The Wave, by Todd Strasser

Once upon a time, back when I was a teenager... there was this TV movie about an experiment carried out in a high school in California. During a discussion of WWII, a history teacher is confronted with his class' incredulity over the fact that the Nazi Party managed to convince an entire nation to participate, mostly unknowingly, in a movement that resulted in genocide. The teacher goes about to show his class that not only this was possible, but also that it could happen again. He carries out an experiment that almost spirals out of his control easily creating a fascist movement that grows to engulf almost the entire school.

This short novel is about the real event. I picked it up in hopes that it would explore the issues much more deeply than the movie and was very disppointed to discover that it doesn't. The writing style is easy, almost too easy. It seems to me that this was not written for a mature audience, but rather for young adults, that crowd between 12 and 16 years of age. An adult would soon discover that, although there are indeed important lessons to learn from the experiment in fascism, this book fails to explore them in deeper and significant ways. This book is no more than the movie and actually reads like the novelization of the screenplay. It's marginally an ok read, but in the end, it doesn't satisfy.