The Pulitzer Prize-winning author's classic, 'brilliantly illuminated' account of education in America (The New York Times Book Review).

Mrs. Zajac is feisty, funny, and tough. She likes to call herself an 'old-lady teacher.' (She is thirty-four.) Around Kelly School, she is infamous for her discipline: 'She is mean, bro,' says one of her students. But children love her, and so will the reader of this extraordinarily moving book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of House and The Soul of a New Machine.

Tracy Kidder spent nine months in Mrs. Zajac's fifth-grade classroom in a depressed area of Holyoke, Massachusetts. Living among the twenty schoolchildren and their indomitable teacher, he shared their joys, catastrophes, and small but essential triumphs. His resulting New York Times bestseller is a revelatory and remarkably poignant account of an inner-city school that 'erupts with passionate life,' and a close-up examination of what is wrong—and right—with education in America (USA Today).

'More than a book about needy children and a valiant teacher; it is full of the author's genuine love, delight and celebration of the human condition. He has never used his talent so well.' —The New York Times