My colleague Allen Carey-Webb's _Literature and lives : a response-based, cultural studies approach to teaching English_ (NCTE, 2001) devotes a full chapter to the use of HF in the high school classroom. Based on many years spent training and mentoring (at the college level) high school teachers to teach literature, this book offers some useful and stimulating ideas for how to broach the controversies with intelligence and sensitivity. I'd also like to say that the "less combative" designation obscures or denies more useful responses to MT's novel. As long as we treat HF as the one indispensible source on late-19th-c. racial issues, then it will of course seem annoying or troublesome to some readers. The novel's cultural centrality is not to be denied, and that makes it a useful teaching tool. The inclusion of, say, Douglass and Washington and Chesnutt, just to name a few, can relieve MT of the burden of being the token spokesnovelist for American race and, potentially, relieve critics and supporters alike of the burden of claiming that it's HF or nothing. Why does it have to be a one or the other scenario? Nicolas Witschi Western Michigan University