Books in Brief

White Teacher in a Black School, by Robert Kendall (Devin-Adair, $4.95). Robert Kendall spent two years teaching English in a 90 per cent Negro school in Los Angeles. He volunteered for the assignment because he felt he could help the underprivileged children he would be teaching. But although warned what it would be like, he was unprepared not only for the filthy mouthed, filthy mannered, violent, retarded and perverted children he taught, but even more for the callous disregard of the existing situation shown by every school administrator and educationist he encountered. The boy who threw a knife at Mr. Kendall was sent to “Social Adjustment” and Kendall was called on the carpet for allowing conduct that might give the school a bad name. When Kendall protested that a boy who was so severely retarded that at the age of fourteen he crawled into the classroom on his hands and knees, should be sent to a special school, he was told: that’s none of your business, just see he gets a passing grade. Mr. Kendall is a very angry young man. And his anger is directed more at the school principals and administrators who put up with the situation than with the children who made his life hell. Highly recommended for the sanctimonious. Perhaps the mother who doesn’t want her child bused to a predominantly Negro school is not a racist; perhaps she just doesn’t want her ten-year-old exposed to the first words Robert Kendall heard when he walked into his new school: “You don’t call my mother no whore and get by with it, you dirty sonofabitch!” P. L. BUCKLEY

Vietnam, An Eye-witness Account, by Suzanne Labin (Crestwood Books, $1.50). It’s all here. The whole, awful story (minus of course the death twitches of the past several months) of the Vietnam tragedy. A “tragedy,” that is, with respect to the focal point of the book and the Vietnam story generally: the assassination of the Diem Government, after its dedicated, agonized struggle to reform and remould the conglomerate of disparate and helpless Indochinese into a nation. A nation which successfully parried a Communist monolith, and a nation which had just discovered itself as a viable, free people. Miss Labin is both French, and a woman —which accounts for the excesses of her documentary (overdrawn syllogisms, pages spotted with boldface, capitalized and italicized harangues, and so on). None of these instances of hyperbole particularly bothered me; nor does her black-and-white view of the over-all politico-military picture in Vietnam. We are, after all, at war in Indochina. And in war there is the enemy, and your ally. You back the ally to the hilt—and leave worrying about social-working his problems (if at all) for peacetime. (Unless we’re to be off on another binge to make the world safe for democracy, that is.) And it is the case against our doing just this that Miss Labin so concisely states.

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White Teacher in a Black School, by Robert Kendall (Devin-Adair, $4.95). Robert Kendall spent two years teaching English in a 90 per cent Negro school in Los Angeles. He volunteered for the assignment because he felt he could help the underprivileged children he would be teaching. But although warned what it would be like, he was unprepared not only for the filthy mouthed, filthy mannered, violent, retarded and perverted children he taught, but even more for the callous disregard of the existing situation shown by every school administrator and educationist he encountered. The boy who threw a knife at Mr. Kendall was sent to “Social Adjustment” and Kendall was called on the carpet for allowing conduct that might give the school a bad name. When Kendall protested that a boy who was so severely retarded that at the age of fourteen he crawled into the classroom on his hands and knees, should be sent to a special school, he was told: that’s none of your business, just see he gets a passing grade. Mr. Kendall is a very angry young man. And his anger is directed more at the school principals and administrators who put up with the situation than with the children who made his life hell. Highly recommended for the sanctimonious. Perhaps the mother who doesn’t want her child bused to a predominantly Negro school is not a racist; perhaps she just doesn’t want her ten-year-old exposed to the first words Robert Kendall heard when he walked into his new school: “You don’t call my mother no whore and get by with it, you dirty sonofabitch!” P. L. BUCKLEY

Vietnam, An Eye-witness Account, by Suzanne Labin (Crestwood Books, $1.50). It’s all here. The whole, awful story (minus of course the death twitches of the past several months) of the Vietnam tragedy. A “tragedy,” that is, with respect to the focal point of the book and the Vietnam story generally: the assassination of the Diem Government, after its dedicated, agonized struggle to reform and remould the conglomerate of disparate and helpless Indochinese into a nation. A nation which successfully parried a Communist monolith, and a nation which had just discovered itself as a viable, free people. Miss Labin is both French, and a woman —which accounts for the excesses of her documentary (overdrawn syllogisms, pages spotted with boldface, capitalized and italicized harangues, and so on). None of these instances of hyperbole particularly bothered me; nor does her black-and-white view of the over-all politico-military picture in Vietnam. We are, after all, at war in Indochina. And in war there is the enemy, and your ally. You back the ally to the hilt—and leave worrying about social-working his problems (if at all) for peacetime. (Unless we’re to be off on another binge to make the world safe for democracy, that is.) And it is the case against our doing just this that Miss Labin so concisely states.