Never in my life have I read a book so hard hitting and thought provoking and also gripping as The Wave. It's short but definitely not sweet! Have you ever wondered how so many Germans could have sided with Hitler in the Second World War? How they could have turned a blind eye on what Hitler was doing and been afraid of one man? How they didn't all fight back when they saw the horrible things they were doing?
Well a high school history class did and after asking their teacher these very questions, the teacher decided to perform the most dangerous experiment ever thought of. He wanted to see how power could go to the head and how you can get swept along in that power. How willing people are to follow it. So he invented the wave: "Strength through action, strength through community, strength through courage". These are the slogans of the wave along
with a salute. It's just a way of getting the students to work harder, isn't it?
However the wave is out of control and is something much bigger than the average school craze that soon passes. Pretty soon people are taking the wave too seriously and when a Jewish boy gets beaten up, Laurie Sanders, one of the few people not in a kind of hypnotised trance, knows that the wave has to stop and along with her boyfriend David they convince their history teacher that his so called experiment has gone drastically wrong. He certainly found out how people can be terrorised in to joining a cult or group but realises he has created one that will literally do anything he says…. And just the other day in the history lesson they had said how World War 2 could never happen again - after this he wasn't so sure.
In the end the only thing that could convince the students to come to their senses and stop the wave was saying that the wave was not his idea but something that was happening in many schools and that they had a wave world leader. Then he called upon drastic measures. He put a picture of Hitler up on the board and said "this is your leader" Of course that made the students nearly faint and suddenly they saw everything and were shocked at their own behaviour. However the teacher was just shocked that it had come to this.
Now I thought this was an amazing story of course and was just marvelling how anyone could think up something like this and being glad it wasn't true when my heart nearly missed a beat because I turned to the back page and realised they didn't have to make it up. It was a true story! A real incident that occurred in a Californian high school. The History teacher had written this book and said that it was the most terrifying thing he ever lived through. Oh.
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