Mark Oppenheimer

Memoir by a high school and occasional college debater. After starting with prank telephone calls and other hijinks that would’ve gotten a poorer, darker kid sent to juvenile detention if not jail (he wrote a letter pretending to be another kid, accusing her father of abusing her), Oppenheimer got scared and ultimately ended up in debate, which gave him the opportunity to play with the words and rhetoric he so loved. I was hoping for a memoir of my kind of debate (policy), but Oppenheimer did parliamentary and thus looked down on policy debaters as we did on his kind. His descriptions of skating by on the most tenuous of knowledge of current events didn’t mesh with my recollections of spending hours each day on research. But chacun a son gout, I guess.… (mehr)