Books

The architecture critic Paul Goldberger lays out how one man, David Walentas, saw the potential in a derelict warehouse district on the Brooklyn waterfront. And the desirable enclave Dumbo was born.

Tomi Ungerer’s final children’s book follows a flight through a harrowing dystopia, while Kate McMullan celebrates spring and Katharine Holabird just celebrates.

It would be hard to imagine a more pugnacious epistolary sampling than “Speaking in an Empty Room: The Collected Letters of John Sanford,” who was an exacting writer’s writer and a veteran of Hollywood blacklisting.

Jennet Conant’s “The Great Secret” is about many things: the chaotic nature of war, the subterfuge of governments, the randomness of scientific discovery, the story of one unassuming young American doctor.

An East Hamptoner looks back on an encounter with the writer, recently given new life in a PBS documentary.

Expressions of guilt pervade Bina Bernard’s wrenching debut novel about a Polish Jewish couple’s desperate struggle to protect their children during the Holocaust.

Jill Bialosky’s latest poetry collection, “Asylum,” offers a pilgrimage of sorts in five sections through the shock, grief, guilt, and eventual acceptance occasioned by a sibling’s suicide.

Alexander Nemerov’s “Fierce Poise” captures the first decade of Helen Frankenthaler’s career with both a fly-on-the-wall intimacy and a great understanding of her work and what made her tick.

Walter Isaacson reveals in clear, simple, factual, and fascinating detail how Jennifer Doudna spearheaded the invention of the revolutionary gene-editing tool Crispr.

The real mixes with the imaginary, Thomas Hart Benton with the young sleuths hunting his murderer, in Helen Harrison’s latest, set in 1967 New York.

In Daphne Merkin's novel, Judith Stone is a book editor in 1990s Manhattan in a relationship of “erotic compliance” and “self-abandon” — not erotica, but literary erotic psychology.

Take an acupuncturist, her mysterious love interest, a corpse, Stony Brook detectives, a sadistic villain, and mix well for the second thriller from Greg Wands and Elizabeth Keenan.

Bugsy Siegel was lavishly rewarded for his crimes, we learn in Michael Shnayerson’s new biography, although money didn't really interest him. He wanted fame and respect more, but his impulsive nature gave him a dark reputation he never escaped.

In “What Becomes a Legend Most,” Philip Gefter shows Richard Avedon to be an eminent fashion photographer driven to be recognized as a great artist but met with disdain from the establishment.

Three children’s book authors from hereabouts, Billy Baldwin, Susan Verde, and Kori Peters, boldly go where parents often neglect to tread, broaching the topics of perseverance, gratitude, and the social good.

The characters in Jeffrey Sussman’s “Big Apple Gangsters” are occupied with bootlegging, garbage collecting, cement mixing, heroin dealing, and killing, mainly each other. The action extends to Mussolini, Batista, J. Edgar Hoover, Joe DiMaggio, and, the coup de grace, Rudy Giuliani.

In her gripping first novel, “A Most English Princess,” Clare McHugh has seized on the fact that Vicky, the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria, was surely the smartest and most capable of her siblings. Her claim to England’s throne, however, was dashed by her younger brother.

“Being Ram Das” is the memoir of the former Richard Alpert of Boston, whose remarkable journey took him from elite universities, high social status, and hallucinogenic drug use to points near and very far, including, in 1967, to the feet of a blanketed man in the Himalayas.

This collection of Tony Towle’s poems, itself a work of art, contains numerous photos, most black and white by Hans Namuth. Through this lens of a particular time and place in the 1960s, a world opens up, offering a glimpse at a specific historical moment.

Kurt Wenzel, novelist, book and theater critic, and the best-read man we know, picks ’em.

John Steinbeck couldn’t stop writing. Couldn’t stop rushing out to right injustices. He was a loner who never seemed to be lonely, William Souder writes in “Mad at the World,” his new biography.

Some are surprising; others, considering the times, probably predictable, but here, for your reading pleasure and inspiration, are some of the most popular books we on the East End are giving each other this holiday season.

Organized chronologically over the past five decades, Jerry Seinfeld’s “Is This Anything?” is both a history of American habits and preoccupations and also an autobiographical record of the thoughts of an analytically minded American male as he progressed from his 20s to his 60s.

New from local authors: Former ad man Lyle Greenfield brings art world psychological suspense, 1980s-style, and Kay Tobler Liss takes on Montauk in the off-season, where a Native American woman fends off a land grab.

“Inside Story” is utterly saturated with death. Paradoxically, it is also one of the liveliest and most entertaining books from Martin Amis since his 2000 memoir, “Experience.”

The new Pushcart anthology of the best of the small presses is heavy on sincerity, light on cynicism; heavy on depth of feeling, light on cheap shots.

“One Last Lunch,” Erica Heller’s colorful compendium of essays, gives a number of writers the chance to share a repast with their deceased friends, lovers, colleagues, occasional alter egos, and notably fathers, from Saul Bellow to John Cheever to, of course, Joseph Heller.

In “On Account of Race,” Lawrence Goldstone traces Supreme Court decisions regarding voting rights from the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to the present. It is a book that challenges your faith in the independence and fairness of the high court.

Grace Schulman casts her steady eye on mortality in her new collection of poems, “The Marble Bed.” Or, more accurately, she casts her eye on the things around her and they describe mortality back to her. 

Donald Trump is by far the most egregious liar ever to reside in the White House, but he is hardly the first, writes Eric Alterman in “Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie — and Why Trump Is Worse,” a kind of American history textbook for our unsettled times.