cover image On the Outside Looking In: Stories from an Inner City High School

On the Outside Looking In: Stories from an Inner City High School

Cristina Rathbone. Atlantic Monthly Press, $26 (320pp) ISBN 978-0-87113-707-4

This poignant account of teenagers attending a last-chance high school is a depressing confirmation of the entrenched isolation of poverty. Rathbone, a freelance journalist living in New York City, spent a year hanging out with students, mostly Hispanic and African American, assigned by the educational bureaucracy to classrooms fashioned out of abandoned office space in midtown Manhattan. The 750-plus students came from all over the city; their parents were often jobless drug addicts and alcoholics. The author recounts the day-to-day experiences of youngsters that drove them to become gang members and street hustlers. Rathbone becomes profoundly depressed, as does the reader, as she tries to befriend and help these troubled kids. Offering no solutions of her own, she takes solace from the fact that 85 of the kids obtained a diploma. The role of the teachers in this achievement is largely omitted here, although Rathbone spent a lot of time attending student discussion sessions run by the school principal, Ed Reynolds, himself a tragic figure who refuses to be beaten down by the system. 25,000 first printing; author tour. (Feb.)