Synopses & Reviews
"Disquieting...often poignant" (Time), an "engrossing" (Newsweek) exploration of racial attitudes in America, as illumined by the case of Edmund Perry: a seventeen-year-old black honors student from Harlem who, soon after being graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, perhaps the nation's most prestigious prep school, was killed by a young white plainclothes policeman whom he and a companion allegedly tried to mug.
Review
"Mr. Anson is interested in exploring Edmund Perry's short life, and especially his education...the irony that someone who had already traveled so for would end up lying on a sidewalk so close to where he had grown up, a cop's bullet in his belly." New York Times Book Review
Review
"Compelling...a portrait of 'cultural schizophrenia' and a detailed account of a teenager who tried, unsuccessfully, to keep a foot in two different worlds." Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Review
"Unfolds like a detective story." Chicago Sun-Times
Review
"Profoundly disturbing." Kansas City Star
Review
"[A] compelling account of the life and death of a Harlem teenager." Library Journal
Synopsis
A complex, poignant exploration of racial attitudes in America, as illumined by the case of Edmund Perry. Perry, a seventeen-year-old black honors student from Harlem, was fatally shot by a young white plainclothes policeman in 1985 in an alleged mugging attempt. Perryhad recently graduated from Philips Exeter Academy and was to attend Stanford University that fall. The shooting and the subsequent case, in which Edmund's elder brother Jonah, an undergraduate at Cornell University, was accused, tried, and found not guilty, drew national headlines and was the subject of heated debate among black and white communities alike. Using interviews with Perry's parents, friends, and former teachers in Harlem and at Exeter, journalist Robert Sam Anson has written a compelling account of a boy caught between two worlds and a profound portrait of the state of race in America."
Synopsis
An exploration of how Edmund Perry, a 17 year old black honors student from Harlem, was killed soon after graduation by a young white plain clothes policeman in an alleged mugging attempt.