Be True to Your School

by Bob Greene

Book Overview

Today, Bob Greene is a celebrated, nationally-syndicated columnist. In 1964, he was a seventeen-year-old Ohio high school kid. And he kept a diary. It's all here. The teenage girl who got away. The... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0689116128
• ISBN13: 9780689116124
• Release Date: April 1987
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 331 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Didn't want it to end!

The Beatles coming on the Ed Sullivan show, the endless wondering of exactly how to attract the opposite sex, and the simple ups and downs of growing up are captured dead on in this. Wish he'd kept a diary of his senior year and his four years of college. Good stuff!

Even 30 years later, the book is timeless...

I loved Greene, but had resisted buying this book. What could I, someone who graduated from private school in Chicago in 1992, learn from 1964? I've never much cared for the 1960's. After reading Greene's novel, All Summer Long, I went out and bought Be True to Your School. The novel contained flashbacks to high school--Be True...contains the real stories. In most ways, the power of Be True is even stronger than the novel because it was all true. As many of the other reviewers have said, it rings true to high school. I laughed, I cried, and I underlined the book. It will stand among my favorite works. Greene was a talented writer even at 17. He poesses a very rare gift. He has the ability to capture life's small moments and illuminate them. He celebrates their importance and makes no excuses for it--nor should he. He finds wisdom in those youthful experiences. He cherishes them. That is the lesson I take from this book. Too many people these days want to forget their teenage years and "move on." Greene teaches us that we will be forever shaped by those experiences, so we might as well celebrate them. If we take their lessons and memories and keep them close to our hearts, we will not only be true to our schools, but true to ourselves. As he does so often in his column, Greene shines again.

Captures the Essence of High School

I read this book when I was twelve, and at that time I thought it was "explicit." I reread it last week and cried. The story is so real, so genuine, that I thought about my high school days and all the crap we got in to and out of. Greene, unknowingly, captured how uncertain being 17 is.

i was touched

I baught this book a few years back and i finally had time to read it this past month...and i couldn't put it down. i would like to take time out of my life to thank Bob Greene for opening up his heart to us by publishing his journal from his senior year. I am currently a senior at a private school in Chicago and I connect with everything he wrote. My friends and I want to do what he did on new years eve. The best part about reading it was that I knew Greene from the newspaper and him bringing us into his life when he was 18 was awesome. i have started to journal because of him. thanks bob i'll never forget you.

Bob Greene takes you into the heart of high school '64.

Bob Greene is the journalist who knows how to find the hooks in any story and plant them directly into you, without pain. He makes reading effortless and unstoppable. This may well be his best book because he was working from his own diary of the year 1964. The detail of that journal calls up personalities, events, feelings, ritual, love and yearnings, all of it tossed wildly around by the musical tidal waves created by the Beatles. This is also a fine telling of an american story: how events shape the course of a life... and create an extraordinary human being. Reading Bob Greene is like reading Stephen King (mostly) without the horror. It is reality which carries the message of great writers, and Bob Greene is a great writer who will take you back to high school in Ohio as surely as Stephen King took you to 1958 Maine in "It." I can barely wait to start re-re-re-re-reading this book. Five years is too long. Tim Niles