In the current deluge of "civil rights" literature, this excellent book [The New Equality] is unlikely to get the wide reading it deserves. Which is too bad, for it is one of the few to put "the movement" in a broader context, to deal in recommendations as well as jeremiads, and to adopt a radical as opposed to a liberal stance (that is, dealing in essentials rather than palliatives). The book has faults, largely organizational. Since they are not significant when weighed against...

Hentoff's ability to speak both passionately and objectively makes The First Freedom a success. Readers are left with two valuable insights, each essential to a healthy tolerance for the role of free expression in our society. The first is that the First Amendment has never been static. The wording seems simple enough ("Congress shall make no law …") but the interpretation and application of those words to changing circumstances has been one of the great challenges to our society...

Nat Hentoff has written two novels for teenagers: one good, Jazz Country …; and one, to my mind, a failure, I'm really dragged but nothing gets me down…. In his essay "Fiction for Teenagers," Hentoff says, "Is it possible, then, to reach these children of McLuhan in that old-time medium, the novel? I believe it is, because their primary concerns are only partially explored in the messages they get from their music and are diverted rather than probed on television. I...

Mr. Hentoff's ["In the Country of Ourselves"] focuses on three urban high school activists—Josh, Schwartz and Jane—in course of telling the story of a student uprising that's violently put down by cops. Josh is the head of a Revolutionary High School Collective and bent on major acts of violence—to awaken classmates to the truth that they are in "a state of false consciousness … unfree … channelled into roles in the society that would &#x...

Mr. Hentoff's book [The New Equality] is the most sophisticated gloss of the [Civil Rights] Movement to date. So keen is his sensibility, so evident his intimacy with what's going on, and, most important, so pertinent are his suggestions for social action that The New Equality, for all its brevity, stands almost alone … among the flood of recent books on the subject. One has confidence that Hentoff really understands what Negroes are feeling. But a further distinction is that his accoun...

Jazz Country is a novel directed at young people struggling to realize themselves; it is also a gem of a book that talks rare sense about the ambiguities of race, the difficulties of a child's growth, and the ironies of artistic life. Tom, son of a New York corporation lawyer, plays the trumpet with near single-minded devotion. He is finishing high school and wondering whether to enter college or make a try at being a professional jazz musician. To do the latter means leaving white, middle-class terr...

[The Day They Came to Arrest the Book is a] fictionalized airing of the book censorship issue, set in a high school with a weak, oily principal, a strong and principled English teacher, and a new librarian…. Hentoff avoids the predictable alliances by making the complainant a black parent who objects to the use of "nigger" in Huckleberry Finn. Before the book issue emerges, Hentoff sets the stage with a guest debate, for an American history class, between an articulate conservative and ...

[At the end of "The Day They Came to Arrest the Book"], George Mason High School and the community have just emerged from bloody struggle between the forces of darkness seeking to censor "Huckleberry Finn" and the forces of light. By a dramatic last-minute shift the latter have won a precarious victory, and Moore [the high school principal] is already plotting to unleash another assault when the balance on the school board is tipped. The new members include a black "activi...

The American boys' private school has had a bad press in recent times. John Knowles's A Separate Peace and Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War uncovered tensions and animosities of peculiar cruelty. Nat Hentoff's Alcott School [in This School Is Driving Me Crazy] is seen from a more comic standpoint, but the plot still turns upon bullying and extortion in the corridors and cloakrooms. Sam Davidson is amusingly scatter-brained, highly articulate, given to thoughtless horsing around...

Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick, Tattered Tom and Ben the Luggage Boy—those brave little ragamuffins of a century ago—have long since petrified into pillars of the community. Sweet were their uses of adversity, as they parlayed pants patches into stock certificates…. [Today, one hundred years after Alger, rags] have become the symbol of riches. Youthful outcries against the system, the Establishment and middle-class consuming have become so persistent and eloquent that moral outrage ...

["Does This School Have Capital Punishment?" is] a sentimental fantasy, complete with good guys who need to learn compassion, bad guys who turn out to have soft hearts and a fairy godfather in the form of a great old black jazz musician. It is improbable, to say the least, that a renowned trumpeter named Major Kelley would travel from New York to Chicago to help a bright, smart-alecky white kid beat an unfair accusation of marijuana possession—and then buy a cake inscribed "INNOC...

Two centuries after Shakespeare, not to mention ten times as many after Homer, people still did not know what "poetry is."… So it is hardly surprising that, after the mere 75 years in the history of jazz, this latter-day art form still tempts the definers. In "Jazz Is" a long-time social critic and heart-on-sleeve jazz specialist throws the latest lifeline to a laity left floundering by such wry semi-truths as the one attributed to jazz's Shakespeare, Louis Armstron...

[I'm Really Dragged but Nothing Gets Me Down is an] episodic story in which believable, sincere, intelligent and philosophically opposed characters discuss their differences, don't resolve them, and are left with nagging frustration and a sense of solitude. High school senior Jeremy Wolf wishes he were sufficiently emancipated to smoke pot, sufficiently courageous and zealous to resist the draft, and enough of a soul brother to be able to get through to a kid in a tutorial program. While despi...

By any standard—and surely these days books for the 14-year-old upwards ought to stand up as adult fare—[Jazz Country] is an excellent novel. Not only does Nat Hentoff show with great perception the development of one boy's understanding of other people, but without any strain, without recourse to either hip jargon or learned explanations, he opens for the uninitiated the significance of the world of jazz…. Tom is a nice guy, making good grades at school and with the kind of calm...

Sam Davidson [the protagonist of This School Is Driving Me Crazy] is a bright, energetic boy with a Big Problem: he doesn't want to attend the school of which his father is headmaster. Father insists. Sam, always in some minor scrape or up to some mischief, is his teachers' despair. When a smaller boy, lying, accuses Sam of being the bully who forced him to steal, matters come to a head; the trio of real bullies is unmasked and expelled, the attitudes of teachers are exposed, and the relations...

Nat Hentoff's "I'm Really Dragged But Nothing Gets Me Down" treats an important dilemma: how best can a young man serve his country and himself and retain his sense of morality? Jeremy Wolf, 18, and his friends must face the issues of the draft. Refusing to register means a prison sentence, a loss of five years out of life; accepting a draft card, in their view, means accepting a sellout to murder; capitalizing on their opportunity for deferment by attending college means that th...

[The Day They Came to Arrest the Book is an] undisguised but timely and articulate issue book with a number of artfully developed stereotypes…. New librarian Dierdre Fitzgerald finds herself smack in the middle of [a censorship] controversy when a student, objecting to Twain's portrayal of blacks and his use of the word "nigger" in [Huckleberry Finn] …, complains to his father, who petitions the principal (the most odious character in the book) for the novel's withd...

Fresh from Hentoff's This School Is Driving Me Crazy …, [in Does This School Have Capital Punishment?], Sam Davidson enrolls in Burr Academy, noted for its discipline and fairness, Sam's rebelliousness and carelessness, however, soon get him into trouble—he's caught with the circumstantial evidence after Jeremiah Saddlefield had thrown half-smoked joints at Sam and his friend Rob and run out of the locker room. The headmaster places Sam and Rob on probation until he can ge...

"Fiction can be more real than fact, can tell you more about what ordinary people were like," according to a student at the high school where Hentoff sets ["The Day They Came to Arrest the Book"]. The statement implies the reason for the fictional treatment of real and widely aired demands for book censorship. The format works well, thanks to the author's striking use of dialogue, individualizing a large cast of opposing characters…. Adding fuel to incendiary debate...

In the Country of Ourselves [like Jazz Country and I'm Really Dragged But Nothing Gets Me Down is] about being in high school today, but it displays even more of an awareness of the complexities of this situation than did the two earlier novels. Here, mutually suspicious black and white radical students, with the aid of a concerned teacher and an apparent New Left sympathizer in the local police force, attempt to disrupt order in the high school they attend. Opposing them is a stubborn, authoritarian...

[Nat Hentoff's The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America] is the first truly popular history of the First Amendment, making it accessible to senior high students and non-scholarly minded adults…. [Hentoff provides] the background for understanding why the framers of the Constitution's Bill of Rights felt that it was necessary to spell out the restrictions the Constitution was placing on government. This background information is followed by discussion of numero...

Without using an over-abundance of slang [in Does This School Have Capital Punishment?, Nat Hentoff] creates believable teenage dialogue. Sam is both funny and earnest in his ironic observations; conversation reveals the character of the adults, too. The contemptuous school director and Jeremiah's callous father are antagonists, and—realistically—neither of them is completely vanquished at the conclusion. The relationships between the fathers and the sons are central to the plot, yet no...

["Jazz Country"] is the best of the teen-age books I have read. Not only does it render the experience of jazz with passion, with what strikes an uninformed reader as veracity; it presents its Negro characters with honesty and dignity, capturing well the white boy's longing to partake of the Negro experience in order, as he thinks, to produce great jazz. Yet it is precisely in so far as it is tailored for teen-agers that the book fails. Its teen-age hero is cardboard, its plot an outrag...

[Despite] a forthright title This School is Driving Me Crazy proves something of a disappointment. Deep in the heart of the Blackboard Jungle, where protection rackets flourish and honour rides high, Nat Hentoff's anti-hero plays an unpleasant double-act as petulant pupil and headmaster's son. The text makes heavy weather of a fine central theme. Furious bursts of capital letters and italics highlight parental psychology; interest lapses after the villains' cover is blown and the final ...