I didn't love every moment of this--moments, for example, that veer into platitudes or seem to romanticize the past--but these are small critiques of a book that all teachers and, really, anyone who knows a teenager (or is a teenager) should read. That last chapter is scathing in the best possible way. I want to include a quote, but it's hard to choose just one. Hm. How about this one, appearing in one of the last chapters:

"Is there anything that I can do, a lot of young people have written to ask me, to avoid becoming an out-of-touch, entitled little shit? I don't have a satisfying answer, short of telling you to transfer to a public university. You cannot cogitate your way to sympathy with people of different backgrounds, still less to knowledge of them. You need to interact with them directly, and it has to be on an equal footing: not in the context of 'service,' and not in the spirit of 'making an effort'... The only way to treat somebody as an equal is to realize that that's exactly what they are" (222).

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