BASIC NEEDS: A Year With Street Kids...

BASIC NEEDS: A Year With Street Kids in a City School by Julie Landsman (Milkweed Editions: $12.95; 241 pp., paperback original). Landsman’s journal of a year spent teaching children with severe learning problems in Minneapolis proves that the ongoing battles against drugs, abuse, neglect and poverty are not restricted to the inner cities. Despite occasional hopeful moments (a boy and his father learning to read together) her portrait of an outnumbered staff working to save a few young people from the gaping holes in the social service net suggests that conditions continue to deteriorate for many American children.