Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Broadway; 1st edition (May 11, 2004)
ISBN: 0767914791

 

"Chris Colin, one of his generation's most talented new voices, offers us a look at his class of '93 that is alternately funny, dismaying, touching and inspiring."

-David Talbot, Founder and Editor in Chief, Salon.com

"Essential reading....Captivating."

-GQ magazine

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Excerpts from the book...

From the Introduction:
It's been a decade since my high school classmates and I have all stood under the same roof, since we've filled each other with the same confusion and smallness and lust. Our ten-year reunion is nearly upon us, and at this moment millions of other Americans are planning for similar evenings of nostalgia and embarrassment, with roughly equal amounts of clamminess to their palms.
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From Chapter 3, Lorraine Bembry:
Lorraine and I met in our sophomore-year Spanish class -- home of the blessed group project, public education's answer to oysters and Spanish Fly -- and I still recall that immediate recognition that we'd been put on the planet to locate each other and begin construction of our separate and preferable universe. We didn't get A's that semester in Spanish. No nos preocupabamos.
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From Chapter 17, Matt Farbman:
The cop eased the squad car over to the two youths, who were in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong hour. It so happened that one of them -- the tall, lanky one, my classmate -- represented all that may evolve in a human being over just ten years, perhaps represented human potential itself in this way, certainly represented the most dramatic transformation among the Thomas Jefferson High School Class of '93. This was not apparent or of interest to the cop. He arrested them.
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In the year leading up to his ten-year reunion, journalist Chris Colin tracked down his former classmates and asked them to pull back the curtains on their lives.

Sometimes what he discovers is a full swath of American history, other times simply frank and arresting accounts of how people fall in love, or steady their nerves on hills in Kosovo, or fall on their knees before God, or find out biology had handed them the wrong gender, and otherwise lurch into adulthood.

And when the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology class of 1993 finally reconvenes for the reunion itself -- after the very core of their country seems to have been shaken -- Colin finds maybe he and his classmates never left high school behind in the first place.