Book Review: Life at the Intersection: Community, Class and SchoolingLife at the Intersection: Community, Class and Schooling by Carl E. James. Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood. Reviewed by Paul Orlowski, University of SaskatchewanWith Life at the Intersection, Carl James has written a very useful and important book. The intersection referred to in the book's title is the one at Jane and Finch, located at the nexus of a neighbourhood that the mainstream media continually paint as notoriously violent and filled with society's outcasts. This book takes on the media's monolithic portrayal of an incredibly diverse and complex neighbourhood in one of the world's most multicultural cities: the Jane and Finch area of northwestern Toronto is home to some 75,000 residents of various ethnic, racial, religious and generational backgrounds (p. 29). Although most outsiders think of mainly Black people inhabiting the Jane and Finch neighbourhoods in reality, they comprise 20% of the population. White residents make up the largest group at 29%, with South Asians, East Asians, and Latin Americans making up most of the remainder (p. 34).I grew up in a Scarborough, a Toronto neighbourhood that at times rivals Jane and Finch in terms of the media's ongoing focus and fascination with violence. Although I have spent most of my adult life in western Canada, I frequently visit the neighbourhood I grew up in as my aging mother and my brother still live there. I have watched this neighbourhood evolve from one composed of various European ethnic groups, especially Polish, Italian and Irish Catholics, to one similar in cultural makeup to the Jane and Finch area. Since the mid 1980s, I have been a teacher, first in the high schools of Vancouver's multicultural east end, and for the past decade as a teacher educator in three western Canadian universities. It is through all of these lenses that I read James' fascinating book.James, a Black immigrant from the Caribbean, is the perfect person to critique media portrayals and honestly describe the people who live in this part of Toronto - he has been engaged in community work in the Jane and Finch neighbourhood for almost 20 years. He has written extensively about his experiences and the young people he has met in the Jane and Finch corridor, and he refers to several of these studies in this book. This background and experience gives James a kind of insider-outsider status with the communities who live there. Because of this, the reader receives an incredibly rich cultural description and deep analysis of students, parents, teachers and teacher who have invested much of their lives in the neighbourhood.Much of James' experience with the people of Jane and Finch has been through his faculty position at York University and the Westview Partnership between the university and the Toronto District School Board. This partnership is unique in Canada and seeks to enrich the schooling experience through programs designed to meet the needs, interests and expectations of students, teachers, parents, administrators and teacher candidates (p. 72). Indeed, one particular program offered through the partnership, the University Path Program, operates on a premise that frames this entire book: students' failures are due not merely to their individual efforts, social situation, or cultures but also to educational and social contexts and structural barriers that limit their capacity to imagine and pursue certain possibilities after high school (p. 72). In other words, schools do not operate within a social vacuum. They reflect the values and ideologies of the dominant society. In the case of this special program, however, a serious attempt has been made to have the schools reflect the needs of the surrounding communities.Life at the Intersection is an exceptionally poignant book for educators, especially because of its analytical approach to cultural studies in relation to schooling. …