Beating a Dead Stick - Paperback

by Herbert Knapp (Author)

A student at an urban high school is raped in the book room, but won't identify the rapist. Near the school, another student is murdered during a robbery at a convenience store. There are rumors of a call-girl ring involving the students, but the faculty remains comically oblivious.When English teacher Barbara Butler's best friend, a transvestite math teacher, is badly beaten but too frightened to identify his attacker, Barbara turns to a former student, now a grown-up detective, to discover the truth.While this book is about teenage gangsters and buffoonish educators, it is also about the way cultural changes tend to outrun our ability to describe them accurately, accounting for our indecisive and illogical efforts to cope with them.

Author Biography

HERBERT KNAPP taught in both public and private high schools for 25 years. He is the author of Did Your See This?: Poems to Provoke the Politically Correct (Girandole Books, 2016). He and his wife, Mary, now live in New York City. They are co-authors of One Potato, Two Potato: The Secret Education of American Children (W.W. Norton, 1976) and Red, White and Blue Paradise (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), a memoir of their years in the American Canal Zone in Panama.