Books: Smart Guy

I CAN GET IT FOR You WHOLESALE— Jerome Weidman—Simon & Schuster ($2).

Boys in Manhattan's public schools are taught, among other things, that honesty is the best policy, that Kipling's It is a great poem with a practical moral message. But, as Jerome Weidman says, "It isn't what you're taught; it's what you learn." Jerome Weidman went to an East Side public school, thought his classmates "a pretty decent bunch." Meeting them again ten years later, he wondered "what had turned the kids I'd played with into these sharp little wise guys . ....