Best Intentions: The Education and Killing of Edmund Perry, Paperback

A complex, poignant exploration of racial attitudes in America, as illumined by the case of Edmund Perry. Perry, a seventeen-year-old black honors student from Harlem, was fatally shot by a young white plainclothes policeman in 1985 in an alleged mugging attempt. Perry had recently graduated from Philips Exeter Academy and was to attend Stanford University that fall. The shooting and the subsequent case, in which Edmund's elder brother Jonah, an undergraduate at Cornell University, was accused, tried, and found not guilty, drew national headlines and was the subject of heated debate among black and white communities alike. Using interviews with Perry's parents, friends, and former teachers in Harlem and at Exeter, journalist Robert Sam Anson has written a compelling account of a boy caught between two worlds and a profound portrait of the state of race in America.

About the Author:

Robert Sam Anson became a reporter for Time while still a student at the University of Notre Dame, where he was involved in antiwar and civil rights movements. In 1970, while on assignment in Cambodia, he was taken prisoner of war. Anson has worked as an anchorman for public television, a senior writer for New Time magazine, and a freelance magazine writer and author. He is the author of, among others, Best Intentions, McGovern: A Biography, and Exile: The Unquiet Oblivion of Richard M. Nixon.