two million Vietnamese men, women, and children and 58,000 Americans?

   Thomas E. Barden, editor of “Steinbeck in Vietnam” and professor of English at the University of Toledo, answers many questions in the scholarly background he provides. Why, for example, did Steinbeck, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962, become a war correspondent in 1966? After all, he was 64 years old. In Vietnam, journalists in their 30s were called “old man” by younger colleagues. It turns out that Steinbeck had been a correspondent for The New York Herald Tribune during World War II, a job he sought because he was not allowed to serve in the U.S. Army.

    Now that’s a story in itself. In the 1940s, Steinbeck was regarded as an “extremist subversive” by U.S. conservatives. The F.B.I. kept a dossier on him, noting his association with “elements” of the Communist Party and the appearance of his writings in Communist publications.

    The U.S. Army intelligence service wrote, “In view of substantial doubt as to subject’s loyalty and discretion, it is recommended that subject not be considered favorably for a commission in the Army of the United States.”

    Here’s the amazing part. While the Army reached this conclusion, its commander in chief, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had a personal relationship with Steinbeck and sought his advice. Among the topics Roosevelt discussed with Steinbeck was the very war the writer was not considered trustworthy enough to engage in as a U.S. soldier. Meanwhile, the “subject,” wanting to see the action for himself, managed to get an overseas assignment from The Trib.

    In an odd parallel, more than 20 years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson wanted John Steinbeck’s opinion about the war in Vietnam. He asked his close friend — the Nobel laureate whom most Americans saw as morally trustworthy — to go to Vietnam as a correspondent. He thought Steinbeck’s words would promote his cause: to increase America’s involvement in a war he believed could be won.

    Journalists who dared to go into harm’s way had begun to provide images that ignited antiwar sentiment in the United States. Takeovers and teach-ins on college campuses, draft-card burnings, and protest marches were making news. These forms of political expression emerged quickly and organically from struggles that yielded the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

    War protesters made Steinbeck furious. He thought they should go to Vietnam and care for the wounded instead of burning their draft cards. This view may have been strengthened by the fact that his son John Steinbeck IV had just been sent to Vietnam as a soldier. His other son, Thom, also in the Army, was expected to be deployed to the war zone. Steinbeck wanted to go to Vietnam to see for himself what his boys would be facing and, most of all, he wanted to see them.

    For all his liberal leanings, we are told, Steinbeck was against any system that promoted the collective over the individual. He thought the individual was both source and guardian of freedom of thought. Like Johnson, Steinbeck saw the war as a necessary means to halt the spread of Communism, but he was not comfortable going to war as a government spokesman. So, he approached Newsday’s publisher, Harry F. Guggenheim, for whom he had written before. The author was given complete freedom to write whatever he chose.

    This reader instantly felt the sensation of being told the absolute truth, as Steinbeck saw it, or, perhaps, as he was assigned to tell it in what he perceived to be service to his country and to democracy. I confess it’s the first time in more than 45 years that I was able to experience pro-war words about Vietnam and not run screaming from the room — a testament to Steinbeck’s ability to convince by pure passion and by vivid description.

    He very quickly perceived and conveyed how the Mekong Delta was key to feeding the entire region beyond Vietnam. He grasped the local politics engendered by a culture of rice farmers. He met American soldiers along the way and portrayed them to be as vital and heroic as his humble fictional characters. Despite the inexcusable My Lai Massacre of 1968 and other heinous atrocities that became known after Steinbeck’s death, most U.S. soldiers certainly were valiant. Steinbeck’s appreciation, had it been available to them, might have offered comfort when they returned to a scornful nation.

    Praise of Steinbeck’s literary skills shouldn’t obscure the eerie confrontation with his naivete and/or his propaganda. He says that reporters had freedom to go anywhere they wished. Though there is some truth to this, most reporters partook of the military press briefings at the Rex Hotel in the city once called Saigon. Those notorious briefings came to be known as the Five o’clock Follies because of their increasingly unrecognizable relationship to what the more intrepid reporters learned in the field. And, of course, in Steinbeck’s “going anywhere he wanted to go,” he was escorted by military higher-ups. Did he really think the top brass who took him to see his son in combat, took him to what they didn’t want him to see as well as what they did?

    Steinbeck himself says it best: “. . . armies haven’t changed in one respect since Roman times. They have never liked or trusted news. Given their druthers, army commands would announce victories and deny defeats and nothing more.”

    Professor Barden writes that the dispatches are important and worth reading because they are the last work of a major writer. I would agree, even though they uphold fictions that did irreparable harm.

    Fran Castan, who lives in Springs, is writing a memoir. She is author of “The Widow’s Quilt,” a book of poems, and “Venice: City That Paints Itself,” a collection of her poems and paintings by Lewis Zacks, her husband.

    John Steinbeck lived in Sag Harbor for many years.