Books

Barry Sonnenfeld’s view of his own history is a mordant one: “Regret the past. Fear the present. Dread the future” are the words he says he lives by, despite having fashioned a very nice life and career out of the shambles of his youth.     

Why was Maj. Benjamin M. Koehler, a distinguished veteran of the Spanish-American War and a West Point graduate, tried in a military tribunal for homoerotic acts?

“Texas Flood,” a colorful biography of the complicated and obsessed Stevie Ray Vaughan, brings together the recollections of friends, bandmates, managers, fellow guitar heroes, and relatives like his older brother, the guitarist Jimmie Vaughan.

Carl Safina is among those few standing in the way of the mass extinctions we’re causing. He beseeches us poetically and tirelessly to hear what nature is saying, and the way he shares his deep love of life on Earth can at times make reading his most recent book, “Becoming Wild,” rather difficult.

There are precious few introductions to the subject of sculpture, so Eric Gibson of The Wall Street Journal addressed that void with this collection of 36 clear and learned essays.

After more than 50 years of teaching, researching, lecturing, and publishing, John A. Strong has written the book we have all been waiting for, a chronicle of the clash of Indian and English cultures and whaling interests on Long Island in the years following settlement.

“Front Pages, Front Lines” is a compendium of essays about the relationship between journalism and the women’s suffrage movement, but also a corrective of that reporting and what really happened.

The culture critic and iconoclast Katie Roiphe is specific about a particular preoccupation: “women strong in public, weak in private.”

From one poet to another: In his new memoir, Mark Doty explores the lasting effect Walt Whitman has had on his life and work, wondering at this “extraordinary flowering that seemed to appear out of nowhere.”

Class warfare in the Hamptons gets personal, and dark, in Jason Allen’s debut novel, “The East End,” now out in convenient paperback for your reading pleasure.

Paul Lisicky’s new memoir, “Later,” is at once a beautifully crafted description of the rhythms of life in a resort community and a story of surviving the height of the AIDS epidemic.

Just what exactly is the legacy of Harry Houdini, this remarkable magician, escape artist, movie star, aviator, author, and investigator of the paranormal?