Among Schoolchildren

Tracy Kidder--the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Soul of a New Machine and the extraordinary national bestseller House--spent nine months in Mrs. Zajac's fifth-grade classroom in the depressed "Flats" of Holyoke, Massachusetts. For an entire year he lived among twenty schoolchildren and their indomitable, compassionate teacher--sharing their joys, their catastrophes, and their small but essential triumphs. As a result, he has written a revealing, remarkably poignant account of education in America...and his most memorable, emotionally charged, and important book to date. SC, 340 pages.