At a recent morning assembly at an elementary school not far west of the Shinnecock Canal, the guest reader, Jay Schneiderman, was introduced as a renaissance man, if not exactly in the following words: former East Hampton Town supervisor, legislator who finally broke the County Road 39 traffic logjam, vanquisher of that tough old pol George Guldi, drummer, and now, author and illustrator.

    Of a children’s book. Specifically, “The Stonecutter,” a self-published tale “adapted from an ancient Chinese fable.” In it, a humble worker is brought to a standstill by the heat of the sun and comes to covet its power. Further, in a sudden display of shape-shifting, he becomes the sun. What follows is a kind of  cosmological game of rock, paper, scissors. A cloud obscures the sun, so, seeking still more power, the stonecutter takes its form. Then the wind disperses the cloud, after which a stone wall stops the wind cold, and we’re back where we began.

    But wait. The newly vivified wall, just beginning to flex its muscles and boast, sees that it can be felled by a mere stonecutter. As a result, it wishes to re-embody him. And thus the lesson of being true to oneself. At Mr. Schneiderman’s reading of the book’s last line, teachers in unison let out a sincere “Aww.”

    As for the students, they were, as one teacher put it, unusually engaged, peppering the county legislator with questions about the illustrations, which, simple and not without charm, he did on a computer. The story has its share of wit, too, as when the cloud excuses itself to go ruin someone’s parade.

    For a new children’s book author, Mr. Schneiderman gets a couple of things right, in keeping the story basic, not wordy, and in moving it along briskly. His text rhymes, yet even that is unobtrusive rather than cloying. Maybe a proclamation is in order.  

“The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat”

Thomas McNamee

Free Press, $27

   When Craig Claiborne put his East Hampton house up for sale in 1988, the real estate agent included a long list of professional restaurant equipment in the “once-in-a-lifetime kitchen.” Apart from the many food columns, restaurant reviews, and best-selling cookbooks that made Claiborne’s reputation, the kitchen was about all he had left to show for his decades as food editor of The New York Times. It was largely paid for by The Times, proof of his success and his value, and it was where all those memorable meals were prepared by star chefs and consumed by notable guests.

    For an asking price of $885,000, the atypical house on Clamshell Avenue facing Hand’s Creek was built to Claiborne’s plans in 1979. The kitchen had a stainless-steel Chinese roast pork oven, Salamander broiler, Simac “Gelatio” ice cream maker, Traulsen refrigeration, and 500-bottle wine closet. It was a kitchen wagging a house. Even by today’s measure, the space anchored by a 10-foot marble work island under a skylight would make Mario Batali wet his “Fanta pants” with excitement.

     Claiborne had just definitively retired from The Times in 1988 when he tried unsuccessfully to sell the house. The food newsletter he once produced with the late Pierre Franey, his longtime Times colleague and East Hampton neighbor, had failed. The food world already had started to change around him. He needed to reinvent himself. Instead, as we see in “The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat” by Thomas McNamee, he continued a sad decline.

    Reading this first comprehensive account of Claiborne’s life to appear since his death in 2000, it seems that he’s been given a somewhat ambiguous legacy 50 years after publishing his first column for The Times. In a world that has become so obsessed with food and dining, why did it take so long for someone to tell the story of someone so influential in what Mr. McNamee calls the “American food renaissance”? Why was Mr. McNamee, with only one other book in this genre to his credit — about Alice Waters and Chez Panisse — the one to write it?

    No one doubts the extraordinary degree to which Claiborne changed what and how we eat today. Mr. McNamee accurately points out that it helped him to have the power of The Times behind him. Still, Claiborne set his own high standards that — at least before today’s food blogging free-for-all — were previously unimaginable. It’s difficult to measure his full contribution, not just to diners but to the food and hospitality trade.

    Does it say as much about Claiborne’s contribution as it does about how his public, peers, and subjects ultimately perceived him that only now do we have a (sort of) definitive book about him? Has the rush to celebrity chef status and all its TV trappings reached such intensity that it has diminished Claiborne’s legacy so quickly? Or, as Mr. McNamee’s research attests, after years of not too successfully hiding his condescension is Claiborne seated in the restaurant equivalent of Siberia?

    Perhaps that’s why Henri Soulé and his Le Pavillon restaurant in New York City (and brief summer outpost at the Hedges in East Hampton) were Claiborne’s ideals for fine French dining. Mr. McNamee shows us that Soulé was as much a dominant influence on Claiborne as his early studies at the Ecole Hoteliere de la Société Suisse des Hoteliers in Lausanne, Switzerland. Claiborne saw Soulé as the real thing, an imperious bearer of standards for classic French cuisine in a room governed by impeccable service — if not snobbism. In Soulé, Claiborne may unwittingly have come across the monster he was to help create in today’s egomaniacal TV celebrity chefs.

    So what sort of monster has Claiborne created 50 years on? Take Scott Conan, the recent subject of a “Power Dressing” column in The Financial Times. Conan is 41, a U.S. chef, television personality, and cookbook author with six restaurants across this country and Canada. He’s been host of “24-hour Restaurant Battle” on the Food Network and is a judge on “Chopped.” Describing his shirt, Conan the power dresser informs us: “This is a light blue cotton, and woven inside the twill-like fabric is a darker blue. All my clothes are made to measure. I’m not just in the restaurant business; they’re quality restaurants so the shirt is representative.”

    We can only imagine what Craig would say if he were around to read this sort of thing. Perhaps, “I’ll have what he’s wearing.”

    Of all the people who could have written this book, why Mr. McNamee? To answer that you’d have to ask a long list of people who might have more deeply captured the era and the man. Gael Greene, for one, could have given us more zest and feel for her subject. Maybe there just wasn’t all that much material in the end. Were there too many falling-outs for anyone that close to him to want to put it all back together again? As informative as “The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat” can be, someday someone should delve more deeply into the social context that is the real payoff in what Claiborne accomplished for people and how they eat.

    For now, Mr. McNamee gives us an accurate chronological account of a life and the people who were close to it before Claiborne’s darkness alienated them. He was frustrated in love and in not being able to live freely gay for much of his life. He drank a lot, and he largely ignored his deteriorating health later on.

    In contrast to his subject’s élan, Mr. McNamee’s style is clunky and colloquial at times. There are stretches when he marshals so much information that the maddening signature of Zagat’s guide reviews comes to mind: Some readers will enjoy the accounts of feuding chefs, others will cringe at the attempts to put Claiborne’s sexuality into context.

    In more than a few places Mr. McNamee’s references to food and cooking can seem more researched than knowledgeable. Other sections read as though he spent too much time in Claiborne’s archives rather than talking to people about him. We loved what Claiborne had to teach us, but everyone agreed that his writing mostly had the fluidity of a starched white napkin draped over a waiter’s forearm.

    The book’s notes, credits, and index will be a helpful resource for those in the younger “Top Chef” generation who may just now be discovering Claiborne. Some of the detail seems included for the sake of proving that the research is ironclad. For those of us in East Hampton, it’s nice to know that Jacques Franey’s birthday is June 30 so we could wish him well when channeling his father, Pierre, at Domaine Franey Wines & Spirits on Pantigo Road. Among others, Mr. McNamee spoke extensively to Jacques’s sister, Diane, for the book.

    Leaving no heirs, Claiborne left his estate to his great love, Jim Dinneen, and to the Culinary Institute of America, where a bookstore and scholarship fund bear his name. It was a fitting legacy from someone who long ago saw the value of such an institute in America — much the way Claiborne’s studies in Lausanne formed the approach to food and service he would keep forever.

    While carefully describing the bitterness Claiborne never eluded, Mr. McNamee still makes sure Claiborne’s great kindness, generosity, and encouragement for others are given credit. Beyond helping Pierre Franey gain prominence, he backed Mimi Sheraton to become The Times restaurant critic, guided Marcella Hazan to produce one of the best Italian cookbooks ever written, and was the first to discover many other household names in the food business today.

    As a side note, when I was a reporter for this newspaper in 1989 I got a call from Craig. He liked a piece I wrote about his Clamshell Avenue house being for sale. Would I organize the notes he’d been collecting for a book? We met at the house, I agreed, and I helped edit his last published book, “Elements of Etiquette: A Guide to Table Manners in an Imperfect World” (2001).

    I don’t remember what he served at the first meal I had with Claiborne and Jim at the house, but I do recall the wine. It was a Simi Valley chardonnay I still buy today. Knowing about the famous $4,000 meal he and Pierre Franey shared in Paris in 1975 to stick it to American Express after winning a PBS auction, I had expected a bigger bottle, maybe a white Burgundy. No, the surprisingly crisp Californian was a sign of Craig’s egalitarian appreciation and respect for what was simply good.

    Aside from its weak spots, Mr. McNamee’s book ultimately brings a complex and reserved man into accurate focus. We’re left with someone whose great achievements were overshadowed by loneliness and sadness. We wish he could have been a little less ahead of his time — for himself, and for us. In this era of “vibe dining” establishments and retina-exploding presentation, we could use a little more Claiborne.

    Eric Kuhn is a former reporter and news editor for The Star. He has lived in Paris since 2000.

    Thomas McNamee lives in San Francisco.

   So how’s the East End market for literary readings? Strong? Steady? Saturated? Is the top-flight quality outpacing demand, or driven by it, and not just by the bursting supply of name authors here?

    An S.P.O. (seasonal public offering) on July 14 at the Amagansett Library will start off a series of half a dozen Saturday evening visits by writers with books in hand, joining or competing with Canio’s Cultural Cafe in Sag Harbor, Fridays at Five in Bridgehampton, BookHampton’s regular events across its four shops, the readings at the bucolic Quogue Library and occasionally at the East Hampton Library and Rogers Memorial in Southampton, and, over at the Marine Museum in Amagansett, the Poetry Marathon, which returns on Sunday at 5 p.m., when Anne Sager and the playwright Joe Pintauro step to the lectern.

    Authors After Hours is the name, and it will open with Louis Begley on the 14th, reading from “Schmidt Steps Back,” the latest of his Schmidt novels. Hilma Wolitzer will follow on the 21st with her new novel of late-life romance, “An Available Man,” well reviewed in The New York Times, and on the 28th Carl Safina will elaborate on “The View From Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World.”

    Aug. 4 brings Roger Rosenblatt cracking the spine of his most recent memoir, “Kayak Morning: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats,” a follow-up to his tale of family loss, “Making Toast.” On the 18th, Allan Retzky of Amagansett will give an airing to his spanking-new debut novel, “Vanished in the Dunes,” a thriller. And the series concludes on Aug. 25 with the science writer Dava Sobel and “A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos.”

    The readings start at 6 p.m. and are free.

Furst Reads in Sag

    Ah, September in Paris — the bridges over the glittering Seine, the cafes, and, in Alan Furst’s latest novel of espionage, intrigue, and lust, the impending advance of Nazi tanks across the continent. It’s 1938 in “Mission to Paris,” and caught up in the machinations leading up to war are an Austro-Slovenian Hollywood actor, a German baroness, a Russian actress and spy, and for good measure a Hungarian diplomat or two.

    Mr. Furst, who with his string of popular and critically praised novels is now king of the historical espionage genre, while at the same time surpassing genre fiction, will read from “Mission to Paris” on Saturday at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor — the novelist’s home village, it just so happens.

“The Spine of the Continent”

    Mary Ellen Hannibal of the Springs Hannibals has a new book, “The Spine of the Continent,” coming out in September from Lyons Press, and it has already reaped acclaim from the sometimes prickly Kirkus book review journal — you know the one, with the no-frills layout in a plain white wrapper.

    The book tackles a large-scale conservation effort and the scientists and activists behind it. The idea is to connect untamed stretches and pockets of wild or at least nature-friendly land the length of the Rocky Mountains, making an ecosystem and haven for wildlife. To put a fine point on it, the book’s subtitle: “The Most Ambitious Wildlife Conservation Project Ever Undertaken.”

    Ms. Hannibal is the author, most recently, of “Evidence of Evolution.” She has written for The San Francisco Chronicle and lives in the Bay Area.

“Mission to Paris”

Alan Furst

Random House, $27

    The specter that haunts the Europe of Alan Furst’s novels is a cataclysm beyond the imagination of his characters. But it is agonizingly real to his readers. Millions of men, women, and children will die after his story is told because of the greed, stupidity, ego, nationalism, and pure malevolence of characters we have met on his pages. Mr. Furst’s protagonists can’t stop the slaughter because they are not the standard cardboard heroes in formulaic thrillers; they are decent, urbane men over their heads in a web of evil. Mr. Furst’s superb novels of historical suspense and political adventure are in a genre of his own.

    Of course, Mr. Furst has his own conventions of mood, style, and plot. His latest, “Mission to Paris,” typically transports us into place with its opening sentence. “In Paris, the evenings of September are sometimes warm, excessively gentle, and, in the magic particular to that city, irresistibly seductive. The autumn of the year 1938 began in just such weather and on the terraces of the best cafes, in the famous restaurants, at the dinner parties one wished to attend, the conversation was, of necessity, lively and smart: fashion, cinema, love affairs, politics, and, yes, the possibility of war.”

    We will soon be dining at those cafes and restaurants and parties and we will be drawn into the curious silence around the one verboten conversation — the tens of millions of dollars, in francs, that the Nazi government’s propaganda apparatus has been spreading around the salons and boardrooms of the influential.

    Some of that “German money” is marked for the former Franz Stalka, an Austro-Slovenian who had emigrated to America and reinvented himself as Frederic Stahl, a Hollywood actor typecast as “a warm man in a cold world.”

    Stahl is a quintessential Furst leading man, lonely, flawed, competent (two Oscar nominations!), and ultimately driven by a romantic disposition and a spiny integrity.

    He is in Paris to star in a movie called, amusingly, “Apres la Guerre,” about the aftermath of the war to end all wars. The Nazi propagandists, aware of his Viennese birth, exert pressure on him to visit Berlin. They think an American star making a movie in Paris giving awards at a German film festival would help the larger scheme of encouraging French passivity to the massing Third Reich war machine. Stahl brushes them off until an official at the American Embassy suggests that such a trip might just be useful. There is information to be had. Risky, yes. And yet, if you really are an American you will want to do your part. . . .

    Somehow, Mr. Furst makes all this nuanced shadow play seem urgently compelling in the manner of Joseph Conrad, Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, and John le Carré, writers whose mixture of cynicism laced with hope he matches. If there is a downside to Mr. Furst it is that he makes it impossible after reading him to waste any more time on all those flatulent best-selling “thrillers” in which the entire world hangs in the balance while a “maverick” federal agent disarms a bomb, kickboxes an assassin, or joysticks a drone while giving lessons in tantric sex.

    Which is not to say that Stahl, like most of Mr. Furst’s protagonists, doesn’t end up with a small gun in one hand and an interesting woman in the other.

    Mr. Furst’s books are great reads on two levels; they are beachy page-turners and, if you are willing to slip into his sly, dry realpolitik, they are sophisticated meditations on government, power, powerlessness, and the danger of history ignored. One can find a subversive message here. Our leaders may well be inept, corrupt, even foolish, but we are worse if we simply give up or wait for the hero on the white horse.

    The choice of era is instructive and a fine parallel to our own. Money was being made, warnings were being ignored, incompetent leaders were being followed, and everyday people who could have made a difference were passively complicitous or in denial. And we didn’t even get German money.

    Mr. Furst has written a dozen novels set in that tense and perilous time he has recreated so convincingly. Each novel stands alone without benefit of a continuing hero or city, yet he manages to keep them fresh without a convoluted plot. It is the smells and tastes of the city that perk and sustain our interest as well as the historical and political references. There are never chunks of hasty explication or characters talking like textbooks. We come to care about those characters, too. Will Stahl be able to save his new love, the costume designer Renate, and get back to the safety of the Warner Brothers studio?

    The style is smooth, occasionally elegant, more often plainly direct. And the sense of impending doom colors everything noir. Even while dining in Maxim’s or trying new positions with his fling, Kiki, one imagines a black-and-white world.

    You can’t just read one Furst novel. Among my favorites, soon to be a BBC America mini-series, is “The Spies of Warsaw,” in which a French nobleman, Lt. Colonel Mercier, his leg stiff from a World War I wound (it hampers his tennis but not his lovemaking), becomes the military attaché, the resident spymaster, in Warsaw.

    He’s more comfortable with a gun than the actor Stahl, but the woman in question, a lawyer for the League of Nations, is the standard Furstian handful with a complicated past and a dicey future. Poland is shadowy and intriguing and the spycraft is enthralling. Now I even know how to safeguard my passwords: shave a small patch from my dog’s back, write my passwords in indelible ink, then just wait for the hair to grow back. First Mr. Furst is entertaining, then informative, finally invaluable.

    Alan Furst lives in Sag Harbor.

    Robert Lipsyte’s memoir, “An Accidental Sportswriter,” was just issued in paperback. He lives on Shelter Island.

  “An Uncommon

Journey”

Deborah Strobin and Ilie Wacs

Barricade Books, $24.95

     Just as many people believe that the name of every victim of the Holocaust deserves to be remembered in perpetuity, so, too, it is held, the story of each survivor deserves to be told and heard. Both gestures are rooted in the dual needs to honor and to remember.

    Deborah Strobin and Ilie Wacs, in their joint memoir, “An Uncommon Journey: From Vienna to Shanghai to America — A Brother and Sister Escape to Freedom During World War II,” shed light on a story of survivorship less often told but nevertheless worthy of being heard.

    Between 1937 and 1941, approximately 20,000 European Jews fled to Shanghai, China, seeking refuge from the ever-tightening noose of Nazi oppression. The Wacs family, residents of Vienna, was among them — Moritz, a skilled tailor, Helen, a shy housewife and mother, and their two children, Ilie and Dorit. In August 1939, heeding the stern warning of one of Moritz’s gentile employees (who seemed to know that war would begin on Sept. 1), the family boarded the last ship to leave Vienna for Shanghai before the Anschluss.

    Part of this book’s uniqueness is its format. While the overall story is told chronologically — from childhood in Vienna, which Dorit (Deborah) is too young to remember firsthand, to competent adulthood in the United States — the narration alternates between sections headed “Brother” and those headed “Sister.” They often cover the same material, though from different viewpoints, which adds nuance. Each contributor has a distinctive voice. That those voices are quite different is jarring at first, but, ultimately, it leads to a clear understanding of precisely who each of the authors is.

    For Ashkenazi Jews from central Europe, settling into life in Shanghai was by no means easy. In addition to the obvious differences of language, culture, and climate, there were also the issues of poverty and the hardship of war that had to be faced daily. Soon after the Wacs family’s arrival, the Japanese occupied Shanghai. Along with a number of other people, Jews were forced to relocate within a one-square-mile area of the Hongkou district that was designated as the Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees. In other words, a ghetto.

    Interestingly, the Japanese occupiers remained unresponsive to pressure from their German allies when it came to sending the Shanghai Jews back to Europe. Mr. Wacs writes that one reason for this may have been that, during the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, the only money Japan was able to raise in Europe was from Jewish sources.

    Although life in the Shanghai ghetto may not have been so harrowing as in the Warsaw ghetto or others, it was nevertheless grim. The Wacs family occupied an apartment of one and a half rooms, with a communal toilet outside. Even boiled water had to be purchased daily. For cooking, a large flowerpot was turned into a makeshift hibachi.

    Eventual liberation came in 1945. Mr. Wacs writes: “Then on July 17, 1945, I will never forget the date, American bombers made their usual noon appearance, high in the sky. Only this time, instead of flying over, they opened their cargo doors, and bombs fell like rain. Until that moment, despite all our hardships, I had considered myself a spectator of the war, staring out my window, drawing the life below. As the ground shook and Mutti screamed for me to ‘Run!’ it occurred to me that I might not be around to see what happened next.”

    His sister, Ms. Strobin, eight years younger, has the following recollection of the same event: “We heard the planes before we saw them, and I could tell they were American planes. American planes were like a bullet, buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, while Japanese planes were squeaky and clunky sounding. Mutti yelled at both of us, ‘Get downstairs!’ but Ilie wouldn’t budge, he wasn’t finished with his drawing. . . . He was trying to capture the moment in charcoal. . . . As the bombs began to land, he kept drawing.”

    Relief from war’s end was short-lived. It wasn’t long before the Chinese Communists began their takeover of the mainland. According to Ms. Strobin, “Once again, we were on the last ship out. Last boat out of Vienna, because of Papa’s stubbornness, and, for the same reason, we were among the last people to leave Shanghai.”

    The remainder of the book is an account of what happened to the authors and their parents in the many years that followed. It is an intimate, sometimes poignant, look at a family that kept going, out of affection and loyalty to one another and despite the cruel vagaries of history.

    A worthwhile subtext is how both of the authors came into their own. Mr. Wacs had an easier time of it. His talent as an artist was discovered while the family was in Shanghai. Through the intervention of a sympathetic member of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, young Ilie was sent to art school in Paris. This led to a successful career in the fashion world — in Paris and as a well-known designer of fine ladies’ coats in the U.S. Eventually, he retired from business to devote himself to producing art. His family’s experience as stateless Jews who fled for their lives has had a significant effect upon his work, which has been exhibited, among other places, here on the South Fork.

    For Ms. Strobin, the road to self-discovery and fulfillment was less direct and took longer. Over time, however, she morphed from a shy, insecure refugee girl into a confident and accomplished woman who has written a record of significant achievement as a fund-raiser, most notably in the area of stem cell research.

    Two aspects of the book require comment. The first is the question of proportion, always a difficult thing to achieve. The authors’ wartime experiences and reflections occupy well less than half of the volume. Inasmuch as this part of their story holds the most potential for the greatest interest, one wishes it had been longer. Also, the book could have used a better proofreader; there are a number of missing words and small grammatical errors that should not appear in any published work.

    These concerns notwithstanding, however, the authors’ stories stand on their own and speak for themselves. Papa and Mutti would be justifiably proud of their progeny.

    Ilie Wacs lives in Sagaponack.

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

Drumm TV

    The Star’s Russell Drumm can be seen reading from his forthcoming novel, “A Rogue’s Yarn,” on LTV this week — specifically, tomorrow at 1 p.m., Saturday at 4:30 p.m., Sunday night at 10:30, Tuesday at 11 a.m., and on Friday, June 8, at 1 p.m. The novel, the story of an aging homeless surfer living in Waikiki with a dark secret, will be out first as an e-book this summer.

    The hourlong reading was recorded not long ago at the Montauk Bookshop, where Mr. Drumm was joined by another surfer, Claude Mayers of Water Mill, who read a number of poems, some from “Vault of Poems.” Published in 2011, the collection covers his work from 1968 through 2010. Music is part of the TV program, too, courtesy of the bands Gold and Gunmetal, 9th Wave, and Clouds at Dusk.

“No Go Sleep!”

    That eternal concern of parents and nemesis of children, sleep, will be considered anew on Saturday at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, when Jules Feiffer and Kate Feiffer, his daughter, present their new children’s book collaboration, “No Go Sleep!” In it, a little one, awake in his crib, is cajoled to conk out by animals, a passing car, even the sun, which promises to come back to play the following day.

    The book follows up the duo’s “My Side of the Car,” from last year, a recollection of an odd “weather event,” as the forecasters say, in which it rained only on the driver’s side of Mr. Feiffer’s car on a trip to the zoo. The legendary cartoonist, who lives in Southampton of late, will also sign copies of his 2010 memoir, “Backing Into Forward,” which was released in paperback last month by the University of Chicago Press. What’s more, Mr. Feiffer’s cover illustration for Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth” will be available for sale in signed, limited-edition prints. The 50th anniversary of the book’s publication was recently celebrated.

“A New Yorker at Sea”

Nick Catalano

Aegean Press, $11

    By his own account, Nick Catalano was inexactly cut out for sailing. In this self-published book, the author early on notes that “the idea of sailing and the dream of adventure were always more appealing than the actual conditions at sea.” He finds that “sailing in any wind over twelve knots gave [him] the willies.” In local waters, that should keep him chronically on edge. Further, he “couldn’t master knot-tying, got very nervous at docking,” and feared his crewmates might “discover his on-deck ineptitude.” But Mr. Catalano gets kudos for persistence.

    It soon becomes clear that “A New Yorker at Sea” is a reconstruction of sailing notes and a manuscript going back at least 20 years. The book offers a short, easy-to-miss frontispiece — a disclaimer of sorts — seeking to remind us that the dated subject matter still has relevance, and some of it does.

    Considering the danger and discomforts of Mr. Catalano’s misadventures, it’s no wonder his book is fraught with foreboding and mood swings, from anxiety to self-celebration. There is no even keel. But then, stress comes with the territory if, for example, you are trying to race a yacht in a hurricane.

    The first chapter finds the author crewing aboard the 30-foot sloop Cassandra, racing east down the Atlantic coast of Long Island. So is Hurricane Bob, which struck the East Coast in August 1991. Cassandra appears to have “finished first” by default, at an unspecified location in Long Island Sound. Competitors were scattered, dismasted, or capsized that day by the storm. A race like this one was most likely canceled.

    Then, in a brief, five-page account, the author begins to emerge, this time with bravado: “Sailing in forty knots of wind should have terrified me, but there I was, urging the boat onward with the madness of a modern-day Ahab.”

    The next three pages deliver a cursory account of island hopping in the Windward Islands of the Caribbean: St. Vincent, Bequia (a sailing hotspot favored by the trust-funded), the lovely Jost Van Dyke, and St. John. These disconnected snippets suggest that the author is certifying his experience while, paradoxically, discrediting his own seamanship.

    Mr. Catalano refers to sailing people as “yachties” throughout this book. The author, whether or not a yachtie himself, ends the introductory pages with a peculiar insight: “In addition to the physical challenge of sailing, there’s the stress of making sure you operate according to Hoyle, or some wise ass will always be ready to criticize so he can score points with his guests and aggrandize his macho personality.”

    These rudderless narratives finally arrive at the book’s larger storyline in chapter three. It begins with a cram course on famous sailors, particularly circumnavigators like Joshua Slocum, Francis Chichester, Robin Knox-Johnston, Susan Hiscock, and Bernard Moitessier. Why? Because the author has been requested to replace a crew member aboard the 52-foot cutter Bravura, which is attempting to complete its own circumnavigation of the world. The yacht is progressing, with difficulties, up the Suez Canal.

    Next we find Mr. Catalano among the ruins of the city of Suez. Aging wreckage from the Yom Kippur War of 1973 is strewn about the Canal Zone. He fulminates against Egyptian cab drivers and hotel service. He calls to mind the Palestinian terrorist hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985 and the murder of the wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer. Our narrator is, as a supposed friend to Israel, an ugly American, like it or not.

    Clearly we are in another time zone in a different era. And for the first time, the book’s recurring lapses in continuity tumble us into an exotic and interesting read.

    At the Suez Yacht Club, the narrator makes his rendezvous with the cutter Bravura, the boat’s owner, and another crew member. Formal introductions aboard the boat bring the reader another surprise. Nick Catalano, the author-narrator to this point, introduces himself as Joe Pisano, the replacement crew member.

    So it is that Nick Catalano loses his place as narrator and acquires a pseudonym. (Notes on the book’s back cover help to confirm the Pisano transformation.) Through this rather facile name change, a fictional character takes the author’s place. “Virtually all of what follows is true,” writes Mr. Catalano in the book’s introduction. Hence, permission to embroider on the facts has been granted.

    In any case, the yacht Cassanda will need all the help she can get on this voyage, which carries us through to the book’s unnerving surprise ending. The yacht’s engine is cutting in and out, and they are short on motor oil, beer, and water. Behemoth — and oblivious — oil tankers bear down on them in the narrow canal. At a pier, they are accosted by armed men on horseback. If they ever get out of the Suez Canal Zone, engine repairs will have to wait until reaching Malta, well over 1,000 miles away.

    As it turns out, Mr. Catalano — as well as his doppelganger, Joe Pisano — has one practical yachting skill: He can steer a straight course. While clumsy with nautical terms and rigging, the man can hold a steady rhumb line. That is, he can steer a prescribed compass bearing to keep the ship on course, toward their destination, Malta.

    How much seat-of-your-pants deepwater adventure fills the next 120-odd pages? Enough. During the period described, Middle East tensions were potentially dangerous. So was cruising the stormy Mediterranean without GPS navigation, prior to its invention. An unlucky boat might be blown off course and encounter, for example, a Libyan gunboat. (President Reagan launched air strikes on Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces in April 1986.)

    While the author is not a natural raconteur, he has brought back from decades past a nautical tale nobody else can tell. And one nobody could enjoy without the advent of self-publishing. Happily, even if this nautical memoir was not written for posterity, it will not be consigned to oblivion.

    Nick Catalano teaches literature and music at Pace University. He is the author of “Clifford Brown: The Life and Art of the Legendary Jazz Trumpeter” and lives part time in East Hampton.

    Jeane Bice is a writer and sailing instructor who lives in Springs.

Orion Award for Safina

    “The View From Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World” by Carl Safina won the 2012 Orion Book Award last week. The award recognizes “the book’s success in addressing the human relationship with the natural world in a fresh, thought-provoking, and engaging manner,” according to a release from Orion, an environmental, literary, and cultural magazine out of Great Barrington, Mass.

    Mr. Safina, who lives on Napeague, is president and co-founder of the Blue Ocean Institute in Cold Spring Harbor. His previous books include “Song for the Blue Ocean” and “A Sea in Flames: The Deepwater Horizon Blowout.” Among the finalists were “Swamplandia!” by Karen Russell and “Fire Season” by Philip Connors.

The Mom Egg Rolls In

    Poetry fans, mothers, and those attuned to that holiday on Sunday that you’d best not neglect, take note: The new issue of a literary journal called The Mom Egg is not only out, it features the poetry of Kathy Engel — Sagaponacker, N.Y.U. professor, Hayground School founder.

    In addition to poems, The Mom Egg features fiction, creative nonfiction, and art by mothers and about motherhood. This particular issue focuses on the body, from image to sexuality to matters of reproduction.

College Writing Awards

    College students. Might there be any reading this page? Well, you family relation out there, here’s something of interest to pass on: Suffolk Community College is sponsoring creative writing awards for college writers. They come with prize money and online publication for the winners in four categories: poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and one-act play.

    The original, previously unpublished work must be submitted with no name on it. Poets have been asked to submit three poems, one per page, each with a title. For fiction writers, it’s one story up to 10 pages, double-spaced. A complete piece is preferred over an excerpt. The same length requirement applies to creative nonfiction, which includes memoir, “lyric essay,” and literary journalism. (That piece written for English class? The one where you argue counterintuitively that Wordsworth came not to praise nature but to wage war on it? Forget it. No academic prose will be accepted.) And last, plays can be up to 20 pages in a standard format.

    Students can submit work in more than one genre. The reading fee is $5, which is waived for Suffolk Community College students. All submissions must go through the following doozy of an online address: thescccreativewritingfestival.submishmash.com/submit.

    There’s time, as the deadline is Feb. 15 of next year. But if the last-minute all-nighter works for you, go for it.

Kids’ Lit Workshops

    Interested in writing for children? Space remains in the first session of children’s literature workshops from July 11 to 15 at Stony Brook Southampton’s coming conference, called Summer Arts Southampton.

    Emma Walton Hamilton is directing the workshops. Leading the young-adult novel session will be Cynthia Leitich Smith and Greg Leitich Smith. Peter H. Reynolds, an author and illustrator, will lead a picture book workshop, and the middle-grade novel session will be led by Kate McMullan, a Horn Book Award-winning writer who lives in Sag Harbor.

    The workshops are open to new, established, and aspiring writers, the college said in a release, and involve lectures, group discussions, and more. Applications and further details can be found online at southamptonarts.org.