Jennifer Senft, an editor and English and writing instructor, is offering two workshops in April — the Art of Fiction, at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, and one on nature writing at the South Fork Natural History Museum in Bridge­hampton.

In the first, the fiction will be inspired by the art that’s in the Parrish, from the museum’s permanent collection to “Parrish Perspectives,” the current show of work by Jules Feiffer, Robert Dash, and Joe Zucker. Explored, Ms. Senft wrote, will be “fiction that you imagine within a piece of art, fiction in the style of the art, or fiction that replicates the medium.” Participants can write prose, drama, or poetry. The work of Oscar Wilde and Frank O’Hara will be among the readings.

The workshop, which costs $100 for museum members or $120 for nonmembers, will start on April 16 and continue on the following three Thursdays from 10 a.m. to noon.

At SoFo, genres including “personal nonfiction, journaling, poetry, fiction, and/or scientific inquiry” will be in play in a workshop devoted to writing about nature a la Annie Dillard, Peter Mat­thiessen, Richard Brautigan, and the poets Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams. Examples of their work will be read and discussed, though the list was still being put together.

“This workshop will also be casual,” Ms. Senft wrote in an email. “We’ll walk outside in Vineyard Field (behind the museum) for prompts and cues. . . .” It will meet on three Saturdays from 10 a.m. to noon, from April 25 to May 9. The fee is $60 for members, $85 for nonmembers.

Registration is through the two museums.

“Radical Descent” — Digitally

Linda Coleman’s memoir, “Radical Descent: The Cultivation of an American Revolutionary,” published by the Pushcart Press of Springs in the fall, is now out as an e-book for Kindle, Google Play, and similar formats.

It chronicles the political travails, emotional confusion, and wrenching aftermath of her actions as a radical leftist from a privileged background in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Ms. Coleman, who lives in Springs, is a longtime nurse practitioner and an ordained Zen monk. She led writing workshops for women in Suffolk County jails for 10 years. An interview with her can be seen on the “One-to-One” show on cuny.tv or YouTube.

In the “Neuron Mirror”

Sales of the poetry collection “Neuron Mirror” go to the Lustgarten Foundation’s research into a cure for pancreatic cancer. Furthermore, the book, a collaborative effort of Virginia Walker and Michael Walsh, is dedicated to three South Fork poets who died of the disease: Siv Cedering, Antje Katcher, and Robert Long, who was an editor at The Star.

Mr. Walsh and Ms. Walker, who teaches at Dowling and Suffolk Community College and lives on Shelter Island, will read from the book on Saturday at 2 p.m. at the East Hampton Library.

Clare Coss on Du Bois

The publication of Clare Coss’s 2014 play, “Dr. Du Bois and Miss Ovington,” will be hailed with a book party at, appropriately, the Drama Book Shop in Manhattan on Tuesday at 5 p.m. Two of the original production’s principal players, Kathleen Chalfant and Timothy Simonson, will give a dramatic reading, and there will follow a reception, book signing, and question-and-answer session with Ms. Coss, who lives in Springs.

The play follows a clash between W.E.B. Du Bois and Mary White Ovington, two founders of the N.A.A.C.P., in 1915, at a critical juncture for the future of civil rights in this country.

Return of the Poetry Affair

National Poetry Month is upon us, and to mark it Rosalind Brenner, a Springs artist, has again organized a Poetry Affair at LTV Studios in Wainscott. This year’s brings 14 Long Island poets to read from their work starting at 7 p.m. on Friday, April 10.

Among those reading with Ms. Brenner, a poet in her own right, will be Carole Stone, The Star’s book reviewer this week, whose collections include “American Rhapsody,” from CavanKerry Press. This year’s Walt Whitman Birthplace Association Long Island Poet of the Year, Graham Everett, who is the founding editor of Street Press, and last year’s, Annabelle Moseley, a Pushcart Prize nominee several times over, will read, as will George Wallace, a past Suffolk County poet laureate.

“They will be short readings of approximately five minutes each,” Ms. Brenner said. “We want to give you a quick taste and leave you asking for more.” A reception will start at 6:30, and books will be available for purchase. Admission is $5 or a donation of food to the East Hampton Food Pantry.

Workshops in Verse and Prose

Beginning on April 16 and running for two consecutive Thursdays at 7 p.m., Marc Perrin will lead a poetry workshop at the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor. Mr. Perrin, an instructor in creative writing and literature at Stony Brook University and the author of two collections of poems, will explore “poetic genres, markets, inspiration, and process,” a release said. The course is limited to 12 participants and costs $20. Registration in advance is required.

At the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton, it’s time for another round of memoir writing classes with Eileen Obser, East Hamptoner and veteran writing coach. Starting on Tuesday at 5:30 p.m., “personal and autobiographical writing” will be examined, involving readings, exercises, and group discussions. “Research techniques . . . and marketing information are included.” All levels of ability will be welcomed. The cost is $65 for five two-hour sessions.

“The Innovators”

Walter Isaacson

Simon & Schuster, $35

The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms.     — Muriel Rukeyser

“The Innovators” offers you a splendid journey through time and space via personalities, facts, and ideas. It is rich in stories, both personal and historical, easy-to-understand technical details at the intersection of the humanities and technology, and the importance of “human-machine symbiosis.” I recommend it highly to anyone who wants to know how we got to here and now, and how “it” came from “bit” — the striking idea that information sits at the heart of all reality, just as it sits at the core of a computer.

Walter Isaacson has set out to report on how innovations actually happen in the real world. How disruptive ideas became realities. Who made the dozens of breakthroughs that gave us the digital culture we inhabit (and many enjoy) today. How collaborations among peers and between generations emerge in creating the digital revolution. (But not universally — think solo innovators like Newton, Einstein, Godel.) What the ingredients of “creative leaps” are. And how cultural and social forces made possible the “climate of innovation” that led to our digital era. In this ambitious undertaking, he is (happily) very successful.

According to the celebrated physicist John Archibald Wheeler, “ ‘It from bit’ symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has . . . an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of ‘yes-no’ questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.”

On the other hand, the poet Muriel Rukeyser believed that stories trump digits. Can they both be right?

This book illuminates the human stories that drive the technology and science developed by many well-known characters — Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Alan Turing, IBM’s Deep Blue chess-playing computer — and dozens of unsung heroes, such as Ada, Countess of Lovelace (1815-52), a brilliant eccentric. And thereby hangs a beguiling tale, one of many Mr. Isaacson tells.

Ada was the only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron, the famous (and infamous) Romantic poet who was “seductive, troubled, brooding, and sexually adventurous.” Ada inherited her “poetic and insubordinate temperament” from her father and her interest in mathematics from her mother. (Think Rukeyser and Wheeler as a team.) This created a combination Ada called her love for “poetical science,” and she felt comfortable at the crossroads of the hard sciences and the soft humanities.

Mr. Isaacson comes back to this dual constellation of interests over and over again as he discusses the other heroes of the digital revolution, yet she is the most notable woman to play a starring role in this story of digital innovations.

Ada had inherited many of Lord Byron’s eccentricities and passions. While a teenager, she had a liaison with her tutor. She studied mathematics, was enamored of technology, and was impressed with an automatic weaving loom that used punched cards to instruct a single piece of equipment to create varied fabric patterns. These were precursors of IBM’s punch cards that told early mainframe computers what to do.

Ada befriended many talented think­ers of her era, such as Charles Babbage, inventor of the Difference Engine, a mechanical device that calculated trigonometric values and logarithms by breaking the process into “baby steps” that entailed only addition and subtraction. It could even solve differential equations. Babbage later developed the Analytical Engine, which could be “programmed” (as we would say today) and was a century ahead of its time.

In an essay on imagination, Ada wrote that Babbage had been able to do this using a trick employed by many great innovators: a facility for combining ideas from many different fields of activity. Again and again this quality appears to an extraordinary degree among the larger-than-life personalities whose vivid stories appear in Mr. Isaacson’s book, abetted by their ability to work together in teams focused on inspired collaborations.

To some, Lady Lovelace was a computer pioneer and a feminist icon. But she was ridiculed as delusional, gran­diose, and flighty by others. She appreciated, popularized, and even financed Babbage’s pioneering work. She figured out how to “program” a Difference Engine. Sadly, after becoming addicted to gambling and opiates, she died penniless at age 36 — the same age Lord Byron died — and was buried next to her father.

Alan Turing’s story (and that of his universal computer) has been well told in biographies and the cinema, but other major characters who appear are Vannevar Bush (who first described a personal computer), John von Neumann (who built an enormous modern computer at the Institute for Advanced Study), Stewart Brand (who developed the Whole Earth Catalog), Linus Torvalds (creator of Linux open-source software), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (creators of Google), and many others.

Before Google came along, computer geeks avoided anything in their field that might have been considered “touchy-feely” — their pejorative term for human responses to hardware and software, the humanities. Mr. Page and Mr. Brin changed all of that in 1998. Vannevar Bush had said in 1945 that knowledge was expanding at such an astonishing rate that it was virtually impossible to find the proverbial needle in a haystack. Mr. Page and Mr. Brin, in their paper “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” showed how they could “map” billions of Web pages and rank a website according to how often people visited it or other Web pages cited or referred to it (called backlinks), which was roughly congruent to a billion-member crowd’s subjective idea of a website’s importance.

This vision culminated in such an intimate linkage between computers, networks, and humans that we can now search for — and promptly find information on — virtually any subject, from antiprotons to zebras. Searching Google these days begins to feel spooky, like having an infinite IQ . . . something I’ve always wanted!

“The Innovators” contains a valuable timeline that provides a synoptic overview of the innovators and their contributions to the digital revolution, and a brilliant summary of Mr. Isaacson’s theme that diverse teams made this one hell of a revolution.

Stephen Rosen, a physicist, lives in New York and East Hampton. His latest book is “Youth, Middle-Age, and You-Look-Great! Dying to Come Back as a Memoir.”

Walter Isaacson, former managing editor of Time magazine and the author of “Steve Jobs,” has spent summers on the South Fork for many years.

“Deep Lane”

Mark Doty

W.W. Norton, $25.95

Mark Doty’s “Deep Lane” is a book about country, symbolized by gardens and animals, frequently Mr. Doty’s dog, Ned, who accompanies him on long walks, but also birds, deer, goats, sea lions, a mammoth, a white fish, and ticks that enter his Eden. “Deep Lane” is about city in poems that take place on New York’s streets, in bars, gyms, hospitals, and barbershops.

In each of these environments, the poet’s appetite for life and awareness of loss and recovery are omnipresent, particularly when human beings make entrances: the poet’s ex, his present love, his mother and father, painters like Robert Harms and Jackson Pollock, and poets, among them Alan Dugan and Robinson Jeffers.

Poetry, a leitmotif throughout the book, beautifully captures Mr. Doty’s deep connection to his identity as a poet. He shows us, with a touch of irony, Alan Dugan, the “recalcitrant old boho,” and with precise description, Robinson Jeffers, a poet who “who could not be wholeheartedly pleased / with anything human.” His awareness of the art of poetry extends his humanity, as in the poem “ARS POETICA 14th St. Gym,” in which the title equates the precepts of poetry with “beauty that does not disguise the wound” when a one-armed man lifts himself on a pull-up machine.

Another major human connection, of children with their parents, was painful for Mr. Doty. He reveals this honestly as they speak to him from the underworld in poems that evoke their hurtful relationship with him. In “Apparition,” as he trims forsythia at the kitchen sink, his father says, “Mark is making the house pretty.” We learn his father did not speak to him for the last five years of his life, but he concludes that though he has been addressed in the third person, “He did say my name,” and it wasn’t mockery.

His mother, gone for 30 years, similarly is given the benefit of the doubt when her voice in him says, “You’ve got to forgive me,” and for a moment they are at last “equally in love / with intoxication,” after which she says, “I never meant to harm you.” The understatement in these poems is masterful in conveying irony and hurt.

But pain caused by humans can be mitigated by the beauty of nature, as in “Verge,” a poem about blooming cherry trees on the highway in April, which turns into a love poem when the poet, after a party, walks with his soon-to-become lover to his motorcycle, “perhaps a pair / of — could it be — soon-to-flower trees?” Mr. Doty shows his appetite for beauty and for life most clearly in “Hungry Ghost,” where he learns from his teachers that “my desire was a thirst / for something beyond forms.” He wonders, “When I’m gone, will I stop wanting?” He concludes that wanting “is also a form of immortality.”

The poem that to me most fully and poignantly represents the theme of loss and recovery is “This Is Your Home Now,” an elegy in which he describes the closing of the barbershop on 18th Street where the Peruvian barbers for years have been comforting: “I was happy in any chair, though I liked best / the touch of the oldest, who’d rest his hand / against my neck in the thoughtless confident way.” When the shop closes and he feels at a loss, he finds a sign, WILLIE’S BARBERSHOP, down the street. Willie tells him, “This is your home now,” leading Mr. Doty to the recollection of “the men I have outlived” and for whom he still feels grief.

The barbershop metamorphoses into “the kingdom of the lost” as Mr. Doty adds up his present satisfactions, a man who loves him, their dogs, more years together. For those of us who have lost a sense of belonging, this poem strikes a universal nerve.

In other poems home represents life’s difficulties. An example is “Spent,” when the poet, locked out of his house several times as he tries to bring the hydrangeas he cut inside, has to climb through a window, reminding us, almost comically, of life’s unforeseen hazards. And yet, as he shows in the poem that follows, “Amagansett Cherry,” “the con­torted thrust” of the cherry tree, rather than an unbent branch, is what gives it fervor.

Eight of the poems in “Deep Lane” are titled “Deep Lane,” the site of the poet’s Eden with its “crooked house” that exemplifies his human Garden of Eden. This shingled house symbolizes a oneness with nature. This is where the poet picks radishes, walks through paths in a cemetery, pulls up wild mustard.

The city, on the other hand, is a place of more human experience, as exemplified in “Underworld,” “the boy in outpatient . . . has failed to kill himself,” and in a needle-drug addict in “Crystal.”

“Deep Lane” sometimes seems more emotionally invested in the plant and animal world than in the human, most fully in “The King of Fire Island,” where “a buck in velvet at the garden rim” observing the men in “tea-dance light” makes the men “objects of his regal, / mild regard,” rather than he, theirs. The deer becomes “monarch of holly” and “hobbling prince of shadblow grove,” while “the men swayed and danced.”

When a deer’s head is found floating in the bay, the poem resolves its narrative by the poet asking to be guided out of the story and concludes the deer “must have been weary of that form, / as I grow weary of my head.”

What is so compelling in this long narrative is how the buck ultimately takes over the poem, and the island’s men who “stand with cocktails” recede as mere mortals.

Mr. Doty’s projection of himself as one with the deer epitomizes his constant identification with animals and plants, both an escape and a recognition of the mortality of humans. “Deep Lane” is a book of such moments; a paean to the fertility and the tragedy of human, animal, and vegetable life. It is sensitively and subtly written, and deeply satisfying, as the power of love with a found mate merges with the beauty of the natural world.

Carole Stone’s most recent book is “Hurt, the Shadow: The Josephine Hopper Poems.” A professor emerita of English at Montclair State University, she lives part time in Springs.

Mark Doty of Springs won a National Book Award for “Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems.” He teaches at Rutgers University.

“The Players”

Jill Bialosky

Knopf, $26

Jill Bialosky’s “The Players” captures the essence of Americana in her baseball poems, in her descriptions of the beach, nature, small-town life, motherhood, and parents. Her true subject is the inevitability of loss, which includes children growing up and leaving, the death of a parent.

The introductory poem, “The Lucky Ones,” involves the theme of the much loved son maturing, “ours, the boy of late youth, / of our happiness and our struggles, the boy who made us whole / and broken, was in his room perhaps dreaming / of a girl and sleeping the long, tangled sleep of a teenager.” Nature and its dark underside is introduced through the image of a garter snake, “a comet of danger, serpent of the water” they watch as they sit on the beach.

The son’s maturation is followed up in the long poem “Manhood” that makes up the first section, held together by the masculine American pursuit of baseball. The poem’s point of view, ranging from the players, the mothers, the fathers, girls who were “played,” and the spectators, covers the gamut of the game, a stand-in for emerging male aggression and a rite of passage from boyhood to manhood. The nuances of the game and the boys’ development are shown. Its ultimate reward when “your eye caught hers / and your body exploded into bliss.” Baseball is a symbol for the needs and concerns of all of these groups, all of whom are players even if they are not on the field.

Other American scenes are evoked through landscape, as in “American Comedy,” where “They are tearing up fields where horses graze / for designer mansions,” while the speaker misses “wildflowers, horse dung, and clover.” In these poems the dark side of American life emerges subtly as varied characters who inhabit Ms. Bialosky’s milieu are presented. In “Sonnet for the Misbegotten” there are surfers “in black diving penguin suits,” anorexics “speed-walking the beach,” and a scene at a barbecue. What could be more American? The two ironic titles quietly convey Ms. Bialosky’s critique of the dramatis personae as well as their vulnerability. In “American Pastoral,” for example, “One of us joined a support group / or is leaving the marriage.”

Having wondered many times who owns the flip-flops and shoes left by beachgoers I have to say my favorite poem in this section was “Ode.” I love the way Ms. Bialosky places this seemingly humorous poem in a literary context, tradition being the first hint the poem has a deeper meaning. She goes directly to her omnipresent theme, loss. “Somebody stole my yellow flip-flops.” She speculates, “I guess they needed them more than me,” and tells us, “I bought them / at Kmart for ten ninety-nine.” Her overreaction to this theft — “It makes / me sad. The lack of humanity. The / guts. The betrayal” — is intentionally laughable. Yet underneath the comic surface lies the outrage at losses, large and small.

And the larger losses appear in poems in the section called “The Players,” having to do with what happens after a loved one dies when there is the packing up of documents and household possessions: birth and death certificates, the divorce decree, scrapbooks with corsages and ballet programs. “The Guardians,” an apt title for the poem, suggests that those who were once guarded by the dead are now their guardians.

I was particularly drawn to “April Mornings,” a takeoff on Robert Hayden’s “Sunday Mornings,” one of my all-time favorite poems. In Ms. Bialosky’s version it is the mother, rather than the father, who gets up. However, instead of a caring parent, we read of “the dull and sad / pennies of her eyes, / body limp as a fevered / child’s” and “the awful creak / of the iron mail chute” opening before “the knife slit open / the envelopes / of debts unpaid.”

There are many enjoyable poems in this book, with descriptions of creatures such as sand crabs, gulls, and sandpipers, as well as the ocean, a solid tree, a bird’s nest.

She deftly merges the world of birds with the way marriage evolves from first tenderness in “Marriage Nests,” which has the two powerful last lines “I hear him get up, the sound of heavy footsteps. / Birds call. A cry deeper than hurt or love.”

The three poems about literature, in a section slyly titled “Interlude,” cite novels that educate us, such as “The House of Mirth” and “A Tale of Two Cities,” and describe a visit to Jane Austen’s haunts in Bath and the influence of “The Portrait of a Lady.” These poems serve as a counterpoint to the family life in the poems that surround them, a commentary on how reading also forms us.

Most poignant and true are poems about a son who has turned into an adolescent, especially “Perspective,” with its lovely lyrical refrain, “For two days it was cold and it rained.” Its conclusion has the mother remembering the family that was: “Look, that was once us / sailing down the small / sand hill to the beach / with you in our arms.”

The speaker’s inner thoughts, while she observes the ocean, the beach, the sea animals, reveal the essence of her feelings about the anguish of mothers who “must watch their children / thrive and suffer,” in short, life’s impermanence. Through close observation of her world, Ms. Bialosky conveys both the ordinariness and the extraordinariness of life.

Jill Bialosky’s books include “History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life,” a memoir, and “Intruder,” a collection of poems. An editor at W.W. Norton, she lives in New York and Bridgehampton.

Carole Stone’s most recent poetry collections are “Hurt, the Shadow” and “American Rhapsody.” She lives part time in Springs.

Lunch With Sheehy

Gail Sheehy’s recent autobiography, “Daring: My Passages,” explores her career in journalism at New York magazine in the go-go ’70s, her hugely popular 1976 book, “Passages,” and her relationship with Clay Felker, the influential editor. She will discuss all this and more as the guest of the League of Women Voters of the Hamptons at a lunch on Friday, April 24, from noon to 3 p.m. The setting is Cowfish, on the Shinnecock Canal in Hampton Bays, where three courses will be served and books will be available at a discounted price.

R.S.V.P.s are due by tomorrow by sending a $60 check — made out to LWV Hamptons — to Gladys Remler, the league’s co-chairwoman of special events, at 180 Melody Court, Eastport 11941. The number to call with questions is 288-9021.

Remembrance at Canio’s

To mark Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 16 and the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps, Sande Boritz Berger will visit Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor to read from her debut novel, “The Sweetness,” on Saturday at 5 p.m. The book, a semifinalist for Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel award, involves two Jewish girls, cousins, one American and one Eastern European, and their differing experiences in wartime.

The author is a graduate of Stony Brook Southampton’s M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature and lives in Bridgehampton.

“The Emotional Lives of Animals & Children”

William Crain

Turning Stone, $15.95

William Crain, a professor of psychology at the City College of New York, has written a controversial book, a clear polemic against mistreatment of animals. “If we believe we have a moral obligation to reduce suffering in the world, we must include animals,” he writes. “To ignore their suffering, and focus only on our own species, is self-serving and prejudicial.”

In his mid-30s, Mr. Crain became a vegetarian. He knew little, then, about the horror of meat animals on factory farms. “The thought just came to me,” he writes, “that I would be a more peaceful person if I didn’t eat animals.”

Mr. Crain’s wife, Ellen, a pediatrician, arrived at a similar position. “She decided, pretty much on the basis of facts alone, that the treatment of animals in modern societies was abysmal.” It seemed self-evident that abysmal treatment included the act of eating them.

Mr. Crain hopes to help his readers develop empathy for animals. To accomplish that, he taps into our own childhood experiences with nature, using observations he has made of children and animals at the Safe Haven Farm Sanctuary, which he and his wife founded in Poughquag, N.Y. He admits these are informal observations, not research, yet he makes some convincing arguments that animals and children share many characteristics.

He lists some. 1) Fear. He describes the sanctuary’s first goats rescued from a live meat market. It took them months to develop trust for their new caregivers. 2) Play. He observed a baby goat jumping off a rock, over and over, with variations similar to the behavior of a 3-year-old child who practices jumping off a step. 3) Freedom. The professor observes that free-range animals seem much happier than caged ones, just as children with outdoor space to play in feel happier. 4) The ability to care about others. If treated respectfully by humans, many different animals care deeply for the human species. They can be both loving and protective.

There are times the author strains to make his connections between animals and humans. He hypothesizes that animals share spirituality with humans, but it does not seem self-evident that a goat standing on a hillside gazing into the horizon is in “a state of deep peace” similar to a human meditative state “on a sacred mountain.”

Do the comparisons between animals and children demean humanity? Many great heroes have maintained their own self-worth by differentiating themselves. “I am not an animal,” Spartacus proclaimed. Well, that’s currently open for more discussion, Mr. Spartacus.

The central point seems to be: Children and animals share many qualities. We don’t eat children, and we shouldn’t eat animals either. The author does not take this intellectual leap in writing, but leads his readers to the chasm and gives us the opportunity to jump across it ourselves if we have the tendency to do so. There are times the book’s message is stated so quietly it seems the professor wanted to avoid any controversy the book might engender.

Darwin proposed that all species are related, that we all belong to one extended family. Mr. Crain points out that current animal behavior research finds increasing evidence that other species share human cognitive and emotional capacities. Of all the points the author asks his readers to consider, this may be the most controversial, especially for the world’s religions. If it is possible that all species are related, then religions must pose the question, “Do all creatures possess a soul?” (Or, do any?)

This could be a timely issue for religions to debate, although lessons from history would indicate a discussion would be insufficient to distract some religious people from killing infidels.

The same week I was asked by an editor at The Star to review “The Emotional Lives of Animals & Children,” a headline appeared in The New York Times. “U.S. Research Lab Lets Livestock Suffer in Quest for Profit. Animal Welfare at Risk in Experiments for Meat Industry.”

If there was ever a piece of writing that could help Mr. Crain and others in the animal rights movement reduce animal suffering, this Times article about a taxpayer-financed federal institution called the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center is that piece.

The Meat Animal Research Center is made up of a complex of laboratories and pastures that sprawls over 55 square miles in Nebraska. The center has one overarching mission: help farmers and ranchers produce more beef, pork, and lamb and turn a higher profit. One of the center’s proponents claims, “It’s not a perfect world. We are trying to feed a population that is expanding very rapidly, to nine billion by 2050, and if we are going to feed that population, there are some trade-offs.”

Those trade-offs at the Meat Animal Research Center include baby piglets being crushed by mothers who have been bred to produce larger litters, and dead lambs piled up as mothers abandon one or more of their multiple-birth offspring and the center’s staff allows the lambs to starve in order to see which mothers will respond to the hungry bleating of their rejected babies. This is a disturbing fact for anyone interested in animal rights. Our tax dollars finance research that causes deliberate, extreme animal suffering.

The animal suffering documented in the Times article is more than an isolated incident growing out of a specific need to meet the demands of world hunger. It is the manifestation of the country’s prevailing attitude that the suffering of animals does not matter as long as it is for the benefit of humans. That this is the accepted attitude and practice is evidenced by how animals are treated within the crowded factory farms that raise commercial beef, pork, and poultry for retail outlets.

Mr. Crain, although admitting knowledge about what goes on within the factory farms, has chosen not to inform his readers, assuming, I imagine, that perhaps enough has already been said. On the other hand, it seems anyone who is concerned about animal suffering should not ignore a chance to speak truthfully about the accepted standard of practice on corporate factory farms, a major cause of animal suffering.

It is to their credit that Mr. Crain and his wife fight the pervasive national attitude about animal suffering through the Safe Haven Farm Sanctuary, with its 70 animals they have rescued, some from live meat markets in the Bronx and some that have managed to escape from a neighboring game farm where birds are raised off-premises, shipped to the farm, and released from cages moments before a hunting party arrives to shoot birds that have barely learned to fly. But the live meat markets and the hunting farms are small potatoes in the struggle for animal rights. The cause Mr. Crain promotes is a badly imbalanced fight against a monolithic corporate factory meat industry, supported by the U.S. government, where there are tens of millions of animals in despicable conditions. And these conditions are pretty much ignored by the general populace of the country.

Perhaps Mr. Crain is far ahead of his time. In this country we hardly seem ready to consider the issues of animal suffering and animal rights. In 1949, we participated in and signed the updated Geneva Convention that forbids the torture of human beings. But we now know our country, after an intricate process of rationalization to justify it by the very highest levels of our government, has continued torturing humans. The recently released Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture was reviewed in an issue of The New York Review of Books. The last sentence of the review reads, “We translated our ignorance into their pain. That is the story the Senate report tells.”

One captive was thought to be a high-ranking Al Qaeda member. He was subjected to 180 consecutive hours of sleep deprivation and waterboarded 83 times. It turned out he was not a member of Al Qaeda, but was their travel agent. He had given interrogators all the information he had long before they began using the “enhanced interrogation techniques” adopted by our country.

It is doubtful that the same country is ready to think seriously about reducing the suffering of other species. I’m afraid we will need many more books about animal rights, and many more animal sanctuaries, and many more vegetarians who speak out, and many more small organic farms, and many more elections before animal suffering enters the national consciousness.

Gary Reiswig is the author of “Land Rush,” a new short-story collection, and “The Thousand Mile Stare: One Family’s Journey Through the Struggle and Science of Alzheimer’s.” He lives in Springs.

William Crain, the president of the East Hampton Group for Wildlife, lives part time in Montauk.

A Poetry Tete-a-Tete

“Baseball is portrayed in these radiant new poems by Jill Bialosky as a ‘fierce and feral’ rite of passage in which we’re all held hostage to the always surprising vicissitudes of time and change.” So says Philip Schultz, the East Hampton poet and Pulitzer Prize winner, in a blurb on the back of Ms. Bialosky’s new collection, “The Players,” thus hinting at a subject the two might take up in their conversation Saturday at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.

Ms. Bialosky’s previous book of poems was “Intruder.” An editor at W.W. Norton and part-time Bridgehamptoner, she is also the author of the memoir “History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life” and novels including “The Life Room.”

Montauk Thriller

Looking for some fishing action? Or rather action in a fishin’ kind of place? Set at Montauk Point and out in the depths of the Atlantic, “In Secret Waters,” a new novel by Richard Weissmann, involves, for one thing, terrorists (fresh off the ISIS hacking of the Montauk Manor website, no less), but more to the point “a vast fortune in stolen diamonds, lost since World War II,” and said to be somewhere in the wreckage of the sunken Andrea Doria.

Charged with finding it for the purposes of paying restitution to victims of the Holocaust is one Erik Hazen, a charter boat captain and ex-Navy Seal described as “born and raised on the not-so-chic side of the Hamptons” and belonging to a family that for eight generations has made a living “haul seining, trap netting, clamming, and scalloping.”

“Some of the characters were inspired by men I met during the 1980s and 1990s when I was writing feature articles about the local commercial fishing industry for The New York Times,” Mr. Weissmann said. He lives in Bellport. The book is available on Amazon.com.

Rebecca Alexander is a force to be reckoned with. At the writing of this memoir, she is in her early 20s. She is accomplished, vivacious, active, energetic, and derives a great deal of satisfaction from helping others. She has taught in a prison; she has volunteered for Project Open Hand, a nonprofit organization that delivers meals to people living with H.I.V./AIDS.

Ms. Alexander earned a master’s degree in public health and a second master’s in social work, both from Columbia University. In addition, she has trained at a psychoanalytic institute, received a certification in psychodynamic psychotherapy, and works full time as a psychotherapist. She also works as a spin instructor.

She is an extreme athlete who has run with the Olympic torch as a Community Hero and successfully completed a five-mile lake swim and a 600-mile AIDS/LifeCycle bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

As if all of this were not enough (and there is more, much more, far too much to mention in a book review limited to a mere 1,200 words), she has accomplished all of this while becoming steadily deaf and blind. Because of a rare genetic disorder called Usher syndrome, Ms. Alexander is eventually heading toward a condition called deafblindness. Yeah, that’s what Helen Keller had.

At the moment, Usher syndrome is irreversible, untreatable, and there is little, medically, to be done about it, other than await the inevitable decline. This, however, does not stop Rebecca for one instant. She is doing anything but going gentle into that good night.

Her book, “Not Fade Away: A Memoir of Senses Lost and Found,” is nicely and movingly written (co-written with Sascha Alper) and, surprisingly, possesses tremendous cheerful humor. Despite her downward spiral of lost senses, the memoir contains not a shred of self-pity. Not an iota. None. Really.

Rebecca keeps a positive attitude without sounding in the slightest Pollyanna, saccharine, or unrealistic about what she is experiencing. She allows herself deep sadness at her losses — and at her impending even greater and more final losses — but throughout this impressive memoir she manages to maintain a tone that demonstrates her bravery, defiance, determination, and, yes, even humor.

Ms. Alexander had a pretty normal childhood, though she admits to being unusually klutzy, which may have been an early herald of her syndrome, as her hearing may have already been slightly compromised, and one of the hallmarks of Usher syndrome is vestibular dysfunction, which may cause imbalance and spatial disorientation.

Then, at 18, already feeling the beginnings of the decline of her senses, she comes home drunk one night and on her way to the bathroom accidentally tumbles out the window of her second-floor bedroom. She falls “backward more than twenty-seven feet onto the flagstone patio behind our house, landing, miraculously, on my left side, breaking almost everything but my head and neck.”

The fall leaves her needing several surgeries. “Ultimately, the only thing left without a cast would be my right leg and foot.” There follows a two-page description of the difficulties involved in being able to pick up a pen with her foot. Already going blind and deaf, and now this. Can we say “the trials of Job”?

Ms. Alexander describes where she acquired her positive attitude. “When we spend time together now, both with our hearing aids, me with my cane and her with her walking stick, Grandma Faye is a living example of what she taught me then. Nobody wants to hear you complain, so keep the bitching and moaning to yourself. Embrace the world with a positive outlook, and you will get so much more out of life.”

She writes:

. . . I wouldn’t wish what I have on anyone, and would never have chosen it, but it has given me an extraordinary ability to understand profoundly what living in the moment really means and to always try my best to do just that.

I don’t mean living each day as if it were my last. I have been there, done that. I’ve gone bungee jumping and skydiving. There have been times when there were too many guys, too much drinking, a never-ending whirlwind of “let’s grab life by the balls” . . . but never pausing to catch my breath is not the way to appreciate a world that is slowly — and sometimes not so slowly — going silent and dark for me. And while mine is an accelerated decline, one that will leave me with decades of blindness and deafness — many more than I’ll spend with hearing and vision, if I live a long and healthy life — the end is inevitable for all of us. In some ways, I feel lucky to never be able to forget that.

I found myself quite moved when she writes, “Sometimes I can’t help but wonder how it will be at the very end, though I try not to. Will I have a last clear image that I see, before my pinprick of a hole [her vision is blackening inward, contracting toward the center, which is still mostly clear] finally closes up forever? Or will things just blur more and more, an impressionist painting that gets increasingly less recognizable until finally it’s just a swirl of fading color, and then nothing? Will the last authentic sound I hear be a laugh, a cry, a subway rumbling into the station?”

In order to maintain a semblance of normal life, Ms. Alexander has had to learn sign language and Braille. She must use a cane and has three different hearing aids for different environments and a cochlear implant in one ear. Mind you, this does not stop her from being quite active in the New York City dating and singles scene. Talk about valor! Dating is tough enough when you can see and hear most of what is going on.

But as her vision and hearing continue to fade away, she will be unable to see others sign and will at some point be reduced to tactile signing, “the language used by people who are both deaf and blind.” Her description of learning this, and doing it with her best friend, Caroline Kaczor, a 2006 graduate of East Hampton High School, is at once lovely, poignant, intimate, and deeply frightening to me, who is merely facing the normal declines of age.

We’ll lie facing one another, and she’ll take both of my hands and place hers inside them. As her hand begins to take form, I’ll start to sound out the word she is spelling in my hand, listening intently with my palm and fingers, closing my eyes to help me focus. While I hold and follow the movement of her hands, Caroline will bring her pointer finger to her chest, and I’ll speak aloud what she is signing. . . .

At first we were terrible at it, and I would start to giggle at every mistake . . . and though I couldn’t hear Caroline, I knew she was giggling, too, because I could feel the quick little bounces her upper body would make against the bed. . . . Caroline could hear the sound of my laughter loud and clear, but she knew that I couldn’t hear hers, so she would take my hand and place it against her neck right at her vocal cords, so that I could feel her laughing, which made me laugh even harder.

. . . Watching people tactile-sign is like watching two people embrace, an elaborate dance of hands and fingers.

This book, a brave and affecting and funny account of a horrible and frightening illness, made me laugh and cry and feel truly and deeply moved. It does not seem like the kind of book one would enjoy, but I did enjoy it. I also think that I am going to buy several copies and give them to people I know who are facing some tough illness or period in their lives. “Not Fade Away” is a blueprint for handling the ugliest kind of shit life can throw at you, with grace and guts and courage. Bravo, Ms. Alexander!

Michael Z. Jody is a psychoanalyst and couples counselor with a practice in New York City and Amagansett.