Type of bind: Paperback
Format: Bargain Price
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 288
Printing Date: May 28, 2002
Sale Popularity Level: 1944027
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Off the coast of Cape Cod lies a small windswept island called Penikese. Alone on the island is a school for juvenile delinquents, the Penikese Island School, where Daniel Robb lived and worked as a teacher, not far from the mainland town where he grew up. By turns harsh, desolate, and starkly beautiful, the island offers its temporary residents respite from lives filled with abuse, violence, and chaos. But as Robb discovers, peace, solitude, and a structured lifestyle can go only so far toward healing the anger and hurt he finds not only in his students but within himself -- feelings left over from the broken home of his childhood. Lyrical and heartfelt, 'Crossing the Water' is the memoir of his very first eighteen months on Penikese, and a poignant meditation on the many ways that young men can become lost. Ranging in age from fourteen to seventeen and numbering up to eight at a time, Robb's students at Penikese have been convicted of crimes including arson, assault, and armed robbery. They are tough, troubled kids who are sentenced to the school by courts in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. During their time at Penikese, they live in a house together with the staff of four and share the responsibilities of living on the island -- chopping wood, cooking meals, maintaining and repairing the buildings, caring for the farm animals, and doing other chores. For many of the students, it's the very first time they've experienced such a combination of discipline and freedom, or the kind of trust extended to them by the staff. And despite their resistance and sometime wildness, Robb soon finds that they have the capacity not only to confound but to surprise him, both with their insight and theirvulnerability. In 'Crossing the Water,' he renders the boys' voices and his life with them -- the confrontations, the rare epiphanies, the flashes of humour -- with great vividness. Passionate, poetic, and deeply felt, 'Crossing the Water' is a powerful and moving book, and the debut of a tremendously gifted young writer.
Amazon.com Review:
It's a rare pleasure when a new author shows not only notable talent, but the skill and chutzpah to go where no one else has gone before. Daniel Robb takes a subject that many have considered but few understood--juvenile delinquents--and writes about it with rare insight. For a year and a half, Robb was a teacher on Penikese Island, off Cape Cod, where teenage boys are sent by the courts and social services to put six months between themselves and their chaotic daily lives. During this time they experience safety, a routine, hard work, and the decency and constancy of adults better adjusted than the ones they've known. The place is less a school, Robb writes, than 'a family, or a way of life, a rhythm, a discipline, a music, with many voices of boys competing with my own for ownership of the tale.' The boys have varied résumés: Mose shot a man who threatened him one night; Edward torched a boat for money; Alan is the king of substance abuse; Burt's parents have both been in jail since he was 7. But Robb finds that they all have a number of things in common--childhoods fraught with so many uncertainties that they never learned cause and effect, the lack of a father's guidance--the same things, it turn out, that plague Robb's own heart.
Robb has a gift for evoking their natural surroundings on the island in a language that resembles poetry while capturing the cadences and tribulations of his surly yet charming students with perfect pitch and clear-eyed sympathy. Not only does the dichotomy make for compelling reading, it works on the kids as well: Ned, the longhaired metalhead, gives CPR to a mouse and actually revives it; Wyatt, who stole cars out of boredom, considers his absent father's legacy after reading a Gary Snyder poem. Robb is a literary voyager in the most unlikely of places, and, in the end, reveals that even boys such as these have a poetry all their own. --Lesley Reed
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Rated by buyers 
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As I read this wonderful book by Robb, I mused that I wish I had been able to teach it at the University where I taught Young Adult literature teachers of young adults. So much of the YA literature offers "insider" stories, but never seems to give the idea that there is a way out, often leaving readers feeling hopeless and helpless in our modern world. This remarkable book offers us a true glimpse into a modern young person's problematic life, and yet shows us that there are always choices, always people like Dan to offer a better way.
One thing that truly impressed me was the subtle, never over-wrought literary allusions to such writers as Henry David Thoreau and Mark Twain. Daniel Robb went to the Island to live deliberately, to simplify, to get in touch with himself, the core of his being, and to reach out to some of the troubled young men of our current world. Furthermore, the entire story is built on a the extended metaphor of the story of Beowulf. Robb informs his readers at the end of his book just how the ancient story of Beowulf is anything but dead literature--it still resonates in our modern world. The readers of this excellent memoir will be given as much as the subjects of the story, and this reader is indeed grateful to Daniel Robb for his insight and his fine writing. Dr. Janice E. Patten
Rated by buyers 
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As my title states, I just couldn't get into this book, even though I work with kids. I didn't finish it. I thought it was sad that the school's sucess rate with the kids wasn't much better than the prison system's sucess rate. It seemed that the school administration was proud of the fact that they didn't have any professional counselling for the kids, and I'm not so sure that's something to be proud of.
Rated by buyers -
Dan Robb's memoir criss-crosses the worlds of the Pennikese bad boys--his students; of his own memories of a sometimes tempest-tossed adolescence; of his adult role of teacher in uncharted territory; and of an island--sere and beautiful, immutably changing with the seasons and with the boys who come and go--a place isolated yet self-contained, severe and yet secure, once "home" to lepers, now a prison-home for boys perched on the brink of social leprosy.
Robb's beautifully descriptive book carries the reader back and forth among these intersecting worlds while limning sharp yet fleshy portraits of the boys, each of whose stories grabs and engrosses. This is a book--yes, for teachers who know, or are learning, that the best kind of pedagogy is through memory, storytelling and the imaging of new worlds; for those concerned about how to treat and heal our outcast and abandoned children; and for those who, along with their interest in a critical and wrenching problem, also take pleasure in the work of a gifted teacher/writer/artist.
Rated by buyers -
Dan Robb's memoir criss-crosses the worlds of the Pennikese bad boys--his students; of his own memories of a sometimes tempest-tossed adolescence; of his adult role of teacher in uncharted territory; and of an island--sere and beautiful, immutably changing with the seasons and with the boys who come and go--a place isolated yet self-contained, severe and yet secure, once "home" to lepers, now a prison-home for boys perched on the brink of social leprosy.
Robb's beautifully descriptive book carries the reader back and forth among these intersecting worlds while limning sharp yet fleshy portraits of the boys, each of whose stories grabs and engrosses. This is a book--yes, for teachers who know, or are learning, that the best kind of pedagogy is through memory, storytelling and the imaging of new worlds; for those concerned about how to treat and heal our outcast and abandoned children; and for those who, along with their interest in a critical and wrenching problem, can also take pleasure in the work of a gifted teacher/writer/artist.
Rated by buyers -
In this wonderful book, Dan Robb has managed to write about his experience teaching troubled boys with soul and without sentimentality. The rawness of his experience teaching on an isolated island off of Cape Cod, and the soul searching it prompted, makes for compelling reading no matter how much time you spend thinking about or working with kids. As the mother of a small boy, I also felt that reading this book was a way of learning about how to be a good parent to my child. I recommend this book with all my heart, and hope that it touches you as deeply as it did me.
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