Straight from the front line of urban America, the inspiring story of one fierce
ly determined teacher and her remarkable students.
As an idealistic twenty-thr
ee-year-old English teacher at Wilson High School in Long beach, California, Eri
n Gruwell confronted a room of "unteachable, at-risk" students. One day she inte
rcepted a note with an ugly racial caricature, and angrily declared that this wa
s precisely the sort of thing that led to the Holocaust--only to be met by uncom
prehending looks. So she and her students, using the treasured books "Anne Frank
: The Diary of a Young Girl" and "Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Sarajevo" as
their guides, undertook a life-changing, eye-opening, spirit-raising odyssey aga
inst intolerance and misunderstanding. They learned to see the parallels in thes
e books to their own lives, recording their thoughts and feelings in diaries and
dubbing themselves the "Freedom Writers" in homage to the civil rights activist
s "The Freedom Riders."
