Jessica Davis was my professor at Harvard. She is the best! Matthew Wes

Sara Lightfoot is an incredible author that writes with style, candor and vividness that allows one to experience the context as though he/she is actually involved rather than examining the process vicariously. The author recognizes that it is important for readers to be able to place these high schools in context, visualize the terrain, the community and the people. Lightfoot has done this by working through the inside out, much like an artist painting a portrait capturing the essence of truth with a myriad of dimensions. Lightfoot offers a penetrable look inside high schools whhile exploring the inherent goodness of schools. She provides a description of "goodness" as not being static nor an absolute quality that can be measured as a single indicator of success of effectiveness but a mixture of parts that produce the whole. This mixture encompasses less tangible, more elusive qualities that can only be discerned through close, vivid description, through subtle nuances, and thhrough detailed narratives that reveal the sustaining values of an institution. A quality that is evident of Lightfoot throughout the text is that she looks for the"good" in all six schools,even though they are not equal. All too often, rersearchers get caught up in identifying a cause or over-emphasining the negeative aspects while allowing the "good" qualities to go unnoticed. Lightfoot goes the extra mile is this respect by bringing forth the good in each school. It is through work such as this that researchers can learn many transferable lessons that can be utilized in a wide array of research studies. With this in mind, I give Sara Lightfoot's book, The Good High School, a five star rating.

I think the book dealt deeply with the intangibles that a sucessful life can be.

Balm in Gilead is a great story of courage, perseverance, and passion in the face of adversity. Margaret Morgan-Lawrence strived to become a doctor because of the death of her younger brother. Throughout her journey to become a healer she encounters institutional racism. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot expresses her mother's memories vividly. If you are looking for a story that insprires you to strive toward a profession you feel called to this is the book for you.

I really, really did not enjoy reading this book. I sort of liked the first chapter, but it was all downhill from there. The author makes all these comparisons between the subjects of her chapters, but they're all obvious, and it makes it seem like she's just trying to take up space and talk down to readers--like she's assuming we couldn't draw these very obvious conclusions ourselves. I didn't even think that most of the people she featured in the chapters were that remarkable. Definitely not a book to waste your money on.

Professor Lawrence-Lightfoot has presented some wonderful stories of some very engaging people. I enjoyed reading about their lives and the author's involvement with them. The book had the potential to provide a real service to all of us struggling with this area of behavior and specifically to those of us trying to help others give respect. However, the book just comes to a dead stop at the end of the last story . . .with no effort to pull together the common themes about respect---what have learned about being respectful? How can we be more respectful? It's up to the reader to go back and dig out the learnings from these stories. I subsequently wrote to the author asking for more information or a summary of respectful behaviours and she, in turn, turned my request over to her graduate assistant in a gesture that was profoundly disrepectful.

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot explores six different themes of respect by profiling six individuals that she associates with those qualities. I found the book uneven between the chapters, but that is because I found some of the people she profiled more interesting than others. I particularly enjoyed her chapter on David Wilkins, the Harvard Law School Professor; his strides for excellence seems to measure merely his own inadequacies (his was the chapter on Self-Respect). I was fascinated reading about him.

Still, I would recommend this book taken as an exploration--not definitive, not a self-help book, and not an exposition. But it is inspiring, challenging, informative, and she writes very well.