The Headmaster Ritual
Original airdate: July 27, 2007
About the Book: A novice teacher and an alienated senior endure a year under the hand of the school’s manipulative headmaster with a sinister agenda of his own.
Taylor Antrim’s debut is a clear-eyed examination of hidden worlds whose complexities and rules are only 
understood from inside: the insular ecosystem of boarding school; the thorny dynamics of fathers and sons; and the self-deluding excesses of blind ideological commitment.
Dyer Martin, a new history teacher at the prestigious Britton School, arrives in the fall ready to close the door on the failures of his past: a disastrous first job, a broken engagement, and acute uncertainty about his future. James, a lonely senior, just wants to make it through his last year unscathed, avoiding both the brutal hazing of dorm-life and the stern and unforgiving eye of his father, the school’s politically radical headmaster, Ed Wolfe.
But soon both Dyer and James are inescapably drawn into Wolfe’s hidden agenda for Britton, as the headmaster orders Dyer to set up and run a Model UN club for students. As the United States moves steadily toward a conflict with an increasingly hostile North Korea, whose pursuit of nuclear technology is pushing the world to the brink of nuclear armageddon, Wolfe’s political fervor begins to consume him. And he sets in motion a plan that jeopardizes his job, his school, and even the life of his own son.
Taylor Antrim is an editor at ForbesLife and a regular contributor to the New York Times and to Vogue. His work has appeared in Esquire, San Francisco Chronicle, Village Voice, and other magazines and journals. A graduate of Stanford and of Oxford, he earned his MFA from Virginia, where he held the Poe-Faulkner Fellowship.
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