5/4/2023 0 Comments Growing up in spanish![]() Webber’s sincerity, optimism, and honest insights are refreshingly uplifting.”īut I wonder whether that sincerity, and that optimism, and those honest insights, don’t also in a sense make this experience one of a kind. “Webber has created a blend of heartfelt innocence, historical document and social commentary in this warm and multi-textured memoir. ![]() And strengthens our connections to one another through an understanding of our shared history. His unique vantage point helps debunk commonly held stereotypes about Spanish Harlem, its people, youth and race relations in general. And Piri Thomas, the author of “Down These Mean Streets” wrote as a blurb on the back of the book and I hope you’ll read the book and read the blurb: “Bravo to Tom Webber for such a beautifully written and sensitive reflection on his boyhood as a white kid growing up in black and brown Spanish Harlem in the 1950s and 60s. Publishers Weekly accurately called it “an exemplary coming-of-age memoir”. Now, what brought Tom Webber and me together, of course, was his wonderfully sensitive and evocative Scribner book, Flying Over 96th Street: The Memoir of an East Harlem White Boy. An expert on education in our inner cities and the founder and Superintendent/Executive Director of Edwin Gould Academy, he grew up mostly in Spanish Harlem, the neighborhood where he and his wife raised their own family and continue to call home. Webber is a Harvard graduate with a Ph.D. ![]() I’m Richard Heffner, your host of The Open Mind … and my guest today is one of the most interesting persons I’ve met in all my years now of moderating its “Book Talk” series for Columbia University’s prestigious Teachers College.
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