The breeze danced across the sails of many boats tied in the Menemsha Sound but it seemed barely to sway the majestic 70-foot frame of the Relemar. Entering the yacht’s living room to shake hands with a tall, poised and enthusiastic brunette, it’s hard to shake the feeling that you have taken a step into Kitty Pilgrim’s debut novel, The Explorer’s Code.

In the early 1970s, when the tide of summer residents would go out in September, there were always young people who didn’t want to leave the Vineyard — and they didn’t have to, because there was no particular place they planned to go. Land was still relatively affordable, or their families had land, and they built themselves homes back in the woods, had kids, a few animals and a garden, and patched together a living with the usual Vineyard hodgepodge of work or self-employment.

The Emperor of All Maladies is a billed as a biography of cancer and author Siddhartha Mukherjee treats his subject with all the reverence of a living subject.

“Cancer cells grow faster, adapt better,” he writes. “They are better versions of ourselves.”

The number 56, representing baseball Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak in 1941, is the most resonant numeral in sports. Nothing approaches it — not in baseball, basketball, football, hockey, darts or kick the can. To deliver hits every day, amid constant inspection and increasing pressure, leaves athletes in all sports slack-jawed.

Young poets have until Monday at 5 p.m. to enter their poems in the Elisa Brickner Poetry Contest, sponsored by The Elisa Brickner Fund of the Chilmark Free Public Library. The contest was created to foster the love of poetry, and provides cash prizes of $200 and $100. To be eligible, poets must be entering grades 6 - 12 in the fall. Winners will be asked to read their poems on Monday, August 15, at 5:30 p.m.

This year the Polly Hill Arboretum’s annual David H. Smith Memorial lecture features Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens plant curator Bill Cullina, who will discuss the environment via a long-term geological view. His talk is called The Web of Life: Taking the Long View.