A Silicon Valley entrepreneur takes on the challenge of a lifetime: teaching in one of California's toughest high schools. Entrepreneur Steve Poizner has run a billion dollar company, but the greatest challenge of his life was the year he spent teaching twelfth graders at San Jose's Mt. Pleasant High School. On many days, like the one when a student's boyfriend was arrested for bank robbery, his managerial and entrepreneurial skills seemed irrelevant. But on others, they helped him demonstrate how exciting it is to learn. Playing Jeopardy with the class and inviting speakers into the classroom, Poizner motivated his students by expanding their horizons far beyond their high school's walls. Poizner writes, "Often I came to ask myself one question: What exactly are you doing here? As it turns out, I was receiving one hell of an education." Mt Pleasant is ultimately a success story, as Poizner wins Rookie Teacher of the Year honors and, more important, ensures that all his students graduate.

A majestic tale of colonialism and transformation, Patrice Nganang's Mount Pleasant tells the astonishing story of the birth of modern Cameroon, a place subject to the whims of the French and the Germans, yet engaged in a cultural revolution. In 1931, Sara is taken from her family and brought to Mount Pleasant as a gift for Sultan Njoya, a ruler cast into exile by French colonialists. Merely nine years old, she is on the verge of becoming the sultan’s 681st wife. But when she is dragged to Bertha, the long-suffering slave charged with training Njoya’s brides, Sara’s life takes a curious turn. Bertha sees within this little girl her son Nebu, who died tragically years before, and she saves Sara from her fate by disguising her as her son. In Sara’s new life as a boy she bears witness to the world of Sultan Njoya---a magical yet vulnerable community of artists and intellectuals---and learns of the sultan’s final days in the Palace of All Dreams and the sad fate of Nebu, the greatest artist their culture had ever seen. Seven decades later, a student returns home to Cameroon to learn about the place it once was, and she finds Sara, silent for years, ready to tell her story. But her serpentine tale, entangled by flawed memory and bursts of the imagination, reinvents history anew. The award-winning novelist Patrice Nganang’s Mount Pleasant is a lyrical resurrection of early-twentieth-century Cameroon and an elegy to the people swept up in the forces of colonization.

In middle age, debt has become the most significant relationship in Harry Salter's life. He was born to wealthy parents in leafy and privileged Rosedale, at a time when the city was still defined by its WASP elite. But nothing in life has turned out the way Harry was led to expect. He's unsure of his place in society, his marriage is crumbling, his son is bordering on estranged, and on top of it all his father is dying. As he sits at his father's bedside, Harry inevitably daydreams about his inheritance. A couple of his father's millions would rescue him from his ballooning debt--maybe even save his marriage. But when the will is read, all that's left for Harry is $4200. Dale Salter's money is gone. Out of desperation and disbelief, Harry starts to dig into what happened to the money. As he follows a trail strewn with family secrets and unsavory suspicions, he discovers not only that old money has lost its grip and new money taken on an ugly hue, but that his whole existence been cast into shadow by the weight of his expectations.

Mount Pleasant--Samuel P. Brown must have thought the name perfect when he chose it for his country estate on a wooded hill overlooking Washington City. The name also suited the New Englanders who settled in the village that Brown founded near Fourteenth Street and Park Road just after the Civil War. Around 1900, the once-isolated village began its transformation into a fashionable suburb after the city extended Sixteenth Street through Mount Pleasant's heart, and a new streetcar line linked the area to downtown. Developers constructed elegant apartment buildings and spacious brick row houses on block after block, and successful businessmen built stately residences along Park Road. Change arrived again with the Great Depression and then World War II, as the suburb evolved into an urban, exclusively white, working-class enclave that eventually became mostly African American. In addition, a Latino presence was evident as early as the 1960s. By the 1980s, the neighborhood was known as the heart of D.C.'s Latino and counterculture communities. Today these communities are dispersing, however, in response to a booming real estate market in Washington, D.C.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1870.