City Schools

Told with equal parts raw honesty and unbridled compassion, All Day recounts a year in Liza Jessie Peterson's classroom at Island Academy, the high school for inmates detained at New York City's Rikers Island. A poet and an actress who had done occasional workshops at the correctional facility, Peterson was ill prepared for a full-time stint teaching in the GED program for the incarcerated youths.

Fans of New York Times best seller The Nanny Diaries will rejoice in this wickedly hilarious novel, which acclaimed author Katharine Weber says is "much funnier and darker". Optioned for a major motion picture starring Catherine Zeta-Jones, The Ivy Chronicles skewers the twisted priorities of America's well-heeled elite.

In the privileged world of Manhattan’s elite Dearborn Academy, three mothers—Abby, Kara, and Hollis—form an unlikely bond. Until a student is murdered on a class trip their teenagers attended, and every parent has something to hide. Artistic single mom Abby and career-challenged Kara have always felt like outsiders among Dearborn’s rich, powerful families.

In 2002, New York City's newly elected mayor Michael Bloomberg made a historic announcement: His administration had won control of the city's school system in a first step toward reversing its precipitous decline. In a controversial move, he appointed Joel Klein, an accomplished lawyer from outside the education establishment, to lead this ambitious campaign. Lessons of Hope is Klein's inside account of his eight-year mission of improvement.

In this classic 1948 memoir, now in its fourth edition, Caroline Pratt recounts, in a wry authorial voice much closer to Will Rogers than John Dewey, how she founded what is now the dynamic City and Country School in New York City; invented the maple "unit blocks” that have become a staple in classrooms and children’s homes around the globe; and came to play an important role in reimagining preschool and primary-school education in ways that resound in the tumultuously creative age before us.

When turbocharged Park Avenue mom Ivy Ames finds she's been downsized from her high-powered corporate job and her marriage, she swiftly realises that she's going to need a whole new way to support herself and her two private-school daughters. At first she does the obvious thing -- she panics. Then she decides to put her years of marketing savvy to work and dreams up a brilliant new business: helping upscale New Yorkers get their little darlings into the most exclusive kindergartens in the city.