Among Schoolchildren

Tracy Kidder — the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Soul of a New Machine and the extraordinary national bestseller House — spent nine months in Mrs. Zajac's fifth-grade classroom in the depressed "Flats" of Holyoke, Massachusetts. For an entire year he lived among twenty schoolchildren and their indomitable, compassionate teacher — sharings their joys, their catastrophes, and their small but essential triumphs. As a result, he has written a revealing, remarkably poignant ac…