Book Markers 08.25.11

“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.