A captivating story of hopeless young men whose committed teacher listens—and thereby learns as much as he teaches.
Novelist Salzman (Lying Awake, 2000, etc.) chronicles his experiences as a teacher of writing to young defendants held in Central Juvenile Hall, Los Angeles.
It makes quite a contrast with the gentle tone of Salzman’s memoir about teaching in China (Iron and Silk, 1986), having more in common with the how-I-survived-in-a-tough-classroom accounts of George Dennison and Jonathan Kozol. In 1997, needing background for a juvenile delinquent character in his novel-in-progress, the writer visited a class of juvenile criminals taught by a friend and began teaching his own group after succumbing to some arm-twisting from the friend and from a dedicated nun, Sister Janet, who appears throughout the text. An author’s note informs us that he “re-created from memory” the conversations he held with these tough young men (most accused of murder), and he must have quite a memory, for the narrative is principally dialogue. Salzman held two one-hour sessions per week as part of a project sponsored by a nonprofit foundation. Here, he describes individual class sessions and reproduces (verbatim, he says, with only the spelling and mechanics standardized) some of the pieces the students wrote during the class. Their work ranges from angry to poignant to ugly to horrifying to horrible to pathetic. Salzman occasionally takes us outside—a particularly effective instance involves watching a meteor shower with his father in Arizona—but for the most part he confines his story, like his students, so readers feel the institutional claustrophobia. The author carefully documents his insecurities, his frustrations, and his occasional inability to coax much work or interest—or even civility—from the class, but he also describes in great detail his many successes, most notably a “retreat” that he helps arrange with writing students from other units in the facility. Neither does he neglect to record numerous laudatory comments about his work from colleagues, students, and corrections officers.
A captivating story of hopeless young men whose committed teacher listens—and thereby learns as much as he teaches.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-41308-1
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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