Admissions

August 1, 2021

In I Came All This Way To Meet You, New York Times best-selling author Attenberg explains that as the daughter of a traveling salesman she came by her wanderlust naturally and shows how reflecting on her early years during her travels led her to writing--and particularly her theme of troubled families (75,000-copy first printing). Award-winning actress and Food Network star Bertinelli follows up her No. 1 New York Times best-selling memoir Losing It with inspiration as she turns 60 in Enough Already (100,000-copy first printing). In High-Risk Homosexual, a memoir ranging from funny (a baby speaking an ancient Jesuit language) to heartbreaking (the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando), Gomez explains how he came to embrace his gay, Latinx identity within a culture of machismo. In This Boy We Made, Harris relates her efforts to determine what is suddenly wrong with her bouncy 22-month-old boy in a system frequently inhospitable to Black mothers and her discovery when meeting with a geneticist that she has medical issues of her own. In Admissions, James relates the complications of being a diversity recruiter for select, largely white prep schools after attending The Taft School as its first Black legacy student. Attorney, podcaster, and Extra correspondent Lindsay discusses growing up in Dallas, TX; her career in law; and why she chose to be the first Black Bachelorette on The Bachelor in Miss Me with That. Miller reveals how he made the Jump, taking Nike's Jordan Brand from a relatively modest $150 million sneaker producer to a $4.5 billion worldwide footwear and apparel phenomenon while also recalling his teenage jailtime and the nightmares from which he still suffers and arguing for criminal justice reform and greater educational opportunities for the currently or formerly imprisoned. After her mother, actress Roseanne Barr, moved the family to celebrity-soaked Hollywood from working-class Denver, using personal details from their lives there for her sitcom's storylines, the teenaged Pentland endured anxiety and eating issues and various 1980s-sanctioned self-help interventions while muttering to herself This Will Be Funny Later (evidently proved here). In Lost & Found, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker staffer Schulz explores the bittersweet reality of meeting the woman she would marry just 18 months before losing her father. Readers Rise with Vonn as she earns 82 World Cup wins, 20 World Cup titles, seven World Championship medals, and three Olympic medals to become one of the top women ski racers of all time. Raised in Albania, the last Communist country in Europe, where the final tumble of Stalin's and Hoxha's statues soon led to economic chaos, political violence, and the flight of the disillusioned, Ypi has earned the right more than most to ponder what it means to be Free.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 11, 2021
In this scintillating debut, former Shondaland editor James intertwines her own coming-of-age story with a searing indictment of elite academia. “To be Black in a New England boarding school,” she writes, “is to be touted for your statistical presence... and ignored everywhere else.” The first Black American legacy to graduate from Taft School in 2006, James recounts her rude awakening when the “freedom and independence” she was promised as a student turned out to be the opposite. Taft, she recalls, was a school both uniquely attuned to and openly hostile to her development and that of other “expert, if involuntary, pioneers” who were forced to navigate the constraints of an institution that catered to its “white majority.” Notably, she recalls an unfounded accusation of theft by a classmate, that—after being threatened with police intervention—James was pressured to confess to. Despite the challenges she faced, James reflects on the paradoxical sense of safety she felt as a “Talented-Tenth-respectability-obsessed-snob” and how, after graduating, she worked as an independent school admissions counselor peddling the “myths of American upward mobility” to low-income families, before finally confronting her trauma and speaking out about the pervasive racism in boarding schools. The result is an eye-opening examination of race, class, and privilege in America. Agent: Jane von Mehren, Aevitas Creative Management.

November 1, 2021
A founding editor of Shondaland.com recounts her experiences as a student at an elite boarding school and, later, as an admissions officer specializing in diversity recruitment. When James enrolled at the prestigious Taft School, she had no idea that, as Taft's first "Black American legacy student to graduate since 1891," she would become the school's poster child for diversity. The beautiful campus seemed to promise madcap Harry Potter-style adventures, but James soon realized that the majority-White school was really a "swamp of microaggressions" that threatened to engulf her at every turn. During her first year, a White student not only accused an innocent James of stealing $20 from her room, but also threatened to call her uncle, who was a police officer. The author also observed unequal treatment of her peers. Where two students of color were expelled for copying from each other, a White male student who had plagiarized work was punished by being sent to the school's Learning Center. Taft aggressively "preached diversity and inclusion and yet took money from [former Fox News CEO] Roger Ailes." When a White student wrote an article in the school newspaper that students of color were the true racists for being "unfriendly, intimidating and granted too much special treatment," the school did nothing. Committed to diversity, James became a private school recruiter. Within a short time, however, she realized that her efforts to help other students of color amounted to selling "a lie for a living." The author has a unique and timely story to tell, but her recollections of her years at Taft are detailed to a fault. The result is an often rambling narrative that, in (over-)recounting the minutiae of her everyday experiences, often drifts away from the pertinent race issues that are at the heart of her story. A well-intentioned but overdone memoir in need of streamlining.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

January 1, 2022
Thanks to popular culture, two frameworks come to mind when one thinks about boarding school and its pupils. There's the glamorous and wealthy elite � la Gossip Girl or the rebellious teen shipped off to shape up as seen on Maury. James smashes those preconceived notions by sharing her experiences as the first African American legacy to graduate from the prestigious Taft School in Connecticut. As an adult, James worked in diversity recruitment for admissions offices to other prominent, independent boarding schools. James' career forced her to remove the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia and look back on her time at Taft with a critical lens. She recounts anecdotes, some comical and some disturbing, about the predominately white student body and faculty. James deals with microaggressions, dismantling respectability politics, blatant racism in a school newspaper editorial, and growing up as a teen in the early aughts. James' social commentary and sparkling wit shine throughout this absorbing and insightful coming-of-age memoir. Recommended for readers interested in a peek behind the curtain of private-school education.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

December 3, 2021

An admittedly privileged perspective of attending boarding school as a Black American student, this is James's coming-of-age story while enrolled at the elite Taft School in Connecticut. Readers won't find anecdotes of boarding school scandals, drugs, or partying in its pages, but they will become well acquainted with the cultural and societal growth of a young girl obsessed with role playing, instant messaging, Star Trek, and Dogma, who also happens to be the first Black American legacy student to graduate from Taft School. There is no rage or rebellion in these pages; only sincerity and self-awareness. James admits her own naivete and ignorance of code switching, microaggressions, and respectability politics at the beginning of her time at boarding school, but upon graduation realizes many aspects of the Taft School experience for Black students are questionable, problematic, and oftentimes traumatic. James's reflection on her time at Taft and career as an admissions counselor reveals both the subtle microaggressions and outright racism toward Black students in a predominantly white school. VERDICT This is a must-read for anyone who felt like their circle of friends was chosen for them or limited to one table in the cafeteria and for anyone who assumes the lives of privileged Black students are devoid of racism.--Alana Quarles, Fairfax Cty. P.L., Alexandria, VA

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.