NAMED A BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF 2022 BY ESQUIRE
"[C]harming and surprising. . . The work of Admissions is laying
down, with wit and care, the burden James assumed at 15, that she -- or
any Black student, or all Black students -- would manage the failures of
a racially illiterate community. . . The best depiction of elite
whiteness I've read."--New York Times
A Most Anticipated Book by Vogue.com - Parade - Town
& Country - Nylon -New York Post - Lit Hub - BookRiot - Electric
Literature - Glamour - Marie Claire - Publishers Weekly - Bustle -
Fodor's Travel-** Business Insider - Pop Sugar - InsideHook
- SheReads**
Early on in Kendra James' professional life, she began to feel like she
was selling a lie. As an admissions officer specializing in diversity
recruitment for independent prep schools, she persuaded students and
families to embark on the same perilous journey she herself had made--to
attend cutthroat and largely white schools similar to The Taft School,
where she had been the first African-American legacy student only a few
years earlier. Her new job forced her to reflect on her own elite
education experience, and to realize how disillusioned she had become
with America's inequitable system.
In ADMISSIONS, Kendra looks back at the three years she spent at Taft,
chronicling clashes with her lily-white roommate, how she had to unlearn
the respectability politics she'd been raised with, and the fall-out
from a horrifying article in the student newspaper that accused Black
and Latinx students of being responsible for segregation of campus.
Through these stories, some troubling, others hilarious, she
deconstructs the lies and half-truths she herself would later tell as an
admissions professional, in addition to the myths about boarding schools
perpetuated by popular culture.
With its combination of incisive social critique and uproarious
depictions of elite nonsense, ADMISSIONS will resonate with anyone who
has ever been The Only One in a room, dealt with racial
microaggressions, or even just suffered from an extreme case of
homesickness.
