“A School of Our Own”

Samuel Levin and Susan Engel

The New Press, $25.95

Confessions of a reviewer: A book with two authors? Approach with caution. A mother-son writing duo? Possible treacle alert. A teenager who started his own school? Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Back-patting danger. 

Sigh of relief: This book? No need for alarm. Not cloying. Not self-congratulatory. Instead — thoughtful, thought-provoking, moving.

Here’s the premise, and it’s unusual. Samuel Levin was a high school junior. His before and after-school job was tending cows on a dairy farm — a job he loved. He makes clear over and again how much he loved the heifers, the milking, the smells, the early mornings, even the cow dung. One exceptional young man. 

Who knew that what was happening in his high school was so incorrect? “. . . I’d sit through the first three periods of my day, mostly bored, occasionally annoyed. In the classes that were the least boring, I tried to think of ways to make them more interesting. I’d translate words to binary, think of alternative explanations for data that purported to support a theory, design math puzzles. In the most boring classes, I just thought about other things. I planned science experiments, wrote stories, or daydreamed.” This was not a disaffected young man: He revered his one-on-one math teacher, whom he termed “brilliant.”

Lunch was all right. But then there was the English class with the teacher who “seemed to not like books, or kids for that matter.” Here was a young man who was furious for good reason. 

Weave in his mother’s commentary. “Weave” is the perfect verb because her commentary is seamless. Sam is Susan Engel’s third child; the other two had already graduated from college by the time he was tackling his junior year. “I was painfully aware, like other parents, of the pitfalls of adolescence. After all, there are so many ways for kids between the ages of fourteen and eighteen to screw up. It would be hard not to quake at the potential disasters that lie in wait for the teen who goes astray.”

Ms. Engel goes on to cite the work of the anthropologist Ruth Benedict, who noted “that many cultures lead their youngsters toward maturity by gradually giving them more autonomy and accountability. But our culture, she pointed out, did not. In fact, she argued, our society was notable for the disjuncture we create between childhood and adulthood. We baby them for a very long time and then fling them into a free fall toward adulthood.” And then, gulp, Ms. Engel tells us that Benedict was writing in 1934. How little has changed.

Then one day, not unlike any other, Sam made sure that so much did change. He worked intensely on creating “the Independent Project.” He figured out how to work with educators and fellow students to create a curriculum that would work for his fellow students, for himself, and for teachers. A high school that was a high school created by students, for students, about students. 

His mother’s comments? “At seventeen, Sam was naive. And he was brash. From the time he decided to do this, it never seemed to occur to him that he might not get past the first stage.” She knew the pitfalls that awaited him. She knew the possibilities of success.

And success came piling on. Fellow students loved IP. They were no longer bored, angry, disillusioned. They were connected to their studies.

Mr. Levin inherited the educational reform genes from both his grandmother and mother. His grandmother Tinka Topping and Ms. Engel have been education advocates on the East End for decades, playing pivotal roles in the founding of the Hampton Day School — back in the late 1960s — as well as the Hayground School. Ms. Engel, a psychology professor at Williams, is an expert in autobiographical memory and the development of curiosity. Her previous books include “Real Kids: Creating Meaning in Everyday Life.”

A proofreader this reviewer would have hoped for: a high school English teacher (different from the one referenced above) who might have caught noun-pronoun disagreement and a few other grammatical snafus. However, it is the heart, the passion of the underlying mission that carries this book.

One of the impressive aspects of this educational experiment is the willingness of Mr. Levin and Ms. Engel to discuss shortcomings. In “Appendix: Nuts and Bolts,” the authors admit that teachers are not as widely acknowledged in the text as they were in the beginning of the work. 

“We haven’t discussed teachers yet,” Ms. Engel writes, “because Sam originally envisioned one role for them and ended up contending with a very different one. The truth is, the school wasn’t able to allot the teacher hours the IP wanted. This is ironic, given that one of the faculty’s biggest fears was that teachers would become irrelevant or redundant in the IP. Part of it came down to the unions. The teachers couldn’t work with the IP without extra compensation, and the school didn’t have enough money for that. The upshot was that teachers had a surprisingly marginal role in the Independent Project, when they were intended to have a central role. . . . The teachers’ job in the Independent Project is nuanced and slippery. They have to guide without leading, help without pushing. They must use their judgment about when to step in and when to step back. They should use their passion for and mastery over their own subject to model how to work in that field.”

“A School of Our Own” is a mother-son love story. A love story regarding learning. One of the most touching love stories is one of the most unexpected: A young woman in the IP project was cutting class during IP. Problematic, right? Where was she? Sneaking out to memorize lines from “Macbeth.”

Susan Engel grew up in Sagaponack. She and Samuel Levin will speak about their book next Thursday at 5:30 p.m. at the Hayground School in Bridgehampton.

Laura Wells is a regular book reviewer for The Star. She lives in Sag Harbor.

“Rembrandt’s Shadow” by Janet Lee Berg tells the story of Sylvie Rosenberg, a teenage daughter of a successful but emotionally distant art dealer in Holland in the 1930s. When the Nazis occupy the country, her father trades a painting by Rembrandt for his daughter’s safety and that of 25 other Jews.

Sylvie finds herself standing on a train platform surrounded by Gestapo, guns, and attack dogs, wondering if the next train will take her to Spain or to a concentration camp. Across locations and decades, the book follows her experiences at a British internment facility in Jamaica and on to Long Island, where a new life with a door-to-door salesman ends up with her and her son being abandoned.

The debut novel, just published by Post Hill Press, is based on the experiences of the Katz family, of whom Ms. Berg’s husband is a descendant. Ms. Berg, the author of “Glitz of the Hamptons” and a contributor of essays to The Star for many years, will read from it on Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Quogue Library. She will also discuss restitution of art looted during World War II.

For those out and about farther up the Island tomorrow, Ms. Berg can be seen at 7 p.m. at the Book Revue in Huntington.

It’s that time again. The air is crisp, the leaves are turning, the kids are back in school. And readings have returned in earnest to the college.

To Stony Brook Southampton, that is, where the fall iteration of the Writers Speak series of free author appearances starts up on Wednesday at 7 p.m. with Kim Addonizio, who is out with two new books, “Mortal Trash: Poems” and “Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions From a Writing Life.” 

This one is different, in part because preceding it at 5:30 will be an open house for prospective students in the M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature, which sponsors Writers Speak. Julie Sheehan, the program’s director, and other faculty members will discuss workshops in fiction, creative nonfiction and memoir, poetry, and playwriting. Emma Walton Hamilton will go over the children’s literature fellows program. A reception for Ms. Addonizio starts at 6:30.

Coming down the pike for Writers Speak are Dani Shapiro, the author of “Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life,” on Oct. 19, John Knight, an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, in conversation with Emily Gilbert, a creative writing instructor at the Stony Brook campus, on Nov. 2, Lia Purpura, a poet, on Nov. 16, and Ruth Franklin, a book critic, together with the college’s Susan Scarf Merrell on Nov. 30. Students enrolled in the M.F.A. program will read from their work on Dec. 7. 

The readings, which involve book signings and periods for questions and answers, happen in the Radio Lounge, upstairs in Chancellors Hall.

“Under the Harrow”

Flynn Berry

Penguin Books, $16

A thriller is supposed to thrill and this one does, right from the outset, but not with the usual car chases or shootouts or spooky, otherworldly phenomena. Instead, the reader is gripped by masterful plotting, tight, elegant prose, and assured psychological insight. 

Nora Lawrence, the narrator of “Under the Harrow,” has come by train from London to the small, bucolic suburb of Marlow to stay with her sister, Rachel, a visit she happily anticipates. The 30-something siblings, survivors of haphazard parenting, are especially close. Their conversations are intimate and sympathetic; they’ve rented a vacation house together in the past and plan to do so soon again. Nora, who’s recovering from a painful breakup, is looking forward to sharing some good news — she’s been awarded a residency at an artists’ retreat in France — and a celebratory drink. 

She’s not alarmed when Rachel isn’t at the station to greet her, and she sets out by foot to Rachel’s house. The bloody scene she encounters there is shocking — her sister dead of multiple stab wounds, and Fenno, Rachel’s large German shepherd, hanged from a banister and turning slowly on the noose of his lead. The details are certainly grisly, but not gratuitous. Nora’s shock is also ours, her grief palpably real, coming down “like a guillotine when the woman put her finger to Rachel’s neck.” 

At the police station, she thinks, “It’s strange to be so tired, and also so scared, as if my body is asleep but receiving electric jolts.” And much later, she wants to tell someone “about the moment between opening the door of the house and understanding what had happened, when what I felt was wonder. It was an incredible feeling, golden and drugged. . . . I wouldn’t mind living my whole life in that gap.” 

We learn that Rachel, a nurse, had endured another brutal physical attack — years earlier, when she was a teenager — for which no one was ever charged. Nora sustains guilt about that event because she chose to sleep in rather than accompany Rachel on the day it happened. 

Gradually and steadily, we become aware of other details of the sisters’ past and of their character. Rachel harbored obsessive vengeful thoughts about her first attacker, owned a blackjack, and had committed lesser acts of violence herself, like dropping beer bottles on a bartender’s feet and punching a man in the head at a party. When a detective remarks that Rachel could be unpleasant, Nora evokes a smile by saying, “I liked that about her.” Nora, who has a history of sleepwalking, keeps a carving knife under her bed and carries a straight razor and pepper spray by day. 

Despite Nora’s conviction that she and Rachel kept nothing from each other, she discovers that Rachel withheld some vital information. Her beloved dog, Fenno, was acquired as much for protection as for companionship. She had recently stayed for a week with her best friend, lying about a broken boiler at her own house. But even when Nora unearths a disturbing personal betrayal — a valid reason for ambivalence — she’s still irrevocably devoted to Rachel: “Bitch, I think, and the venom does nothing to how much I miss her.” And she’s no less determined to find her sister’s killer.

Several suspects present themselves, with Nora, not surprisingly, among them. Others include Stephen Bailey, the man Rachel almost married — “Close brush, she said” — and Keith Denton, a married plumber who seems to be fixated on her. He admits to having seen her on the morning of her final day. And Rachel had mentioned meeting with someone named Martin — from work, she said vaguely, but no one at the hospital can place him. 

Then there’s Andrew Healy, Lee Barton, and Paul Wheeler. All of them have served time for inflicting grievous bodily harm on women. Rachel seemed to think Healy was her initial assailant. She had even visited him recently in prison, another secret she’d kept from Nora. The lead detective asks questions about the sisters’ father, an alcoholic and a petty criminal with whom they’ve lost touch. The detective wants to know if he’s violent, and Nora isn’t sure. 

Is there any connection between Rachel’s murder and a woman from the sisters’ hometown who’s gone missing, or with a local, fatal car crash? Rachel knew the accident victim. Nora is convinced that her sister was being stalked; she shows the police a place in the woods with a clear view of Rachel’s house, a virtual hideout littered with beer cans and cigarettes. She pictures creepy Keith Denton as the voyeur, but the police suggest she might have set the site up herself.

“Under the Harrow” is written in the present tense, so that everything seems to be happening in the very moment it appears on the page, heightening its cinematic suspense. The novel offers many pleasures in addition to its driving narrative, especially the fresh and scrupulous descriptions of place and circumstance. At Rachel’s funeral, Nora observes, “The air in the church is restive and tortured, the result of two hundred people trying not to make a sound. I wish they would all talk.” She feels isolated in her mourning, but when the last of the guests leave, she “thought they would stay longer, and knowing that they didn’t is like watching it grow dark in the afternoon.” 

After an impulsive hookup with a man she met at a bar, she says, “He was handsome and the encounter was surreal, and jolly, as they can be sometimes, as though we had a snow day when everybody else had to work.” And when the detective with whom Nora becomes involved asks her what she hates about London, she tells him it’s the noise. “The noise is the best part,” he says, which really resonated with this big-city-loving reader. 

Best of all, though, are Nora’s thoughts about her sister — “Her face is so familiar it is like looking at myself” — whom she resurrects in moments of wishful amnesia before lapsing again into the horror of reality, where loneliness, as she puts it, has her by the throat. She thinks, “I don’t know how to survive the hours until I can sleep.”

But her misery is nothing compared to Rachel’s forfeiture of the living world, of the extraordinary and the mundane. “She had so much left to do . . . she has been taken away from everything, she lost everything. She likes red lipstick, and will never again stand in the aisle at a chemist’s, testing the shades on the back of her hand.”

Flynn Berry, an American writer, has chosen a British setting for her story, perhaps in homage to Ruth Rendell and P.D James, both virtuosos of character study, whose literary heir she might be. There’s never a sense of dislocation or fictional tourism in “Under the Harrow.” It’s a classic whodunit that is greatly enriched by the quality of the writing. I found myself marking up pages while fighting the urge to turn them. 

Even the book’s title seems inspired. Its source, revealed in the epigraph, is “A Grief Observed” by C.S. Lewis, an aching meditation on the death of his young wife. “Come, what do we gain by evasions? We are under the harrow and can’t escape.” Love and loss, and their fateful link, are also at the heart of this debut novel by a first-rate storyteller. 

Hilma Wolitzer’s novels include “An Available Man” and “The Doctor’s Daughter.” She lives in New York City and spent many years in Springs.

Flynn Berry has spent summers in Amagansett since 1990.

Achievement Award for Caro

Robert Caro is the author of just five books in his 80 years, but what books — from 1974’s “The Power Broker,” about the urban planner Robert Moses, practically required reading for anyone interested in the history of New York City or the art of biography, to the monumental “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” series: “The Path to Power,” “Means of Ascent,” “Master of the Senate,” and “The Passage of Power.”

The part-time East Hampton resident has now added to his accolades a National Book Award medal for lifetime achievement, given for a “distinguished contribution to American letters,” it was announced last week. 

“Caro’s in-depth and long-term exploration of the lives of two prominent men makes a much larger contribution to American letters than it might seem at first glance,” Lisa Lucas, the executive director of the National Book Foundation, said in a release. “His life’s work, and his stunning prose, teaches us to better understand political influence, American democracy, and the true power of biography.”

He will receive the award on Nov. 16 at the National Book Awards ceremony, dinner, and benefit in Manhattan, at which awards in poetry, children’s literature, nonfiction, and fiction will be given out, the latter category including Colson Whitehead, of the Sag Harbor family, for his novel “The Underground Railroad.” 

Mr. Caro joins Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, and Ursula K. Le Guin in winning the lifetime achievement award. He is at work on the fifth installment in his L.B.J. series.

Boo! It’s “Ghost Hampton”

The title might recall a stroll down a South Fork Main Street post-Tumbleweed Tuesday, or a visit to one of our beaches just now — deserted despite waters still plenty warm for a dip — but in reality “Ghost Hampton” is what the title says it is, a ghost story set here. Bridgehampton, specifically, where a real estate lawyer is ethically challenged (no surprise there), down on his luck and alcoholic (adding to his sympathy quotient), and in possession of newfound paranormal abilities (the novelistic twist). 

The haunting comes by way of Jewel, a fetching but long-dead girl from Victorian times who tells the lawyer his daughter, a Southampton Town police detective, has four days to live. He is thus moved to save an old Victorian house on behalf of the specter. Enter a parasitical TV reporter and . . . 

Want more? The author, Ken McGorry, will appear at two local libraries to read from his debut tale of mystery, first in East Hampton on Saturday at 1 p.m., and then at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton on Tuesday night at 7. 

Flash Fiction at the Parrish

The idea is to prowl the polished floors of the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill in search of inspiration from its permanent collection. You write a bit of short, very short, fiction based on what you see, and then gather in a studio to read it and talk. So whaddaya say?

One Jennifer Senft, who teaches in the English and humanities departments at Suffolk Community College, will lead such a class on Friday, Oct. 7, from 1:30 to 4 p.m. The cost for the single session is $40, or $30 for museum members, and registration is by phone with the Parrish. 

Ms. Senft, please note, will be back at the museum to lead a poetry class (villanelle, haiku, or free verse) on Nov. 18, which is also a Friday, also from 1:30 to 4, and also for $30 or $40, depending. This time the inspiration will come from the collection, yes, but additionally from the potato barn-like building itself and the wild-growing grounds surrounding it. 

But wait, looking to indulge an urge for ever-popular memoir? Look no further than the Hampton Library, because Eileen Obser, East Hamptoner and veteran writing instructor, will return there for a $75 six-week series starting Tuesday from 5 to 7 p.m. Registration is by phone with the library.

"The Underground Railroad"

Colson Whitehead

Doubleday, $26.95

In Colson Whitehead’s 2001 novel, “John Henry Days,” a black journalist known only as J. attends the annual John Henry festival. J. is a junketeer — that is, a journalist on assignment who enjoys sponging off publishers for free lodging and per diems in exchange for mediocre copy on frivolous subjects. The tension of the novel was in watching Mr. Whitehead juxtapose the journalist’s disaffection with scenes of the real-life exploits of the legendary John Henry. It was clear that Mr. Whitehead, a former journalist, was excoriating himself — for eating at the trough of junk publishing while other African-Americans did important work.

With his new novel, “The Underground Railroad,” Mr. Whitehead no longer needs to take himself to task. 

The novel tells the story of Cora, a teenage slave who flees for the North. Early in the novel, Mr. Whitehead depicts life on the plantation with a visceral authority that still has the ability to shock in our jaded era. 

“Not long after it became known that Cora’s womanhood had come into flower, Edward, Pot, and two hands from the southern half dragged her behind the smokehouse. If anyone heard or saw, they did not intervene. The Hob women sewed her up.”

But Mr. Whitehead is too smart a writer to make “The Underground Railroad” simply another litany of white atrocities and triumphant freedom. That story has been told countless times, and told well. In this novel, after 60 pages of plantation life scenes (which include a brilliant set piece about a tiny garden plot that Cora protects with brutal determination), the writer finds a completely new way to tell the story of the escaped slave. 

Mr. Whitehead, whose novels often brush against the barriers of postmodernism, invents a real — rather than metaphorical — underground railroad, complete with boxcars, tracks, and railway men. (It is interesting that many high school teachers have complained that they bought copies of Mr. Whitehead’s book based on the title and Oprah’s recommendation, only to find that the novel completely upended the historical facts.) And if the reader thinks that such a railway is a one-way ticket to safety, they will have to think again. Mr. Whitehead has a few more tricks up his sleeve. 

The author manipulates time and space so that when Cora gets off the railroad in South Carolina she sees a skyscraper, then meets a group of whites who seem accepting of fleeing slaves, but on whom they are in fact conducting genetic experiments. (This hearkens to the Tuskegee incident beginning in the 1930s in which African-American men with syphilis were led to believe they were receiving treatment but were in fact the subject of a medical experiment.) That the reader is not exactly sure what time period Cora is suddenly in only makes the encounter more disorienting and creepy. Stops in Indiana and Tennessee offer different, though equally imaginative, perils. 

Still, “The Underground Railroad” doesn’t always keep its momentum; sometimes Mr. Whitehead’s postmodern flourishes seem to get the best of him. Just when you are caught up in the suspense of Cora’s flight, for example, Mr. Whitehead interjects yet another character, taking us backward or forward in time and disrupting the novel’s trajectory. Some of these characters are worth the diversion, such as the brutal white slave hunter Ridgeway (“If niggers were supposed to have their freedom, they wouldn’t be in chains”), while others are less interesting. Of course it may simply be that Cora is so compelling a character — and you are rooting so hard for her to find freedom — that any detour from her story can seem like a narrative misstep.

Nevertheless, there’s no denying that the book is a triumph. Mr. Whitehead has found a new way to tell the story of slavery that seems more real than if he had stuck to the facts. “All art is a lie that helps us see the truth more clearly,” Picasso once said. “The Underground Railroad” fulfills that edict, and is undoubtedly the most audacious and inventive novel of the year. 

Colson Whitehead is the author “Sag Harbor,” about his time growing up there.

Kurt Wenzel’s novels include “Lit Life.” A regular book reviewer for The Star, he lives in Springs.

A high tea in woodsy Sagaponack north of the highway on the property of a sculptor of some note might be enough of a draw. But add in the poetry of the recently departed as read by other poets, accented by a live performance of jazz and blues, the enticement of sandwiches and pastries, and what’s more, some potent fruit of the vine courtesy of a vineyard, Wolffer, just down the road, and now you’re talking an honest-to-goodness happening.

The day is Sunday, the time is 4 to 6 p.m., the place is 93 Merchants Path at the studio of Hans Van de Bovenkamp, the music is by OCDC (that would be Cynthia Daniels and Sarah Greene), and the poems to be read are the work of Robert Long, who was an editor and art critic at The Star, Antje Katcher, whose last, posthumous collection was “Catechism,” Diana Chang, and Siv Cedering, who was married to Mr. Van de Bovenkamp. 

The readers will be Fran Castan, a Long Island Poet of the Year not long ago, Canio Pavone, the founder of Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, Janice Bishop, and Carol Sherman of East Hampton, who just came out with a new book of poetry, “Adios, San Miguel.” 

The afternoon has been organized by Virginia Walker, who lives on Shelter Island and teaches English and humanities at Suffolk Community College. She and a fellow poet, the late Michael Walsh, wrote “Neuron Mirror” together, and copies will be given to those who attend. The collection raised money for the Lustgarten Foundation’s research into a cure for pancreatic cancer. Admission to the reading is $20, also to benefit the Lustgarten Foundation.

Seating is limited. R.S.V.P.s, due by tomorrow, are being taken at 631-749-2394 or by email at [email protected]. 

And now for a taste of the meat of the matter, “Poem for My Mother,” by Ms. Cedering:

Remember when I draped

the ruffled cotton cape

around your shoulders,

turned off the lights

and stood behind your chair,

brushing, brushing your hair.

The friction of the brush

in the dry air

of that small inland town

created stars that flew

as if God himself was there

in the small space 

between my hands and your hair.

Now we live on separate coasts

of a foreign country.

A continent stretches between us.

You write of your illness,

your fear of blindness.

You say you wake afraid

to open your eyes.

Mother, if some morning

you open your eyes to see

daylight as a dark room around you,

I will drape a ruffled cotton cape

around your shoulders

and stand behind your chair,

brushing the stars out of your hair.

Over the summer The New York Times ran a piece about a rush by publishers to reissue books about Donald Trump, given his ascendancy to the Republican nomination for president. When it came to Harry Hurt III’s 1993 “Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump,” however, the original publisher, Norton, would have none of it.

This apparently led to a Kickstarter campaign to fund a self-publishing effort, but then it was Echo Point to the rescue, the results of which you can see for yourself on Saturday from 4 to 6 p.m. at Page restaurant at 63 Main Street in Sag Harbor (Mr. Hurt’s home village, naturally), where the author will sign copies of his eyebrow-raising exposé of personal, financial, and real estate development shenanigans. Reservations are being taken at [email protected].

Mr. Hurt is a former correspondent (Newsweek), columnist (The Times), and editor (Travel + Leisure Golf). Given that background, one might wonder if he won’t feel a touch of disappointment at the electoral loss of four years of entertaining press conferences and bluster at the hands of a President Trump. 

But that’s a question for another time — or for the 30 seconds while he scrawls his name in front of you.

“Clamour of Crows”

Ray Merritt

Permanent Press, $29.95

There may be a murder at the heart of Ray Merritt’s first novel, “Clamour of Crows” — it’s hard to get published without one these days — but what’s really of interest is the author’s exploration of the culture of a Wall Street law firm, the fading clubbiness, the ascendant multiethnic meritocracy, and always the cutthroat competition and ingrained sexism.

We’re talking Big Law here, “the twenty-first-century term,” Jonathan (Tuck) Tucker tells us in his first-person narration, “for white shoe Wall Street large-firm practice. That was a more appropriate handle.” But gone is not only the prep and Ivy school WASP homogeneity, the major firms aren’t even on Wall Street anymore, having moved uptown. 

The reader might be generally aware of that line of work’s tough cost-benefit realities, its tendency to chew up and spit out 9 out of 10 of the best and brightest hires within a decade or so, despite entry-level salaries nearing 200 grand, as Tuck points out, but nonetheless his world-weary running commentary is often fascinating — the way those firms were spoiled by hard-charging baby boomers, for instance, while the millennials and “the whatevers” bring an expectation of inclusion into a resolutely hierarchical workplace, along with the baggage of “their personal passions,” thus complicating the institutional expectation that they become “pantry maids and foot soldiers” in the name of the firm.

It’s enough to make a nickel-and-dimer’s heart swell.

Tuck, our guide through a thicket of depositions and greedy third parties and a rich man’s contested will, wielding a verbal machete against tangles of corporate divisions and the attendant drones, hangers-on, and henchmen, all the while negotiating the convoluted family flow chart of a staunch advocate of polyamory, is a self-described “dysfunctional widower and career griever,” his wife and two children having died in a car wreck on the Long Island Expressway. 

But at least he’s sympathetic and clear-eyed. Having been temporarily lured back into a life with the big firm, he dutifully assembles an investigative team — at the forefront a couple of young associates, Drew, a Bohemian-chic kinda gal with a ready laugh, and Dixie, a gay former football standout at Yale who hails from the Redneck Riviera. Their bull sessions recall scenes from “The Paper Chase,” what with their reports (“What have you learned?”), occasionally Socratic questioning, interviews with the ensnared or the conniving, and always Tuck leading them back to the central point, or points, the mystery of the great man’s death and the myriad suspects. This he often does with a reader-friendly and, given the sheer number of characters, quite necessary “Let’s go over what we know” summation.

The deceased is Ben Baum, an electronics retail magnate whose company unwisely ventured into the dark territory of quasi-military security operations, a la the infamous Blackwater. He’s a fellow who would surreptitiously have his autistic son sterilized to prevent unfit progeny, but before you think too ill of him, he’s also something of an imaginative fabulist devoted to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. His precatory letter, ostensibly a statement of his wishes written with one foot in the grave, is more of an upturned middle finger of a word puzzle partially composed in the runes of the language Tolkien invented for Bilbo Baggins. 

Baum, children’s literature — that’s right, he’s descended from L. Frank Baum, the author of the Oz series, and so the question becomes just who is that man behind the curtain. 

Let’s pull back our own curtain a bit, shall we? A difficulty in reviewing a plot-driven book like this is that if you’re not a fan of summarization, if in fact you avoid it as much as you do revealing spoilers, then where are you?

Perhaps back with likable Tuck. Here’s a glimpse: “I have a set formula for selecting my attire. Shirt from the top of the pile, shorts with the most elastic, trousers with remnants of a crease, shoes with a semblance of polish. Then I top that off with the sweater with the least lint balls and the jacket with the fewest dog hairs. Finally, double-checking that the socks are a close match, I am ready to roll.”

Humility will get you everywhere.

Ray Merritt’s previous books include “Full of Grace: A Journey Through the History of Childhood.” A former corporate lawyer, he lives on North Haven.

“From Silk to Silicon”

Jeffrey E. Garten

HarperCollins, $29.99

I’ve attended every Democratic convention since 1980, when, as a high school senior, I navigated the Missouri caucuses to emerge as a Ted Kennedy delegate. This summer — nine conventions later — I was particularly excited to go to Philadelphia to see the first woman ever nominated for president by a major party. It would be smooth sailing, I thought. 

Yet, each night when I stood in the crowded Wells Fargo Center, it was clear that something was amiss. The neatly packaged party narrative was interrupted. Bernie Sanders supporters, activists, and other progressives were making an unusual objection. Theirs wasn’t solely an antiwar message or a civil rights protest. This year’s political revolution had an antitrade message at its core. Hand-drawn signs with “TPP” written on them and a bold slash through it were everywhere. I heard Buffalo Springfield’s refrain in my head, “There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.” 

Hillary Clinton, once an advocate for multilateral trade agreements, was forced to back off her endorsement of the Trans-Pacific Partnership to keep her coalition together. And in Cleveland at the Republican convention one week earlier, the G.O.P. — usually a steadfast proponent of open markets and increased international commerce — nominated a dissident with a distinctly nationalistic message. For globalists and trade enthusiasts, this may truly be the summer of their discontent. 

Swimming against the tide of rhetoric and going far deeper than sound bites, Jeffrey Garten’s “From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives” explains the complex economic and geopolitical forces beneath the uproar. Like Mr. Garten’s previous works, including “The Politics of Fortune” and “A Cold Peace,” this book is deeply researched, thoughtful, and enlightening. Mr. Garten reframes the trade dilemma in human terms, profiling 10 individuals who were crucial to the rise of globalism. In doing so, he helps the lay reader understand why globalization is causing such a ruckus.

Some of the profiles are of people we know — or think we know — well: Genghis Khan, John D. Rockefeller, Margaret Thatcher, and Deng Xiaoping. Others were new to me: the British Empire builder Robert Clive, the early technology entrepreneur Cyrus Field, and the European diplomat Jean Monnet. According to Mr. Garten, each “made the world smaller and more interconnected.” The framework, the author further explains, is essential because “understanding the central personalities of our past constitutes the flesh and blood of history.”

Mr. Garten gets right to the heart of the tension in the opening chapter, on Genghis Khan, the brutal conqueror who opened the trade routes across China, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean to establish what became known as the Silk Road. Mr. Garten notes, “His life reflects the two sides of globalization — the dislocation and destruction that it can inflict and the peace, modernization, and prosperity that it can create.”

John D. Rockefeller also personified the complexities associated with global expansion and economic inequality. Mr. Garten describes Rockefeller as a hard-driving “pioneer and predator.” He built Standard Oil and manipulated the railroads in pursuit of his monopoly. The tables turned on Rockefeller in the 1890s when the Progressives won a big victory with the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act to punish the trusts that controlled tobacco, steel, sugar, and other industries. Standard Oil and Rockefeller himself became targets of public anger. 

Shortly thereafter, Rockefeller started to give away his money, becoming one of the world’s most generous philanthropists. “One can be forgiven for thinking that John was two men, one obsessed with making money, the other with giving it away; one the master of rapacious corporate tactics to slay competitors, the other dedicated to improving conditions for humanity.”

In the chapter on Margaret Thatcher, the author brings the Iron Lady to life. Mr. Garten claims Thatcher’s greatest achievement was not being the first woman to become prime minister of Great Britain, but that she “exceeded this distinction by becoming the world’s most important advocate for freeing trade and investment from government control, selling off state-owned companies to the private sector, weakening labor unions, and in general allowing markets to link with one another to cross borders and build a web of connections that became — and remains — the major force of globalization.” 

I wonder what Prime Minister Thatcher would make of the recent vote by the British public to exit the European Union. And I shudder to think what the Iron Lady would think of the recently elected second female prime minister, Theresa May — a fellow Conservative with a populist tone and antibusiness rhetoric. There are several moments in “From Silk to Silicon” when the past echoes in the present as the arguments for and against globalization continue to reverberate.

The final portrait is of Deng Xiaoping and his tumultuous journey through modern Chinese history. Deng lived and worked in the shadow of Mao Zedong, at times in Mao’s favor and other moments in exile. Deng was a veteran of the Long March and the Chinese Revolution, but wound up under house arrest during the Cultural Revolution. Deng orchestrated an amazing comeback late in life, rising to top positions in the government and ultimately becoming Communist Party leader, China’s most powerful figure, from the 1970s through 1997. 

Mr. Garten identifies Deng as a pivotal figure. “Deng was obsessed with science, technology, and education. . . . He supported increased budgets and better working conditions for researchers. In a sharp departure from Mao, he encouraged more Chinese students to study abroad, and more contact between Chinese and Western scientists. To make his modernization priorities clear, Deng built trips to the West around visits to companies such as Boeing and IBM.”

Throughout the book, one marvels at Mr. Garten’s objectivity, though suspects he is a globalization proponent. That perspective does not prevent him from laying bare globalization’s most horrific elements: “It started slowly enough with the kidnapping of a few African natives, then progressed to bartering with tribal leaders, exchanging Portuguese linen, silver, and wheat for African men, women, and children. On the morning of August 8, 1444, the first cargo of 235 Africans, taken from what is now Senegal, were delivered to the Portuguese port of Lagos. Historians say this is when modern slavery began.” 

One cannot help but notice that Mr. Garten’s history of international commercial activity was — as the elite business world is today — largely the purview of men. Nine of the 10 individuals he profiles are men. All blurbs of praise on the book jacket are from men. There are few female voices.

Male-dominated voices aside, there is little to criticize in “From Silk to Silicon” and much to praise — especially the way in which Mr. Garten is a natural teacher. He educates his reader about economic and foreign policy, bringing us along without an ounce of condescension. You can almost hear the excitement in his voice as he describes each scene with enthusiasm, as if he were discovering these details for the first time.

“From Silk to Silicon” was 10 years in the making, and yet the timing is perfect. The conflict between economic growth and growing inequality makes this book absolutely of the moment. The profiles through history offer current insights into other contemporary quagmires, from environmental pressures to immigration and refugee upheaval. 

In the final chapter, Mr. Garten reviews some common traits among his 10 subjects. “Each had missionary-like faith in what they were attempting to do,” he writes. These leaders also “swam with the stream rather than against it.” They capitalized on the moment. And Mr. Garten expresses surprise at “just how deep in the nitty-gritty most of my subjects waded.” 

Fortitude, good timing, and command of the details could be equally good descriptors for Mr. Garten himself.

Jeffrey E. Garten is dean emeritus at the Yale School of Management. He lives part time in East Hampton.

Sally Susman is a regular book reviewer for The Star. She lives in Manhattan and Sag Harbor.