Back to Murder Creek

Who would’ve thought that blackface and white supremacy would return to the headlines in such a major and dispiriting way? But there’s a parallel yet quite different trip into the past available, as NewSouth Books has just released in paperback “The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement,” a 2008 memoir by Bob Zellner of Southampton.

The son of a Methodist minister, born in Alabama into a family of Ku Klux Klan members, Mr. Zellner went on to reverse his personal trajectory to become field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, agitating for civil rights throughout the 1960s. South Forkers might know him better for his past work heading up the Anti-Bias Task Force or running for supervisor in Southampton, or his protests on behalf of the Shinnecocks, among other ventures in civic life here over the years.

Celebrating Black Writers

Along similar lines, roughly speaking, it’s not too late to check out a copy of John Edgar Wideman’s “Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File,” about the father of the martyred civil rights figure Emmett Till, a 14-year-old from Chicago brutally murdered in Mississippi in 1955 after being accused of flirting with a white woman. 

A copy is available at the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor, which is where it could be put to use in Sunday’s African-American Read-In from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m., arranged in conjunction with Canio’s Books down Main Street. Readers of all stripes have been invited to take part with short pieces and excerpts from favorite works. The organizers suggest “fiction, nonfiction, poetry, oral history, or family story” — and the attendance of listeners, too. Signing up ahead of time is recommended, and light refreshments are in store.

Now here’s a getaway for serious readers. The Baker House 1650 on Main Street in East Hampton is offering what’s billed as a Hamptons Bedside Reading Weekend, from March 1 to 3, that in fact involves more than books stashed in rooms: The authors themselves will put in appearances, namely those associated with a women’s literary and marketing cooperative called the Tall Poppies, a group that also raises money for various literary causes.

“Events throughout the weekend include cocktail parties and book signings,” in the words of a release. “Special package rates are available for this weekend,” which involves a two-night stay at the inn, a gift bag, a stack of books, breakfast each day, a $100 credit to dine at the Jean-Georges restaurant at the Topping Rose House in Bridgehampton, and admission to five author get-togethers. The cost starts at $908.36, to put a fine point on it. Reservations are through the Baker House 1650. 

On March 1, a meet-and-greet with cocktails at Topping Rose from 6 to 8 p.m. will welcome Amy Impellizzeri, who will sign her political thriller “Why We Lie.” The next day, a tea tasting and book signing will take place at the White Fences Inn in Southampton, with Kristy Woodson Harvey and “The Secret to Southern Charm” from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Also on March 2, the 1770 House in East Hampton will host Amy Reichart with “The Optimist’s Guide to Letting Go” from 2 to 4 p.m. From 5 to 7 that night, a champagne cocktail party back at the Baker House will feature Kelly Simmons and “The Fifth of July,” a story of a dysfunctional family on Nantucket.

The book gatherings wrap up on March 3 from noon to 2 p.m. at the Maidstone Hotel in East Hampton, as Sandra Block uncaps her pen for her new novel of revenge, “What Happened That Night.” Light refreshments are in store.        

“Thanks a Thousand”

A.J. Jacobs

TED Books, $16.99

Ah, coffee. Chromosome crackler. Goose to flagging spirits. Drudgery obliterator. Focus for the brain’s fog. Fuel to modernity’s engine. Where would we be without it?

In this caffeinated society, if you’re going to be grateful for something, King Bean is hard to beat. A.J. Jacobs wasted no time in seizing on this when he set about looking for a “mental makeover” and his next writing project. As a middle-aged parent of young boys, he admirably sought to spend less of his remaining time on earth annoyed and irritable, anxious, hidebound by the “deficit” mind-set, as the academics call it — that is, dwelling on the negative.

Thus Project Gratitude, as articulated in his latest book, “Thanks a Thousand,” the thousand referring to the number of people he aims to thank for the work they put in toward his getting his mitts on his paper cup of morning coffee, “something I can’t live without” — even if they’re as indirectly involved as a maker of wooden pallets.

It’s “a huge theme I’ve noticed in my previous writing projects,” Mr. Jacobs says. “That the exterior shapes the interior. That our speech and actions change our thoughts.”

And so the annoyed man becomes the annoying. He does not stint on the thank-you notes — “most of the people don’t write back” — or the ingratiating phone calls. About that pallet manufacturer, Mr. Jacobs gets the boss on the horn from New Jersey and hears falsely effusive thanks for his thanks. Undaunted, he follows up later with a legitimate question and is practically hung up on.  

“Well, that’s fine” is how a deputy commissioner with the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene answers what must have sounded like a prank call but in reality was an expression of gratitude “for keeping my food safe.” Here and elsewhere, the reader helplessly pictures eyes rolling skyward in disbelief, shoulders slumping with exasperation, mouths going slack with contempt. 

At a Brooklyn coffee roastery, he attempts to thank a guy on a forklift and is waved off. “Maybe he thinks it’s condescending to be thanked. Maybe he just wants to be left alone to do his job. Maybe the other guys do as well but are too polite to say so.”

One appreciates the author’s honesty. 

Some of the parties involved don’t deserve thanks at all. The inventors of the Java Jacket may have had a sample of their brainchild in an exhibition called “Humble Masterpieces” at the Museum of Modern Art, but what an extraneous, resource-wasting scourge that paper sleeve is. 

Again to the author’s credit, by the end of his tale he shows up at his favorite neighborhood coffee shop with a reusable container in hand.

When his attention turns to coffee lids and a chapter subheading reads “Thanks for Stopping the Coffee From Spilling on My Lap,” it brings up a curious omission: the infamous and tort-rattling lawsuit over just such a scalding in the early 1990s, which was widely condemned as frivolous but in fact wasn’t, given the 79-year-old female plaintiff’s reddened and blistered private parts and subsequent skin grafts and the necessary punitive judgment against the Golden Arches. 

Unscientifically speaking, this reader has often gratefully thought of that case and its moderating influence on the industrywide practice of sadistically serving up to-go coffee so hot it could have been fresh from the Fukushima reactor.

The thanks are a gimmick. And maybe that’s okay. But is this a book about gratitude, or is it a book about coffee? In a New York Times piece about serial memoirists last week, Mr. Jacobs was referred to in passing as a “stunt” journalist like George Plimpton, a practice that may have made more sense in the past with books like “The Year of Living Biblically,” but here, why not just write about the history of the potent drink, something like Mark Kurlansky’s “Salt”? 

Even as a vehicle to compassion and storytelling, the psychological implications of forced gratitude can’t compete with, for instance, the description of an arduous trip to a small coffee farm in remote Colombia, during which from the back of a pickup truck the author catches the driver making the sign of the cross as they skirt a rocky cliff-side road. 

Mr. Jacobs rightly worries about being condescending. He’s not alone. Still, it has to be said that the sincerity is endearing when after a dinner he’s sitting on the farmhouse porch, looking out over the mountains and greenery, the source of it all, as it were, and pulls out a crumpled note of thanks for the family’s hard work. 

He reads in halting Spanish of how happy and energized their crop makes him back in the United States. He won’t take it for granted, he says. “From now on, I’ll think of you when I drink my morning coffee.” 

You want to believe him. 

A.J. Jacobs has family in East Hampton.

The arresting title “It Were as Well to Please the Devil as Anger Him: Witchcraft in the Founding Days of East Hampton” dates to Loretta Orion’s 1998 lecture for East Hampton’s 350th anniversary celebration. Put together with her husband, Hugh King, the town crier, its 16 pages are readily found on the East Hampton Library’s website. 

Now, after intervening years of research and writing and the gathering of historical paintings, engravings, and lithographs, she has applied that title to a new book, and she’ll be returning to the library on Feb. 2 for a talk and book signing, joined by Mr. King and her other collaborators, Catherine Tremblay and Aimee Webb.  

The famous 1657 case of Goody Garlick, who was tried in Connecticut by John Winthrop Jr., the governor of that colony, after being accused of witchcraft by a daughter of Lion Gardiner, is the crux of the matter. And it remains pertinent, Ms. Orion writes, “because this story and the other witchcraft cases mentioned in my book highlight how the act of dehumanizing people can lead society to inflict awful treatment on those individuals because they are not considered ‘human’ and therefore must be evil.”

The Age of Enlightenment was a wave that broke slowly across the American colonies. East Hamptoners of the second half of the 17th century still held their share of medieval beliefs when it came to crime, punishment, and superstition. Just ask Goody. Or, that is, her intermediary, Ms. Orion, starting at 2 p.m.

“The Bodies in Person”

Nick McDonell

Blue Rider Press, $28

Nick McDonell set himself a noble mission: to put names and faces on the civilians killed and injured by U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. And, similarly, to identify Americans tasked with estimating that “collateral damage” in advance, attempting to limit or at least record it, accept responsibility, make amends.

But “The Bodies in Person,” Mr. McDonell’s report from the bloody field, albeit a bit of a battle itself, is powerful, often poignant proof that the system fails outrageously, perhaps inevitably, despite much formal proclamation of the value America places on innocent life regardless of race, religion, or nationality.

We get a multitude of names, physical descriptions, even a few photos.

One is Sara Mohammed, 7, of Tikrit, whose family took her to Delhi for surgery on the hole in a heart valve, only to see her fatally injured back home by the blast from an airstrike on the house across the street — after it was taken over by ISIS. An airstrike U.S. Central Command denies making.

Another is Zabiullah Zarifi, 37, of Parwan, north of Kabul, who prizes photos from his years working for Americans at Bagram Air Base since the Afghan war began in 2001. Then an American patrol shot up his car, leaving him scarred and paralyzed from the waist down. And his “unstable crook” of a brother, according to Mr. McDonell, signed for the $7,500 the U.S. meant for the actual victim of such injuries — “solatia.” A sliding scale gives more to survivors of those killed.

In a camp for internal refugees outside Fallujah, we meet Noor Najem Abid, who didn’t know how old she was, but said she was nine months pregnant when her belly was pierced by shrapnel from a missile blast down the street from her garden. After which she delivered dead twins.

At least as infuriating as the case histories is the system itself. “The number of civilian casualties has decreased a great deal compared to the casualties in 2007 to 2014,” Mohammad Asim, the governor of Parwan, tells the author. But a United Nations chart on the same page shows a steady increase across Afghanistan in those years, from 5,969 dead and injured annually to 11,418.

In Iraq, civilian casualty numbers were on the rise before the flowering of ISIS, according to the U.N. Assistance Mission there (also contradicted by official Iraqi and coalition forces), from 3,238 in 2012 to 19,266 in 2016, though down to 8,079 the next year.

And even those numbers may be low, for several reasons, including that hospitals are often too frantically busy to keep records, sometimes tending to patients already dead “lest relatives with militia contacts, dissatisfied with a doctor’s efforts, demand blood money,” says Mr. McDonell.

And who is a civilian, anyway? The author introduces us to the “Ten Dollar Taliban” — a concept explained by an “erudite and combat-tested” lieutenant colonel named Mark in Kabul:

“They need ten dollars today. They need ten dollars tomorrow. So they’ll join the team for the sake of earning that ten dollars in order to put food on the table. . . . Is that guy Taliban, or is he civilian? And if we are gonna win this, isn’t he, you know, the swing voter that we need to be focusing on instead of killing him?”

A taxi driver outside Erbil articulates the essence of survival: “When Saddam was alive, we were clapping for him. The Americans came, we clapped. Then the army came, we clapped. ISIS came, we clapped. Now the army has come back, we clap.”

We learn of the military’s NCV or NCCV — the “non-combatant casualty cutoff value” — “ultimately set by the president, and classified,” Mr. McDonell explains. And he quotes a Colonel Nicholas, senior legal adviser at U.S. headquarters in Kabul: “The NCV represents a number of civilians that could be killed, that might be acceptable under . . . whatever restrictions the U.S. government has put on us.”

As he spoke with Mr. McDonell, the NCV for conventional forces in Afghanistan was zero, and in Iraq and Syria 10. “No one will speak publicly about the numbers for the CIA or Special Forces,” Mr. McDonell reports. “Conversations off the record suggest they are higher.”

The projected number of civilians likely to be killed or injured in any particular operation is governed by the Collateral Damage Estimate Methodology. It requires that “target packets” meet a series of criteria or “pillars” — positive identification, a no-strike list that includes nearby mosques and historical ruins, the number of civilians in each bomb or missile’s known radius of destruction (no greater than the NCV without a special okay from the Pentagon, supposedly).

Mr. McDonell sits in the Tactical Operations Center, or TOC, in southern Afghanistan when a strike is called against six men they watch on eye-in-the-sky monitor screens. One of them is digging a bunker — quickly categorized as an “established fighting position” — behind a stone wall, then firing over that wall at an Afghan National Army outpost.

After missile explosions that resemble “red flowers” on the video screens, two men are seen running off — “squirters.” Whether the digger-shooter is dead — and whether the others were comrades or under duress — is not known.

The lawyer in the room, a Texas litigator named Bobby with the body of a weightlifter, ponders how the standard of proof for such a killing strike compares with “beyond a reasonable doubt” for a murder conviction back home. “Somewhere about probable cause,” he admits.

“I’m trying to figure it out in my own head, in my own heart, whether it is appropriate sometimes to kill innocent people to get what we want,” Mr. McDonell tells Callie, a contractor from defense giant BAE Systems, who also works in the TOC.

“I just don’t know if there’s a mitigation on how not to do that when you’re fighting an enemy who will protect himself with women and children,” she says. “I mean, that’s the evil, right?”

Even the most modern technology is no guarantee against dreadful mistakes. One officer recalls a strike involving a man who, on the monitors, seemed to be running with a rocket-propelled grenade. After the smoke cleared, it turned out to be his blanket roll.

Not accidentally, I think, the style of this book itself creates a kind of chaotic battlefield confusion. Mr. McDonell won fame at age 17 with the novel “Twelve,” about privileged Manhattan kids like himself. Here his narrative seems purposely fragmented, as if itself blown apart by a grenade, lurching forward and back in time, from Iraq to Afghanistan and back, with frequent digressions and complex ethical considerations.

His footnotes do not simply specify sources but constitute whole paragraphs seemingly moved from the main text, sometimes with key facts.

For example, in describing how a Civilian Casualty Credibility Assessment Review Board compares allegations of such injuries with official military and civilian records, available video, and other intelligence, Mr. McDonell saves for a footnote (128) that members of the investigating team “do not typically visit the sites.” But a few pages later we learn that media attention can prompt just such visits.

Digressions often stop moving accounts of death, injury, or other dangers. Noting that 10-year-old Hidran Ali Abdullah, paralyzed by an airstrike during the Third Battle of Fallujah, would never likely fly herself, leads into a history of weaponized flight starting with hot air balloons directing French artillery fire in the 1890s.

At a bombing site in west Mosul, the call for body bags described as “cheap, bright blue, and made, probably, of polyethylene,” prompts comment on a massing of plastics in the Pacific Ocean.

After ISIS moves into the town of Albu Hardan in Iraq’s Anbar Province, and airstrikes against it begin, Mr. McDonell reports the tears of a Sufi woman named Aisha. The remains of her husband, Mohammed, cannot even be found in the rubble that was their home. Then he defines three types of human tears (basal, reflexive, psychic).

There is no official confirmation of that strike. Mr. McDonell doubts Aisha will ever receive compensation, then adds: “She will not knock, perilously, on the door of the American embassy, which cost $750 million to construct.” As if anyone could think she would, or find the cost relevant.

But he goes on: “She is not permitted anywhere near that compound, across the river in the Green Zone, around which the sons of Iraqi oligarchs, made wealthy by the U.S. invasion, raced me on their jetskis, across the oil-slick Tigris. . . .”

Wait! What? Our noble war reporter off-duty was also jaunting on a Jet Ski? Or just speeding along a riverbank road? But why such a self-indulgent counterpoint to Aisha’s tears?

Mr. McDonell frequently argues that privileged, powerful America sees the innocent lives it takes abroad as less worthy than those it is protecting at home. But this is not World War II; America is not really killing those likely to take U.S. lives.

In fact, the actual trade-off is, in a way, more chilling: taking lives — innocent and otherwise — in far-off nations to bring what America sees as the blessings of political stability, public safety, dare we say democracy. And, yes, maybe for access to some natural resources.

Without doubting Mr. McDonell’s earnestness, I found his personal moralizing in many places ponderous, at the very least distracting from the real drama he has covered. In another footnote (235), he seems to acknowledge “this ‘voice-of-God’ rhetoric.”

Still, if it helps him get through the night after all the sniper fire he’s ducked, blasts he’s felt, blood and gore he’s seen, who can say nay? And if war is hell, should not reading war reporting be a bit hellish too? So let Mr. McDonell have the last words:

“The only non-combatant casualty cutoff value consistent with our values is zero. . . . To set a limit of zero in good faith requires a radical reduction in our use of force, a rejection of violence equal to the full measure of devotion that many of our citizens have given throughout history, in defiance of cruelties at home and abroad. It is to recommit ourselves to equality, and so to a difficult moral truth: that Americans should be more willing to risk death, so that others might live, because those others are our equals.”

And this: “No litany of sufferings will reduce our tolerance for violence. Only life can do that, not death alone. And so for my part I am grateful for swimming in the ocean, and for the desert, too, and for bats over rubble. For iron, which is found not only in missile fragments but Paris’s wrought railings. For everything, really . . . because they are elements of our universal but as yet scientifically unarticulated shared consciousness, representing grace, which makes needless death all the madder.”

Nick McDonell’s other books include the novel “An Expensive Education” and “The End of Major Combat Operations.” He has family in Amagansett.

David M. Alpern was a reporter, writer, and senior editor at Newsweek, ran the “Newsweek on Air” and “For Your Ears Only” radio broadcasts for more than 30 years, and later hosted weekly podcasts for World Policy Journal from his home in Sag Harbor.

The interview began, as if in essay form, with a wide, philosophical question: “Why am I a writer? To be published or simply to write?”

Speaking in person with Paul Harding, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and the most recent addition to the teaching roster at Stony Brook Southampton’s M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature, is rather like reading one of his books. He presents a large accumulation of detail and a lot of opinions about time, art, and the slippery nature of success. 

There’s always this belief that anything has the potential to become interesting if you examine it closely enough, especially the presence of the past, which — as his literary idol, Faulkner, once suggested — is never dead, never really past. And he tends to leave the big answers up to you to decide, making the reader, or the interviewer, feel brilliant too. Or a bit stupid.

Mr. Harding won the Pulitzer in 2010 for his debut novel, “Tinkers,” set in bleak New England and delving into a dying old man’s past relationship with his father, in a time-bending meditation on loss and family ties. The manuscript, said the author, had languished on his desk for several years as a long list of editors at major publishing houses rejected it, no doubt worried it would never sell because of its almost defiant lack of plot. 

“But I rejected the rejection letters,” Mr. Harding said wryly. “I wouldn’t change my book to satisfy anybody.” It’s what he tells his creative writing students today: “Write the sort of book you want people to read. Don’t write for people who won’t read your book.”

Eventually, the Bellevue Literary Press, a small independent house, published it in 2009 to little fanfare. The New York Times ignored it completely. And yet this slim 192-page novel was awarded the $10,000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, an award given to a piece of “distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life,” thereby refuting the assumption that winning such a prestigious award is the crowning achievement of a much-laureled book.

It was “a token of encouragement,” he said of the Pulitzer. “A sign for me to keep doing what I was doing.” 

In 2013, Mr. Harding followed his debut with “Enon,” published by Random House. The Wall Street Journal called it one of “the best novels of the year,” but The New York Times concluded that lightning had not struck twice for the author.

The “knife sharpening” among critics was inevitable, according to the author. He knew there would be those who would never like his second book, and he was prepared. 

“If I had been 25 when I won the Pulitzer, it might have paralyzed me,” he said. “But I was 42. I had already been in a band for years. I knew not to mix up publicity with art.”

His rock band career began in 1990, when he was a drummer for the Cold Water Flat band, formed with two other students while he was studying at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The band lasted about five years, producing two albums and getting some airplay mainly on college radio stations. “We went on tour at some point,” he recalled, “and basically broke up between Houston and Dallas.”

It was then that Mr. Harding enrolled in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop creative writing program, where he became a student of Marilynne Robinson, a Pulitzer Prize winner for her novel “Gilead” in 2005, which also swept the reader into the thoughts of a dying old man. Ms. Robinson’s influence on Mr. Harding was profound: “That’s the life I want for my brain,” he remembered thinking. 

At Stony Brook Southampton, Mr. Harding joins an impressive faculty list that includes Meg Wolitzer, Amy Hempel, Cornelius Eady, and Roger Rosenblatt. 

Over the last decade, doubts have plagued the inexorable rise of creative writing workshops around the world. The British author Hanif Kureishi, himself a creative writing teacher at a British university, dismissed the existence of a transferable, teachable craft in writing, when he said that writing a story is “a difficult thing to do and it’s a great skill to have. Can you teach that? I don’t think you can.” And with programs costing anywhere between $35,000 and $73,000, a creative writing degree is sometimes regarded as a marker of finances rather than potential. 

Mr. Harding doesn’t agree, believing that good writing is a mixture of the calculated and the instinctual. “We have this retrograde romanticism of just set yourself on fire and write,” he said. In reality, like any of the fine arts, he explained, there’s a technical side to the craft. Literature is style, and style comes down to the shape and wording of sentences. His job as a writing teacher is not to impose rules but to help newer or younger writers think about verb tenses, the passage of time, constructing attention, and bringing the reader into the moment, when the mind cleaves to the page. 

During the coming spring semester, Mr. Harding will teach an undergraduate writing course as well as a graduate-level seminar on Shakespeare.

Does he ever slum it intellectually? Not really. He admitted spending his downtime poring over masters like Shakespeare, Faulkner, Faust, Melville, and even the Bible. (“I love the way my brain feels when I read them.”) For him, it’s the sort of writing that is intended to be read deeply and repeatedly — something he strives to achieve in his own work. 

“I don’t want people to read my book and say ‘I got it’ after one reading. Does anybody ever listen to an album they love only once?”

“Untrue”

Wednesday Martin

Little Brown Spark, $28

For heterosexual husbands, or men engaged in long-term monogamous relationships with women, Wednesday Martin offers this advice for starting 2019 with a bang: Give your lady a “hall pass.”

The part-time Sag Harbor resident and author of the clunkily titled “Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free” had more accurately suggested in the British press that such an item would make a stellar holiday gift for the picky spouse. “This Christmas give your wife something she really wants. Something truly exciting: a hall pass,” she said.

The hall pass, according to Ms. Martin, a social researcher and cultural critic, is redeemable for sex with someone other than your long-term partner while remaining committed to the primary relationship. It could be for a one-off festive fling or, as long as both parties agree, the start of a beautiful polyamorous arrangement, also known as consensual non-monogamy. 

The reason we women might need this “quickie voucher” is at the core of “Untrue,” which attempts to shatter the central fallacy that women find monogamy easier than men. In fact, the opposite is true, the author argues, because a woman’s libido is every bit as demanding as a man’s. The untruths about male and female desires — that women instinctually want to be “true” in a monogamous relationship, while men are hard-wired to be gadabouts — have been man-made, presented by male scientists from Charles Darwin down. Drawing from tremendous research conducted by a number of eminent female social scientists, “Untrue” makes the bold claim that women crave sexual variety just as much as men do. Perhaps even more.

In a chapter titled “Women Who Like Sex Too Much,” Ms. Martin writes, “It tends to be women, I was repeatedly informed, who are telling their partners that they want open relationships and marriages, or that they want a sexual and romantic life unbeholden to the dyad. . . . Rather than throwing ‘female Viagra’ at these women, what if we told them the truth? That it’s normal for women to get bored? That it’s normal to want to have sex in lots of different ways, with many partners? And that women too, and perhaps especially, have cheating minds and hearts and bodies?”

In support of her thesis, she takes us on a rollicking ride through history, revealing that it was the development of farming, in Jordan about 12,000 years ago, that introduced the idea of a woman’s place being in the home. According to the author, plowing required more upper-body strength and “led to a new and rigidly gendered division of labor.”

Ms. Martin, whose 2015 New York Times best-selling memoir, “Primates of Park Avenue,” caused a huge stir because of factual inconsistencies, is a talented writer and manages to turn relatively dry material into sexy and often titillating prose. Her interviews are extensive and include experts in primatology, cultural and biological anthropology, psychology, sociology, and medicine. Remarkably, it all adds up to a rather fun read.

But her title promising a “new science” seems awfully hyperbolic. Mostly, her scientific findings date back at least a couple of decades. The majority of her anthropological examples of cultures in which females live openly in non-monogamous arrangements involve remote African tribes, such as the Himba of Namibia, in which nearly 32 percent of babies are fathered through extramarital affairs, the Ache tribe, whose members once roamed the hilly forests of Paraguay, and the women of Lesotho, a small country near South Africa, who seem to be having it off with everyone while their husbands are away. 

There’s also much on the sexual appetite of female bonobos, our oversexed closest primate relatives, who like to resolve conflicts through sexual activity. Again, this is hardly new evidence. In the mid-1970s, Takayoshi Kano, a Japanese primatologist, was one of the first to document the central position of females in bonobo society, discovering that they mated with different males and sometimes even with juveniles or infants.

So, out there in the lawless wild, everybody seems to be having a raucous time. But what about in the civilized West? According to one interviewee, who had a husband and several partners, the key to success is a shared Google calendar. 

The author also learned about polyamory in our society during a workshop on consensual non-monogamy hosted by Mark Kaupp, a New York therapist. The workshop offered advice on managing open relationships, ranging from couples who agreed not to disclose their infidelities to polyamorous couples discussing “mandatory disclosure” and “ethical non-monogamy.” And often, the therapist explained, when polyamory was consensual, the couple had sexual contracts drawn up by lawyers. No wonder they’re putting it about like wild bonobos! Could there be anything less erotic than having your lawyer draft an agreement for sex between you and your partner? 

Despite some very flimsy examples of “real life” women in polyamorous arrangements — first names only for privacy — “Untrue” is ultimately convincing in its fight for women’s lib — women’s libidos, that is. But it’s not Ms. Martin’s argument that’s the problem, it’s the practice. Because it presents the modern woman with yet another box to tick: erotic empowerment. Who has the energy?

Not to sound all moralistic, but Allan Zola Kronzek opens his introduction to “Grandpa Magic” with a paragraph on the value of old-fashioned magic in breaking a particularly harmful kind of spell, that cast by ubiquitous electronic devices. 

“Use counter-magic!” he writes. “Change a fork into a knife, pull coins from thin air, shove a drinking straw up your nose, turn your napkin into a chicken. That will do the trick, trust me. In fact, it could even lead to some genuine human-to-human interaction.”

And thus this book — a guide to tricks grandparents can perform for entertainment and as a way to bond with kids over secrets shared, all mixed with magic mentoring for the young. From Workman Publishing, it retails for $16.95.

Mr. Kronzek lives in Sag Harbor and has been around forever, in the good sense of the phrase. So you haven’t been around forever? Then you might know him from his million-selling “The Sorcerer’s Companion: A Guide to the Magical World of Harry Potter.” He’ll stay in his home village for an appearance at Canio’s Books on Dec. 7 at 5 p.m., which means not just the usual signing and talk, but a magic show.

And now your faithful correspondent will do his own disappearing act, and yield the floor to Kyle Hilton for one of his charming illustrations from the book.

Allan Zola Kronzek will sign copies of “Grandpa Magic” at the Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor on Sunday, Dec. 23, at 2:30 p.m.

In the Old Rogers

Remember Southampton’s old Rogers Memorial Library on Job’s Lane? The stately 1895 red brick pile with all the nooks and crannies for reading inside? It may have been repurposed recently as a furniture and home furnishings store, One Kings Lane, but the reading part will be making a return, at least for one afternoon, Saturday from 2 to 4, when the folks from Southampton Books will host an open-mike poetry reading.

The gathering aims to “ring in the holiday season,” and to that end a flier promises wine, “a special guest,” and discounts on books of poetry and certain One Kings Lane wares.

Margolick at Lunch

David Margolick and his latest, “The Promise and the Dream: The Untold Story of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy,” will be the focus of this year’s Friends of the John Jermain Memorial Library author’s lunch on Sunday starting at noon at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor. Mr. Margolick, a veteran Vanity Fair hand who has a house in Noyac, has been on the civil rights beat of late, another recent book being “Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock,” about the 1957 school desegregation effort.

The lunch costs $55, and reservations are required by calling Valerie Cuyjet at 631-725-4147. Copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing. 

“Quarterback”
John Feinstein
Doubleday, $27.95

The consensus in the National Football League that a team goes nowhere without a franchise quarterback is treated as gospel today more than ever. Billion-dollar franchises are leveraged on finding a star quarterback, seasons may be intentionally lost to get into position to draft one, and the care and feeding of such quarterbacks once they arrive in town tends to eclipse all other franchise business.

Nothing gets a coach and general manager a contract extension — or run out of town — like whether they guess right on their quarterback.

But as history has repeatedly shown, finding a capable quarterback is an exceedingly vexing and inexact science, even in this age of sophisticated analytics and draft science in which college players are scouted, poked, prodded, and psychologically tested for months.

The tension in all of those colliding forces makes for a terrific, and timely, idea for the latest book that John Feinstein has chosen to write. And the five quarterbacks that Feinstein, a longtime homeowner on Shelter Island, has chosen to spotlight are well chosen: Andrew Luck, Joe Flacco, Alex Smith, Ryan Fitzpatrick, and Doug Williams aren’t the most famous choices he could have made, but they are apt picks because of the different footholds they occupy on the N.F.L. quarterback spectrum. 

Feinstein has made a career out of deep-dive looks at sports topics dating back to his 1986 blockbuster, “A Season on the Brink” (still the best-selling sports book of all time), and he does a capable job here of rendering what these men’s existence is like, and the overheated context in which they work. 

Early in the book, Flacco, the Baltimore Ravens’ longtime quarterback, could be speaking for all of them when he says, “The criticism comes with the territory.”

“Even when it’s not your fault?” Feinstein asks.

“It’s always my fault,” Flacco answers.

Luck, who has had a promising but injury-plagued career with Indianapolis, represents the can’t-miss star. Flacco is the small-college find whose physical skills — starting with a howitzer arm — overrode scouts’ concerns about whether he could navigate graduating to stiffer competition. The day Flacco fell in the draft to Baltimore, team executives literally jumped up and down celebrating in their draft war room.

Ryan Fitzpatrick — sometimes jokingly called FitzMagic by his peers today — is a journeyman, the first Harvard QB ever to start an N.F.L. game, and Feinstein shows how at times Fitzpatrick was shadowed by his lack of pedigree, even when he had career-best years. Alex Smith is the hard-knocks guy who was drafted number one over all by the San Francisco 49ers in 2005, and then embarked on a fitful career marked by big expectations, injuries, and repeated wholesale coaching changes that inhibited his development until he connected with the quarterback whisperer Andy Reid in Kansas City. Smith’s teams frequently win, yet he’s constantly criticized for not being flashier.

Doug Williams, the first African-American quarterback to win a Super Bowl, is the launch point for how racism and prejudice were prevalent when he broke into the league in 1970s. The N.F.L. teams he played for never tried to switch him to a different position. He even quit football for a spell rather than accept a lowball contract extension from Tampa Bay until a coach who believed in him — Joe Gibbs — brought him back into the league and they embarked on their title run after Williams lost his 26-year-old wife to a brain tumor, leaving him to raise their 3-month-old daughter alone.

Along with acquainting readers with each man’s personal story, Feinstein lays out the context and overarching issues any N.F.L. quarterback faces along the way: the unsentimental front-office types who treat quarterbacks as disposable objects even when they do succeed; the reliable fickleness of fans that skews toward irrational; the brutal physical toll the game extracts, and the disconnect between how quarterback is a “dependent” position — “Linemen must block, receivers must run precise patterns and make catches while being crushed by defenders,” Feinstein writes — and yet, if things go wrong, the quarterback becomes the “fall guy.”

Feinstein provides some fine anecdotes that illustrate his basic premise that “There is no position in sports more glamorous, more lucrative, more visible, more high-risk. In thirty-two cities, the quarterback carries the hopes and dreams of millions of fans and is the centerpiece for the media that covers every N.F.L. team.” The story of how Smith once found two paycheck envelopes left in his locker and mistook one of them for $1,000 — not his $1-million signing bonus — until he was nearly at the bank teller’s window shows the credulity-bending world and life changes pro athletes sometimes go through.

Smith says, “I arranged for direct deposit after that.”

But what the book doesn’t succeed at is breaking more new ground by, say, providing a more sophisticated look at the modern intricacies of what is often called the most difficult position to play in sports. And that’s a shortcoming. 

Readers don’t come to a Feinstein book expecting stylish prose, they expect deep reporting. A great deal of what he writes here, starting with the boilerplate quotes that frequently make their way into print, will not be revelations to avid N.F.L. fans. “Quarterback” is better suited to fans looking for a breezy read or a greater acquaintance with the N.F.L. and the challenges, ethos, and perseverance it takes for these men to continue to survive in a Darwinian world that’s gotten more Darwinian over time.

John Feinstein is a journalist, broadcaster, and author of 35 books, including “Caddy for Life” and “A Good Walk Spoiled.”

Johnette Howard is an author and former senior writer at Sports Illustrated, ESPN, and The Washington Post. Her work has been collected in eight anthologies, including David Halberstam’s “The Best American Sports Writing of the Century.”