Oswaldo was flummoxed by the fact that his friend could be so quiet, almost embarrassed, about his academic acumen, yet so damn loud and proud of his status as a premier campus drug dealer.”I’ve never...

The word “fronting” was important to Rob. A coward who acted tough was fronting. A nerd who acted dumb was fronting. A rich kid who acted poor was fronting. Rob found the instinct very offensive,...

The student body, too, felt more diverse. Rob spoke often of “real people” with his friends, by which he meant people who struggled, like they all did. On the Ivy League campus visits, any sense...

Her son seemed to be belatedly rebelling against all his celebrated accomplishments- as well as the responsibilities inherent in them, the obligations to own his talents.In that rebellion, she saw a young man who was...

But words mattered, more so in Newark than many other places. In a world where income and possessions were limited, words represented dignity, pride, self-worth.

The men her girlfriends dated were too often angry and muttering about oppression. One of the reasons she took to Skeet later in life was that he never went to that place; he believed with...

He saw something more in those eyes. The emotion wasn’t nakedly apparent, but Mr. Cawley was a professional at reading the subtleties of people. The elderly and wildly successful credit card magnate believed that certain...

Say a white boy takes a wrong turn and comes to my hood,” he once said. “Now he’s in the minority––nobody wants him there, unless it’s to rob his ass––and more than anything he has...

At Yale, most everyone (except Oswaldo Gutierrez) refrained from telling Rob what to do, because of the way he’d grown up in Newark. In Newark, most everyone (except Oswaldo Gutierrez) refrained from telling Rob what...

He was known to hit low, drive upward from the hips, and flip other boys over his shoulder and onto their backs, knocking the wind out of them on the glass-littered asphalt, sometimes causing a...

In East Orange, initiations were completed by murdering someone, for no other reason than to prove to a tremendously cold, tremendously tight brotherhood that you possessed the hardness required to watch their backs.

Unbeknownst to me, from the beginning of freshman year Rob and Oswaldo had been drawn away from Yale via their friends on the dining hall and custodial staffs, outward into the city of New Haven....

In the wake of his breakdown, Oswaldo had become hyperattuned to the way he, and people like him, were perceived. For his first three years at Yale, he’d been frustrated by these perceptions, feeling that...