Read This Book

This graphics-rich collaboration by three Gen X writers is like Jon Stewart’s America for the Y.A. set. But unlike Stewart’s readers — at least theoretically — the intended audience for “Americapedia” still needs to learn the basics of the American Revolution (“America Unfriends Great Britain”). So while the book holds no shortage of attitude and satire, it also imparts an impressive array of historical substance and even a degree of earnestness and patriotism, complete with an appendix on civic action for teenagers.      

 - Pamela Paul's review of Americapedia in The New York Times Sunday Book Review

The 6^th graders owned the back of the class. We were the spillover kids, one handful too many to squeeze into overcrowded rooms up the hall. To accommodate our odd numbers, the school shoved a bank of desks together in the 5th grade pod. The poor instructor had probably won Teacher of the Year the previous spring. Her prize for her excellence was a group of rowdy pre-adolescents gumming up the works in her class.

Because we were older and fewer, our teacher's main concern was keeping us out of trouble so she could teach her little ducklings. If she left us to our own devices for more than ten minutes, she would have a Lord of the Flies situation on her hands. Andy and I, seated across the island of desks from each other, did not help the situation. We irritated the spit out of each other. He razzed me until I was close to tears, probably because I was a hyper-sensitive dope and what's more fun than getting a rise out of a weepy pre-teen girl? I undoubtedly fumbled around for come-backs, and maybe even managed to bruise a remote corner of his ego with my screechy insults.

Our teacher tried to keep the lot of us out of trouble by throwing heaps of busy-work our way. Those wide-ruled, black-and-white composition books were one tool for classroom management. The assignments were the usual elementary school pablum – “What I Did on my Summer Vacation.” To kill time, we read our entries out loud to each other.

Bo-o-oring.

Until Andy got going. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who loved his stories most of all. Most days, I would have given anything to live on a different planet than that boy. But Andy's stories. . . well. They made me want to come back for a visit.

Memory fuzzes out after a couple of decades. The narratives might have involved the delicious comeuppance of the class bully. Maybe interplanetary hijinks between the cafeteria lady and the gym teacher. Who knows? All I remember were that his pieces were short, dangerous (the teacher was covering fractions with the toddlers up front, after all), and hysterically funny to an audience of 11-year-olds. Andy only needed a No. 2 pencil and half a blank page to make his peers titter and squirm in delight.

One brief moment in one otherwise indistinct day still blazes in my recollection. Snickering with my classmates as Andy read one of his naughty tales, a Mack truck plowed into me. I stopped laughing and reeled with a sudden realization. Andy had written it. This kid had taken a pencil and just written down a story from inside his own brain!

You would think this would not be such a revelation to a child raised by bibliophiles. My house had no television in it until I was ten years old. We owned records and art supplies and a big back yard, but what we collected in the greatest abundance was books. Mountains of books. Teetering, sagging shelves full of books.  From my earliest years, I had a voracious appetite for all those words. My father did not sit at the edge of my sister’s and my bunk bed and read Dr. Seuss. No, he read us Mark Twain. Charles Dickens. Victor Hugo. Seriously.  My childhood villain was Javert, not Boss Hogg.

Somehow, I had missed a key point in all that reading. A person, a real human person, had cut every one of my beloved characters from the cloth of imagination. Someone had written those stories.

Someone like Andy.

Why not someone like me?

The glare of this one single flashpoint from over 25 years ago still makes me blink. That day, I started writing. Really writing. Not just writing the dreary assignments doled out by an overworked and underpaid teacher, but building narratives. Playing with language. Practicing the craft.

I was eons behind Andy in both native talent and training hours logged. But I began then, at the unruly back end of a crowded classroom. I began to write.

As for Andy? He never stopped.

Next week, you can order Andisheh Nouraee's first book. Americapedia: Taking the Dumb out of Freedom, is launching on July 19th. That clever kid is one of three authors of this smart, satire-rich take on American politics and history. In the decades since he left those composition books behind, the fella’s wit has only grown sharper and his writing more polished.

And he still knows how to make every grinning idiot in the room squirm.

Read this book. Remember someone very real wrote it. Raise your glass – and your pencil – to that deserving guy.  Then go out and buy a few copies for your friends. Buy some for your enemies, too. You never know when you might learn something from them.