“Ice Cap”

Chris Knopf

Minotaur Books, $25.99

    You’ve got to hand it to Chris Knopf: He knows how to have fun. His prose vaults across the page with happy confidence — though I suspect he doesn’t waste much time analyzing his characters’ deepest motivations, let alone plot developments that are more convenient than believable.

    In his new mystery, “Ice Cap,” the characters are there to amuse. They are a semi-noir cast with advanced degrees, who channel their underused intelligence into nonstop wisecracks and literary references. If the author feels a gun battle might spice up his heroine’s afternoon, then a gun battle it is. Doesn’t­ every girl lawyer need her own Glock — particularly if her practice was formerly in Hamptons real estate?

    “Ice Cap,” the third in Mr. Knopf’s series of Jackie Swaitkowski mysteries, satisfies many elements of the beach read — a little romance, a puzzling mystery, a fair amount of diverting comedy. It has the added virtue, for those who are reading this, of unfolding at a beach community near you, from the mean streets of Southampton, down Montauk Highway, to Amagansett, where after nightfall you’d apparently be advised not to walk alone. Don’t go looking for familiar landmarks, however. This East End is being blanketed by so many blizzards, it might as well be Buffalo.

    On the day in question, Jackie Swaitkowski takes a call from a client, Franco Delano Roosevelt, who looks as though he might be facing a murder charge. Following a rich tradition, Franco, a former Wall Street hotshot, is a closet sweetie in spite of the rough exterior. Nonetheless, he has spent time in the slammer some years ago for killing his former girlfriend’s husband with a rotisserie skewer.

    Since returning from upstate, Franco has suffered reduced circumstances. He has been working as a handyman for Tad Buczek, a Southampton “artist” who has sold off most of his family’s vast potato fields. With the millions he’s collected, Tad has turned what remains of his property into a kind of personal theme park, replete with massive scrap metal sculptures rigged as water fountains.

    By the time the curtain rises, Tad Buczek is as dead as a doornail. Franco has managed to muck up the crime scene by dragging Tad’s inert body out of the field where he “stumbled” over it covered with snow. Did Franco murder Buczek or not? That he’s cuddling up with Zina Buczek — the deceased’s sexy Polish mail-order bride — doesn’t look good in his police file.

    But what kind of mystery would this be if the most obvious suspect was actually the murderer? As “Tad never tired of pissing people off,” there is no shortage of possibilities. There’s his association with Ivor Fleming, the scrap metal king of a Russian/Polish underworld — though the motive for murder, in this case, is hard to pinpoint. And how about the neighbors, who might have offed Tad to hold on to their property values? Finally, there is the Buczek family, not a single member of which held Tad in high regard.

    Before he’s done, Mr. Knopf introduces such a staggering array of characters that you’ll need index cards to keep them straight. At the center is Jackie, an attractive, late-30s-ish widow, the book’s Nancy Drew, who is related to the victim through her late husband. When Jackie’s not driving her Volvo over snowbound roads, she’s in her flannel pajamas, working out of the office in her apartment above a Japanese restaurant. (This is no glamour Hamptons mystery.) She is conflicted about her boyfriend, sorely needs a decent hairstylist, and so enjoys her cocktails that I fear in future books we will find her at A.A. meetings. Endearingly, Jackie confides in her readers, even as her career as a laid-back Hamptons criminal lawyer strains credibility.

    Wherever Jackie Swaitkowski goes, so goes the snappy dialogue. After she orders a bottle of wine for herself in a restaurant, a snotty French waiter counters with, “Our least expensive wine? We have a mediocre blend from a struggling vineyard that we’ll likely not source from again. I’m sure it will suit Madame perfectly.”

    The most unlikely characters quote Winston Churchill, refer to Kublai Khan, use Latin expressions like in flagrante delicto, and sling irony with the ease of jaded intellectuals. The goons (“meatballs who work as muscle”) shadowing Jackie leave a warning note on her car signed, “Your Reverse Guardian Angels.” Surely, a goon this sophisticated can find a better line of work. Or maybe not in the new economy.

    The dialogue is not just witty, but occasionally wise. “Everybody can get lonely, Jackie,” says Franco, explaining his affair with Zina. “Doesn’t always mean they want to become your soul mate.”

    In the final analysis, Mr. Knopf hasn’t­ quite decided if “Ice Cap” is a mystery or a no-holds-barred comedy. If it’s the former, then the plot feels a bit lazy, which robs the narrative of urgency. Since it’s going nowhere special, you want him to wrap things up and get to the big reveal. A comedy, on the other hand, would need to be broader, quirkier, and more over the top — a la Carl Hiaasen, which it resembles, but in northern climes.

    On the strength of its dialogue, however, “Ice Cap” could have a brilliant future as a feature film. With clever casting, characters who sound similar (albeit witty) on the page would become distinct, and implausible scenes might benefit from some good old-fashioned physical comedy.

    Ellen T. White, former managing editor of the New York Public Library, is the author of “Simply Irresistible,” a humorous how-to that culls the lessons of the great romantic women of history. She lives in Springs.

    Chris Knopf has a house in South­ampton.

It’s a Book, It’s a Periodical . . .

    No, it’s the new Southampton Review, volume VI, number 2, summer 2012, 232 pages, retailing for 15 bucks and coming to you fresh and glossily printed courtesy of Stony Brook Southampton’s M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature.

    This one’s different. It’s got a lecture by Richard Leakey, the eminent anthropologist, on the development of language. (He also drops in that Europeans alone in the world have Neanderthal genes — explains a lot, doesn’t­ it.) The lecture was given in January at the Turkana Basin Institute in Kenya, where Julie Sheehan, the Review’s poetry editor, led a workshop emphasizing the oral tradition in the birthplace of human language. A selection of poems from that workshop runs here with photos of the place and the native people.

    From cartoonists to memoirists to fiction writers to a maker of fire drawings on paper, the contributors number an impressive 51. Call it vitality.

Dan, Being Dan

    If you’re wondering how it’s going at what looks like a vast and industrial new headquarters for Dan’s Papers on Country Road 39 in Southampton, a chance to ask Dan Rattiner himself will present itself on Saturday at 4 p.m. when he appears at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.

    Beyond browsing the funky shelves, he’ll be reading from his new book, “Still in the Hamptons: More Tales of the Rich, the Famous, and the Rest of Us,” from SUNY’s Excelsior Editions. A follow-up to “In the Hamptons” and “In the Hamptons Too,” it profiles the famous, all right, from Peter Jennings to Frank Perdue, but also the merely locally famous, like the late lamented Paul Sidney of WLNG and Bridgehampton’s Charlie Vanderveer. And of course there are Mr. Rattiner’s trademark whimsical tributes to the old charms of the South Fork, like a Christmastime visit in 1986 to Lillywhite’s, the toy store that was on Job’s Lane in Southampton. How can you beat a 69-cent hockey stick?   

 “At the Fights”

Edited by George Kimball

and John Schulian

Library of America, $19.95

   Boxing has inspired memorable prose from many gifted writers, and many of those writers have hailed from Long Island’s East End — George Plimpton, Budd Schulberg, Mike Lupica, Robert Lipsyte, A.J. Liebling, Wilfrid Sheed.

    The prizefighters they write about are a colorful tribe. Above — or below — all other athletes, prizefighters are a driven lot. When did you last hear of a football, baseball, or basketball player called “hungry”? A.J. Liebling pointed out that while one might play baseball, football, or basketball, nobody “plays” boxing. The former heavyweight contender George Chuvalo once said, “You don’t bring boxing gloves to a picnic.”

    In this fine boxing anthology, John Schulian, one of the editors, calls “boxing, prizefighting, the sweet science, the fight game . . . the best friend a writer ever had. . . . There is an undeniable jolt to watching violence in the ring, an almost electrical charge composed of equal parts beauty and savagery, and it can stir the poet in a writer who doesn’t­ realize he has poetry in him.”

    In every story of “At the Fights,” poetry meets pugilism, eloquence meets brutality, and brains meet brawn. The history of boxing is wonderfully artful and gruesome. And these writers bring beautiful prose to this ugly sport. For 3,000 years, from Homer to Ernest Hemingway, Plato to Priestly, and Virgil to Robert Lipsyte, writers have been concerned with man in the most fundamental form of competition, in the most completely expressive of the arts.

    Regrettably, however, today’s boxing and yesteryear’s literary journalism did not reach their peaks at the same time. Today’s boxing fans live in a twilight era after Muhammad Ali, and before him, Joe Louis, and before him, Jack Dempsey.

    Mike Tyson? David Remnick of The New Yorker writes of Tyson in “Kid Dynamite Blows Up,” “. . . he was briefly burning as a heavyweight comet . . . and a tragicomic figure.” Joyce Carol Oates offers her opinion of Tyson in “Rape and the Boxing Ring”: “He will be remembered less for his seemingly limitless promise and ultimately squandered talent than for two other life-defining moments, one out of the ring and one in it,” the one in it involving a chunk of Evander Holyfield’s ear.

    But the ring has always been a refuge for the extraordinary Mike Tysons of the world. The pattern of social and economic persecution in this country is traced in the names and records of the great Irish, then Jewish, Italian, and black fighters who have graced the sport.

    The boxing writers in this anthology find the ugly beauty of a sport that pits one man against another unprotected by armor and bereft of any weapon save his own fists. Boxing is a brutal sport and it reveals brutal truth. Truth is revealed in John Schulian’s remembrance of Johnny Bratton, a fighter who had everything inside the ring and out until — bam! — he lost it. Now we see Johnny hanging around the lobby of a seedy South Side Chicago hotel, just keeping out of the rain. There is no better listener than Schulian to memorialize him.

   There’s ugly truth in Jack London’s “Johnson vs. Jeffries.” He gives us a 1910 ringside seat and breathes life into the historic Jack Johnson-Jim Jeffries bout held in Reno, Nev.

    Katherine Dunn’s riveting exposé “The Knockout: Lucia Rijker” is as honest as the award-winning film “Million Dollar Baby” was successful.

    My appreciation goes out to George Kimball and John Schulian for giving us an eloquently honest boxing book that appears at a time when boxing is at its lowest ebb in the history of the sport. The stories in this book may ease the sorrow and pain of a dying sport — a sport I, for one, once loved.

    Like David Sedaris, I like nonfiction books about people with wretched lives. The worse off the better. Everybody involved in boxing — the fighter, the manager, and the promoter — is a little bit off. When I boxed, I was a bit demented. That was my strength — my craziness. That’s why boxing is such a fascinating topic — it’s a dystopia. Boxing is where an angry soul rises out of his own smoldering slum in order to be exploited by a grasping, greedy sycophant.

    When I was fighting, boxing was left hooks, uppercuts, and right crosses — it was my beauty. What daffodils were for Wordsworth, a knockout was for me.

    There is no clear binding storyline in “At the Fights.” The stories simply spotlight the virtues and vices of great champions: Jack Johnson, Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Roberto Duran. There are stories about lesser champions and contenders — tragic Sonny Liston and gut-wrenching Ray Mancini. Colorful celebrities are sprinkled throughout: Malcolm X, David Merrick, Eddie Arcaro, Fatty Arbuckle, Jim Brown, Frankie Carbo, and Dizzy Dean. All hint at their own virtues and vices.

    While reading this collection, with its inherent beauty-violence, I felt a kind of joy exuding from within me. Reading creative language is joyful. Traveling back in time is joyful. I suspect readers will discover their own joy reading this book.

    George Plimpton, who lived in Sagaponack, had his nose bloodied by Archie Moore, was tackled by Alex Karras, pitched to Willie Mays, lost at golf to Sam Snead and at tennis to Pancho Gonzales. Plimpton was a “professional amateur” whose unique balance of insight and self-deprecating humor is evident in “Miami Notebook: Cassius Clay and Malcolm X.” In it, we meet King Levinsky, “a second-rate heavyweight in his prime (he was one of Joe Louis’s bums of the month) who fought too long, so it had affected him, and he is now an ambulatory tie-salesman.” Plimpton, sitting at a luncheonette table, recounts Malcolm X’s perspective on a young Cassius Clay: “Clay is sensitive, very humble, yet shrewd — with as much untapped mental energy as he has physical power. He should be a diplomat.”

    Mike Lupica of Bridgehampton, the Daily News columnist and ESPN commentator (when not playing a scrappy shortstop in East Hampton’s Artists and Writers Softball Game), gives us “Donfire of the Vanities.” Here we meet a nightmare named Don King. It is a scathing glimpse of a man who spent 3 years and 11 months in jail for manslaughter. From his brownstone on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, we hear King brag, “I watched the first Ali-Frazier fight in prison and I promoted the third one.” The heavyweight champion Larry Holmes, one of many boxers who say King has cheated them, says of King, “He looks black, lives white, and thinks green.”

    “King,” writes Lupica, “is one of the most remarkable figures in the history of sports. And he could have become the important black voice he desperately wants to be. Up close to King, you see the brains, you see the charm, and you see the passion. Ultimately, though, you have to see the hustler in him. The man is full of anger. It is more impressive than his whole range of thought, from Hitler to the Bible.” There is much dysfunction in Don King.

    Boxing is dysfunction.

    The last best look America got at Dick Schaap, who died in 2001, was when he was reining in the runaway egos on ESPN’s “The Sports Reporters.” Schaap’s “Muhammad Ali Then and Now” is an early snapshot of a young Cassius Clay. He writes: “It is ridiculous, of course, to link presidents and prizefighters, yet somehow, in this case, it seems strangely logical. When I think back to the late summer of 1960, my most persistent memories are of the two men who wanted to be president and of the boy who wanted to be heavyweight champion of the world. And he was a boy — a bubbling boy without a serious thought in his head, without a problem that he didn’t feel his fists or his wit would eventually solve.”

    Shelter Island’s Robert Lipsyte, the author of a boxing-themed novel, “The Contender,” gives us “Pride of the Tiger,” a gem about Dick Tiger of Nigeria, a forgotten middleweight champion who encounters more violence outside the ring than inside.

    Budd Schulberg, who lived in Quiogue, was the only man to be both a winner of an Academy Award (for “On the Waterfront” in 1954) and an inductee into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. In “The Fight (the King Is Dead), ” Schulberg catches lightning in a bottle when describing the 1921 Benny Leonard-Richie Mitchell bout held in the old Madison Square Garden.

    There is the muscular prose of Norman Mailer in an excerpt from “The Fight,” describing Ali and Joe Frazier; the biting, hyperbolic wit of H.L. Mencken in “Dempsey vs. Carpentier,” and the incisive analysis of Joyce Carol Oates in “Rape and the Boxing Ring.” “Boxing is for men, and is about men, and is men,” Oates writes. “A celebration of the lost art of masculinity all the more lost for being lost.”

    Perhaps boxing is lost. Or maybe it’s just anachronistic. I don’t attend fights much anymore; it’s a young man’s sport, and I’m no longer a young man. But this book resurrected something youthful inside me. My blood ran faster, I could hear the crowds, and I felt the punches, all while sitting safely in my comfy chair.

    As a writer, the insightful writing in this book made me jealous. But “At the Fights” rekindled my respect for boxing and for boxers. Ah! The pen is mightier than the sword, or in this case, the boxing glove.

    Peter Wood, who lives in East Hampton, is the author of “Confessions of a Fighter” and “A Clenched Fist.” He was a middleweight finalist in the 1971 New York City Golden Gloves and selected to represent America in the Maccabiah Games held in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1977.

“The Book of Obama”

Ted Rall

Seven Stories, $14.95

   The current state of the United States maddens Ted Rall, and in his most recent book, he seeks to enrage his readers. While the book will most likely anger many people, the ire it raises may not always be focused in the way Mr. Rall intends. The problems that Mr. Rall deftly elucidates — income inequality, political hypocrisy, crony capitalism — trouble me; in fact, they deeply trouble me, but, as I read “The Book of Obama: From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt,” I also felt upset by the gaps in Mr. Rall’s logic.

    Mr. Rall’s work is very important because the mass media, governed by commercial and political interests, ignore the decidedly unglamorous and morally disquieting stories of poverty, international human rights abuses, and corrupt business that Mr. Rall addresses. The flaws in his book are in no way a reason to ignore these very true and very important problems. But, to address these problems, we need to move beyond either/or logic; we need to reimagine the possibilities of nonviolence, and we need to always remember that the future involves all of us, not us versus them.

   Let me first emphasize that Mr. Rall gets so very much right. For example, he is right when it comes to political hypocrisy and international affairs. Waging wars to oust some dictators based on their human rights records while courting other dictators with equally reprehensible human rights records is nothing new, but Mr. Rall makes us look at this anew when he contrasts U.S. relationships to Libya with U.S. relationships to Uzbekistan. We invaded Libya in 2011 with the purported intention of toppling Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi because of his dictatorial rule. In the same year, the U.S. lifted sanctions against Uzbekistan in order to cultivate a relationship with Islam Karimov, whose government had attracted the attention of Amnesty International for, among other atrocities, boiling dissidents alive.

    Mr. Rall not only points out this hypocrisy, he also connects these international problems and the money we spend on war with national problems of debt and the lived experience of Americans who are suffering because our government hasabdicated responsibility for really protecting its citizens. He makes us see that the real threats to our security come not from foreign dictators but rather from the predations of capitalism, as practiced by Americans and by others. He is right.

    I part from Mr. Rall when he directs much of the blame at President Obama and argues that we will not find viable solutions in our current political system. I believe President Obama has made some progress on a number of the problems he inherited. This is not enough for Mr. Rall. A crucial part of his argument is that incrementalism does not work, and he offers a witty cartoon to illustrate this. It imagines what would have ensued had Lincoln employed incrementalism: 4 percent fewer whippings rather than the abolition of slavery.

    Mr. Rall’s cartoons are like funhouse mirrors that force us to see the hypocrisy of much common sense. While I agree that incrementalism alone will not work, Mr. Rall misleads by offering a false choice between incrementalism and revolution. This false choice, relying on either/or logic, conceals other options, such as pursuing incremental change within the system and also engaging in other work to enact change.

    Here is what I mean. We can vote and we should vote because there are real differences between the candidates. I believe that President Obama has done a better job than John McCain would have and that today, President Obama offers a different vision of the future and different policies than those Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan propose. Because these differences will have concrete consequences on our lives, I will vote for Barack Obama.

    In addition to voting, we can work outside the system in a range of ways. Mr. Rall’s outside-the-system solutions are more interesting, if less precise, than his exhaustive and exhausting critique of President Obama. In some ways, he addresses the final chapter of this book to the leaders of the Occupy movement, urging them to make greater efforts to find common ground with the many disenfranchised Americans who have been and continue to be hurt by business as usual. Yet, he also advocates violence as a necessary component of change, a position that would not help the Occupy movement find common ground with mainstream America.

    Last autumn, harvest time, I kept expecting the Occupy protesters in New York to hack through the concrete sidewalks of downtown Manhattan and start planting vegetable gardens. That is how the revolution began in Starhawk’s 1993 novel “The Fifth Sacred Thing,” a work that helps me understand the limits of Mr. Rall’s argument for violent interventions. Creating gardens out of concrete is no longer a utopian dream, but rather part of a global movement of people finding power in their ability to feed themselves and their communities.

    In addition, some people are establishing time banks that encourage barter rather than reliance on the dominant economy. Transition towns, so named because they are actively working to make the transition to more sustainable communities by reducing dependence on fossil fuels, offer a model for enacting change on many levels. We can take steps that will make our lives better in material, aesthetic ways, steps that will improve our communities and pave the way for a more equitable and environmentally sound future, and we can also vote, thereby working toward a better world within the system and beyond it.

    Mr. Rall reminds us of how much work needs to be done; we need to engage in this work in many ways.

    Stephanie Wade teaches writing at Unity College in Maine and spends summers in East Hampton.

    Ted Rall has a house in East Hampton.

   The eighth annual Authors Night, a cocktail party and book signing to benefit the East Hampton Library, will take place on Saturday from 5 to 7:30 p.m. The authors reception will be followed by 25 dinner parties held at private houses in the area, each in honor of one of the guest authors, who will attend.

    For the first time, the “under the tent” reception will be held off-site, at the Gardiner Farm at 36 James Lane in East Hampton. Alec Baldwin and Barbara Goldsmith, presiding founders of the event, will be joined by Ken Auletta, David Baldacci, Robert A. Caro, Dick Cavett, Lynn Sherr, and Dava Sobel, who are honorary co-chairs, as well as more than 120 other authors.

    Among the authors at the book signing will be Kelly Killoren Bensimon, Philip Galanes, Oz Garcia, Peter Kaminsky, Robert Klein, Hilary Knight, Lucette Lagnado, Katie Lee, Robert Lipsyte, Jeffrey Lyons, Kati Marton, Peter Matthiessen, Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, Michael Shnayerson, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Sam Talbot, Ali Wentworth, and Ruth Westheimer.

    Guests at the reception can meet with the authors, buy their books, and have them personally inscribed, as well as enjoy hors d’oeuvres, wine, and beer donated by local businesses.

    Authors Night is the library’s largest fund-raiser of the year, raising more than 10 percent of its annual operating budget, according to Dennis Fabiszak, the library’s director. “We like to say it’s the largest dinner party in the Hamptons,” he said, “because we will have more than 500 people at dinners related to the event.” Tickets, at $100 for the reception, or $250 for the reception and an 8 p.m. author dinner, are available online at authorsnight.org and at the library.

    Fewer authors will be in attendance this year than last, Mr. Fabiszak said, “but the number of best-selling authors at the event is much greater than any year we’ve had in the past. We’re very excited that Bob Caro is going to be back. He’s a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and is out with his newest book, the fourth in the Lyndon Johnson series” — “The Passage of Power,” which is reviewed in this issue.

    “We’re also excited that for the first time we have Robert Massie, who just won an American Library Association award.” Mr. Massie was awarded the association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction for “Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman.”

    “We think it’s going to be a great event with the two of them here,” Mr. Fabiszak said.

“The Passage of Power”

Robert A. Caro

Knopf, $35

   Show me someone who thinks of history as the dry recitation of accumulated facts, and I’ll show you a person who has never known the pleasure of reading a book by Robert A. Caro.

    The fourth volume of Mr. Caro’s leviathan biography of the 36th president of the United States, “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” is a masterfully written account of a short but intense period of Johnson’s life. Titled “The Passage of Power,” it covers primarily four years (1960 to 1964) during which L.B.J., who had already turned himself into one of the most powerful and adept Senate majority leaders of modern times (if not of all time), campaigned for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination, lost the nomination to John F. Kennedy, agreed to run for vice president on the Kennedy ticket, served with increasing despair as vice president for three years, and rose, phoenix-like, from the relative powerlessness and obscurity of that job to take hold of the reins of government immediately after President Kennedy’s assassination.

    At slightly more than 600 pages, this latest installment of Mr. Caro’s opus on L.B.J. is a compelling read. Its strength, I believe, is in the combination of a crisp, clear, journalistic writing style and comprehensive research into the people and events about which the author writes. One’s impression is that he left no memo or news account unread, no interview unconducted. He marshals, with sublime ease, an unimaginable array of facts. The payoff for the reader is a text that is engaging and memorable.

    Perhaps the strongest theme in this book — as it is in much of Mr. Caro’s work — is the question of power, the passion for which was close to the core of L.B.J.’s animus. “Another continuing motif of Lyndon Johnson’s career — one that had been repeated in every institution in which he had climbed to power — was that the more power he acquired, the more he reveled in its use,” Mr. Caro writes, “flaunting it, using it often just for the sake of using it, bending men to his will just to show that he could. . . .”

    Dating from his time at an obscure teachers college in South Texas, the Johnson pattern was to take for himself seemingly insignificant jobs in government and unobtrusively accrue to those positions greater and greater influence.

    Because political power was the currency Johnson was most comfortable dealing in, many of the people close to him were surprised that he chose to accept Kennedy’s offer of the vice presidential nomination at the 1960 Democratic Party convention in Los Angeles. Up to that point in American history, the vice presidency had generally been something of a laughingstock, a largely ceremonial position characterized by boredom rather than power. Apparently, however, Johnson felt as though he had no choice but to accept the offer to become Kennedy’s running mate. He campaigned earnestly, struggling, as he often had to do, to get the public to see him as progressive and liberal, rather than as a Southern conservative. (Mr. Caro’s treatment of Johnson’s record on civil rights is nuanced and fair.)

    After victory over the Republican ticket of Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge, President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson began an increasingly frustrating working relationship that was never satisfactorily resolved. “Lyndon Johnson,” we are told, “who had devoted all his life to the accumulation of power, possessed now no power at all, and as Vice President the only power he would ever possess was what the President might choose to give him. He understood that now: understood that it was imperative for him to remain in the President’s good graces. All his life Lyndon Johnson had been as obsequious to those he needed as he had been overbearing to those he didn’t — and now he needed Jack Kennedy desperately.”

    To make matters worse, it became bitterly clear to the man whose roots were in a tiny, hardscrabble South Texas town that he and his wife were objects of derision among many members of the president’s inner circle, who formed a kind of “smart young set” of the era.

    “Some of the New Frontiersmen had a gift for words, and the terms that finally became the accepted nicknames for Lyndon Johnson in their social gatherings — ‘Uncle Cornpone’ or ‘Rufus Cornpone’ — were, in their opinion, so funny. They had a nickname for Lady Bird, too, so when the New Frontiersmen referred to the Johnsons as a couple, it might be as ‘Uncle Cornpone and his Little Pork Chop.’ The journalists who, as members of the in group, were at the parties would hear a West Winger laughingly refer to ‘Lyndon? Lyndon Who?’ and references to the situation would creep into print.”

    That “situation,” like so many other things, was to change forever on a Friday in Dallas in 1963. Mr. Caro’s description of the events of Nov. 22 and the several days following are particularly rich in detail. Knowing his subject’s character as well as he does, he speculates that L.B.J. had probably given at least some thought to what would happen if he had to assume the presidency suddenly. Sitting in the high-backed chair reserved for the commander in chief aboard Air Force One en route back to Washington with his predecessor’s body, now-President Lyndon Baines Johnson pulled a pad toward him and wrote three words: 1) Staff, 2) Cabinet, 3) Leadership.

    “But if ‘leadership’ as he wrote it on the pad referred only to a meeting of congressional kingpins,” Mr. Caro tells us, “the word also had broader connotations, and he showed not only that he knew what to do — but that he had the will to do it.”

    Of President Johnson’s meeting that very evening with Congressional leaders, Mr. Caro quotes Hugh Sidey, a journalist and longtime observer of the presidency. That session, Sidey wrote, contained “the real clue to [Johnson’s] flawless assumption of power. The evening had no real purpose. It was a kind of tribal ritual of those men who wielded power in the legislative halls [where] meetings are a way of life and a sign of authority.” Once Johnson had called such meetings, summoning such men. He hadn’t called one for three years. But now he had called one again. And, Sidey wrote, “those men understood.”

    Of particular interest is Mr. Caro’s handling of the longstanding feud between Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy — “bad blood” more than a feud, really. He details how Bobby Kennedy tried to convince his brother to withdraw the offer of the vice presidency to the despised Lyndon Johnson and how, when his brother refused to do so, the future attorney general tried to convince Johnson not to accept it. Along with the matter of power, the toxic relationship between L.B.J. and R.F.K. is a recurring motif throughout this book.

    One of Mr. Caro’s virtues as a biographer and historian is that he assiduously avoids judging the people and events he writes about, allowing the facts to speak for themselves. This is an implicit compliment to the reader, allowing him to make his own assessments. As one whose first exposure to the events Mr. Caro illuminates was as “current events,” I was struck by how very much times have changed. Whatever one makes of Lyndon Johnson and John and Robert Kennedy — arguably all of whom are the protagonists of this particular volume — it seems irrefutable that these were people of entirely different stature from those who are the political players and leaders of the present era.

    Robert A. Caro has a house in East Hampton.

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

   Robert A. Caro, besides being perhaps the country’s pre-eminent biographer, is one of the main cogs in the fund-raising machine that is the East Hampton Library’s Authors Night, which, as is detailed elsewhere on this very page, happens Saturday.

   But before then, he’ll warm up his speaking voice and writing hand with an appearance at Fridays at Five on the back lawn of the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton, reading from “The Passage of Power,” answering questions, and signing copies. The name of the series tells no lie: It starts tomorrow at 5 p.m. The cost is $15, and there’s plenty of red and white wine to quaff.

    There have been several exhibitions and related events surrounding the 100th anniversary of Jackson Pollock’s birth in January. While not a cause for celebration, the anniversary of his storied death just passed on Saturday.

    Although not specifically tied to these events, a few recent books have also addressed aspects of Pollock’s life and his influences. Last summer saw the publication of Gail Levin’s definitive biography of his wife, Lee Krasner. A book on Thomas Hart Benton by Justin Wolff (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $40) covers the life of another caretaker of Pollock as well as a formative influence on the young artist.

    Two other recent books, Evelyn Toynton’s “Jackson Pollock,” part of the Yale University Press’s Icons of America series ($26), and “American Letters 1927-1947: Jackson Pollock and Family” (Polity, $25), contribute to the rather large existing canon of publications devoted to the artist.

    Ms. Levin’s book, reviewed in The Star last summer, is the best in this class in terms of insight and historical fact. The book about Benton is also a thorough treatment of Pollock and an analysis of why his art did and then did not matter to 20th-century viewers and beyond.

    The two books exclusively about Pollock are not definitive, but both serve their individual purposes well. Ms. Toynton’s is a slim monograph that sets the artist in the broader context of his times. The basics familiar to anyone with working knowledge of Pollock’s life, e.g., his relationships with his brothers and mother, his relationship with Benton, his meeting Krasner, the mural for Peggy Guggenheim, and so on, are all there — as are reminders of what the art world and greater world around them were experiencing in the years of the Depression, World War II, and after, that made his contributions to those worlds at those times so meaningful.

    It is a good book to sit down with for an evening and walk away with a decent understanding of who the artist was and what he was trying to accomplish. It also looks at Pollock’s mysticism, his Jungian analysis, his alcoholism, and the influence of the Surrealists on his work. It’s not a biography so much as a portrait of an artist during the prime years of his life and the external forces that shaped him.

    As such, it still has its ambitions. Ms. Toynton sets out to debunk the myth of the “Cody, Wyoming Cowboy” that always serves as a facile way of summing up his outsider and outlaw persona. She points out that Pollock may have been born there, but with two vagabond parents was gone by the age of 10 months. He did live in the American West at various times in his youth, but spent just as much time in California. Still, the openness of that terrain and the sand paintings made by Navaho tribal members would have a great influence on his mature work in the way he laid out the large canvases on the floor and would paint with twigs and other unconventional tools. It was a myth that he seemed to play up in New York as well.

    A show on view through October at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs looks at the influence of Jose Clemente Orozco, a painter Pollock and his brothers became familiar with in their travels and at home, but Ms. Toynton states that Pollock’s use of common house paints and auto enamels was actually something he learned from another Mexican muralist, David Siqueiros.

    In an interesting contrast between books, Ms. Toynton sees the Pollock-Benton bond as a kindly, nurturing one, describing Pollock as being quite attached to Benton’s family and spending summers at their house on Martha’s Vineyard. In Mr. Wolff’s book, it sounds more tempestuous and Oedipal in some ways: Pollock’s rejection of Benton’s art and his sexually charged relationship with Benton’s wife even as he was baby-sitting and doing errands for them in exchange for their support.

    Both men apparently were hard drinkers and surly in their interactions. Before Pollock moved into a fuller abstract mode, he seems to have had nothing but respect for Benton. He later disavowed his mentor’s influence in his work.

    In the book of Pollock family letters, edited by Sylvia Winter Pollock with an introduction by Michael Leja, a more personal and firsthand account emerges. Mr. Leja contributes a well-ended summing up of the family’s background and the forces shaping their choices of profession, politics, and places of residence throughout their lives.

    He notes, as is also evident, that much of the mythology surrounding Pollock melts away in these personal messages to the people who knew him best. There are letters between the parents, LeRoy and Stella Pollock, the five Pollock brothers — Charles, Marvin (known as Mart), Frank, Sanford (known as Sande), and Paul Jackson (known as Jack and later Jackson) — their wives, and associates. Pollock’s family background was complex and unconventional. His father, who was born LeRoy McCoy, was left to work with a farm family whose last name was Pollock when his parents found themselves too poor to raise him.

    LeRoy left a similar legacy to his children. After a series of economic failures, he left his family in California to find his fortune. Although he continued to support them as much as he could financially and saw his sons on extended visits, he was never really part of the family household after a time and chose not to live with their mother even when he had another chance to try.

    One of the earliest letters is a warm discussion between LeRoy and a 16-year-old Jackson of a previous letter about religion. It is a simple but emotionally full note that makes their arrangement seem not so terrible after all. Through the 1930s there are letters with news of marriages and union and political activity. The 1940s chart the course of Pollock’s increasing success and notoriety and his evident pride in it.

    The book is likely to appeal primarily to Pollock enthusiasts who have exhausted other biographical sources, but it is also a fascinating firsthand portrait of an American family struggling through challenging times.

  “Killing the Messenger”

Thomas Peele

Crown, $26

   On Aug. 2, 2007, a 19-year-old male wielding a handheld shotgun killed the editor of The Oakland Post, a small, free, weekly newspaper in California. The killer had followed the orders given him by his 21-year-old employer, Yusuf Bey IV. Chauncey Bailey, his newspaper career tumbling in an avalanche of misfortune, seemed to be an unlikely target for murder, but he had written an unflattering story about an Oakland institution, Your Black Muslim Bakery.

   What Bailey had written was not the kind of story usually published by The Oakland Post, in which black business success stories were used to herald community progress. Nor was Bailey’s story about the bakery exceptionally well written. In fact, The Post’s publisher had refused to print it because it lacked attribution. But Yusuf Bey IV, who had been head of the bakery for two years, did not know the paper had refused to publish its editor’s negative story about the bakery’s nefarious business activities.

   Fourth, as he was called, became head of Your Black Muslim Bakery after his brother, four years older, was killed, possibly at the behest of Fourth. Yusuf Bey IV was ill equipped to manage the complex business enterprises established by his father, Yusuf Bey, consisting of one semi-legitimate business, the bakery, and numerous scams. Your Black Muslim Bakery made and sold banana cakes and fish sandwiches in the black community, a much healthier menu than white people/corporations offered to blacks, Bey claimed. The success of the bakery, however, depended heavily on the forced labor of women and children. Much of the rest of Bey’s enterprise depended on welfare payments for the children of the women and girls he enslaved and impregnated behind the walls of the bakery.

   Yusuf Bey, a k a Joseph Stephens, had been a “coiffeur with panache,” styling the hair of white women. After he converted to the Black Muslim religion and changed his name, he claimed he wanted to help his people. In addition, though, he wanted to become rich and to take any woman he desired to be his sexual partner. When he was criticized by leaders of the Black Muslims, he disassociated himself from the Black Muslim faith, but “clung to their rhetoric and preached their radical faith to his breakaway sect,” convincing many to give themselves totally to his version of the faith. While preaching self-determination, Bey “held absolute power over his followers, controlling when they worked, ate, and spoke, when and where they slept, what they wore, where they went.”

    In his weekly TV program, he preached that drugs were the devils’ (white people) way of suppressing and destroying blacks and preached against drinking alcohol. He also preached black superiority and stressed the “inferiority of other races, especially whites and Jews.” He recruited and trained a small army made up mostly of released convicts. They were, ostensibly, employees of Your Black Muslim Bakery, paid for by government grants for training and employment. The ex-con army was used to intimidate anyone who opposed Bey.

    His group controlled areas of Oakland that had been a problem for the overworked Oakland police force. Because the crime rate went down in the area around Your Black Muslim Bakery, the police practically withdrew, leaving the neighborhood in the hands of Bey and his men. The bakery obtained repeated government loans and grants that supported the army and, at the same time, a lavish lifestyle for Bey. The good life for Yusuf Bey lasted nearly 30 years.

    Under his fictional version of Islam, Bey justified both polygamy and sex with young girls as perfectly permissible. Eventually, some of the women he had abused banded together to file charges because their children, even their grandchildren in some cases, were being raped and enslaved. Finally, 27 rape charges were filed, Bey was arrested, and bail was set at $1 million. By that time, Bey was terminally ill. He was able to delay a trial long enough to die without being convicted. With no conviction for his crimes, those among his women and children who were loyal could claim his innocence, and Your Black Muslim Bakery was left to his heirs.

    Yusuf Bey had founded his business on the philosophical base of the Black Muslim faith, but as he moved forward he concentrated on his personal goals — power, money, and sex. His son and successor, Yusuf Bey IV, seemed to have little use for religion when he, still a teenager, first took over the bakery and its related enterprises. He also lacked the charisma and administrative ability of his father. As his inherited empire crumbled around him, he began studying the early words of the religious people his father had followed. He began thinking of himself as special, as having a divine calling. Despite the evidence that things were not going well in his empire, he believed himself to be protected.

    That kind of magical thinking must have led him to believe he would suffer no repercussions if he sent his soldiers to kill the journalist, Chauncey Bailey, who had written a negative story about him and Your Black Muslim Bakery. He was almost right. He almost got away with a brutal murder.

    Why he did not is what makes this one of the most important books I have read in the past decade. If I had the persuasive ability of Yusuf Bey, who persuaded officials to award some large grants to Your Black Muslim Bakery, perhaps I could persuade every elected official and every government employee, especially those in law enforcement, to read this book. Then I’d recruit ordinary citizens to read “Killing the Messenger,” especially people who think that no problems for our country will emerge from the differences in opportunity and lifestyle between the absurdly rich and the staggeringly poor.

    Just as Bey cajoled government officials into giving him money, if I had his ability I’d cajole religious fundamentalists to read this book. I mean those who believe their brand of religion should be the only religion for our democracy. “Killing the Messenger” is more than a nonfiction thriller, it is, perhaps unintentionally, a commentary on some of the major problems that face our country.

    This book reminds us all of the importance of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States because, ultimately, it was good old-fashioned journalism that brought justice to the murderers of Chauncey Bailey. When it was known that he might have been murdered because of a story he had written, the Chauncey Bailey Project was formed and journalists from many regions assembled in Oakland.

    Thomas Peele, the author of this book, was part of the project. For four years, dozens of investigative stories were written and published, finally exposing the facts about Your Black Muslim Bakery, the Oakland Police Department, and government officials who had developed selective vision in the expenditure of public funds when it was expedient to do so. Money from universities, foundations, and organizations supported the project. On the basis of this cooperative journalistic endeavor, Yusuf Bey IV and his henchmen were arrested, tried, and convicted for the murder of Chauncey Bailey.

    In the late 1960s, I was the minister of a mostly white church in a mostly black neighborhood in Pittsburgh, a stronghold, along with Detroit, of the Black Muslim faith. A group of white ministers held regular meetings with the leaders of the Black Muslims to promote understanding and cooperation through dialogue. In those meetings we heard about the forces of racism that gave root to their movement. In “Killing the Messenger,” the author also provides a summary of the historical context out of which a radical such as Yusuf Bey could manipulate a community and have the kind of impact on a city that Bey had in Oakland. On page 66, the author recounts what was happening when Southern blacks were migrating to the industrial areas of the North:

    “The Klan was growing rapidly in the North. Membership in Michigan eventually exceeded 800,000, the largest of any state. At rallies in the hinterlands, Klansmen claimed Detroit should be the exclusive domain of Caucasians. Klan membership in Detroit grew from a few thousand in 1921 to 22,000 less than two years later. As ballot counters began tallying the results of the 1923 municipal elections, crosses burned outside city hall. On Christmas Eve, the Klan placed a giant, oil-soaked cross downtown. A man dressed as Santa Claus ignited it, and four thousand men encircling the conflagration bowed their heads, reciting the Lord’s Prayer.”

    It is extremely important that readers of this book have a clear understanding of the history of prejudice and intimidation. Without this context for the emergence of the Black Muslim movement, the reader might easily drift into new layers of prejudice and be tempted to assign characteristics of the few described in this narrative to the many. Complex forces brought about the Black Muslim movement, and eventually the events in Oakland, culminating in the murder of the black writer Chauncey Bailey.

    Not even the history of suffering among blacks in the North can soften the horrible crimes and abuses that were inflicted on people in Oakland and documented in “Killing the Messenger.” However, without the historical reference provided in a dramatic, although brief, section of the book, I fear information about the events in Oakland as described might not only affirm racial bias but also give credence to individuals and organizations that oppose worthwhile social programs for struggling neighborhoods that need them.

    The First Amendment prohibits the making of any law impeding the exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, or infringing on the freedom of the press, as well as other protections. This galvanizing book, “Killing the Messenger: A Story of Radical Faith, Racism’s Backlash, and the Assassination of a Journalist,” may be uncomfortable to read because it reminds us how terribly fragile and violable those precious First Amendment rights are, even in an established, pluralistic society. Despite that discomfort, it should be read and appreciated as an important and timely book.

    Thomas Peele is an investigative reporter for the Bay Area News Group. He grew up in East Hampton and graduated from East Hampton High School.

    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.

“Ponies & Rainbows”

Sean Egan

BearManor Media, $32.95

    Buried somewhere in Sean Egan’s biography of James Kirkwood Jr. is an interesting book and an interesting man. Unfortunately the storyline is so smothered in irrelevant detail that it takes extraordinary patience to unearth them.

    Kirkwood is perhaps best known as one of the writers of the long-running musical “A Chorus Line.” He also wrote several novels, one of which, “P.S. Your Cat Is Dead,” was made into a play that I saw in its third revival in New York. I remember it as original and shockingly funny.

    Jimmy Kirkwood was the son of two movie stars, Lila Lee and James Kirkwood Sr., actors in silent movies who made the transition to talkies. They were members of the Hollywood elite of that era. James Kirkwood Sr. was not only an impressive stage and screen actor, he directed Mary Pickford in nine movies and he and Lila were friends with her and other major stars: Gloria Swanson, Al Jolson, and Dolores del Rio. Their marriage was a battleground, however, and they divorced in 1930.

    When he was 12 years old, Jimmy Kirkwood suffered a trauma that, in all likelihood, profoundly affected him for the rest of his life. He discovered the decomposing body of his mother’s fiancé, of whom he was allegedly fond, in the garden hammock of a friend’s house where they were staying. How long had it been there? Was the gun in the victim’s hand the weapon that had killed him? Much mystery surrounded this incident, at first listed by the police as a suicide, later investigated as a possible homicide. The death had all the ingredients of Hollywood crime fiction. Kirkwood later used this story as a central theme in his first novel, “There Must Be a Pony!”

    It is at this juncture that my major objections to this biography surfaced. There is a blurring between the real events in Kirkwood’s life and the fictional situations he created in his novels. A biographer’s task is to bring clarity to his subject, but Mr. Egan indulges in outright gossip.

    The reader gets no hard facts about this man, Reid Russell, with whom Kirkwood’s mother claimed to have been “madly in love.” Was he the kindly, reliable father figure Kirkwood depicts in his novel, or was he a suicidal depressive, fired from his job and facing financial ruin? If the latter, why was Lila engaged to a man who constantly threatened suicide?

    We are never told but instead given conflicting opinions from the press coverage and various friends, some of whom met Kirkwood many, many years after the 1936 event. One, William Russo, speculates that Kirkwood may have killed Russell, and moreover that the boy, who was fascinated by death (what imaginative adolescent isn’t, particularly in these circumstances?), could possibly have been a serial murderer. Another friend, Jim Piazza, who was Kirkwood’s lover in the 1980s, suggests that 12-year-old Jimmy may have had an incestuous relationship with his mother — they were “almost unnaturally together” — and that the boy could have killed Russell out of jealousy. With friends like these . . .

    That brings up the question of Kirkwood’s homosexuality, which is obsessively discussed in this biography. There is little doubt that he was gay, despite relationships with women in his early years. A friend at the time, when asked if Jimmy was straight, responded, “Straight with a lot of curves.” He was known to be both the partner and the lover of the talented actor Lee Goodman when they performed in a successful stand-up comedy act that lasted seven years. Later he was a lively part of the gay scene in the Hamptons (he met his longtime lover and steadfast friend, Arthur Beckenstein, at a gay bar called the Millstone).

    But he has been criticized for not being open about his sexual orientation in his novels. As Mr. Egan points out, when his early novels, “There Must Be a Pony!” and “Good Times/Bad Times,” were written, homosexuality was still a punishable offense for which you could be given a jail sentence, so it was wise to be discreet. However, those gays who read the books responded to the coded message they conveyed. The paramount themes were the pain of being young and an outsider and the passionate need for a strong, loyal friendship with another like-minded person. Years after they were published, Kirkwood was still getting letters from young admirers saying the books had been life-changing for them.

    I remember watching “A Chorus Line” and being riveted. Here was a show so current, so remarkably frank, so unlike any musical I’d seen before. I have to think that regardless of all the interviews with the dancers that shaped the script, and some carping about his contribution to the show, Kirkwood was a perfect choice as librettist on this particular project. He loved theater but he had quit performing because he hated the humiliating audition process. Moreover, he was a writer who was funny and irreverent. He was the ideal choice for the musical, and it made him a millionaire.

    Sean Egan’s “Ponies & Rainbows” (a terrible title) is worth reading, if you have the time. There are some lovely passages about the pleasures of living in the Hamptons, where Kirkwood became a year-round resident. His second house sat on a bluff in East Hampton 40 feet above Three Mile Harbor, from which vantage point it provided a spectacular view of the whole bay.

    Kirkwood was a complex man, sensitive yet with an explosive temper, particularly if he felt slighted. Among other reported violent outbursts, he got into a much-publicized physical confrontation with Joseph Papp, the producer of “A Chorus Line,” on the occasion of the musical’s 5,000th performance.

    On the other hand, he was capable of long-term, loving relationships, like the one with Arthur Beckenstein, which he maintained till the end of his life. He was vital, witty, and intelligent, loyal and generous to friends and family. I particularly liked the quotations at the end of the book — this one from a fellow playwright, Terrence McNally:

    “People will still say out of the blue, ‘God, I miss Jimmy.’ . . . When people say ‘Jimmy,’ they don’t have to say ‘Jimmy Kirkwood’ — and it’s a pretty common name. But he was Jimmy and people still miss him and I can’t think of many people that you can say over fifteen years after they’ve left, ‘Oh God, I miss Jimmy.’ ”

    James Kirkwood died in 1989 of AIDS-related cancer. Sean Egan has written books about the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix.

    Jennifer Hartig is a former stage actress who regularly contributes book reviews to The Star. She lives in Noyac.