A man and a woman meet and sparks fly, but not necessarily sparks beneficial to the pair’s mental health; you might almost say the incendiary materials explode in a region of dry brush during a California August. We’ve all experienced volatile relationships, or have known people who’ve weathered them. When it’s someone else, we almost need to place our hands over our eyes.

When authors die, some of their work lives after them. In or out of print, it’s bound and sitting on shelves. But another chunk of inventory survives the author, often to the chagrin of his or her heirs: unpublished or unfinished manuscripts. What to do with this material?

Writer, director and theatre maestro Jon Lipsky, of West Tisbury, was confronted with just such a dilemma when his father, author Eleazar Lipsky (1911-1993), left behind a stack of research books and a synopsis for a riveting historical saga.

For anyone who has ever wondered how Wall Street hedge fund managers sleep at night and look themselves in the mirror in the morning, having spent the preceding day bilking clients, Men of Gain by Hunter McClelland (Strategic Book Publishing, $12.95) will give you a good idea of how this feels from the inside out.

In the past few decades, the only way to spiff up an antique captain’s house was to sell it to a millionaire and have the buyer’s workmen attack it with pick-axes and bulldozers. But something very different and refreshing is happening to the 1840 Captain Thomas Mellen house on Main street, Edgartown, designed by master builder Ariel Norton, and owned by the Keniston family for the past 80 years.

“Gentlemen, I am tickled pink to be instructing you colored fliers,” announces white Captain O’Hurley (Joe Forbrich) to his black World War II aviation cadets, in a voice dripping more sarcasm than the crankcase of a P-40 Warhawk extrudes oil. In truth, at the time that the first black airmen were trained at Tuskegee Army Airfield in 1941, many believed the cadets lacked the intelligence and skill to fly a single-engine or multi-engine plane.

They were wrong.