DISCOVERIES

The Confidence-Man

His Masquerade

Herman Melville

Dalkey Archive: 356 pp., $13.95 paper

HERMAN MELVILLE’S “The Confidence-Man” was first published in 1857, six years after “Moby-Dick.” It was Melville’s last major novel and was not well received, although British critics appreciated the satire on mid-19th century American life. Unlike his earlier tales of adventure, much of the author’s later work had the feel of internal dialogue.

“The Confidence-Man” is a head-spinning work, full of puns and wordplay, references to and parodies of literary works great and small. It begins onboard the Fidèle, a Mississippi steamboat. The book is a literary circus, replete with Bible thumpers and snake-oil salesmen. In the center ring is the shape-shifting confidence man. He is a “Mississippi operator,” one character complains. “What the Indians call a Great Medicine

He operates, he purges, he drains off the repletions.” In a beautiful preface to this edition, Daniel Handler writes: “One gains a confidence as one’s expectations and interpretations are dismantled and refracted through the course of the book -- not a confidence in oneself, but a confidence in literature

One is reminded of why we read -- and that it is precisely to get lost.”

The House the Rockefellers Built

A Tale of Money, Taste, and Power in Twentieth-Century America

Robert F. Dalzell Jr. and Lee Baldwin Dalzell

Henry Holt: 334 pp., $30

THIS is the story of a house and the people who lived in it for three generations. The cast of characters includes gentleman architects, robber barons and prodigal sons. Kykuit was built for John D. Rockefeller Sr. and his wife, Laura Spelman Rockefeller, on 3,500 acres overlooking the Hudson River, and completed in 1913. Thanks in part to Senior’s frugality and dislike of ostentation, the house was not one of those Gilded Age mansions. “There is nothing vulgar here,” noted New York Times architectural critic Paul Goldberger.

“If taste is the pursuit of excellence,” write Robert and Lee Dalzell, “excellence at Kykuit invariably came down to a matter of moral judgment. It was not enough for things to be useful, or fashionable, or even beautiful; they also had to be good.” The house was designed by Delano & Aldrich, the gardens by William Welles Bosworth. Much of the decorating was done by John Jr.’s wife, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (founder of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City).

The Dalzells also collaborated on “George Washington’s Mount Vernon.” They do an astonishing job of placing Kykuit in historical context while weaving the larger-than-life Rockefeller personalities into its very walls and hallways. By 1992, when the house was turned over to the National Trust for Historic Preservation to be opened to the public, no one in the family could afford to live there.

The Unnatural History of the Sea

Callum Roberts

Island Press: 422 pp., $28

HERE is a history, from the 11th century to the present, of fishing and our effect on the oceans. The steady depletion, what Callum Roberts calls “an ecological meltdown,” is not a modern phenomenon; we have been in denial about changes in the oceans for centuries. Roberts uses archeological and historical records to show the drastic reduction in diversity of marine life. But this is not a requiem for the sea. The author believes in the necessary (if not sufficient) role of marine reserves, which currently protect only three-fifths of 1% of the world’s oceans. He believes we can reverse current trends: “Children still find wonders in rock pools; anglers still catch fish from breakwaters.” But you cannot, he writes, “have exploitation without protection.”