Education: Cane Juice

"School, it is like this. School, it is like big sugar-house. It crush and maul us and spin us round. And we go out sweet like sugar. . . . Life, it is like this too. It whip us and pound us, but we come sweet like sugar. . . . We might come like bagasse. Just cane with all the juice crushed out."

So writes Dr. John Earle Uhler in a novel, Cane Juice, which he published last month.* A Yankee, born in Media, Pa. forty years ago, he...