A memorable, uplifting story about a man who helped students create meaning, hope and magic for themselves and their...
A journalist’s account of the final years in a drama teacher’s storied career at a high school in Levittown, Pa., a former mill city fallen on hard times.
Harry S. Truman High was “at best, second rate,” writes New York Times Magazine contributor Sokolove (Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women's Sports, 2008, etc.). But it was also the home of an acclaimed drama program that drew attention from the likes of Cameron Mackintosh, producer of such smash hits as Phantom of the Opera and Miss Saigon. The man behind the program, Lou Volpe, was the main reason for its amazing success. Sokolove follows his former teacher and two groups of students Volpe worked with at Truman High between 2010 and 2012. Demanding, complex and sensitive, Volpe, who was also Sokolove’s high school English teacher, taught by instinct rather than formula. The main lesson he passed on to his students was that dramatic art was not just a way of expressing feelings, but also of “fully embracing, and understanding, life.” Volpe never shied away from controversial subject matter, nor did he balk at having his students perform plays that had only been done by professional theater companies. In the two years the book covers, this gifted teacher brought two sexually explosive plays—Good Boys and True and Spring Awakening—to the Truman stage. Volpe showed his students, who ranged from drama “regulars” to athletes to talented unknowns, how to harness the discomfort that often characterized their lives and channel it into their art. The results were astonishing by most measures but ordinary by the Truman drama program’s standards. Good Boys earned the class a berth at a prestigious high school theater festival, and Volpe’s version of Spring Awakening received the nod from its Broadway producers to be performed at other high schools.
A memorable, uplifting story about a man who helped students create meaning, hope and magic for themselves and their beleaguered community.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59448-822-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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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