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Book Markers: 08.31.14

Local book news
By
Star Staff

Bergen, Clinton, BookHampton

When Candice Bergen’s memoir “Knock Wood” came out in 1984, being chased by a young Jack Nicholson in “Carnal Knowledge” may still have been relatively fresh in the actress’s mind, but her days starring in the television series “Murphy Brown,” and Dan Quayle’s elevation of the character to cultural touchstone status, were yet to come, so there’s surely ample material for a follow-up.

While she’s at work on it, “Knock Wood” has been reissued in paperback, and she’ll read from it at BookHampton in East Hampton on Saturday at 5 p.m.

And there’s still time to get your “Elizabeth Warren for President” placards ready for Hillary Clinton’s appearance at the bookshop on Aug. 16 at 5 p.m.

The New Review

The summer issue of The Southampton Review, just out, clocks in at 237 pages, offering memoir (an excerpt from Roger Rosenblatt’s forthcoming “The Book of Love”), fiction (“Provincetown” by Alice Mattison), cartoons by the likes of George Booth of The New Yorker, and art portfolios featuring the work of April Gornik and James McMullan, from his recent book about growing up abroad during World War II, “Leaving China.”

And from the Department of Common Experience, it must be pointed out that in the back of the book awaits a Billy Collins poem, “Traffic,” in which the speaker is very much stuck in it, watching a mother and stroller overtake him, followed by an elderly couple, before, “Why even Buddha has risen / from his habitual sitting / and is now walking serenely past my car . . .”

“In Praise of Intransigence”

The tension between stubbornness and integrity is explored in “In Praise of Intransigence: The Perils of Flexibility” by Richard Weisberg, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. From the Enlightenment to Vichy France, Mr. Weisberg studies how compromise has tended to turn into complicity. He will discuss the book, new from Oxford University Press, tomorrow at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.

On Saturday at 5 p.m., Gwen Edelman, the author of “War Story,” will read from her new novel, “The Train to Warsaw,” in which a writer and his companion, who together escaped the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, return there 40 years later.

 

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