This School Is Driving Me Crazy

by Nat Hentoff

Twelve-year-old Sam, who has a magnetic attraction for trouble, finds it increasingly difficult to attend the school where his father is headmaster.

Genres: Young Adult, Fiction, Realistic Fiction, Childrens

160 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Nathan Irving "Nat" Hentoff was a historian, novelist, music critic, and syndicated columnist. As a civil libertarian and free-speech activist, he has been described by the Cato Institute—where he has been a senior fellow since 2009—as "one of the foremost authorities on the First Amendment" to the U.S. Constitution. He was a staff writer for The New Yorker for over 25 years, and was formerly a columnist for The Village Voice for over 50 years, in addition to Legal Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, and The Progressive, among others. Since 2014, he has been a regular contributor to the conservative Christian website WorldNetDaily, often in collaboration with his son Nick Hentoff.

Hentoff was a Fulbright Fellow at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1950 and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in education in 1972. The American Bar Association bestowed the Silver Gavel Award in 1980 for his columns on law and criminal justice, and five years later his undergraduate alma mater, Northeastern University, awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Law degree. While working at the Village Voice in 1995, the National Press Foundation granted him the W.M. Kiplinger Distinguished Contributions to Journalism Award. He was a 1999 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary, "for his passionate columns championing free expression and individual rights," which was won by Maureen Dowd. In 2004 he became the first non-musician to be named an NEA Jazz Master by the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts.

Hentoff lectured at many colleges, universities, law schools, elementary, middle and high schools, and has taught courses in journalism and the U.S. Constitution at Princeton University and New York University. He serves on the Board of Advisors of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (F.I.R.E.) and is on the steering committee of the Reporters' Committee for the Freedom of the Press.

Reviews

[Aaron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent, gritty Nat Hentoff young adult story captures the drudgery and bullying inside an expensive NYC school, and with this drama comes the book's only involving characters: the boys. Though prone to juvenile delinquency themselves and bad language, the three friends are believable and also honest with each other. The real villains are the teachers, fascist popular kids--who behave like organized crime--and women. Hentoff creates a gallery of shrewish characters in the book's few female teachers and the protagonist's mother; her relentless nagging and disapproval of everything only make the numerous scenes of arguing (school politics, family, law and order, etc.) hard to take. Otherwise, it's refreshing to see the subject of bullying and friendship captured so vividly in the Old World before cell phones and the internet.

[Vanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Já li este livro há muito tempo, mas lembro-me que gostei :) Não me lembro é grande coisa da história...

[Pedro · Rating 3 out of 5]

Não me lembro muito bem do "sabor" deste livro, mas sei que foi bom. Ponto. Nada de especial, apenas bom.

Tenho de o reler <_<

[Art · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reread July 1980.

[Seamus Fleming · Rating 3 out of 5]

The boy who cried retainer. 2.75 stars