**''Now a Feature Film Starring Bud Cort and Samantha Eggar''*--fr. cvr*** ***Why Shoot the Teacher is a caustic, amiable, and unflinchingly honest account*** of one young man's first collision with reality - an ill paid teaching assignment in an isolated country school during the Great Depression. ***The young man is Max Braithwaite, now one of this country's most successful authors and freelance writers.*** The story he has to tell is riotous, grim, candid and infinitely entertaining. This is a Braithwaite at his vintage best and the humor that earned him the ***1972 Leacock Memorial Medal*** is here in rich abundance. Here, too, is the ***de-humanizing desolation*** of the ***"Dirty Thirties"*** on the ***Saskatchewan Prairies***, the ordeal of youth among a populace bereft of pity and charity, and the human compassion that ***adds warmth and poignancy to Braithwaite's recollections***.