If you’ve ever watched Larry David’s hilarious HBO sitcom, Curb Your Enthusiasm, you’ll know the last person you’d want giving you a ride on Island roads is Mr. David himself. The whole gist of each of his episodes is, “I work hard at being unlikable.” Nonetheless, when Paul Samuel Dolman spent a recent summer rambling around our shores, a nondescript car slowed down, an older, bald guy with sunglasses peered out and asked if he needed a lift.

BACKING INTO FORWARD. By Jules Feiffer. Nan. A. Talese / Doubleday, 2010. 464 pages, photographs. $30 hardcover.

Jules Feiffer is one of our icons in the hall of fame that includes Mike Wallace, Beverly Sills, Bill Styron and Walter Cronkite. Island icons are colossi in the big wide world, and brand-makers of the Vineyard as a place that harbors the rich and famous and give-backers to the community. The billionaires who build bulgy houses come and go.

Gallerist

Leo Castelli

Uncovered

Tom Dunlop will speak about his new book Schooner: Building a Wooden Boat on Martha’s Vineyard at the Chilmark Public Library on Wednesday, Sept. 8 at 5:30 p.m.

Cruising World, in its June 2010 issue wrote: “It was the most festive launch in more than a generation: the christening of Rebecca of Vineyard Haven, a 60-foot, 76,000-pound schooner designed and built, plank on frame, at the Gannon & Benjamin Marine Railway, one of the leading traditional boatbuilding yards on the U.S. continent.

On Wednesday, Sept. 1, Nanucket’s award-winning author Connor Gifford will be on the Vineyard to speak before the 300 teachers of the Martha’s Vineyard school system at the invitation of assistant superintendent Laurie Halt.

Mr. Gifford also will be at Edgartown Books on Wednesday from 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. to sign his hit book, America According to Connor Gifford, with co-author Victora Harris.

Irresistible: Lisa Grunwald

Reads from Her New Novel

Poet Judith Tannenbaum, the author of By Heart: Poetry, Prison and Two Lives, is presenting her work at Featherstone on Thursday, August 19 at 6:30 p.m.

Race, Religion and Reason is the title for the forum on Wednesday, August 18, hosted and organized by seasonal resident and Harvard professor Charles Ogletree at the Performing Arts Center of the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School in Oak Bluffs. The event is free and open to all.

Author Fanny Howe is, by her own account, “sort of obsessed with issues of race.” Her father, Mark deWolfe Howe, was a civil rights activist and Ms. Howe, who now lives in West Tisbury, grew up in the slow-burning racial fire of Boston.

Author Fanny Howe is, by her own account, “sort of obsessed with issues of race.” Her father, Mark deWolfe Howe, was a civil rights activist and Ms. Howe, who now lives in West Tisbury, grew up in the slow-burning racial fire of Boston. These experiences culminated in ’Tis of Thee, a work of drama more poetry than play, penned by Ms. Howe, directed by Robert Scanlon and presented by actors Anthony Gaskins, Jill Macy and Charles Turner on Monday evening at the Vineyard Playhouse as part of its Monday Night Special series.

Literature at Lighthouse

A special evening program called Ships and Sailors, with a tour of the Edgartown Lighthouse, music, and grog and hardtack for the little ones, will take place at the lighthouse on Friday, August 13, from 6 to 8 p.m.