Best Intentions: The Education and Killing of Edmund Perry

Edmund Perry, a seventeen year old student at Exeter Academy, was shot unfairly by a police officer. This officer thought that Eddie was mugging a woman so he immediatly shot him. Eddie lived in Harlem, but attended school in New Hampshire at Exeter Academy. He was living two completely differnt lives, black ghetto with his family friends and a prestigious bording school with his teachers and friends. It was very unlikely for a black boy to go to a prep school at this time, but Edmund was a very smart boy. He attended Harlem primary school then had four years of private school and soon would be going to Stanford University in the fall. This couldn't happen for him. How could someone who worked so hard in life and got far, have their life cut off so short? How is this fair? Robert Sam Anson, the author of "Best Intentions" did a fabulous job getting the facts from Edmund's family and friends, because this is a true story.

This was just a really really good book

Great things were expected of young Edmund Evans Perry, a gifted black teenager raised in Harlem and schooled at Philips Exeter Academy, one of the nation's most prestigious preparatory schools. At seventeen, he had already received four years of top-notch schooling, explored the world (Perry spent a year in Spain), and was accepted to Stanford University, where he planned to go for college starting in the fall of 1985. However, that summer Perry was dead, shot by a policeman on the streets of New York City, allegedly while involved in a mugging. What went wrong? The author spends most of the book trying to answer that question (we learn the basic story in the first couple chapters), and he does a remarkable job of doing just that. Robert Sam Anson interviewed the people who knew Perry, the people who made him what he was, both in Harlem and at Exeter, and over the course of the book, we learn just what happened to Edmund Perry. What you learn may surprise you, and it is sure to inspire many questions in all who happen upon its pages.

I read Best Intentions several years ago and to this day, I cite the book as a major reason I decided to be a writer. Compelling and thorough, the book unfolds like a detective story, as we learn more and more about the life and times of Edmund Perry, the book's tragic subject. After learning about Perry's plight, Anson spent years researching this book and that exhaustive investigation comes through on every page.Perry, an exceedingly intelligent young man, came from a poor family and Harlem and earned a full scholarship to Exeter Academy, one of America's most elite preperatory schools. Making a long story ferociously short, Perry returned to his neighborhood during his senior year at Exeter. During the visit, Perry was shot by an off-duty police officer who claimed that Perry tried to mug him. We learn all of this in the opening pages, the rest is a moving, poignant story, artfully told.