The landmark New York Times bestseller that demonstrates the benefits of race-conscious admissions in higher education First published in 1998, William Bowen and Derek Bok's The Shape of the River became an immediate landmark in the debate over affirmative action in America. It grounded a contentious subject in concrete data at a time when arguments surrounding it were characterized more by emotion than evidence-and it made a forceful case that race-conscious admissions were successfully helping to promote equal opportunity. Today, the issue of affirmative action remains unsettled. Much has changed, but The Shape of the River continues to present the most compelling data available about the effects of affirmative action. Now with a new foreword by Nicholas Lemann and an afterword by Derek Bok, The Shape of the River is an essential text for anyone seeking to understand race-conscious admissions in higher education.

History-natural history, human history, and personal history-and place are the cornerstones of The Eye of the Mammoth. Stephen Harrigan's career has taken him from the Alaska Highway to the Chihuahuan Desert, from the casinos of Monaco to his ancestors' village in the Czech Republic. And now, in this new edition, he movingly recounts in "Off Course" a quest to learn all he can about his father, who died in a plane crash six months before he was born. Harrigan's deceptively straightforward voice belies an intense curiosity about things that, by his own admission, may be "unknowable." Certainly, we are limited in what we can know about the inner life of George Washington, the last days of Davy Crockett, the motives of a caged tiger, or a father we never met, but Harrigan's gift-a gift that has also made him an award-winning novelist-is to bring readers closer to such things, to make them less remote, just as a cave painting in the title essay eerily transmits the living stare of a long-extinct mammoth.

What do we know about the history, origin, design, and purpose of the SAT? Who invented it, and why? How did it acquire such a prominent and lasting position in American education? The Big Test reveals the ideas, people, and politics behind a fifty-year-old utopian social experiment that changed this country. Combining vibrant storytelling, vivid portraiture, and thematic analysis, Lemann shows why this experiment did not turn out as planned. It did create a new elite, but it also generated conflict and tension—and America's best educated, most privileged people are now leaders without followers.

Drawing on unprecedented access to the Educational Testing Service’s archives, Lemann maintains that America’s meritocracy is neither natural nor inevitable, and that it does not apportion opportunity equally or fairly. His important study not only asks profound moral and political questions about the past and future of our society but also carries implications for current social and educational policy. As Brent Staples noted in his New York Times editorial column: “Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts announced that prospective students would no longer be required to submit SAT scores with their applications. . . . Holyoke's president, Joanne Creighton, was personally convinced by reading Nicholas Lemann's book, The Big Test, which documents how the SAT became a tool for class segregation.”

All students of education, sociology, and recent U.S. history—especially those focused on testing, theories of learning, social stratification, or policymaking—will find this book fascinating and alarming.

"An arresting piece of popular history." --Sean Wilentz, "The New York Times Book Review" Nicholas Lemann opens this extraordinary book with a riveting account of the horrific events of Easter 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana, where a white militia of Confederate veterans-turned-vigilantes attacked the black community there and massacred hundreds of people in a gruesome killing spree. This began an insurgency that changed the course of American history: for the next few years white Southern Democrats waged a campaign of political terrorism aiming to overturn the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and challenge President Grant's support for the emergent structures of black political power. "Redemption" is the first book to describe in uncompromising detail this organized racial violence, which reached its apogee in Mississippi in 1875.