Teacher Random House Aug 2002 isbn: 0375504079 $23.95 buy

Mark Edmundson, October 8

Tuesday, 6pm
Harvard Info Center in the Holyoke Center
1350 Mass. Ave, Cambridge
tickets available in store

Edmundson (of the "Teacher", and professor of English at the University of Virginia) has written a brightly illuminated memoir about his teacher, the remarkable Frank Lears, who specialized in unsettling the settled high-school student during the larger cultural disorders of the late sixties. He asked unyielding questions, offered new models of caring, and had challenging expectations. 'Teachers who matter sow seeds like this all the time,' Edmundson writes. 'Some land on the rocks . . . but some take root, too, and they produce and yield'--even though it might take decades. Like Tom Barone's recent book, Touching Eternity (2001), this one is about how great teaching drives us to see our life and its possibilities in a new way, to live it more daringly and with fewer compromises, and to teach others in turn, as Edmundson does in this fine book for teachers and those who remember their own special teachers." -- Booklist