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Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China
As a twenty-year-old exchange student from Stanford University, John Pomfret spent a year at Nanjing University in China. His fellow classmates were among those who survived the twin tragedies of Mao’s rule—the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution—and whose success in government and private industry today are shaping China’s future. Pomfret went on to a career in journalism, spending the bulk of his time in China. After attending the twentieth reunion of his class, he decided to reacquaint himself with some of his classmates. Chinese Lessons is their story and his own.
Beginning with Pomfret’s first days in China, Chinese Lessons takes us back to the often torturous paths that brought together the Nanjing University History Class of 1982. One classmate’s father was killed during the Cultural Revolution for the crime of being an intellectual; another classmate labored in the fields for years rather than agree to a Party-arranged marriage; a third was forced to publicly denounce and humiliate her father. As we watch Pomfret and his classmates begin to make their lives as adults, we see as never before the human cost and triumph of China’s transition from near-feudal communism to first-world capitalism.
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Price: $8.16
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Classmates, The: Privilege, Chaos, and the End of an Era
Fifty years ago, in the fall of 1957, two thirteen-year-old boys were enrolled at an elite, boys-only New England boarding school. One of them, descended from wealth and eminence, would go on to Yale, then to a career as a navy officer and Vietnam war hero, and finally to the U.S. Senate, from where he would fall just short of the White House. The other was a scholarship student, a misfit giant of a boy from a Pennsylvania farm town who would suffer shameful debasements at the hands of his classmates, then go on to a solitary and largely anonymous life as a salesman of encyclopedias and trailer parts--before dying, alone, twelve months after his classmate's narrow loss on Election Day 2004. It is around these two figures, John Kerry and a boy known here only as Arthur, the bookends of a class of one hundred boys, that Geoffrey Douglas--himself a member of that boarding-school class--builds this remarkable memoir. His portrait of their lives and the lives of five others in that class--two more Vietnam veterans with vastly divergent stories, a federal judge, a gay New York artist who struggled for years to find his place in the world, and Douglas himself--offers a memorable look back to a generation caught between the expectations of their fathers and the sometimes terrifying pulls of a society driven by war, defiance, and self-doubt. The class of 1962 was not so different from any other, with its share of swaggerers and shining stars, outcasts and scholarship students. Its distinction was in its timing: at the precise threshold of the cultural and political upheavals of the late 1960s. The world these boys had been trained to enter and to lead, a world very similar to their fathers', would be exploded and recast almost at the moment of their entrance--forcing choices whose consequences were sometimes lifelong. Douglas's chronicle of those times and choices is both a capsule history of an era and a literary tour de force..
Price: $10.41
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The Boys from Dolores: Fidel Castro's Classmates from Revolution to Exile
From the author of Chasing Che, the remarkable tale of a group of boys at the heart of Cuba's political and social history The Boys from Dolores illuminates the elite island society from which Fidel Castro and his brother Raul emerged. The Colegio de Dolores was a Jesuit boarding school in Santiago, Cuba's rich and ancient second city, where Fidel and Raul were educated in the 1930s and '40s. Patrick Symmes begins his story here, tracking down dozens of Fidel's schoolmates glimpsed in a single period photograph. And it is through their stories--their time at the Colegio; the catastrophic effects of the revolution on their lives; their fates since--that Symmes opens a door onto a Cuba, and a time in Castro’s life, that have been deliberately obscured from us. Here too is the elusive Raúl Castro, a cipher destined to rule Cuba in Fidel’s place. We see Castro in his formative youth, an adolescent ruling the classrooms of the Colegio and running in the streets of Santiago. Symmes traces the years in which the revolution was conceived, won, and lost, describing the changes it wrought in Santiago and in the lives of Fidel’s own classmates: we follow them through the maelstrom of the 1960s, as most fight to leave Cuba and a few stay behind. And here, in Santiago today, Symmes finds Castro’s most lasting achievement, the creating and sustaining of a myth-soaked revolutionary idealism amid the harshest realities of daily life. Wholly original in its approach, The Boys from Dolores is a powerfully evocative, eye-opening portrait of Cuba--and of the Castro brothers--in the twentieth century..
Price: $7.94
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Miss Clarkson's Classmate (Signet Regency Romance)
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Vocabulary Improvement Program for English Language Learners and Their Classmates: 5th Grade (Vocabulary Improvement Program for English Language Learners and Their Classmates)
Now teachers can give their students the crucial vocabulary practice they need with this curriculum, which is proven equally effective for English-language learners (ELLs) or students whose first language in English. This program uses an innovative approach to help students build a "toolbox" of skills to decipher unfamiliar words' meanings. Ideal for classrooms with both English- and Spanish-speaking ELLs, the curriculum combines teacher-directed instruction with cooperative group learning and individual activities for vocabulary reinforcement. An age-appropriate, 18-week curriculum used for 30 minutes a day. Includes step-by-step Teacher's Guide..
Price: $39.95
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Vocabulary Improvement Program for English Language Learners and Their Classmates: 4th Grade (Vocabulary Improvement Program for English Language Learners and Their Classmates)
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Everybody Belongs: Changing Negative Attitudes Toward Classmates with Disabilities (Critical Education Practice)
In Everybody Belongs, Dr. Arthur Shapiro discusses how negative myths and stereotypes create ingrained prejudices toward people with disabilities This much-needed text stresses the importance of changing handicapist attitudes and developing a rationale for fostering positive ones. Popular beliefs, myths, and stereotypes are dispelled. Everybody Belongs balances theory with the practical application of ways to change negative prejudices in the classroom..
Price: $45.18
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The Class of 1861: Custer, Ames, and Their Classmates after West Point
George Armstrong Custer wrote about his friend Pierce Manning Butler Young, who left West Point to become a Confederate general: "I remember a conversation held at the table at which I sat during the winter of '60–'61. I was seated next to Cadet P. M. B. Young, a gallant young fellow, a classmate of mine, then and since the war an intimate and valued friend—a major-general in the Confederate forces during the war and a member of Congress from his native State [Georgia] at a later date. The approaching war was as usual the subject of conversation in which all participated, and in the freest and most friendly manner. . . . Finally, in a half jocular, half earnest manner, Young turned to me and delivered himself as follows: 'Custer, my boy, we're going to have war. It's no use talking: I see it coming. All the Crittenden compromises that can be patched up won't avert it. Now let me prophesy what will happen to you and me. You will go home, and your abolition Governor will probably make you colonel of a cavalry regiment. I will go down to Georgia, and ask Governor Brown to give me a cavalry regiment. And who knows but we may move against each other during the war. . . .' Lightly as we both regarded this boyish prediction, it was destined to be fulfilled in a remarkable degree." Ralph Kirshner has provided a richly illustrated forum to enable the West Point class of 1861 to write its own autobiography. Through letters, journals, and published accounts, George Armstrong Custer, Adelbert Ames, and their classmates tell in their own words of their Civil War battles and of their varied careers after the war. Two classes graduated from West Point in 1861 because of Lincoln's need of lieutenants, forty-five cadets in Ames's class in May and thirty-four in Custer's class in June. The cadets range from Henry Algernon du Pont, first in the class of May, whose ancestral home is now Winterthur Garden, to Custer, last in the class of June. "Only thirty-four graduated," remarked Custer, "and of these thirty-three graduated above me." West Point's mathematics professor and librarian Oliver Otis Howard, after whom Howard University is named, is also portrayed. Other famous names from the class of 1861 are John Pelham, Emory Upton, Thomas L. Rosser, John Herbert Kelly (the youngest general in the Confederacy when appointed), Patrick O'Rorke (head of the class of June), Alonzo Cushing, Peter Hains, Edmund Kirby, John Adair (the only deserter in the class), and Judson Kilpatrick (great-grandfather of Gloria Vanderbilt). They describe West Point before the Civil War, the war years, including the Vicksburg campaign and the battle of Gettysburg, the courage and character of classmates, and the ending of the war. Kirshner also highlights postwar lives, including Custer at Little Bighorn; Custer's rebel friend Rosser; John Whitney Barlow, who explored Yellowstone; du Pont, senator and author; Kilpatrick, playwright and diplomat; Orville E. Babcock, Grant's secretary until his indictment in the "Whiskey Ring"; Pierce M. B. Young, a Confederate general who became a diplomat; Hains, the only member of the class to serve on active duty in World War I; and Upton, "the class genius." The book features eighty-three photographs of all but one of the graduates and some of the nongraduates. Kirshner includes an appendix entitled "Roll Call," which discusses their contributions and lists them according to rank in the class. George A. Plimpton provides a foreword about his great-grandfather, Adelbert Ames-Reconstruction governor of Mississippi and the last surviving Civil War general-and President Kennedy. .
Price: $11.11
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Ayiana and the Hurricane Katrina Classmate
Ayiana and the Hurricane Katrina Classmate is based on the main character Ayiana Cimone Powell. Ayiana is a mature, sensitive, African-American teenager, who helps a classmate affected by Hurricane Katrina transition to some form of stability. GinaMarie uses the characters Annie Marie and Geneva Reece, Gertrude Jefferson, and Katherine Cater as staples to complete the “tangible humanity.” Ayiana and the Hurricane Katrina Classmate is a story that will make children of all ages, from all walks of life, “unselfishly” embrace anyone in need..
Price: $19.94
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