INTRODUCTION: Community Theater 3 OUR TOWNS CHAPTER 1: Ironies in the Fire: After the Berkeley-Oakland Conflagration, a Man-made Nightmare 25 CHAPTER 2: Talk, Not Guns, in a San Francisco Neighborhood 47 CHAPTER 3: A Suburb at Odds: The Epic Battle of Mount Laurel 60 CHAPTER 4: Houses Divided: A Gay Man, His Teenage Neighbor, and a Murder 107 PLACES CHAPTER 5: What School Choice Really Means: Fact and PR in East Harlem 133 CHAPTER 6: Good Schools in Bad Times: Reading, Writing--and Hustling for Support--in LA 160 CHAPTER 7: Tales from the Bright Side: The Surprising Success of America's Biggest Community College 174 CHAPTER 8: Uncommon Decency: Pacific Bell Responds to AIDS 193 CHAPTER 9: The Politics of Needle Exchange: Why What's Banned in Boston Is "Best Practice" in Seattle 226 CHAPTER 10: Look Back in Anger: Hemophilia Activism and the Politics of Medical Disaster 248 CHAPTER 11: A Boy's Life: Deadly Sexual Secrets in a Southern Town 267 CHAPTER 12: No Angels, No Demons: Shelby Steele Refuses to See Things in Black and White 287 CHAPTER 13: The Many Masks of Richard Rodriguez 307 EPILOGUE: Fault Lines 331 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 335 INDEX 339
Deftly argued, vividly and elegantly written, this collection treats the most vexed and troubling questions of contemporary American life in an engaging and approachable way. The stories not only demonstrate the weakness of the concept of 'community' as a regulating term but also point to the difficulties and the stakes of public conflicts. I came away from my first reading of this book with the sense that I had been traveling through a country far more complicated--both stranger and more familiar--than the one often alluded to in public polemics. -- Todd Gitlin, New York University Almost Home is an excellent work of reflection and analysis about contemporary social problems. David Kirp teaches his readers with grace, wit, and fine prose. -- Donna Leff, Northwestern University
David L. Kirp is Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of many books, including Our Town: Race, Housing, and the Soul of Suburbia. Some of the stories in Almost Home originally appeared in national magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's.
Remarkably well written, deal[s] with important and fascinating issues, and confront[s] social problems that do indeed require new approaches, new techniques, and new spirit that can reduce the pain that disharmony produces ... -- Roger Starr Washington Times Useful and engagingly written -- Michael Kenney Boston Globe Kirp shows how the border disputes besetting America's geographic and moral communities play out in ... racial linguistic and sexual identity. Washington Post
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