High School Confidential
Secrets of an Undercover Student
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
It's spring semester at Mirador High in Southern California, and twenty-four-year-old Jeremy Iversen is going deep undercover to deliver the real deal about the dull classes and fast times of American teens today.
Trading in his suit and tie for jeans and skater shoes, Iversen posed as a senior transfer student. He took six classes five days a week, dissected a cat, got sent to detention, hung out at the mall, signed yearbooks, and graduated in cap and gown. He infiltrated the homes of his teenage friends, met their parents, and went to their parties. For one entire semester, he led the life of a modern-day high school student -- and lived to tell all about it.
Going way beyond the usual clichés of jock and nerd, the book introduces readers to a revolving cast of fascinating characters from every walk of social life: promiscuous freshmen girls, lunchtime alcoholics, evangelical Christians, perfectionist drug dealers, masochistic vampires, steroid-raging baseball stars, and one principal who will stop at nothing to make her failing school look good.
In this fast-paced exposé, Jeremy Iversen blows the lid off a secret world in which the sexual revolution runs unchecked, where the use of recreational drugs is chronic, and where apathetic teachers don't even bother to teach. This Wild West wonderland, however, lives by strict unwritten rules and ultraconservative politics, creating a pressure cooker of conflict that's bound to explode. High School Confidential isn't confidential anymore.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
What really happens between homeroom and last period in an average American high school? Jeremy Iversen, a 24-year-old Stanford graduate and the author of the novel 21, infiltrated California's Mirador High (fictional name, real school) for a semester to find out. Posing as a high-school transfer student, Iversen discovers what many have discovered before: that high school is "an institution founded on popularity, sports, ass kissing, and corruption." Although Iversen's tone can be entertaining and his descriptions occasionally catch the reader's attention, his story-of an almost out-of-control school in which social cliques (the jocks, nerds, skaters, etc. of any '80s film), alcohol and sex rule and the principal and many teachers are clueless figureheads-is one that has been told too many times. Iversen also has a penchant for grandiose statements about the school system ("The vast and functional cycle, far greater than she or any other entity, would repeat without end until the civilization that sustained it ultimately dissolved as all phenomena must"), and the author's preface about "compromises with characters and chronology" hobbles reportorial integrity. Readers looking for original revelations will be disappointed.
Customer Reviews
High School Confidential
I REALLY ENJOY THIS BOOK!!! Right now i am getting ready to be a Junior in High School and I was givin a choice of books to read for my summer reading project!. I chose this book simply because I am a high school student that goes to a some-what private school. I wanted to read a book that would show me what its like to go to a "normal" high school and compare the pros and cons of both types of schooling. I think this book is soo funny and interesting because I am a teenager who is the age of some of these characters and i have friends that are these ages. I find this book funny because some of these charaters in the book are EXACTLY like people i have actually met. I think this is a good book for students ages 15 and up or adults who are trying to become "hip". Its also a really good book for parents so they can understand what kinds of things their children go through at school and the lives of most teens today. I will most likely read this book more than twice :D