Books

    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!

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“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.

Poets Against Hunger

    As part of a nationwide effort to alleviate hunger, Mark Doty of Springs, a winner of a National Book Award, will head up a group of poets getting together at the Springs Presbyterian Church on Sunday for a reading. The goal is focused: to take in donations of food and money for the Springs Food Pantry. George Wallace, a former Suffolk County poet laureate, will also read, as will Fran Castan, Teri Kennedy, Rosalind Brenner, and Carol Alexander, among others.

Caution: This review is probably not for the sexually faint of heart. “Seven Days in Rio,” the second novel by Francis Levy, is the story of Kenny Cantor, a C.P.A. from New York City who has come to Rio de Janeiro as a sex tourist

    Every “Seinfeld” fan recalls the episode in which Jerry’s wacky neighbor incorporates himself and takes on a young intern named Darren. Darren’s duties at Kramerica include laundry detail and scheduling high tea with a certain Mr. Newman. We laugh because it’s clever. It doesn’t matter that the kid’s being used, that he’s wasting money on empty credits and ridiculous experiences. Sanity prevails in a neat 22 minutes when his college dean puts a stop to it.

“The Journals of Spalding Gray”
Edited by Nell Casey
Alfred A. Knopf, $28.95

    Creatives have the propensity to see life in quotations. However Job-like their experience, the proclivity and ability to turn it into art is ultimately a redeeming factor. Naturally the inclination to treat all of experience as a palette can also have a distancing effect. Nothing is ever taken at face value or enjoyed for what it is.

Francis Levy’s “Seven Days”

    What price buttocks? Ask Kenny Cantor, he’s a money-minded Manhattan C.P.A. taking a sex tour of a profligate South American city in Francis Levy’s “Seven Days in Rio,” just out from Two Dollar Radio. Mr. Levy, who has a house in Wainscott, will read from the novel on Saturday at 3 p.m. at the East Hampton Library.

    Ellen Feldman’s “Next to Love” is an appealing and swiftly moving historical novel. The book leaves its mark through careful attention to detail along with a keen tracking of the emotional current that runs through the lives of the characters during and in the wake of World War II.

“Next to Love”

Ellen Feldman

Spiegel & Grau, $25

Who’da thunk Franz Kafka would have said, “All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog.” Maybe his translator spelled dog backward by mistake. On second thought, perhaps it’s a fitting observation from the creator of several of literature’s most tortured souls.      

Bill Henderson, founder of the Pushcart Press, contemplates the dog-God connection in his just-published memoir, “All My Dogs: A Life” — this and much more.       

    “They’re having a kid? His life’s over.”

    I heard those only half-joking words at a summer barbecue a few years ago. It took me a while before I could complete the thought: “And a new, richer one begins.”

    What’s nice about “Pobble’s Way” (Flashlight Press, $16.95) by Simon Van Booy is that on a winter walk a father’s flights of fancy match his daughter’s, and the two play off each other. To him, a leaf is a butterfly raft. To her, a mushroom is a frog umbrella.

     Jay McInerney, the author of “Bright Lights, Big City” and the current wine columnist for The Wall Street Journal, will open the Writers Speak series at Stony Brook Southampton on Wednesday.

    The event is sponsored by the campus’s M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature. Mr. McInerney’s reading at 7 p.m. will follow a 6 p.m. open house in the radio lounge at Chancellors Hall.

    His other titles include “Ransom,” “Story of My Life,” “Brightness Falls,” “The Last of the Savages,” “The Good Life,” and a collection of short stories, “How It Ended.”

    Eric Alterman’s latest book, “Kabuki Democracy: The System vs. Barack Obama,” analyzes the reasons why President Obama has failed to enact the progressive reforms articulated in his presidential campaign. In sum, Mr. Alterman depicts a system controlled by money and shadow play rather than participatory processes. He marshals an astounding amount of evidence from a wide range of sources to document his central argument: that the banking system, conservative institutions, the media, and lobbyists have warped democracy in the United States.

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“Kabuki Democracy”

    “Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell,” wrote Currer Bell, alias Charlotte Bronte, going on to explain in her flowing style why she and her sisters, Anne and Emily, sought anonymity:

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Nom de Plume:

A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms

Carmela Ciuraru

Harper, $24.99

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    In a Bible class I taught, a woman who was annoyed with an image of a vengeful God said, “Well, why don’t we just write a new Bible?” James Frey has written, not a new Bible, but a testament to the end times with the appearance of the Messiah, a man born of Orthodox Jewish parents in Brooklyn. His name is variously Ben Zion Avrohom, Ben Jones, or Ben.

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“The Final Testament of the Holy Bible”

James Frey

Gagosian Gallery, $50

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    James Salter, the renowned American writer lauded for his straightforward yet probing prose, has received the Rea Award for the Short Story, marking another milestone in his literary career while heralding new works as well. Mr. Salter, who divides his time among Bridgehampton, New York City, and Aspen, Colo., said Elizabeth Rea, the widow of the award’s founder, Michael Rea, called him on Aug. 19 to let him know that he had won the $30,000 award.

    “It was a complete surprise to me,” Mr. Salter said Friday. “You don’t know you are even being considered.”

The needle — you remember needles — stuck

    On an old record played

    On an opera night

    On a poorly heard but richly received

Loving listener supported station.

Twice it caught, so three times it played

The same feather of a song.

The host, whose finger gently

But surely bade the game go on,

Made no apology.

He knew, as did we still up,

The comfort and the affirmation

Of those little clicks sounding

Like the necklace shells of a dancing shaman.

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“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.

    Anne Roiphe is certainly a prolific writer. At the front of her latest book she lists 9 novels and 10 nonfiction works. “Art and Madness” is her third memoir. In it she goes back to her days as a very young woman, employing a somewhat confusing format by skipping back and forth in time between scenes from the 1950s and ’60s, creating an impressionistic mosaic of these years.

“The Barque of Saviors”

    In case you missed it, there have been historically minded Sundays in the Barn talks happening weekly one jaunty ferry ride away on Shelter Island. Next up in the series, which is courtesy of that island’s historical society, is Russell Drumm with his 2001 book, “The Barque of Saviors: Eagle’s Passage From the Nazi Navy to the U.S. Coast Guard.”

Levin on Krasner

    Art aficionados, snap to. Fridays at Five brings a pre-eminent biographer of artists to Bridgehampton tomorrow to talk about a leading female painter and important figure in the women’s rights movement. (To say nothing of her long Springs residency and marriage to Jackson Pollock.)

I have to tell you this, whoever you are:

that on one summer morning here, the ocean

pounded in on tumbledown breakers,

a south wind, bustling along the shore,

whipped the froth into little rainbows,

and a reckless gull swept down the beach

as if to fly were everything it needed.

I thought of your hovering saucers,

looking for clues, and I wanted to write this down,

so it wouldn’t be lost forever —

that once upon a time we had

meadows here, and astonishing things,

Life and Death in Amagansett

    Gary Reiswig was born into a family of fire-and-brimstone religiosity in the flatlands of the Texas Panhandle and grew up across the border in the Sooner State, where he played high school football and became a preacher. That he went on to own and run the Maidstone Arms inn and restaurant in tony East Hampton is a tale in itself. But the story he’ll be telling on Saturday at the Amagansett Library is equally compelling, touching on health care and Congressional testimony, a dread disease and the research push for a cure, life and death.

Celebrating B.H. Friedman

    The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs will be the site of a memorial gathering on Sunday for the writer B.H. Friedman, who was perhaps most famous for his 1972 biography, “Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible.” Among his works to be read is a one-act play, “Meeting the Master,” about the first time he met the artist.

    The words “authors after hours” might call to mind certain tendencies in the letting down of the hair — drunkenness, vicious verbal fisticuffs, sexual deviance. Or they can refer to a series of readings at the Amagansett Library.

Poems in the Salty Air

    Long-lived and as widely published as he is prolific, the poet Simon Perchik will read from his work on Sunday at 5 p.m. in Amagansett. The occasion is the free Poetry Marathon, organized as ever by Sylvia Chavkin and Bebe Antell, the site is the Marine Museum on Bluff Road, and the event is free and followed by a reception at which those in attendance can chat with the poets and help themselves to light refreshments.

It Begins With the Aldas

    Tomorrow Bridgehampton’s most famous residents, Arlene and Alan Alda, will open this year’s iteration of the hamlet’s venerable series of readings, Fridays at Five, at the Hampton Library. (Most generous residents, too, many would say, making sizable donations as they have to the Children’s Museum of the East End and to the library itself, where a room is named after them.)

    Who needs April, the officially, fatuously sanctioned National Poetry Month? Consider, instead, June, with its warm-weather flowering of verse. We had Carol Muske-Dukes at Guild Hall the other day for Poetry Pairs, a series put together by Fran Castan, who in turn has been invited by Paula Trachtman of the Amagansett Press and the Amy Awards to read at the East Hampton Library on Saturday.

“Exploring the Other Island,” John Turner’s recent book on Long Island’s unique and fascinating natural history, is the latest in a long series of modern-day publications on this subject dating back to“Exploring the Other Island,” John Turner’s recent book on Long Island’s unique and fascinating natural history, is the latest in a long series of modern-day publications on this subject dating back to 1962.

You’d sit quietly and suddenly the Parrot would shout,

“Death is the Mother of Beauty!” — and then she’d

Nod and eat a burrito. She was taciturn, but if you

Pushed her, she’d become fiery and cry: “My life

Had stood, a Loaded Gun!” and fan her feathers.

What do you have to offer that is more inventive

Than the Parrot’s glittering discourse? What do you

Have to say that could not be topped by: “The world

Is too much with us,” “Sunset and evening star,”