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What has Obama done so far? Just Say ‘Wait a Minute’ The Fix by Michael Massing Simon and Schuster, 335 pp., $25.00 Drug Crazy: How We Got into This Mess and How We Can Get Out by Mike Gray Random House, 251 pp., $23.95 On a hot, muggy night in the summer of 1976, Ron and Marsha “Keith” Schuchard held a thirteenth-birthday party for their daughter in the backyard of their suburban Atlanta home. The “guests”—many of whom they had never seen before—kept to the shadows of the backyard. That teenagers occasionally do things—and ingest things—that do not meet the approval of their parents is not, of course, all that unusual.

By this point, Schuchard had hooked up with a neighbor, Sue Rusche, and formed Families in Action, the country’s first antidrug parents’ group, and was intensively lobbying the president’s drug adviser. Culture of Poverty. To the Editors: When Professor Christopher Lasch suggests in his article that Italian immigrants advanced themselves by creating the Mafia, he indulges in the same sloppy analysis he accuses the writers of Black Power of doing. Mr. Lasch writes about the Italian immigrant ghetto in which I and many non-Mafia types were born. He asserts we advanced ourselves not as individuals, but through group consciousness. Of course, crimes were high in the ghetto. As studies indicate, a preponderant number of the immigrants made sacrifices of present consumption to capitalize their children. This is the fundamental lesson for the Negro. J.A. Professor of Economics Drexel Institute of Technology Philadelphia, Pa.

Christopher Lasch replies: These are “value judgments” with a vengeance. Yes, self-defense has become a necessity, though too often it does present itself as a radical program for social change. “Putting a stop to murder cannot wait on theory.” As for Mr. Must Schools Fail? No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning by Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom Simon and Schuster, 334 pp., $26.00; $15.00 (paper) Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement by John U. Ogbu, with Astrid Davis Erlbaum, 320 pp., $69.95; $32.50 (paper) Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life by Annette Lareau University of California Press, 331 pp., $51.00; $21.95 (paper) Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society by Michael K.

University of California Press,338 pp., $27.50 There Are No Shortcuts by Rafe Esquith Pantheon, 210 pp., $21.00 Final Test: The Battle for Adequacy in America’s Schools by Peter Schrag New Press, 308 pp., $25.95 City Schools and the American Dream: Reclaiming the Promise of Public Education by Pedro A. Teachers College Press, 187 pp., $50.00; $19.95 (paper) This is not to say that there has been no progress.

Working-class children have no such sense of entitlement. See, for example, Melvin L. Justice for Clarence Thomas. As this article goes to press, the nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court apparently hinges on how many senators accept the charges made by Professor Anita Hill, of the University of Oklahoma Law School, that Thomas sexually harassed her when she was his assistant at the Department of Education and the E E O C Though the Senate Judiciary Committee knew of the accusation before it voted on the nomination, no member of that committee mentioned it publicly until it was leaked to the press only two days before the whole Senate was scheduled to vote on the nomination.

The Senate plainly mismanaged the matter, and the reputation of the Judiciary Committee and of senators who opposed a delay has been damaged. But it would be very unfortunate if these serious failings obscured other, more structural and pervasive, defects in the nomination process that the hearings had already revealed. ‘Why Has He Fallen Short?’ The Promise: President Obama, Year One by Jonathan Alter Simon and Schuster, 458 pp., $28.00 Of course Barack Obama was too hot not to cool down. He was the one so many were waiting for—not only the first African-American president but also the nation’s long-awaited liberator after eight years of Bush-Cheney, the golden-tongued evangelist who could at long last revive and sell the old liberal faith, the first American president in memory to speak to voters as if they might be thinking adults, the first national politician in years to electrify the young.

He was even, of all implausible oddities, a contemporary politician- author who actually wrote his own books. The Obama of Hope and Change was too tough an act for Obama, a mere chief executive, to follow. But still: How did we get to the nadir so fast? There was, however, one contradictory footnote to the many provisional Obama obituaries of late spring and early summer 2010. PolitiFact.com, a database of the St.

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