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Why Shoot the Teacher

Max Braithwaite

Paperback Canadian Manners And Customs

''Now a Feature Film Starring Bud Cort and Samantha Eggar''--fr. cvr

Why Shoot the Teacher is a caustic, amiable, and unflinchingly honest account of one young man's first collision with reality - an ill paid teaching assignment in an isolated country school during the Great Depression.

The young man is Max Braithwaite, now one of this country's most successful authors and freelance writers. The story he has to tell is riotous, grim, candid and infinitely entertaining. This is a Braithwaite at his vintage best and the humor that earned him the 1972 Leacock Memorial Medal is here in rich abundance.

Here, too, is the de-humanizing desolation of the "Dirty Thirties" on the Saskatchewan Prairies, the ordeal of youth among a populace bereft of pity and charity, and the human compassion that adds warmth and poignancy to Braithwaite's recollections.