Stand Before Your God: A Boarding-School Memoir
Books / Hardcover
Books › Biography & Autobiography › Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 0679420568 / Publisher: Random House, February 1994
The author recalls the fourteen years he spent at Britain's greatest boarding schools, Dragon and Eton, and how he came of age there
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Although he is only thirty years old, Paul Watkins has already published four internationally acclaimed books and been hailed as "a terrific writer" by The Washington Post, "a full-fashioned romantic" by The New Yorker, and "one of the most talented of a new generation of American novelists" by the Kansas City Star. Now, in this memoir about an American coming of age at a British boarding school, Paul Watkins makes a dazzling debut as a nonfiction writer.There is no middle ground at boarding school. You must stand before your God and commit. Commit to the bizarre rules of your teachers, men capable of lashing or embracing you depending on their mood. Commit to the games, adventures, and whims of your classmates, a hierarchical clique of boys. Commit to the power structure and discipline of a school that has been educating boys since 1440.From the age of six until he was nineteen, Paul Watkins was indoctrinated into the traditions and idiosyncracies of two of Britain's greatest boarding schools, Dragon and Eton. Perhaps every boy feels like an outsider at school, but as an American whose parents suddenly dropped him off in England without explanation, Watkins really was a foreigner, a Rhode Island Yankee thrust into a strange new world.With warmth and humor, Watkins vividly re-creates the joy and pain of growing up: the first time a boy must defend himself; learning to live apart from parents; dealing with death; confronting brutality; figuring out sex; the moments when a boy realizes his own strength and his own creativity.
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