Description
A Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year
By almost all measures, Kansas City’s Central High School is just every other failing inner-city school–with abysmal test scores, only one in three graduate. Cross-X is the riveting story of Central’s championship debate team. As the students and their coach face formidable opponents from elite prep schools, they will have to also battle bureaucrats who seem maddeningly made up our minds to hold them back, family and friends who are mired in poverty and drug addiction, and–in all probability most daunting–their very own self-destructive choices. This can be a gripping story about the crucial nature of debate in any democratic society, and how through argument, retort, and wit, ideals live on even under probably the most difficult conditions.