(Cont'd)

She holds group discussions to determine what kind of play creates or calms turmoil; she illustrates the phenomenon of very young children needing to make sense of exceptionally violent imagery; and she consults with older grade-school boys who remember what it was like to be obsessed by violence. Katch weaves her story out of the voices of these students and allows their own vocabulary and storytelling to inform her perspective on the meaning of children's violent play.

Katch tackles many of the most nettlesome questions about classroom violence: Do violent movies make violent kids? Are boys more violent than girls, or does girls' violence just assume a more subtle and insidious guise? How does the act of exclusion lead to a cycle of violence? Can language alone be violent? Is it true, as Bettelheim claims, that playing shooting games won't make kids grow up to be violent any more than playing blocks will make them grow up to be architects? The youngsters have much to say. There is her former student Nate, who describes how he watched Kevin slide down the banister in Home Alone 2 and then decided to try it himself: "I thought I could slide down the banister just like Kevin did in the movie. Except he didn't fall off, and I did." There's Jason, who insists that violence in movies is not always a bad thing: "In Amistad, the violence shows how it really was; they're trying to tell you something." The kids also disagree about the amount of authority that parents should wield: Ross insists that "what the parents should do. . .is just say, 'No, no, no, no, no' so they'll just give up. That's what they did to me, and I'm not violent." But Brandon explains that the moment his parents tell him not to watch something, it becomes all the more desirable: "Thatıs when you do open your eyes . . . you just keep them wide open." As the children's voices clash and blend, Katch struggles with her own difficult question: "Can I make a place in school for understanding these fantasies, instead of shutting them out?" In accordance with Bettelheim's injunction that "we learn to understand the children by first looking at our own feelings," Katch weaves her students' voices with her own personal recollections. She remembers the isolation she felt as one of the only Jewish students in her fourth grade class, and her tomboyish attachment to the figure of Joan of Arc. She also explores her reluctance to take her own daughter to see the R-rated film Elizabeth. Katch also looks to fairy tales and storytelling as a way of channeling her students' energy into something better than the suicide game. She tries to replace her children's violent fantasies with the fanciful stories of Cinderella and Baba Yaga.

Jane Katch is unafraid to confront head-on the forces and factors that threaten to convert her kindergarten classroom into a battlefield of hand grenades, suicide chairs, and shouts of "bang bang, youıre dead!" Under Deadman's Skin is a must-read for parents, educators, psychologists, and anyone concerned with the future safety of our nation's children.

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