... The man in question is Larry Hillblom, who merited a brief obituary in The New York Times when his World War II-era seaplane disappeared in the Pacific Ocean off Saipan in 1995, but scarcely a line before or since. That’s a pity: He merits a book.

Hillblom, a native of Kingsburg, is the “H” in DHL, the express-delivery company he co-founded in 1969 after noting, as an impoverished law student at the University of California, Berkeley, that he could make a buck ferrying legal documents in need of urgent execution from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

That trivial aperçu turned out, in the best American tradition, to be worth billions of dollars to him and other shareholders.

With DHL, Hillblom challenged the U.S. postal monopoly. Behind its rapid growth was his winning intuition about globalization. In fact, Hillblom never saw a regulation he didn’t want to overturn or an oversight he didn’t exploit. Anarchy did not so much touch as inhabit him....