“The Eighty-Dollar Champion”

    Harry de Leyer, so the story goes, got the hell out of a Europe wrecked by war and, $160 dollars in his pocket, alighted in the relative stability and sanity of the United States. Here, in the winter of 1956, he spotted a put-upon plow horse literally headed to the slaughterhouse, took him in, and two years later was riding him to show-jumping victory on the sport’s top stage, Madison Square Garden.

    Elizabeth Letts’s book chronicling all that and more, “The Eighty-Dollar Champion: Snowman, the Horse That Inspired a Nation,” came out on Tuesday, and she and Mr. de Leyer will be at the Hampton Classic Horse Show in Bridgehampton on Sunday, its opening day, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. to talk about it and sign copies at the A.S.P.C.A. patio over by the kids’ exhibition tent.

    The Dutch-born Galloping Grandfather, as he is known, has been a participant in the horse show for many years and is familiar in East Hampton for his association with East End Stables, now run by his son Andre.

“The Arrogant Years”

    It seems like only yesterday, the buzz surrounding Lucette Lagnado’s “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit.” But four years have passed since the publication of that book about her family’s flight from Nasser’s Egypt, time enough for a follow-up, namely, “The Arrogant Years: One Girl’s Search for Her Lost Youth, From Cairo to Brooklyn,” forthcoming from Ecco Press.

    That’s another subtitle that nearly says it all, as they tend to do nowadays, yet the memoir involves more than a coming-of-age story, an immigrant’s tale, and the loss of a more accepting and sophisticated Cairo; it is also a mother-daughter story and a look at the upheaval of the 1960s.

    Ms. Lagnado, a Wall Street Journal reporter who lives part time in Sag Harbor, will read from the book and sign copies at the Romany Kramoris Gallery in that village on Saturday from 7 to 9:30 p.m. and on Sunday from 3 to 4:30 p.m.

Poems in the Salty Air

    Long-lived and as widely published as he is prolific, the poet Simon Perchik will read from his work on Sunday at 5 p.m. in Amagansett. The occasion is the free Poetry Marathon, organized as ever by Sylvia Chavkin and Bebe Antell, the site is the Marine Museum on Bluff Road, and the event is free and followed by a reception at which those in attendance can chat with the poets and help themselves to light refreshments.

    Yes, that was “poets,” and making it plural will be Lucas Hunt, who, like Mr. Perchik, is an East Hamptoner, though one born roughly 30 years after the latter wrapped up his service as a pilot in World War II. Mr. Hunt is the author of “Lives,” published by Vagabond Press, and a new collection, “Light on the Concrete,” from the North Sea Poetry Scene Press.

    The following week brings Carol Stone and Monica Enders.

Launching the New Review

    Let’s begin with an embarrassment of riches, the nearly blinding lineup of literary lights reading tomorrow at a celebration for the latest issue of The Southampton Review: Roger Rosenblatt, Meg Wolitzer, Melissa Bank, David Rakoff, Helen Simonson, and Matthew Klam. Poets, too: Billy Collins, Mark Doty, and Julie Sheehan.

    You get the idea, reader; can we leave off every last award and thumbnail bio and get to the meat? The choice words will start flowing at 7:30 p.m. in the Avram Theater on the Stony Brook Southampton campus as part of this year’s writers conference. The brainchild of Robert Reeves, the director of the college’s M.F.A. program in writing and literature, the journal is published twice a year. Its editor in chief, Lou Ann Walker, said in a release that the goal is to strike a balance — between “established and emerging writers” and by emphasizing East End writers in “an international publication open to all.”

    The Southampton Review has also featured the work of South Fork artists ranging from Roy Lichtenstein to Eric Fischl to Frederick Childe Hassam, as well as cartoons, most notably by Jules Feiffer.

    Tickets cost $10 at the door. Reservations can be made by calling the college or visiting stonybrook.edu/avram.

    The words “authors after hours” might call to mind certain tendencies in the letting down of the hair — drunkenness, vicious verbal fisticuffs, sexual deviance. Or they can refer to a series of readings at the Amagansett Library.

    This year’s version began Saturday with the novelist James Frey, whose name retains a certain bad-boy air, doesn’t it. With his latest, “The Final Testament of the Holy Bible,” he boldly, questionably takes on the Good Book, thus following in the steps of his (in some ways) troublemaking literary forebear, Norman Mailer — remember “The Gospel According to the Son”?

    But about the series: Book fans, it’s a strong one. Next up, at 6 p.m. on Saturday, is Hilary Thayer Hamann and “Anthropology of an American Girl,” her novel of a sensitive, perceptive soul’s coming of age in East Hampton in the shaggy, pot-fumed, banana-seat-bicycle 1970s. It’s a peculiar story — its publication, that is, the stuff of a writer’s dreams. Ms. Hamann self-published the book in 2003, and then it was picked up by the Spiegel & Grau publishing house, re-edited and repackaged, and released last year, making a splash and getting its due.

    Here’s a résumé to send your eyebrows skyward: professor of English at the University of Southern California, founder of the graduate program in creative writing and literature there, author of four novels, two books of essays, and eight collections of verse, National Book Award finalist, current poet laureate of California. It belongs to Carol Muske-Dukes, who will be at the library on July 30 to read from her latest book of poems, “Twin Cities.” And, ah, to be bicoastal; she changes up life under the desert skies of L.A. with time at her house in the green fecundity of Springs.

    Another Springs writer, Gary Reiswig, will stop by on the first Saturday in August to talk about his recent book, “The Thousand Mile Stare: One Family’s Journey Through the Science and Struggle of Alzheimer’s.” A former owner of the Maidstone Arms, he has also written a novel, “Water Boy,” set in the 1950s in his native Oklahoma.

    On Aug. 20 the series concludes with one of the hamlet’s own, Neal Gabler, journalist, television commentator and film critic, and the author of monumental biographies of Walter Winchell, Walt Disney, and, now in the works, Ted Kennedy.   

Celebrating B.H. Friedman

    The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs will be the site of a memorial gathering on Sunday for the writer B.H. Friedman, who was perhaps most famous for his 1972 biography, “Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible.” Among his works to be read is a one-act play, “Meeting the Master,” about the first time he met the artist.

    Bernard Harper Friedman died of complications from pneumonia on Jan. 4 at the age of 84. A former real estate executive who lived in East Hampton for many years, he gave up that work to write — not only biographies (the arts patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was another subject) but a memoir of drug experimentation and novels, too, most recently “My Case Rests,” from 2009.

    The event, which starts at 5 p.m., will offer food, drink, and ample reminiscences. Anyone interested in being a reader can call the Pollock-Krasner House and speak to its director, Helen Harrison, or drop a line to [email protected]. 

“Everything Beautiful” in Sag

    Simon Van Booy’s first published work appeared in this newspaper back in 2000. He came to the South Fork to get an M.F.A. in writing from Southampton College and, though he now lives in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, he’s been coming back ever since. For readings, too, like the one on Saturday at 6 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, where the featured book will be his spanking-new debut novel, “Everything Beautiful Began After,” which involves American expats in Greece.

    It follows two well-received story collections, “The Secret Lives of People in Love,” from 2007, and “Love Begins in Winter,” which, more than well received, won the $50,000 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2009. Not a bad supplement for a single father teaching at the School of Visual Arts.

Life and Death in Amagansett

    Gary Reiswig was born into a family of fire-and-brimstone religiosity in the flatlands of the Texas Panhandle and grew up across the border in the Sooner State, where he played high school football and became a preacher. That he went on to own and run the Maidstone Arms inn and restaurant in tony East Hampton is a tale in itself. But the story he’ll be telling on Saturday at the Amagansett Library is equally compelling, touching on health care and Congressional testimony, a dread disease and the research push for a cure, life and death.

    Or, as the title of his recent book, “The Thousand Mile Stare,” puts it, the subject is “One Family’s Journey Through the Struggle and Science of Alzheimer’s.” The latest in the library’s Authors After Hours series, the reading starts at 6 p.m. Mr. Reiswig, a contributor of reviews and essays to The Star who lives in Springs, will be available to chat afterward.

Hard-Boiled Hamill

    Newsprint is dead. Long live newsprint!

    Newspapers may be foundering in the Internet age, to say nothing of the death by a thousand hacks of News of the World across the pond, but that doesn’t mean the office chaos and infighting, drinking and swearing among ink-stained wretches aren’t the stuff of good novels. A top practitioner of such, Pete Hamill, will step up to the podium amid the greenery behind the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton tomorrow at 5 p.m. to read from his latest, “Tabloid City.”

    He knows of what he speaks. The veteran newsman has seemingly held every coveted reporter’s billet in the Big Apple: The Post, Daily News, New York Newsday, Village Voice. And he headed up those first two for a time.

    A no-holds-barred question-and-answer session will follow the reading, and Mr. Hamill will sign copies, too. Wine and hors d’oeuvres at the table under the big Norway maple are a regular feature of Fridays at Five, entrance to which costs $15. Next week brings Gail Levin and “Lee Krasner: A Biography.”

    Who needs April, the officially, fatuously sanctioned National Poetry Month? Consider, instead, June, with its warm-weather flowering of verse. We had Carol Muske-Dukes at Guild Hall the other day for Poetry Pairs, a series put together by Fran Castan, who in turn has been invited by Paula Trachtman of the Amagansett Press and the Amy Awards to read at the East Hampton Library on Saturday.

    Ms. Castan is the author of the recently released book of her poems and paintings by her husband, Lewis Zacks, “Venice: City That Paints Itself,” from Canio’s Editions. She’ll be joined by a quintet of eminent poets from various corners of East Hampton Town: Grace Schulman, Philip Appleman, Harvey Shapiro, Simon Perchik, and Edward Butscher.

    The reading’s theme is house and garden, and spines will be cracked and throats cleared starting at 2 p.m. in, appropriately, the library’s garden. It’s free, and let’s not forget the spread of food and drink to follow.

    Aside from June’s warmth and the setting, Ms. Trachtman said by e-mail that she’d chosen the theme simply because audiences usually prefer one. What’s more, “It’s a topic much discussed at summer events here. I thought it might attract people who avoid poetry.”

    They could spend all day with the stuff. Earlier on Saturday at the library, at 11 a.m., Jean Kemper Hoffmann of East Hampton will read from her 2010 collection, “Storm Warning” (Three Mile Harbor Press). At 7:30 that night, Claude Mayers, a self-described “surfer, political observer, world traveler, health professional, and music aficionado” from Southampton, will be at Ashawagh Hall in Springs with his “Vault of Poems.” The book, coming out next week from Ocean Poetry, is a “mini retrospective” of his work from 1968 through last year. A hip-hop singer and spoken-word performer, Knickie D., will open.

    But before you go, reader, a house-and-garden sampler, Fran Castan’s “Dwelling.”  

The first house you left

dreams. The belly of the sink,

the eye of the glass,

the arms of the old wing chair — all ask,

“What has become of you?”  

Your first house abides,

like the snail’s spent shell

swirled in the shape of seasons gone

and come again, as the planet whirls on

to sleep in its own shadow, only

to shine again in the sun. You

must return to that dwelling in the dark,

awake or asleep,

take memory back,

and, this time, learn to live by heart.

It Begins With the Aldas

    Tomorrow Bridgehampton’s most famous residents, Arlene and Alan Alda, will open this year’s iteration of the hamlet’s venerable series of readings, Fridays at Five, at the Hampton Library. (Most generous residents, too, many would say, making sizable donations as they have to the Children’s Museum of the East End and to the library itself, where a room is named after them.)

    Ms. Alda will read her new children’s book, “Lulu’s Piano Lesson.” Her titles include “Here a Face, There a Face,” full of photos of charming anthropomorphism, from Tunda Books. Her husband will read essays from his 2007 collection, “Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself.” The couple will answer questions and sign copies, too.

    The cost is $15. Drinks will be available on the library’s back lawn, as ever, under that big old Norway maple.

    The series will continue on Friday, July 8, with Tom Clavin and Bob Drury’s new collaboration about the Vietnam War, “Last Men Out.” The authors to follow are David Reynolds (“Mightier Than the Sword”), Adam Haslett (“Union Atlantic”), and Colson Whitehead (“Sag Harbor”). August brings Pete Hamill with “Tabloid City” on the 5th, Gail Levin and “Lee Krasner: A Biography” on the 12th, and on the 19th Roger Rosenblatt with “Unless It Moves the Human Heart.”

Writing Your Life

    Popular and peripatetic, Eileen Obser, that veteran writing instructor, will next set up (work) shop at the Southampton Cultural Center. On the syllabus? “Writing about your life.” As a release reminds us, “Writing your life stories is a gift to yourself, your loved ones, and to history.”

    The weekly classes start on Tuesday, from 1 to 3 p.m., and will run through July 26. The cost is $100. Registration is by phone at 287-4377 or by e-mail at [email protected].

    Ms. Obser, whose own work has been published in this and other newspapers and in various journals, has been leading such workshops for more than 17 years. She lives in East Hampton.

You’d sit quietly and suddenly the Parrot would shout,

“Death is the Mother of Beauty!” — and then she’d

Nod and eat a burrito. She was taciturn, but if you

Pushed her, she’d become fiery and cry: “My life

Had stood, a Loaded Gun!” and fan her feathers.

What do you have to offer that is more inventive

Than the Parrot’s glittering discourse? What do you

Have to say that could not be topped by: “The world

Is too much with us,” “Sunset and evening star,”

“We real cool,” & “They feed they lion” —

Or, “Whose woods these are I think I know”?

I think I know, the Parrot protests. I honestly think

I know, but I am so tired of squeaking the same

Profound shimmering insights — & nobody listening!

    “Parrot” is from Carol Muske-Dukes’s new collection of poems, “Twin Cities,” which came out this week. She will read from it on Sunday at 3 p.m. at Guild Hall for Poetry Pairs. Ms. Muske-Dukes, the poet laureate of California, has a house in Springs. She is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Southern California.

    “Exploring the Other Island,” John Turner’s recent book on Long Island’s unique and fascinating natural history, is the latest in a long series of modern-day publications on this subject dating back to Robert Cushman Murphy’s “Fish-Shape Paumanok: Nature and Man on Long Island” of 1962. Prior to Mr. Turner’s book, the late Dennis Puleston penned his vast Long Island natural history experiences in the 1992 publication “A Natural Journal.”

It wasn’t that long ago that a New York State high court made it official: Long Island, indeed, is an island. It’s vegetatively and geologically different from most of the East Coast, and so its natural history, its flora and fauna, is deserving of a separate and dedicated treatment.

Mr. Turner’s book does just that. Not only does the author describe the Island’s salient and separate ecological communities, from the East River to the tip of Montauk and Orient Points, he does so in chronological fashion, the way another Long Islander, Edwin Way Teale, did it 60 years earlier. Spring, summer, fall, winter, and, oh yes, throw in the night sky when it is most observable, in winter.

    It would be difficult for the average Long Islander not to find some facet or fact of nature that did not personally relate to him or her, as just about every neighborhood has a personality all its own. In terms of plant communities and the wonderful animals that live in them, each is covered. To the west you have the Hempstead Plains remnant, a prairie that once extended 14 miles in one direction and in almost every respect resembled the ones west of the Alleghenies. It is now reduced to less than 100 acres in size. To the east you have the rugged Montauk Moorlands and grasslands, with rocky shores to the north and south.

    In between you have the oak-hickory morainal hardwood forests, the diluvial plains and their rich soils on the north and south, and, most of all, the pine barrens, almost 100,000 acres of intact pine-oak woodlands with special niches like the dwarf pine plains of Westhampton Beach, and the wetlands associated with the state’s largest groundwater river, the mighty Peconic, running easterly and draining parts of the north and south moraines. It is particularly for the creation of the Central Pine Barrens Preserve that we owe Mr. Turner a large debt of gratitude.

    He and two buddies, John Cryan and Bob McGrath, all three barely out of college, came up with the absurd idea to save what George Washington had called “ill-thriven pines” 170 years earlier. They established the Long Island Pine Barrens Society, now one of the Island’s most prestigious and powerful conservation organizations, as currently directed by Richard Amper. Well, these young naturalist turks succeeded, now didn’t they.

“Exploring the

Other Island”

John Turner

Harbor Electronic Publishing, $20

    In between writings and for 30 years running, Mr. Turner has been an ardent activist for Long Island’s ecology and natural heritage, which was about to go up in flames in the latter part of the 20th century. Many of us thought that Nassau and Suffolk Counties would become just one 80-mile-long paved-over shopping center. The idea of saving the pine barrens came along just in time, because until we began looking at it for the marvelous collection of plants and animals that it represents, it was just another piece of land to cut down and develop.

    In the book, we find out about all of its magical attributes, the native lupines, the midget yet full-grown pines with cones that shed their seeds only during a fire, the beautiful buck moth that is dependent upon the little pines, and all the rest of the goings-on in a vast forest that used to be home to bobcats, wolves, rattlesnakes, heath hens, and, yes, even bears.

    The seasons progress starting with early spring and the ospreys’ return, the runs of alewives upstream at the same time as the shad bloom, the barking of wood frogs, the chirping of spring peepers, and the buzzing of Fowler’s toads and the silence of mole salamanders, among them the state-protected tiger salamander, emerging from the earth and slipping into the cool waters of vernal ponds to reproduce. Cool spring is followed by warm spring and the migrations of a hundred or more bird species — water birds, hawks, shorebirds and songbirds, 40 different species of warblers — and the forests just ablaze with leaves are lit up with song.

    At the same time, the diamondback terrapins are leaving the water, and if they can bypass the shore armor and slip between the tires of passing cars on coastal roads they will get to lay their eggs to start a new generation. Concomitantly, coupled horseshoe crabs are whispering on moon tides to lay and fertilize their eggs in the sandy upper intertidal, which they’ve been doing for millions of years, we imagine.

    Then come the whippoorwills, the birds of summer, the ripening of the blueberries and other native fruits, and the South Shore bays filled with tropical fish of every color and form. Before you know it, we’re into the fall migration, with the return of the shorebirds from the north as early as mid-July, followed by the retreat of the ospreys, then the nighthawks, streams of merlins and sparrow hawks along with monarch butterflies and green darners moving over the South Shore dunes from Napeague to Staten Island. And so on, until we are into cold weather and the waterfowl are setting in for a long winter’s night.

    Montauk in the winter becomes the place to visit. The witch hazel trees are still in bloom, and one can still see the stars at night. The waterfowl coming and going off the Point are the most colorful things on the winter seascape. Seals of five species cavort in the surf when they’re not pulling up on the rocks along the north side west of the Lighthouse.

    Having read “Exploring the Other Island,” I personally have come to a better understanding of why we have all been working so hard to keep what we have and live where we live. Why go to Maine or the Carolinas when Long Island’s marine, aquatic, and upland habitats have so much to offer? From one day to the next throughout a given year, it may be the same inside where you live, but it’s always different outside. Amen.

—

    John Turner, former director of Brookhaven Town’s Division of Environmental Protection, taught ornithology at Southampton College for many years. A resident of Massapequa Park, he teaches a course on seabirds and marine turtles at the State University at Stony Brook.

    “Exploring the Other Island” is a revised and expanded second edition.

    “Book Love” by the editors Bill Henderson and James Charlton looks like a sweet gift book, from its title to the baby blue of its cover, from that cover’s image of two pages curving together to form a glowing heart to the volume’s diminutive 5 1/2-by-7 1/2-inch size and 130 whimsically illustrated pages.

    Don’t be fooled. From his bunker in Springs Mr. Henderson has enthusiastically loaded his introduction with mortar shells targeting the encroachment of the digital book, which he likens to an unwanted weed or a voracious carp. Among the salvos: In digital distraction we’re losing our ability to read at length and with true comprehension; thought itself may be on its way out. In thrall to technological innovation, we are unwittingly unraveling the mind-advances made since the Renaissance (he cites Nicholas Carr in this passage).

    One round zeroes in on the supposed environmental benefits of the proliferation of e-readers like the Kindle: the saving of trees. But what about recycled paper? And as the Western states bumper sticker says, “If it can’t be grown, it’s gotta be mined.” In the case of the digital reader, that would be metals, often from Africa, with all the problems of politics and exploitation that implies.

    But then “Book Love” moves on to its more than 600 quotations, in a trinity of groupings: Books, Readers, Writers. Sticking to the theme of Mr. Henderson’s introduction, here’s Nicholson Baker — the author of “Double Fold,” which famously excoriated libraries for dumping old newspapers in the name of nothing more than freeing up some storage space — on the book as object: “It is rectangular and thick, heavy enough to stop a bullet or press a leaf flat. It will, you think, never let you through. And then you begin to lean into it . . . and you’re in. You’re in the book.”

    This one’s published by, who else, Mr. Henderson’s own Pushcart Press and sells for $15.50.