“Dodge City”

Tom Clavin

St. Martin’s, $29.99

For such a small town, Dodge City had an outsized reputation. The cow town sat in southwest Kansas, the last stop before the Great American Desert, the huge swath of mostly unexplored land that stretched to the Rocky Mountains. On the edge of the frontier, it was known as the “wickedest town in the West.” 

Cowboys driving their cattle north from Texas took a pit stop in Dodge City, where the 16 saloons and 47 prostitutes could quickly lighten their wallets and get them into lots of trouble. Gamblers, bandits, and other outlaws were also there to greet them. A transitory spot filled mostly with young men drunk on alcohol and heavily armed, Dodge City was a tinderbox in search of a match. Nearly every night, the town exploded in whiskey-fueled gunfights.

This “den of thieves and cut throats,” as one Kansas newspaper described it at its highpoint — or low point, depending on whom you asked — in the late 1870s, is the subject of Tom Clavin’s new book, “Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West.” Mr. Clavin, a journalist and author of several well-regarded books, is an expert guide to the lawless place, but the book’s real contribution is how Mr. Clavin cuts through the myths and mystique that have accumulated around the town’s two most famous names in order to tell a more accurate history of Earp and Masterson.

It’s a daring proposition, not only because the fantasies and fictions Americans have crafted about the Western frontier are so firmly lodged in our national psyche, but also because stripping Earp and Masterson’s story of its embellishments might yield a tale not worth reading. The two lawmen, after all, had been active participants in the mythmaking of their biographies, so perhaps even they understood that their lives needed some narrative spicing up to become a story that lasted. 

But, as so often is the case, Mr. Clavin shows that the truth is more compelling than fiction. In his author’s note, he writes that his book is “an attempt to spin a yarn as entertaining as tales that have been told before but one that is based on the most reliable research.” On this ground, he largely succeeds.

Before they became partners taming the streets of Dodge City, Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson had met during a buffalo hunt on the prairie. Masterson was quickly impressed by the serious and taciturn Earp, who was five years his senior. He decided to model himself on his new friend, a decision that profited him well in their new life in law enforcement.

As lawmen, they made a striking pair. Wyatt Earp was tall and slender, with piercing blue eyes and a fair complexion; Bat Masterson had darker hair, a stockier build, and stood a few inches shorter. Both men were all muscle. But it was their close friendship and commitment to each other that best characterized their partnership.

Neither man had planned for a life in law enforcement, but they took their responsibility seriously once in the role. Wyatt Earp’s leadership had significant consequences not just for Dodge City, but also for how justice was administered across the emerging Western frontier. Earp recognized that his small team faced difficult odds against the hundreds of armed and rowdy men who prowled Dodge City’s streets.

Because of this he gave his team three rules to help maintain their control and de-escalate the violence that had so easily gotten out of hand under previous lawmen’s watch. First, they were to attempt to reason gently with a man, a tactic that had surprising success in cooling off a hotheaded cowboy before he turned violent. Second, if a law officer had to shoot, he should do it carefully and with precision because so often the first man to fire did not hit his target. (Mr. Clavin’s story is filled with innocent bystanders who were killed by stray bullets shot by careless gunmen brandishing unreliable firearms.) 

Third, if shooting at a man, the officer’s goal should always be to wound him rather than kill. While Earp and Masterson were both sharpshooters known for their fast draws, they actually preferred using the other end of their guns in a technique called “buffaloing,” in which they would knock a man out by striking the handle of a gun on his head.

Such practices brought a measure of peace to Dodge City and earned Earp and Masterson fame and respect across the West. But they also tamp down some of the excitement one might expect in a story about justice in the Wild West, since Mr. Clavin’s truer retelling has a lot less violence than legend had invented. Still, the book’s cast of characters, including big names like Doc Holliday, Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickok, and Fred and Jesse James, but also lesser-known personalities like Prairie Dog Dave and Hurricane Bill, along with Mr. Clavin’s great narrative talents, keep this a page-turning book.

One of its most notable accomplishments comes from elevating Bat Masterson to stand alongside Wyatt Earp in importance, a significant correction to the long narrative tradition in which Masterson has played second fiddle. As the author shows, Masterson’s “life was as adventurous as Wyatt’s . . . but Bat did not have a gunfight in Tombstone to burnish his legend to an iconic glow,” as Earp did. In Mr. Clavin’s telling, Masterson feels as vital to the history of Dodge City as Earp, if not also the more compelling and complicated man.

Carved on Masterson’s gravestone in the Bronx — he had finished his life working as a newspaperman in New York — were the simple words “Loved by Everyone.” That probably wasn’t true for the outlaws who found themselves face to face with Masterson. But it also may have been the truest legend ever to come out of Dodge City. 

Neil J. Young is the author of “We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics.” He lives in East Hampton.

Tom Clavin will take part in the East Hampton Library’s Authors Night on Aug. 12. He lives in Sag Harbor.

The fund-raiser called “the premier literary event of the Hamptons” is bound to be a good time. The 13th annual Authors Night on Saturday, benefiting the East Hampton Library, offers a chance to mingle with favorite writers and illustrators under a tent at 4 Maidstone Lane in the village. The evening will kick off at 5 with a book signing and reception complete with hors d’oeuvres and wine.

More than 100 authors will be present, signing and selling a diverse range of books. History lovers, for example, will find Phil Keith with “Stay the Rising Sun,” Michael Klarman with “The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution,” and Jeffrey Lyons with “What a Time It Was! Leonard Lyons and the Golden Age of New York Nightlife.”

To learn how to whip up a new dish, attendees can visit with John Gilman and his “God’s Love We Deliver Cookbook,” Amy Zerner and Monte Farber and their “Signs and Seasons: An Astrology Cookbook,” or Marissa Hermer, who will be on hand with “An American Girl in London: 120 Nourishing Recipes for Your Family From a Californian Expat.”

Molly Haskell and “Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films,” Steven Lee Myers and “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin,” and Jeffrey Sussman with “Max Baer and Barney Ross: Jewish Heroes of Boxing” will be wielding pens and selling their biographies, and Gerard Schwarz will attend with his autobiography, “Behind the Baton: An American Icon Talks Music.”

When it comes to picture books, children might enjoy Cynthia Bardes’s “Pansy in London: The Mystery of the Missing Puppy,” Susan Verde’s “My Kicks: A Sneaker Story!” or “The Nutcracker in Harlem” by The Star’s T.E. McMorrow. Among The Star’s contributing photographers, Doug Kuntz will be at a table with his children’s book, “Lost and Found Cat: The True Story of Kunkush’s Incredible Journey,” and Durell Godfrey will discuss and sign copies of “Color Your Happy Home,” her second coloring book for adults. 

A complete list of authors can be found on authorsnight.org.

After the reception, guests can continue on to one of more than 30 dinners featuring writers at private houses here. At one of them, Alyssa Mastromonaco, the author of “Who Thought This Was a Good Idea? And Other Questions You Should Have Answers to When You Work in the White House,” will pull back the curtain on the day-to-day operations at the Oval Office. From the other side of the political aisle, Ann Coulter, the provocative television commentator, will host a dinner with her book “In Trump We Trust.”

Elsewhere, Elizabeth Vargas, the ABC News journalist, will present “Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction,” which chronicles her battles with anxiety and alcoholism, and Malcolm Nance, a counterterrorism and intelligence officer frequently seen on MSNBC, will explore “Hacking ISIS: How to Destroy the Global Jihad.” 

Tickets to the reception cost $100 and are available online and at the door on the day of the event. Dinner party tickets cost $300, and guests can choose which to attend. The dinners start at 8 p.m., and those tickets include entry to the book-signing reception and are also available online.

Those who can’t make it to the book signing can tune in to WPPB 88.3, where Bonnie Grice will be interviewing authors live.

“Astrophysics for

People in a Hurry”

Neil deGrasse Tyson

W.W. Norton, $18.95

If this were a book review “for people in a hurry,” I’d suggest: Read this book (1) because it’s a conduit to the cosmos, (2) because you’ll become hungry for more, and (3) so that you can join the club! 

If you’re not in a hurry, stay tuned. 

In “Astrophysics for People in a Hurry,” Neil deGrasse Tyson writes a vivid and virtuosic opening chapter, “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” that is a tour d’horizon (pun intended) of those events that unfolded following the origin of our universe. 

Explaining Newton, gravitation, Einstein, general relativity, gravitational waves, nucleosynthesis, planetary science, galaxy formation, stellar evolution, cosmic microwave background, dark energy, dark matter, and many other “matters” in a slim volume, with easy-to-assimilate, seasoned, charming prose, is not a cakewalk. And Dr. Tyson gives you the whole enchilada, tortilla, petits fours, Linzer torte, and bagel. He persuades you to “suspend your disbelief” and wins you over as he eagerly inspires you to wish for more. He has heft and bandwidth.

Dr. Tyson’s description of the events following the Big Bang includes the story of the “leftover light from a dazzling, sizzling early universe.” And, he says, studying the patterns in the cosmic microwave background “is like performing some sort of cosmic phrenology, as we analyze the skull bumps of the infant universe.”

Hollywood science-fiction epics may portray galaxies and space as romantic and glamorous. “Nobody doesn’t like intergalactic space,” Dr. Tyson seems to agree, “but it can be hazardous to your health if you choose to go there.” He points out that you would freeze to death, your blood cells would burst, and you’d be shot full of very high-energy cosmic radiation — nuclear particles of matter that traverse interstellar and intergalactic space after being ejected by distant exploding stars. 

I was not sure why I loved this book so much: because it was so well written, or because it reminded me of my passion for astrophysics. So I asked a very intelligent good friend — a successful businessman and enthusiastic science aficionado — for his layman’s opinion. He wrote:

“For the novice, this book serves as a fascinating and intensive introduction. It will also encourage him or her to read more on astrophysics . . . and marvel at the way in which Tyson organizes and presents his material. His chapter on Newton’s and Einstein’s theories of gravity, juxtaposed with the current concepts of the gravitational effects of dark matter and dark energy, is extraordinary.” 

I completely agree. Dr. Tyson has a wonderful way with words. “So dark matter is our frenemy. We have no clue what it is. . . . But we desperately need it . . . to arrive at an accurate description of the universe.”

You can’t see it (hence dark), but you can infer the effects of dark matter on galaxies, making them appear — unreasonably! — as if they resembled a solid disc, like the wheel on your car that rotates on its axle. (In our solar system, however, planets revolve around the sun at different speeds that depend on their solar distances.) Thus, dark matter is an attractive force gluing a galaxy’s collection of stars together.

This is unlike dark energy, which is a repulsive force acting, so to speak, as if it were “negative gravity” and, as Dr. Tyson puts it, that it “will ultimately win the tug of war, as it forces the cosmic expansion to accelerate exponentially into the future.”

In other words, dark matter is attractive (some might say feminine) and dark energy is repulsive (some might say masculine), and together they invisibly make up about 95 percent of what’s out there. Only some 5 percent of the universe’s total mass energy is visible to us. Was Buckminster Fuller prophetic when he said the greatest discovery of the 20th century was that the invisible is more important than the visible?

“The matter we have come to love in the universe,” Dr. Tyson says, “is only a light frosting on the cosmic cake, modest buoys afloat in a vast cosmic ocean of something that looks like nothing.”

The author mentions Einstein’s problems with Hitler, who disparaged theoretical physics and general relativity as “Jewish science” and thus inferior to “Aryan science” because it was experimental. In fact, Hitler loathed Einstein so much that he wanted him assassinated, and organized a hundred authors to write a book against Einstein’s ideas. Dr. Tyson paraphrases Einstein, who said about this book of negative propaganda that “if he [Einstein] were wrong, then only one [author] would have been enough.”

In discussing the universality of physical laws, the author humorously relates how he ordered a hot cocoa with whipped cream but was disappointed to see no trace of the topping. The waiter said it had sunk to the bottom, but Dr. Tyson pointed out that since whipped cream has a low density it should have been floating on the top, and that either they forgot to put it in or the laws of physics were different in this restaurant near Caltech. When the waiter reluctantly brought the (forgotten) dollop for the hot cocoa, it floated — thus exemplifying that the laws of physics are universal. Of course, one example is not proof. (Let’s hope the waiter got a good tip and became a physicist.)

Dr. Tyson’s book is justifiably at the top of the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list. He’s an authoritative source of clear ideas about our universe and writes in stylistic, eloquent prose without mathematics. This in itself is quite an unusual feat — considering “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in describing the natural sciences,” as the Nobel-winning physicist Eugene Wigner said, describing an extraordinary phenomenon “bordering on the mysterious.” Just like the universe.

Dr. Tyson also has a special way with children. At a recent standing-room-only Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate on “De-Extinction” at the American Museum of Natural History, he came forward from the podium and sat down at the edge of the stage, long legs dangling down to audience level, to listen to an adorable 9-year-old who had a very intelligent question for him. She wore an extremely colorful and elegant combination of eye-catching attire. Neil lifted her gently onto the stage so the multitudes could see her beguiling individuality. The audience was thrilled. 

So he’s a really nice guy — in addition to writing a really good book.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium and the host of the radio and TV show “StarTalk.” He lives in New York City and East Hampton. 

Stephen Rosen, an astrophysicist who lives in East Hampton, will give a talk, “Albert Einstein: Rock Star,” at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton on Aug. 10 at 5:30 p.m.

Sheldon and Margery Harnick, and their son, Matthew, have pooled their talents to create “Koi: A Modern Folktale,” with photographs of the legendary fish by Margery and Matthew and text by Sheldon Harnick. They will talk about the book on July 29 at 5 p.m. at BookHampton in East Hampton. 

Ms. Harnick first began taking photographs of koi on a visit to her daughter, Beth, in Malibu, Calif. Those images led her to research the history of koi, which includes many legends that testify to their endurance and perseverance.

Mr. Harnick was inspired by the beauty of the fish to create his own legend, in which the pleasure provided by the fish leads the gods to transform them into powerful dragons. Because koi are Asian in origin, the narrative proceeds in haiku verses. Ms. Harnick’s images capture the beauty of the fish, while Matthew Harnick’s portray the gods and dragons.

Margery Harnick is an accomplished actress, painter, and photographer who has exhibited in New York City and East Hampton. Matthew Harnick recently published his own book, “Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade: A New York Holiday Tradition,” which includes both vintage photographs and his own. Sheldon Harnick is the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning Broadway lyricist. The family has a house in East Hampton. 

All year long, BookHampton hosts authors for readings and book signings, and the latest to join the list of notables is Chelsea Clinton.

On Friday, Aug. 4, Ms. Clinton will be on hand to sign her newest book, “She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World,” which introduces readers to a baker’s dozen of “inspirational women who never took no for an answer, and who always, inevitably and without fail, persisted.” Some are living, others long gone.

The book tells the stories of Harriet Tubman, Helen Keller, Clara Lemlich, Nellie Bly, Virginia Apgar, Maria Tallchief, Claudette Colvin, Ruby Bridges, Margaret Chase Smith, Sally Ride, Florence Griffith Joyner, Oprah Winfrey, and Sonia Sotomayor.

“She Persisted,” according to its publicity, “is for everyone who has ever wanted to speak up but has been told to quiet down, for everyone who has ever tried to reach for the stars but was told to sit down, and for everyone who has ever been made to feel unworthy or unimportant or small.” Ms. Clinton has written two other books: “It’s Your World: Get Informed, Get Inspired & Get Going!” and “Governing Global Health: Who Runs the World and Why?” but “She Persisted” marks her first appearance at BookHampton, which is at 41 Main Street in East Hampton.

The event, which does not include a reading, will begin at 1 p.m., and a ticket must be purchased to attend. The price, $17.99, includes not only a copy of the book, but admission for up to four others to join the signing line. Tickets are available online at bookhampton.com/event/chelsea-clinton-she-persisted. 

Prick up your ears, poetry fans: Grace Schulman will take to the lectern to read at Sunday’s gathering of the Poetry Marathon in Amagansett. The Springs part-timer not long ago pulled down a Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America for her distinguished lifetime achievements. A distinguished professor of English at Baruch College, she is the author of numerous collections of poems, most recently “Without a Claim.” She edited “The Poems of Marianne Moore” and in 2010 came out with “First Loves and Other Adventures,” a book of essays on artistic influences and the writing life.

Ms. Schulman will be joined by Elise Paschen, whose 1996 volume, “Infidelities,” won a Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and Poetry magazine. She will read from her latest collection, “The Nightlife,” which was published in May.

The free readings take place at the Marine Museum on Bluff Road, which is open for touring before the 5:30 p.m. start time. A reception follows.

Catch it while you can: The last of the summer’s free Poetry Marathon gatherings is Sunday, when at least seven poets will read from their work starting at 5:30 p.m. at the East Hampton Town Marine Museum. The museum, on Bluff Road in Amagansett, will be open for touring at 5, and refreshments will be served at a reception afterward.

The readers include Carole Stone, Rosalind Brenner, Walter Donway, Pauline Yeats, Carolyn Bistrian, and Daniel Hays. Joining them will be Dee Slavutin of Springs, who last year took over the marathon from the duo who ran it for many years, Sylvia Chavkin and Bebe Antell. She not only took it over, she raised the money to save it.

“The East End light and landscape inspire more than painters,” Ms. Slavutin said in a release. “Poets, too, claim this inspirational source. If you miss this program you’re losing the last chance this summer to enjoy great poetry in our own backyard.”

Below is one of her new poems, “A Summer Ditty.”

Let me eat the purple and the green,

even if it seems unseemly.

I’m hungry for the taste of leaves,

to wipe my mouth on my sleeve.

Then, push off on pedal to the shore

and ask the sky to give me more.

Watch the gull strut and poke

the salted clam properly soaked.

To delight at sighting an umbrella

still cobbed with webs from the cellar.

Tap my toes in briny foam,

explore the shore, free to roam.

Oh July, July, July, July,

it is to you, I owe this high.

“The One-Cent Magenta”

James Barron

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $23.95

Among the most gratifying reading experiences one can enjoy is to penetrate a book that, at first glance, appears to be esoteric or of little interest, only to find it riveting. Daniel James Brown’s “The Boys in the Boat” and virtually anything by John McPhee jump to mind as examples of this phenomenon.

I had hoped that would be the case with James Barron’s recent book, “The One-Cent Magenta: Inside the Quest to Own the Most Valuable Stamp in the World.” After all, Mr. Barron’s previous book, “Piano: The Making of a Steinway Concert Grand,” had been a compelling read. Alas, this time I was disappointed.

The subject here is the history of the rarest, and thus the most valuable, postage stamp ever issued and, by extension, the arcane world of philately, which the author, a well-regarded New York Times reporter, calls Stamp World.

The essence of the book is contained in nine sentences on the back of the jacket:

In 1856, a batch of one-cent magenta stamps were printed, sold, and forgotten.

In 1873, a twelve-year-old boy discovered one of those stamps in his uncle’s basement but had no idea it had become a rarity.

In 1878, the stamp got a spot in the castle of a fabulously wealthy French nobleman.

In 1922, it was bought by an American plutocrat, who may have burned a second one-cent magenta so that this one would remain the only one in the world.

In 1933, the plutocrat’s widow claimed it even though her estranged husband’s will stated the one-cent magenta was not hers to inherit.

In 1940, the stamp was sold by Macy’s to a mysterious buyer who was not identified for three decades.

In 1970, it was acquired at auction by a syndicate led by an entrepreneur who traveled with the stamp in a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist.

In 1980, it was purchased by John E. du Pont, who would later die in prison while serving a thirty-year sentence for murder.

In 2014, it was won at Sotheby’s by a celebrated shoe designer for almost $9.5 million.

On the one hand, that’s all you need to know. On the other hand, the remainder of Mr. Barron’s 241 pages of text is fleshed out by his skillful digging into the essential facts listed above.

The one-cent magenta was “an accidental icon. It was not supposed to be so special.” In 1856, the postal authorities in British Guiana (the country now called Guyana) failed to receive a shipment of 100,000 postage stamps from London. The colonial postmaster commissioned a local newspaper to print a batch of “provisional” stamps in two denominations — two-cent stamps for letters and one-cent stamps for periodicals. It is not known how many were produced, nor how briefly they were in circulation.

The stamps lacked artful design and were not aesthetically pleasing. Over time, that has ceased to matter. As any collector (or student of economics) well understands, what matters is rarity. And in this case, there seems to be but one. Unique in all the world, as they say. That’s the only thing a committed collector needs to know.

As one might expect, the one-cent magenta’s value has increased exponentially over time. Recounting its odyssey chronologically, Mr. Barron emphasizes this point by titling each chapter, beginning with the third, with the stamp’s value at the time. What sold for one (British) cent when it was issued in 1856 sold for six shillings in 1873, £120 five years after that, $32,500 in 1922, and so on. Chapter 11, about the American shoe designer Stuart Weitzman’s 2014 purchase of the one-cent magenta, is titled “$9.5 million.”

Some of Mr. Barron’s background digressions are particularly worthwhile. He notes, for example, the history of the British postal service. Until the 1830s, one could “post” (or mail) things for free. It was incumbent on the recipient to pay. The problem was, they often didn’t, and the postal service was losing a great deal of money. The biggest culprits were newspapers, which were all sent and delivered by post at the time. (There’s a slap-on-the-forehead moment when one realizes why so many newspapers have the word “Post” in their names — not to mention The Saturday Evening Post, the American magazine of revered memory.)

In 1839, Rowland Hill, an English educator, proposed a system of postal reform, the centerpiece of which was that senders would pay postal fees, and a stamp would be affixed to each item sent to prove that the mailing costs had been paid in full. The postage stamp was born — at heart, a tax stamp.

Within a short time, the collecting of stamps (with their implications of exotic places and great distances crossed) became a popular obsession worldwide. Mr. Barron’s discussion of the imperfection of the coined term “philately,” for the interest in stamps, provides a distinct Aha! moment.

In terms of his central focus, however, the one-cent magenta stamp and those who have owned it, this is really a small book. (Measuring 5 by 7 inches in size, that is literally true, as well.) It might have been more successful as a featured article in The New York Times Magazine.

The difficulty is that there is not much by way of the elements that contribute to a gripping story. There is no real dramatic tension, no sustained mystery, no captivating characters, and no awe (as in the transformation of raw materials into a musical instrument capable of producing sublime sound).

“The One-Cent Magenta” is likely to appeal most to committed philatelists. And they, as Mr. Barron acknowledges, make up a dwindling population.

Mr. Barron writes well and with perfect clarity. His reporting skills are sharp. In the future, one can only hope that these talents will be applied, once again, to a more worthy subject.

A weekend resident of East Hampton, James I. Lader regularly contributes book reviews to The Star.

James Barron will sign books at the East Hampton Library’s Authors Night on Aug. 12 and be the guest at one of its fund-raising dinners. He has a house in East Hampton.

“Berlin for Jews”

Leonard Barkan

University of  Chicago Press, $27.50

Leonard Barkan is a Renaissance man, in more ways than one. A Princeton professor, he’s also a classics man, an art history man, an archeology man, an architecture man, a man who loves to travel, and a Jew who has spent much of the last couple of years in Berlin.Who better to write a book with a title like “Berlin for Jews”? 

The title might be understood as simply describing a guidebook for Jewish tourists, and, indeed, it is partly that: Mr. Barkan suggests that a first-time visitor immediately buy a transit pass and board the M29 bus line to see sights like Checkpoint Charlie, the Berlinische Galerie, and the shops on the Kurfürstendamm. There are maps, reproductions of old portraits, and photographs of the city, most of them taken by Mr. Barkan’s talented spouse, Nick Barberio, that provide purposeful orientation. 

But the title also suggests a question: What, besides a geographical area, was pre-Nazi Berlin for the significant minority of Jews who lived there and formed a culturally, artistically, and financially significant part of German society? And what is it for us — and for Mr. Barkan, who says he’s having a love affair with the city — today? 

To answer the first of these questions, Mr. Barkan takes us to a cemetery, Schönhauser Allee, which he presents as “Jewish ground zero,” a physical reconstruction of the city’s history from the point of view of its Jewish residents. Its monuments are “a thesaurus of Jewish family names” and “a riot of majestic titles,” and form a catalog of the architectural fashions in which wealthy Germans memorialized themselves, ranging from Romanesque to High Gothic to Renaissance and beyond; they are a critique of that culture itself. 

“Ornament defines culture,” Mr. Barkan observes, and these highly ornamented tombs testified to a people determined to acquire a culture that was not bequeathed to them by their forebears, and acquired not always gracefully but with great self-confidence: “If this be kitsch, they made the most of it,” he comments. 

Trained as a close reader of texts, Mr. Barkan brings the cemetery to life. He learned German in school when he was 12, growing up in New York, having already picked up Yiddish at home, and he tells us that there is “common ground between the language of the Nazis and the language of their most abject victims.” Upwardly mobile American Jews like the Barkans, especially in New York, had always felt an affinity with German, “the preferred language and civilization,” the language of science, philosophy, and classical music. 

But his parents spoke Yiddish to each other when they did not wish young Leonard to understand (though he picked it up quickly), and he does not hesitate to drop a Yiddish expression into his fluid, readable prose when it expresses something that has no precise equivalent in English — like tchotchkes, the particular kind of knickknacks found covering every horizontal surface in a Jewish family’s home.

Mr. Barkan turns next to the Bayerisches Viertel (the Bavarian Quarter), where those who couldn’t afford grand houses of their own occupied perhaps the world’s first “luxury multiple housing” and which was known at the time as “the Jewish Switzerland” — perhaps because it was a safe haven even before the need for a haven became brutally apparent. For Mr. Barkan it possesses “the quintessential status of what it means to me to be a Jew.” 

Berlin’s Jewish community “believed themselves to be Germans, just like their Christian neighbors,” and produced, in 1929, a volume called “The Jewish Address Book of Greater Berlin,” whose oddity Mr. Barkan explains through a fanciful analogy with another minority simultaneously privileged, tolerated, and oppressed: What if prominent gays got together and produced “The Homosexual Address Book of Greater New York”? It too would be the challenging expression of “separatist and assimilation impulses.” 

The rest of Mr. Barkan’s book is devoted to three prominent Jewish Berliners, carefully chosen to embody the zeitgeists of their eras. The first is Rahel Varnhagen, the unlikely proprietress of a salon — a group of distinguished artists, thinkers, and culture mavens met to engage in brilliantly witty dialogue. She was what Mme. de Stael was to Paris, what Perle Mesta was to Washington: the glue that bound together the cosmopolitan essence of a city. And she attained this status without a fortune or great personal beauty, apparently because of her extraordinary conversational abilities — like Dorothy Parker presiding over the Round Table at the Algonquin two centuries later, but without (pardon the pun) her waspishness. 

Beethoven found his way to Rahel’s house, along with Mendelssohn and Rossini and the writers Kleist and Heine, as well as the nephew of Prince Louis Ferdinand. What was remarkable, and untrue of her later counterparts, was that Rahel was a Jewess — and that this was apparently an unspoken secret kept by almost all of the people who frequented her house. 

James Simon, Mr. Barkan’s favorite Berlin Jew, is described as “bourgeois, liberal, statesmanly, global, supremely generous in giving and bashful in accepting thanks,” a man who almost single-handedly stocked the museums of Berlin with vast collections of important and valuable antiquities. The Zionist Chaim Weizmann took him to be a collaborator with the nascent Nazi movement, calling him “the usual type of Kaiser-Jüden . . . more German than the Germans.” 

And it is true that he was on close terms with Kaiser Wilhelm, his partner in the acquisition of archaeological treasures from the Middle East, including those of Palestine. But it is also true that Simon’s name was removed from the exhibits he had bequeathed to the museums of the city, shortly before his death in 1932, though the breathtaking exhibits themselves remain. 

I had never heard of Rahel Vernhagen, and Simon only vaguely, but every academic in the humanities is familiar with the estimable theorist Walter Benjamin — though having read him did not prepare me for Mr. Barkan’s portrait of the scion of a wealthy and cosmopolitan family that celebrated both Rosh Hashana and organized Easter egg hunts, a man driven by sexual impulses, an urban flaneur nevertheless unable to achieve worldly or academic success, and ultimately driven into exile and then to suicide. 

Yet he was the forerunner of modern writers as diverse as Jane Jacobs, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes. He was a writer who claimed membership in what he believed to be the elite stratum of intellectual achievers, who were, he explained in “Berlin Childhood Around 1900” (a project not very dissimilar from “Berlin for Jews”), of necessity Jewish. Benjamin, for Mr. Barkan, seems to epitomize the paradoxes of being Jewish in Berlin — paradoxes that World War II did not put an end to in a city whose great project has been to rise from the ashes of almost total physical destruction and, partly through acts of atonement, reclaim its humane status. 

Since most of the book concerns prewar Berlin, one cannot escape the unvoiced tension between the upward mobilization and growing confidence of Berlin Jewry before 1930 with what we know is, sooner or later, coming. It reminded me of the 1782 novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” (perhaps better known as the 1988 film “Dangerous Liaisons”), in which French aristocrats sport and connive in decorous languor, oblivious of the fact that in a few years the French Revolution would take its bloody revenge on their privilege and decadence. 

That Mr. Barkan can make a study of people whose homeland devoured them entertaining and palatable is a stunning achievement.

Richard Horwich, who lives in East Hampton, taught literature at Brooklyn College and New York University.

Leonard Barkan, a former wine columnist for The Star, used to live in Springs.

“Sag Harbor: 100 Years of Film in the Village,” an homage to a century of cinema on Main Street, came out on Tuesday. Written by Annette Hinkle, former associate editor of The Sag Harbor Express and currently the community news editor of The Shelter Island Reporter, the book traces the theater’s history from the silent era to its nearly four-decade tenure as the last independent, single-screen theater on the East End. 

The book is filled with vintage photographs, recollections and testimonials by village residents, and fascinating details about films shown there and the people who made it possible. In her introduction, Ms. Hinkle writes, “The beautiful thing about the theater was that for the eight decades it stood, it remained the same. As the world beyond transformed, grew, suffered, went to war and became jaded, within those four walls life appeared to remain a perpetual constant.”

In his foreword, the novelist and essayist Jay McInerney writes, “For as long as any of us could remember, the big red letters floating above Main Street on the white facade of the cinema situated us and grounded us, reminding us, if perhaps we’d had one too many at the bar in the American Hotel, across the street, of just where we were: SAG HARBOR.”

A book launch will be held at Sylvester & Co. in Sag Harbor on July 8 from 6 to 8 p.m. Copies of the $35 hardcover will be in local bookstores and other locations — Naturopathica in East Hampton, Marders in Bridgehampton, and the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill among them, according to Ms. Hinkle — by the end of this week. A portion of the proceeds from sales will be donated to the Sag Harbor Partnership’s campaign to rebuild the cinema, and Ms. Hinkle will have a table at the partnership’s Party Under the Tent on Long Wharf on July 16.