Overview

A beloved schoolteacher chronicles the meteoric rise of his most dazzling student in this ambitious, big-hearted story of learning and legacy. Mr. Keating is an extraordinary teacher: brilliant, dedicated, and possibly a few pages ahead in a book no one else is reading. He's a magician, able to enchant fourteen-year-olds into a love of writing and literature. Yet no student has lived up to the promise of their potential more than Clara Hightower. Over the course of three decades, Clara goes from kindergarten thief to a high school genius, Silicon Valley celebrity, and, finally, animal rights activist turned terrorist. But to tell Clara's story, Mr. Keating must tell his own, including his courtship and marriage, his dreams of writing and comedy, his days in the classroom in lower Manhattan and his rivalry and friendship with his head of school, and his eventual stroke and the isolation that follows. Fiercely original, The Optimists is a love story, a joke book, and a meditation on the meaning of life and death. Tender and insightful, it's a profound testament to the lessons that reach far beyond the classroom.

Full Product Details

9780316576956

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Reviews

""The Optimists is engaging and propulsive from the outset, and the novel deepens and surprises along the way, gathering itself up into a work of startling poignancy. Brian Platzer writes with grace and witty precision about the varieties of human feeling, and he's a font of above-average knock-knock jokes to boot."" --Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask ""The hothouse world of precious academics and precocious children is as strange a place as any to find hope, but the school at the center of The Optimists is such a place. It is the ideal setting for fragile but enduring love, love between young and brilliant students under the fascinated and watchful eye of a loving educator. A book for anyone who has had an unlikely future shaped by a brilliant teacher, which is all of us, isn't it?"" --Stephen Marche, author of On Writing and Failure

Author Information

Brian Platzer was the education columnist for The Atlantic and has written frequently for the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and many other publications. He currently teaches and lives with his family in Brooklyn and Paris.

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