In the Hamptons: A Summer Read for the Soul (Video)

As your sandy summer read dwindles down to its final pages and August's shorter days have you dreading a month of Mondays, Dan Rattiner's latest book In the Hamptons arrives offering life's saltiest stories told with more heart than a Oprah book club pick.

For nearly fifty years, in his publication Dan's Papers, Dan Rattiner has been chronicling the stories and marking the lives of the characters that have made Long Island's tony East End their stage. Rattiner's well-respected publication is arguably America's first free paper, but definitely the barometer, judge and jury or what is real or seasonally silly under the magical light of America's Riviera.

Now is his new book, In the Hamptons, Rattiner presents a collection of funny, enlightening stories that speak to the universality of love, life and the clash of temperaments and temptations when three hundred year old potato fields can sell for tens of millions of dollars. Rattiner is a storyteller like no other offering us insight into our own humanity through the individualists he has met and the fantastically full life he has lived.

In one chapter of this collection of thirty-plus short stories, he tells of his brief unrequited love living in an infamous old house above the sea. Dan struggles through a raging storm to rendezvous with his hormonal satisfaction; it's a story not unlike the story he tells of Frank Mundus who battles against the largest shark ever to be caught on a rod and reel. In both cases something winds up flopping on the beach. It's a page-turning, wonderful, reminiscent
read.

In the Hamptons is at your favorite bookstore or available here.