Books

“Rome”

Robert Hughes

Knopf, $35

How does one tackle a subject as vast, complex, and full of bravado and drama as the history of the city of Rome? The answer, in the form of Robert Hughes’s “Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History,” is as an opinionated but erudite tour guide.

   “Balzac’s Omelette”

Anka Muhlstein

Other Press, $19.95

    While walking past the New Books table you see a small, square, butter-colored book with an irresistible title — “Balzac’s Omelette.” Don’t tell me you can pass by without picking it up for a look, even if it is just in mute tribute to the correct spelling of omelette.

“American Gibraltar”

Henry Osmers

Outskirts Press, $21.95

   Few would guess that the 11,000 acres of scrub oak and pine that we call Montauk can boast a history as complex as a small country’s. In “American Gibraltar: Montauk and the Wars of America,” which covers 300 years, Henry Osmers chronicles the regional repercussions of eight conflicts, from the Indian wars to the cold war years. Owing to its strategic location, Montauk has intersected with our war history and made one of its own.

 “An Available Man”

Hilma Wolitzer

Ballantine, $25  

   “The universe is offering you a gift. Claim it.” This is the urgent imperative put forward by a friendly psychic advising the skeptical and reluctant Edward, a widower and the protagonist of Hilma Wolitzer’s engaging new book, “An Available Man.” Edward, whose beloved wife, Bee, has recently died and left him lonely and bereft, ultimately struggles to find a way to claim the gift: a second chance in life, in love.

   Carl Safina will read from “The View From Lazy Point” on Wednesday at 7 p.m. for the Writers Speak series, sponsored by the M.F.A. program in writing and literature at Stony Brook Southampton. The free event will take place in the Radio Lounge, upstairs in Chancellors Hall.

    Mr. Safina, a past MacArthur fellow, is president and co-founder of the Blue Ocean Institute in Cold Spring Harbor. His PBS series, “Saving the Ocean,” premiered last spring.

 “The View From

Lazy Point”

Carl Safina

Picador, $18

 “The Tender Hour

of Twilight”

Richard Seaver

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $35 

   No review can do justice to this incredibly rich memoir of publishing’s golden age — Paris in the ’50s and New York in the ’60s. At best what follows is just a sketch. You will really have to read Richard Seaver’s masterpiece for yourself. Buy “The Tender Hour of Twilight” at an independent bookstore, Canio’s or BookHampton — it is a celebration of the heyday of such stores long before the metastasis of the e-book, chains, and Amazon.com.

Actors — talented actors, that is — are usually amusing raconteurs and often good writers. They have a love of language, the sensuous savoring of the perfect phrase, and they develop a feeling for the dramatic arc of a scene, the timing of a punch line. So it is not surprising that Hal Holbrook, in his autobiography, “Harold: The Boy Who Became Mark Twain,” relates an arresting and vividly told life story, both personal and professional.

Right around the corner from our boys’ grade school,

they’d go there — first with us and then, older enough,

with their friends — for after-school treats, Everett’s

bushy mustache always smiling behind the counter.

Thirty-three years is a long time to know someone,

let alone a grocery store, and one could claim that

three generations of kids passed through his doors.

When Augie, our 12-year-old, told me about the sign

on the door he looked away, maybe from the idea itself —

    Here’s how it went: Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was at a posh Bastille Day brunch at an oceanfront East Hampton home. A young woman, newly arrived on the East End, trying to make conversation over the smoked salmon tray, offered: “Oh, I’m from Indianapolis, too.” Whereupon Vonnegut, of the rumpled face and sweet, bovine eyes, said: “My mother committed suicide. She should have done it a lot earlier.”

“And So It Goes”

Charles J. Shields

Henry Holt, $30

Poets Pack a Gallery

    It’s billed as a Valentine’s Day reading of poems — but loosely. The day, Saturday, is after the fact, and the definition of a love poem has been expanded to include, for example, a love for the world.

Look Ahead, Writers

    February on eastern Long Island. It can seem like the calendar’s equivalent of 3 a.m., when nothing good happens, not even snow. But using the down time to plan for better days — how about July? — is Julie Sheehan, the director of the M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature at Stony Brook Southampton, who sends word of a boatload of writing workshops bound to set heads nodding in appreciation.

    Out this week in paperback, Helen Schulman’s “This Beautiful Life” is a highly contemporary tale of woe. The novel looks at how a family manages and fails to manage in the grip of a thoroughly distressing sticky wicket brought on by the ills of the exponential Internet and exacerbated by the ills of the family in question. The book is a peek at how individuals operate in society and within a family given ills all around — given life in this novel being something of a mess, it turns out, in spite of the luck, privilege, and striving of the characters.

“Elizabeth and Hazel”

David Margolick

Yale University Press, $26

  Elizabeth and Hazel, two women of Little Rock captured in an iconic photograph, tell the story of Southern school desegregation. The classic frame reveals our beautiful young black heroine, Elizabeth Eckford, as she is harried by a hydra-headed lynch mob in formation. Hazel, the long-unidentified woman behind Elizabeth, is shown screaming racial epithets while dogging the heels of the slender, apparently serene and stoic schoolchild.

“Pushcart Prize XXXVI”

Edited by Bill Henderson

Pushcart Press, $18.95

Now in its 36th year, the annual Pushcart Prize anthology, “Best of the Small Presses,” has become a standard title for anyone interested in a sampling of who or what is happening in contemporary American literature.

    Now in its 36th year, the annual Pushcart Prize anthology, “Best of the Small Presses,” has become a standard title for anyone interested in a sampling of who or what is happening in contemporary American literature.

“My Dyslexia”

Philip Schultz

W.W. Norton, $21.95

I have read one scene in “My Dyslexia” over and over. Each time I read it, the writing is clearer, and the pain I feel when reading the words is more palpable: “I remember the first time I even considered the idea of being a writer. I was in the fifth grade when my reading tutor . . . asked me out of the blue what I thought I might like to do with my life. Without a moment’s hesitation, I answered that I wanted to be a writer.”

    If New York’s Gilded Age had once appeared to be gently disappearing into the pages of the history books, the last few years, laden with financial malfeasance, Wall Street greed, burgeoning poverty, and an ever-increasing gap between the rich and the poor, have made it chillingly relevant.

“Incognito”

Gregory Murphy

Berkley Books, $15

“Kayak Morning”

Roger Rosenblatt

Ecco, $13.99

    Last year was the year of the grief memoir. Joyce Carol Oates’s “A Widow’s Story” concerns the loss of her husband. Meghan O’Rourke’s “The Long Goodbye” takes as its subject the death of her mother. Joan Didion’s “Blue Nights” mourns the death of her daughter. In those works, through the act of memory, the authors skillfully bring to life the loved one who is mourned.

“The Last Whaler”

Nicholas Stevensson Karas

AuthorHouse, $25

    When I checked my morning mail several months ago, I was surprised by a large mystery envelope. I was delighted to see it contained a local historical novel. These are rare creatures out here on the tip of Long Island; not as rare as academics trying to put into words our underpublished history, but still rare enough to cause me to look it over before placing it on my stack of evening reading.

    Another year . . . and another totally subjective list of my favorite books of the year. As ever, it is a personal list, and one that totally leans toward my own sensibilities. And yet I can’t imagine a reader picking up any one of these books and not being challenged, stimulated, or wildly entertained — or all three at once. I hope you find one you enjoy.

    Happy holidays.

“The Pale King”

“Portrait of Long Island”

    When it comes to gift-giving, books are all well and good as gestures, but, let’s face it, they almost always go unread. This is where the picture book comes in — thoughtfulness acknowledged, it can be flipped through in a matter of seconds and placed for all time on a coffee table as decoration.

    Reading Warren H. Phillips’s new autobiography, “Newspaperman: Inside the News Business at The Wall Street Journal,” I was reminded of the expression commonly mistaken for an ancient Chinese curse — “May you live in interesting times.” Once one comes to understand that these words are neither ancient, Chinese, nor a curse, it becomes easy to appreciate them as a good wish, something to be made the most of. That is exactly what Mr. Phillips does.

Poetry in Patchogue

    As the book review on this page indicates, Patchogue contains multitudes.

    On one hand, as an example, the compiler of this column heard his physics teacher at Bridgehampton High circa 1985 express a not uncommon view when he began a discussion of the place with, “If God were to give New York an enema. . . .”

    Thomas McGonigle’s “Going to Patchogue” is a slight, basically plotless metafictional novel of loss, identity, and discovery. First published by the Dalkey Archive Press in 1992 and out of print for a number of years, it has recently been reissued in a paperback edition. The Dalkey Archive is a small publisher known for its interest in less traditional literary works.

Lit Lunch in Sag

    Call it a Sag Harbor affair: Two authors and residents feted at a lunch held in Ted Conklin’s American Hotel, the linchpin establishment in large part responsible some 40 years ago for sparing the village its lot as a half-abandoned wreck fit for wharf rats.

    It’s what we have in common that makes us unique. 

    I’m not sure whether that’s a quote from somebody or my own thoughts as I read “The Arrogant Years: One Girl’s Search for Her Lost Youth, From Cairo to Brooklyn” by Lucette Lagnado.

    What was the greatest discovery of all time?

    Attributed to Albert Einstein, it was compound interest. To the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, it was the discovery of the method of discovery. To Mel Brooks, it was Saran Wrap, because it’s transparent and it keeps food fresh. According to my wife, Celia, the greatest discovery (actually an invention) was the thermos jug, because when you put hot stuff in, it stays hot, and when you put cold stuff in, it stays cold, and, what’s more, it knows when to do what!

__

“A More Perfect Heaven”

    In his new book depicting aspects of the history of the Town of Southampton, David Goddard, a sociologist, sets out to trace the “colonization of the village” in the late-19th century and to document “efforts at outside economic development.” These processes, he maintains, brought the town into the “modern age” and transformed it.