Bestselling author of The Killing Season and veteran Los Angeles Times reporter Miles Corwin spent a school year with twelve high school seniors -- South-Central kids who qualified for a gifted program because of theur exceptional IQs and test scores. Sitting alongside them in classrooms where bullets were known to rip through windows, Corwin chronicled their amazing odyssey as they faced the greatest challenges of their academic lives. And Still We Rise is an unforgettable story of transcending obstacles that would dash the hopes of any but the most exceptional spirits.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Author and journalist Miles Corwin spent an entire school year with a remarkable group of individuals: the students in the senior Advanced Placement English class at Crenshaw High School—young ghetto scholars who have managed to excel despite living in the hostile world of South Central Los Angeles. This book is a moving chronicle of their courage, acheivements, strength, and resilient spirit—their personal crises, setbacks, catastrophes, and triumphs—over an unforgettable 10 month period. It is a fascinating visit to the dynamic, electrically charged classroom of Toni Little, an inspiring but volatile and wildly unpredictable white educator determined to imbue her minority students with a passion for great literature. Corwin also spent the year with Anita "Mama" Moultrie, a flamboyant black teacher whose Afrocentric teaching style was diametrically opposed to Little's traditional approach. The exceptional students provide a ground-zero perspective on the affirmative action debate and will remain with the readers long after they finish the book.

About the Author:

A native of Los Angeles, Miles Corwin is an award-winning reporter for the Los Angeles Times and the author of the critically acclaimed The Killing Season, a national bestseller. He lives with his family outside Los Angeles, California

SYNOPSIS

Author and journalist Miles Corwin spent the entire 1996-97 school year with a remarkable group of individuals: the students in the senior Advanced Placement English class at Crenshaw High School—-young ghetto scholars who have managed to excel despite living in the hostile world of South Central Los Angeles. This book is a moving account of their courage, achievements, strength, and resilient spirit—-their personal crises, setbacks, catastrophes, and triumphs. It is an unforgettable ten-month visit to the dynamic, electrically charged classroom of Toni Little, an inspiring but volatile and wildly unpredictable white educator determined to imbue her minority students with a passion for great literature. Corwin also spent the year with Anita "Mama" Moultrie, a flamboyant black teacher whose Afrocentric teaching style was diametrically opposed to Little's traditional approach. These exceptional students—-all classified as gifted—-provide a ground zero perspective on the affirmative action debate and will remain with the readers always.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Los Angeles Times reporter Corwin offers a viscerally affecting glimpse inside the world of an inner-city high school. Hewing to the approach of his first book, The Killing Season: A Summer Inside an LAPD Homicide Division, he followed the seniors in an Advanced Placement (AP) English class from their first day of school in 1997 to graduation. Overcrowded, underfunded Crenshaw High School has a dropout rate of almost 50%. Notorious as the setting for the movie Boyz 'n the Hood and as home base for one of L.A.'s worst gangs, Crenshaw is located in the impoverished and crime-ridden South-Central district. The struggling students whose stories Corwin adroitly interweaves face trying circumstances: some have parents on welfare, in prison or addicted to crack; many work at part- or full-time jobs; several cope with the scarring effects of physical or sexual abuse. Yet most minority students in Crenshaw's "gifted magnet program" manage to get As and go on to college. Corwin succeeds admirably in avoiding the cliched image of inner-city schools, with wide-eyed, altruistic teachers and menacing students. For example, he describes Toni Little, the white AP English teacher (nearly all of whose students are black), as a volatile, histrionic personality who frequently involves students in her bitter ongoing battle with administrators. California voted to end affirmative action in 1997, and Corwin passionately argues that affirmative action programs are an imperfect but necessary measure to level a grossly uneven playing field. His profiles of high achievers who shun the temptations of the street are sure to inspire. Agent: Barney Karpfinger. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Kay Mills - The Los Angeles Times

[A] splendid new book...Like (Jonathan) Kozol, Corwin can stop you with a moment from his time at Crenshaw, whether it's the day that Toya, for whom school had been the only sanctuary and for whom her teachers had such hope, shows up with her 10-day-old baby, or when a teacher, Toni Little, rails against a school system that makes her teach too many Advanced Placement English students with too little means to provide classroom materials.

Bob Blaisdell - The New York Times Book Review

...readers have to be grateful for the abundance of classroom dialogue that is unexpected, fresh and interesting, and fine portraits, as good as fiction, of two teachers and one student.

Kirkus Reviews

A year in an English class in an inner-city public high school. In the Gifted Magnet Program at Crenshaw High School in South-Central Los Angeles the Advanced Placement students face not merely the academic privileges of competition and interaction with their intellectual peers. They face multiple pressures that would debilitate and demoralize the average adult: poverty, crime, emotional and physical abuse from family members, gangs, drugs, peer pressure, and bureaucratic entanglements whose outcomes will determine their day-to-day survival. Corwin (The Killing Season, 1997) monitored the unfolding 1996-97 academic year with the AP English class at Crenshaw. It was not the best of times, in many regards: the teacher in charge of the class was enmeshed in her own struggle to maintain her professional and emotional focus just then, and the ongoing movement to end affirmative action in public education was facing a statewide vote on that fall's ballot. Whether following the travails facing the vividly characterized students or those facing the class instructor, Toni Little, Corwin kept his own journalistic focus throughout a project that presented professional and ethical challenges of the most exasperating sort. He details the subsequent defeats and triumphs of will and discipline and keeps the story gritty and gripping, even when explaining the history that led to Proposition 187 (the initiative to end affirmative action) or relating the intimate connection between one of the students at Crenshaw and the two black athletes who raised their fists on the victory stand at the 1968 Olympics. Readers might question Corwin's role in the early part of the narrative; he preparesthem forthe moment when the barrier between objectivity and action dissolves late in the story. The stakes here are comparable to those in the documentary Hoop Dreams, and Corwin manages to give academic failure and triumph the same dignified solidity. Reportage of the highest order.