An engrossing profile of an extraordinary guidance counselor who helps kids get into the right colleges through focusing on self- awareness
Gwyeth Smith, known as Smitty, is a nationally renowned guidance counselor who believes that getting into college should be a kid's first great moment of self-discovery. In "Acceptance," David L. Marcus, Pulitzer Prize-winning former education writer for "U.S. News & World Report," spins an absorbing narrative of a year in the lives of Smitty and "his" kids.
At a diverse public school in Long Island, New York, Smitty works his unique magic on students' applications and their lives, helping them find the right college by figuring out who they are, rather than focusing on what their test scores, grades, and finances reflect. Loaded with advice that readers can apply to their own college searches, "Acceptance" is a book that thousands of students and their parents will find indispensable.

The Academy at Swift River specializes in one of the toughest tasks a school can undertake: helping teenagers in crisis regain their bearings. During a fourteen-month academic term at the school, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David L. Marcus witnesses the intense process that turns these kids around.
In his time on campus, Marcus gets to know a diverse and remarkable group of teenagers: a former straight-A student reeling from the death of her mother, a teachers' son grappling with anger over being adopted, a southern girl immersed in drug abuse and unsafe sex, and a boy from Queens overwhelmed by depression. Granted full access to the Swift River proceednigs, Marcus is given the rare chance to observe the students' struggles and see their transformations from the inside. In What It Takes to Pull Me Through, he charts a path to redemption that any teen, any parent, can follow.