South of Heaven: Welcome to High School at the End of 20th Century [Paperback]

Thomas French (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1996

Five students including a popular overachiever, a self-destructive freshman, a determined African-American, a football player, and a troubled loner, offer a perspective on what modern school society is really like. Reprint.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Drawing from the year he spent at a Florida high school, journalist French probes into the lives of five contemporary American teenagers.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

A remarkably intimate--even painfully so--picture of a year in the life of a group of Florida high-school students. Education reporter French (Unanswered Cries, 1991) spent a year in Pinellas County's Largo High School, writing an award- winning series of articles for The St. Petersburg Times. The response from both adult and teenage readers was so positive that French returned to the school to gather additional material for this book by attending classes and social events, hanging out during breaks, and interviewing students, faculty, and families. So revealing is his portrait of teenage life today that one wonders how he did it: How did he persuade these young people to open up to him not only about school, study, and their futures, but also about their home lives, loves, jealousies, intrigues, and uninhibited good times? But open up they did, and their sad, brave, hopeful, and sometimes silly stories are recounted vividly here. Among the students are bright Mike Broome, who's so angry that no one- -teachers, friends, mother, brother--can reach him, and who eventually drops out; John Boyd, whose college football scholarship is threatened when he buys a gun to defend himself against the drug-dealers in his neighborhood and who stops a bullet with his history book; Andrea Taylor, who becomes the first black homecoming queen in Largo's history; and Christine Younskevicius, one of the ``Fearsome Foursome,'' a group of high-profile young women who run the school newspaper, throw darts at a picture of the principal, and take the author on an exuberant scavenger hunt. Here are the algebra tests, the hall passes, the dances and parties--but also the class that has only one student whose parents still live together in a ``traditional'' family; the scramble for high SAT scores; and the striving to earn money, find love, and maintain equilibrium without getting pregnant or doing drugs. An exceptionally revealing--and sympathetic--journey into the isolated, high-pressure world of our teenagers. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Pocket (March 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671898019
• ISBN-13: 978-0671898014
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #515,866 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must-read for every high school teacher, January 8, 1999

By 

Dianne Smith ([e-mail]) (Houston, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: South of Heaven: Welcome to High School at the End of 20th Century (Paperback)

I had the opportunity to hear Thomas French speak at a scholastic journalism convention in October, 1998 where he held the audience of teachers and teenagers spellbound as he recounted the year he spent documenting the lives of several students in a Florida high school. The book was every bit as powerful as the talk he gave. For every high school teacher who has ever felt the frustration with dealing with students whose first priority is not school, this book offers a special insight into why some students are the way they are, and why special programs for these students sometimes work and sometimes do not. Thomas French is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter from the St. Petersburg (FL) Times. I highly recommend this book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars South of Heaven, April 2, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: South of Heaven: Welcome to High School at the End of 20th Century (Paperback)

This book was about high school at the end of the twentieth century. A Largo High there's a program called GOALS, where teachers reach out to the students that try to escape school. It describes several students that attend Largo High and what they do outside of school. This book is great when it came to details.
My favorite character in this book was Christine Younskevicius, everybody calls her YY. She had three close friends that she was always hanging out with. YY was very involved in school, and everybody knew her at Largo High.
I enjoyed reading this book. It was long but worth it. When I was reading it, it felt like I was there watching or listening to what was happening. Those are the kind of books that I personally enjoy reading. This book caught my attention from the very beginning.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Pretty good, pretty accurate, January 10, 2002

By 

Joshua Trevino (Austin, Texas) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: South of Heaven: Welcome to High School at the End of the Twentieth Century (Hardcover)

I am a 1993 graduate of Lakewood High School in Pinellas County, Florida -- same county as Largo, with which I was fairly familiar during my three years at Lakewood. South of Heaven was initially appealing simply because I knew (sometimes tangentially, sometimes directly) a few of the people in the book, and because Tom French was a minor celebrity in our high school journalism class. It was therefore many years before I could read it with some equanimity and objectivity.

Ten years down the road, I have no idea if French's picture of high school is still accurate. What I do know is that it was accurate in 1992. French manages to convey well the social balkanization and creeping despair that infected Pinellas County schools in those days. He also seizes quite well upon the social archetypes of those schools, and does an admirable job of portraying them with sympathy despite their many fault. One certainly feels that French is an astute observer of social interactions: he zeros in on the crucial doings of Largo's social interplay, without losing the forest for the trees.

The book gets four stars for two reasons: first, the writing is journalistic rather than novelistic. French doesn't quite lose the "newspaper tone" in South of Heaven; it does not translate so easily from serial to book as did, say, Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down. It's hardly a fatal flaw, just a nagging one. The second shortcoming is French's analysis of what he sees: there is little, and what little there is is simplistic and unconvincing (anyone familiar with the dreary and pointless GOALS program for failing students in Pinellas could hardly advocate throwing more money into that sinkhole). He is much more of a reporter than an editorializer. To his credit, he seems to understand this, and mostly sticks to reporting.

It's a good book, a good read, and a story that approaches in poignance the heights of another classic piece of high school reportage, Friday Night Lights. Tom French is to be congratulated.