Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of America's Underprepared

Rose, associate director of the UCLA writing program, traces his journey from a Los Angeles ghetto, where illiteracy was the norm, through a series of educational serendipities that led to his career as a teacher. In moving autobiographical vignettes, he pays homage to the interested teachers of his parochial high school, whose best efforts nevertheless left him unready for the rigors of higher education. However, at Loyola, a small Catholic college, Rose experienced epiphany, became successful with the untiring nurturance of four humanities professors who, he shows, exemplify the best in liberal education. Although the anecdotes of Rose's early working-class background are vivid, they function as the underpinning of a thoughtful and enlightening analysis of the tremendous difficulties ghetto children face in finding their places in the American educational system. (Feb.)