'The Newcomers' follows 22 immigrant students as they become Americans
The initial focus of journalist Helen Thorpe's book is intentionally very small: a group of 22 immigrants, teenagers from various countries and cultures, fleeing from war and international chaos and sometimes total dispossession, brought together in a specially-created English-language school class at South High School in Denver, Colorado. Thorpe spent a year and a half at South in order to understand both the students in that special class in Room 142 and the faculty members who
