Summary Of Morton Rhue's The Wave

The Wave was written by Morton Rhue and published in 1982. This book was based on a true story of an incident in a high school history class in Palo Alto in California in 1969 lead by the teacher Ron Jones who says it was the most frightening event he had ever seen in a classroom. In the book the teacher is played by Ben Ross and his high school history class. It all starts when students ask questions about Nazi

Germany and he can’t seem to answer them so he comes up with a plan that will change his classroom FOREVER with his sayings “Strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action. His class room will be filled with nothing but POWER and DICIPLINE and that’s only just the beginning. He started off by teaching
his class how to sit up straight properly in their seats and how to answer

questions properly which meant standing up beside their seat before talking now can you imagine if we tried that now a days!
He was filling his class room with power and all the students could feel it and as days went by and the students became very obedient of the new rules he decided to keep it going, as he thought it was working. Weeks went on and he had come up with the new rules salute whenever you saw another Wave member or chant whenever he

ordered it and also a wave symbol was created to separate the Wave members from the non-members. This was clearly becoming out of control, the students were getting brain washed and they weren’t thinking about anything they were doing and what they were getting themselves into, they were making big mistakes. By the end of the book it had got so crazy that the Wave members started threatening the students who were not members and that’s when

Ben Ross knew it had to be stopped at once so they held a meeting for all the members where he faced the students with what was going on and telling them they shouldn’t have let it get this far by letting it take over them, they needed to wake up to themselves and realize what was going on because who knows how far it would have gone. He practically told them just to stop and think about their future and what they were doing had got the better of them and had to be stopped.
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the end of this students were shocked and in tears realizing what they were doing was wrong! And it was a lesson they were taught that they would never forget. Now you’re thinking why this is a classic. It is because this book was so well known and written by a famous author and it’s easy for us to relate to the characters as we are

high school students too and it’s written in a way it is best understood what is going on. This book is suitable for teenagers and up but I would mostly recommend high school students because they can relate to it a lot easier than others.
The text I chose was Angela’s Ashes “a memoir of a childhood” written by Frank Mc Court and published in 1996. This book was the winner of the 1997 Putlitzer Prize which made me want to read it more because that tells me it’s a good

book to read. It was about an Irish family growing up with the tough, hard working life. The family started off living in America with their 2 little boys under the age of 6. It all started getting worse for them when Angela had baby girl which suffered from cot death only a couple of days old and this left the family sad and cold. The father was an alcoholic and left his family for days leaving the boys to look after themselves because the

mother wouldn’t get out of bed. This was only the beginning of their hard life. Soon later the family moved to Ireland where they had family. The life over there was so different, they were living off the doll because the father was yet to get a job they barely had enough food to survive but they had to struggle through each day as it came. Soon later the mother gave birth to twin boys so the life became even harder as they had to feed

to more mouths now. Years later one of the twins became unwell and they didn’t have the medicine to make him get better and he passed away and then soon after the other twin died in his sleep. This shows you how hard it was to survive with this life style that’s why we need to realize how lucky we are. As their life went on the father moved overseas to work for a year yet he never sent them any money to help out he just spent it all at the pub once he got it and this became a

habit because once the mother gave birth to a new baby boy he went and spent all the money for the baby at the pub once again leaving the poor family to struggle even more. They couldn’t afford to pay rent anymore so they had to move in with a family friend and they didn’t like this. The eldest boy got so sick of this one night he decided to leave and live with his Uncle for a while and get a job. You can probably see where this book is leading, the father left them to

struggle on with their life and faced many more problems day in day out. But overall I thought this book was a great book even though it was very sad to know what they went through and it also has a movie out to that I’m sure would be good. I think this book in years to come will become a classic because of how great of a book it was and how well it written about a family’s struggle to live the hard life. Also because it is very well known and has a famous author and the way it is written. This book I would recommend be read for adults mostly and older teenagers because you need to be able to understand it properly.

Kirsty Greening