On the Outside Looking In: A Year in an Inner-City High School

Cristina Rathbone's critically acclaimed On the Outside Looking In is the story, of inner-city kids who come from poverty, dysfunctional homes, and drug-riddled neighborhoods; of an underfunded high school and its devoted principal, who represent their last slim connections to mainstream society; and of a young reporter who, as Samuel Freedman wrote, "offered her young subjects both compassion and unflinching honesty ... even as she bore witness to the social chaos around them and the persistent humanity in them all".