FREDERICK MULLER LTD
FIRST PRINTING 1959
LONDON, UK
In this novel of tremendous impact, Charles Calitri tells the story of a courageous man, a typical American small town...and a discovery that threatened to blow the town off its staid foundations.
It started with rumours about what was going on in the high school-talk of clandestine love affairs, violence, whispers of a sex club.
Walter Davis, the new dean of Barthorne High, determined he would find out about it and do what he could to correct it, to protect the students. He felt as responsible for them as he did for his own daughter and sons. But when he assembled the shocking facts, he ran into a stone wall of opposition from those whose attitude was: "It's none of our business; they didn't do it in the locker-room....We're not a social welfare organization."
With the lines drawn, the conflict exploded, and before it was over, parents, teachers, students, school and county officials had taken sides. The roots extended deep into the heart of Barthorne itself and in one way or another almost everyone was involved.
The story of how Dean Davis brought the town together out of a situation that almost tore it apart is thrilling and inspiring. It is filled with people you come to know and like or dislike, just as you do their counterparts in your own town. For Barthorne is much like any other community-composed mainly of decent, fair-minded people with the same educational problems as your own.
Here at last is a positive, hopeful novel about a generation in anguish-the parents as well as the children. The story of Walter Davis's battle with bad jnfluence, ignorance, fear and indifference, dramatically told by an author who has devoted his life to teaching, bears the authentic and sometimes terrifying stamp of truth.
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