Literacy in American Lives is an astounding work that cuts across so many disciplines, you'll lose track. It's a remarkable social history, it's ethnography, biting social commentary, educational historiography, psychology, an essential resource for curriculum development. The book catches up with and defines that moving target: What is literacy? Certainly anybody who has anything to do with education, school boards, curriculum developing, funding for our schools, should read this book. Politicians, journalists, teachers, especially. The research is painstaking. Conclusions are vital and well-grounded. It reveals how the very institutions that are supposedly designed to foster literacy may actually be contributing to its uneven distribution by continuing historic patterns of discrimination, and how private interests continue to threaten to hijack our schools. And it reminds us, that's not the way it's supposed to be in our democracy.