brook hauser documents a year of international high school in new york city where 28 languages are spoken, and none of the student body art native and push bigger picture ports on the societal obstacles the students face and a different journeys they took to arrive here in the united states. okay, good evening. i m the director here. welcome. we are excited to have denied the book launch party for brook hauser s book, the new kids. brook hauser will be reading from her book, and then we will be in conversation with francis flaherty. will have a short q&a afterwards. let me briefly introduce brook hauser. brook hauser has written for the new york times, los angeles times, among other publications and she s originally from miami, florida, and now lives in new york. francis flaherty has worked as a columnist and editor at the new york times for the past 17 years and is currently the deputy editor of the home section. is written for harper s, atlanta, commonwealth and
big dreams and brave journeys. we will have brook reading from her book and we will be in conversation with friends and have a short q and a afterwards. brooke hauser has written for the new york times and other publications. she is originally from miami, florida. francisco heardy has worked in said deputy editor and written for harper s atlantic commonwealth and progressive and is teaching at the university. please turn off yourself phones and as you have seen, c-span booktv is filming the event tonight. for the q&a we will be passing around the microphone so please wait for the microphone to reach you. thank you so much. please welcome broke hauser. [applause] we are here to discuss brooke s new book. it is about just to give a capsule summary, a high school in brooklyn called international high school which specializes in the education of immigrants. brooke spent much time at the school chronicleing the life of teens. she will do a reading of a portion later but i want
now they re, i think, the fifth year. so the class, the student body kept growing. but now i think it was the biggest class ever that was just accepted this year, and it s something around 400 students now, i think, right? how, among all those students, did you choose the ones that you would talk to and interview and then write about in your book? um, i had a question that i asked all of the teachers at the beginning of the year which was, when you go home at night, who are the students you can t stop thinking about? and, um, really the teachers led me to find these students. and one girl from china had written a college essay about coming to america. her very first week she was supposed to move in with her father who she hadn t seen in years, and when she got there on her first day, her new stepmother, basically, didn t want her there and kicked her out. and she was, when i met her, living on her own in a room that she represented in china town. so for one english teache
ancestry there were several others including jefferson and lincoln but nobody ever speaks about that. what about the president of the continental congress? he was a black man. could you speak to those issues? i would appreciate it. about barack obama ratio lineage, there has been some attention paid to that and a good many people who object to those like myself who called barack obama of black african american in some who say he should be called multiracial. his mother was white and his father was a black african and. i call barack obama according to what he says he wants to be called. he identifies himself as black and african-american in. so that is how i describe him. it is a very important thing for him to describe himself as black that is an important decision that he made a good many years ago. i think his history would be different if he called himself lotto or multiracial , i had he had done that he would have a different profile am probably would have been seen dif
farmers from te bit, and i found a group of boys from china who all aspired to be hair designers which i don t know, i don t know what a hair designer is exactly, but if you asked them what they wanted to be, they said hair designer. and it was like five boys, and every day they came in with edward scissorhands-style haircuts. there was a group in the cafeteria called the arabic family, boys mostly are from yaleen. so there were all these yemen. so there were all these different groups, and rap groups from the dominican republic and haiti. but no hierarchy, the kids were equal. host: were there are issues among the different religious groups? guest: um host: you mentioned the arabic family. guest: the arabic family, yeah. there were, you know, sometimes you would hear discussions about palestine and israel. i don t really get into any of that in the book. you would hear, um, you know, certainly the kids from china and can the kids from tibet who are buddhist. ther