“A barbershop is a gathering place,” said Craig Marberry, who has crossed America from Michigan to Florida and Texas to New York to capture day-to-day conversations at black barbershops. He recounts them in “Cuttin’ Up: Wit and Wisdom From Black Barber Shops” (Doubleday). The book gathers banter and advice that is shared amid the cutting. As one barber in the book puts it, “My wife has a master’s in psychology and she’s working on her Ph.D. But I do more counseling than she does.”

Standing in front of an exhibit of 181 watercolors by British-born artist Chris Ofili at the Studio Museum in Harlem on Tuesday, Mr. Marberry said barbershops have served as community centers and places where older men “school” younger generations.

A can of “King Talc” powder had sat in the windowsill earlier, as Brooklyn barber Reginald Dumornay cut editor Clarence Haynes’s hair in the museum’s front window just prior to the book program. Later, the book’s editor, Janet Hill, sat in the front row, as the museum’s director of education and public programs, Sandra Jackson, praised Mr. Marberry’s books as primary resource materials for educators.

In an introductory author’s note, Mr. Marberry recalls his boyhood barbershop: “The trumpet of Dizzy Gillespie or the drums of Art Blakey or the voice of Sarah Vaughan poured in buckets from a radio perpetually tuned to WBEE-AM. On hot days, a rotating fan, whose blades looked large enough to propel an airplane, crooned in competition with the radio, swirling with great gusts the talcum powder and menthol-cigarette smoke that dusted the air, the smoke puffed by old men who roared at jokes I didn’t understand.”

Barbershops are places of serendipitous encounters where one even asks the local judge about parking tickets. The book cuts a swath through society, as the barbershop is a place where young and old interact:

Maliek Ray (customer, age 7): “Ouch! That hurts. Are you almost done?”

Randy McKendall (barber, age 32): “I just started.”

The book addresses such issues as race and prejudice. One barbershop owner’s cousin was Emmett Till, the 14-year-old murdered in 1955. Mr. Marberry quoted another who worked in rural North Carolina prior to the Civil Rights movement, where barbers’ permits were issued either as “CC” (colored cutting colored people’s hair) or “CW” (colored cutting white people’s hair).

Present on Tuesday was director Charles Randolph-Wright, who is adapting the book into a play which will open during November on the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. Actors Marva Hicks, Marc Damon Johnson, and Carl Cofield gave a staged reading of selections from the play. The actors portrayed lively barbershop banter. One humorous exchange had a preacher tell someone, “You shouldn’t be drinking.” The other replies, “I ain’t going to drink no more,” but adds, “or no less.”

In the audience was photographer Chester Higgins Jr., who photographed the cover. Also in the audience were some who appeared in Mr. Marberry’s earlier book “Spirit of Harlem: A Portrait of America’s Most Exciting Neighborhood” (Doubleday). One was David House, whose family operated a barbershop at 118th Street and Seventh Avenue beginning in 1946. Over the years customers have included Charlie Parker, Jack Johnson, and Malcolm X. Another present from the book “Spirit of Harlem” was Clara Villarosa, a founder of Hue-Man Bookstore. She said she is on a mission to start a black theater with its own building in Harlem.

Mr. Marberry also examined social history in his previous book, “Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats.” He said: “I hope to do a whole canon of what it means to be a black American.”

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LEARNING FROM LYNCH

The William Butler Yeats Society of New York hosted Thomas Lynch, an undertaker from Milford, Mich., who has written the “Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans” (W.W. Norton). Working with the dead has given Mr. Lynch insight into nuances of life.

In 1970, at age 21, Mr. Lynch traveled to Moveen, a small Irish village on the West Clare peninsula overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. There he met cousins twice-removed Tommy and Nora Lynch, living in a cottage that his great great grandparents had built. He has been traveling back and forth between Michigan and West Clare for the past 35 years.

He was the first of his family to return since his great-grandfather, also named Thomas, left the village in 1890. His cousin said, “So, Tom that went and Tom that would come back. You are welcome to this part of the country.” When she died in 1992, his cousin left him the cottage and its fields.

The book bridges two continents with a series of meditations on topics such as Irish-Americans, Catholicism, family, everyday life, and shared humanity. Mr. Lynch’s wit infuses the book and was in abundance Tuesday evening. One of seven children, he spoke of the large Irish Catholic families he knows. He told the story of a Mrs. Callahan from Ireland who had 18 children. “You must really love children, Mrs. Callahan,” someone told her. “Actually,” she replied, “I just like Jack Callahan.”

That evening he reflected on Yeats’s poem about Ireland called “Great Hatred, Little Room,” and the necessity after the attacks of September 11, 2001, to rethink the meaning of hatred. He was stuck at O’Hare Airport in Chicago on September 11, having come from Reno, Nev., where he had given a speech to an association of funeral directors called “The International Order of the Golden Rule” (its motto is “Service measured not by gold but by the Golden Rule”). He later visited ground zero and saw the alphabetical list of names of victims. He was shocked to see 10 Lynches listed. “The only name with more murdered there was Smith.” Of the Lynches, two bore the same names as his sons, Sean and Michael.

A picture of Yeats stood over Tom’s shoulder as he spoke. Asked how he became a writer, Mr. Lynch said, in fact, “by reading Yeats.” Reading a book, he said, “makes the library come alive” and most writers “are just readers who have gone karaoke.”

Mr. Lynch recalled reading poetry at a school where a youngster asked him a surprising question: “Where did you get your poetic license?” Mr. Lynch had the poise to answer, “I was born with it – as you were.” Born with it he was, and the audience enjoyed an evening of great warmth, like Yeats’s poem, in a little room.