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Books

Blanche Wiesen Cook The Role Model

Reading Blanche Wiesen Cook’s concluding volume of her three-part biography of Eleanor Roosevelt in the weeks following the 2016 election, one is struck by the parallels between her life and that of another former first lady much in the news this year, Hillary Clinton.

Dec 22, 2016
David Nichtern The Truth of the Matter

David Nichtern, a meditation teacher, has written a remarkably useful and succinct handbook of Buddhist practice and psychological concepts.

Dec 15, 2016
Tom Wolfe Chomsky, We Hardly Knew Ye

Does Tom Wolfe know when he attacks mainline Christians as moo-cows that he will arouse a bit of miff?

Dec 8, 2016
Kati Marton Siren Song of the Soviets

Why and how does someone come to embrace a compulsive myth and commit totally to a humanitarian cause for achieving worldwide perpetual perfection?

Dec 1, 2016
Rita Plush Wounded People

The story of a daughter who's unlucky in love, her search for her deadbeat dad, and the solace he finds in a dollhouse.

Nov 23, 2016
Jeffrey Sussman Off the Mean Streets

If you think Jews as boxers sounds like a contradiction in terms, or a comical misprint, or perhaps a racist joke, you need to meet Max Baer and Barney Ross.

Nov 17, 2016
South Fork Poetry: ‘An Album From 1960’

By Bruce Buschel

Nov 17, 2016
South Fork Poetry: ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci II’

Keats observes the last World Series game of the year.

Nov 10, 2016
Helen Simonson Watercolors in the Trenches

I'm grateful for novels that not only incorporate the World War I era, but bring it to life on an intimate scale: history writ small. That's what Helen Simonson has done masterfully in "The Summer Before the War."

Nov 10, 2016
James D. Zirin Politicized and Polarized

James D. Zirin blames personal ideologies among the justices, identity politics, and rank partisanship for a compromised Supreme Court.

Nov 3, 2016
Book Markers 10.27.16

Readings with a Halloween theme, and an editor talks about the publishing business.

Oct 27, 2016
Erica Abeel Winging It

Erica Abeel’s “Wild Girls” follows three friends who meet at Foxleigh — an amalgam of Barnard and Smith — as they negotiate the changing landscape of a woman’s place in America from the 1950s through the early 2000s.

Oct 27, 2016
Lawrence Goldstone Drive, They Said

Lawrence Goldstone has come down to earth. Following his 2014 book, “Birdmen,” a history of early aviation, he has now presented us with “Drive! Henry Ford, George Selden, and the Race to Invent the Auto Age.”

Oct 20, 2016
Cannabis has earned a place in the pharmacopeia, and society, says the author Joe Dolce in “Brave New Weed.” Joe Dolce's Adventures in Cannabis

Joe Dolce is not a stoner. The author of “Brave New Weed: Adventures Into the Uncharted World of Cannabis,” he makes a point of that, but also has no hesitance in “piercing the veil” and talking from a user’s as well as a researcher’s point of view about pot.

Oct 20, 2016
From Susan Verde and Peter H. Reynolds's "The Water Princess" A Tale of Two Princesses

New children’s books explore a West African girl's dreams of a time she won't have to tote water from a far-off well, lessons in gratitude at school, the adventures of a destructive dog, and a Christmas tree that avoids the ax to live another day.

Oct 13, 2016
A Rembrandt in the Holocaust

Janet Lee Berg's first novel involves a father in Nazi-occupied Holland who trades a painting by Rembrandt for his daughter’s safety and that of 25 other Jews.

Oct 6, 2016
Samuel Levin and Susan Engel Student Takeover

A mother-son writing duo? Possible treacle alert. A teenager who started his own school? Back-patting danger. But this book? No need for alarm, it's thought-provoking, even moving.

Oct 6, 2016
Flynn Berry Between Devotion and Betrayal

A thriller is supposed to thrill and this one does, but not with the usual car chases or shootouts or otherworldly phenomena, instead with masterful plotting, tight prose, and assured psychological insight.

Sep 29, 2016
Book Markers for 9.29.16

From Robert Caro's achievement award to "Ghost Hampton" readings

Sep 29, 2016
Writers Speak Is Back (With an Open House)

It’s that time again. The air is crisp, the leaves are turning, the kids are back in school. And readings have returned in earnest to the college.

Sep 29, 2016
A Poetry Tea for the Departed

A high tea north of the highway in Sagaponack will feature the poetry of the recently departed as read by other poets to benefit the Lustgarten Foundation.

Sep 22, 2016
Putting the Hurt on Trump

Harry Hurt III will sign copies of his newly re-released "Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump" on Saturday in Sag Harbor.

Sep 22, 2016
Colson Whitehead Slipping Chains and Time

Colson Whitehead is too smart a writer to make "The Underground Railroad" simply another litany of white atrocities and triumphant freedom; he finds a new way to tell the story.

Sep 22, 2016
Ray Merritt Masters of the Dark Arts

There may be a murder at the heart of Ray Merritt’s first novel, “Clamour of Crows,” but what’s really of interest is the author’s exploration of the culture of a Wall Street law firm.

Sep 13, 2016
Jeffrey E. Garten Portraits in Globalism

Listening to the Bernie Sanders supporters, I heard Buffalo Springfield's refrain in my head, "There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear."

Sep 8, 2016
South Fork Poetry: ‘How sweet the time’

A new poem by Kathy Engel

Sep 1, 2016
Teresa Nicholas South Toward Home

In the summer of 1979 I was introduced to Willie Morris at Bobby Van’s, then a wood-paneled chophouse that bore no resemblance to the chic local outpost it is today.

Sep 1, 2016
Jules Feiffer Bare-Knuckle Ballet

"Cousin Joseph" is the second installment of Jules Feiffer's graphic novel trilogy, a lively (and decidedly deadly) film noir homage that follows on the hard-boiled gumshoe heels of his 2014 New York Times best seller, "Kill My Mother."

Aug 25, 2016
Return of the Poetry Marathon

Remember the Poetry Marathon? Held each summer at the Marine Museum on Bluff Road in Amagansett for years before it quietly left the scene? Well, it’s back.

Aug 25, 2016