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A HERO LIKE ME: A HERO LIKE YOU by Robert Rossner

A HERO LIKE ME: A HERO LIKE YOU

By

Pub Date: May 3rd, 1972
Publisher: Saturday Review Press

The title will indicate the unexceptional niceness of Mr. Rossner's Tom Harris, a high school English teacher, as well as the mutuality of the experience with which he is dealing -- until it heads into a doubledecker melodrama where most of us who would like to stand up to be counted probably aren't. Tom Harris is at Albert Einstein High School -- one of those genius schools until the ""Negroes (begin) yapping at our heels"" and moral and humane considerations must be applied to the livecoal issues which featured in Rossner's actual account of the teachers' strike -- The Year Without an Autumn. Mostly this deals with Tom's own confrontation with an insidious, invidious adolescent, a Jewish Nazi called Alex Margolies whose black hostility is inherited in direct descent from his father. Then there's the fact that Tom knew Alex's father -- in kindergarten, and now is drawn into the failure of his marriage as well as of the youngster. Mr. Rossner has rigged this with the help of too many convenient coincidences so that you're more sympathetic than convinced. But as for his lower case hero, you'll quite like him.