Growing up in middle-class Lagos, Nigeria during the late 1980s and early 1990s, Ihechi forms a band of close friends discovering Lagos together as teenagers with differing opinions of everything from film to football, Fela Kuti to spirituality, sex to politics. They remain close-knit until tragedy unfolds during an anti-government riot. Exiled from Lagos by his concerned mother, Ihechi moves in with his uncle's family, where he struggles to find...

"A masterful tale of social climbing and entrenched class distinctions, as seen through the eyes of an outsider who desperately wants in. Tense, hilarious, and bursting with gorgeous language. Stephanie Clifford is a 21st-century Edith Wharton." -J. Courtney Sullivan, New York Times bestselling author of The Engagements. It's 2006 in the Manhattan of the young and glamorous. Money and class are colliding in a city that is about to go over a financial...

Shares the story of the author's family and upbringing, describing how they moved from poverty to an upwardly mobile clan that included the author, a Yale Law School graduate, while navigating the demands of middle class life and the collective demons of the past.

A critique of the white American class structure argues that the paths of social mobility that once advanced the nation are now serving to further isolate an elite upper class while enforcing a growing and resentful white underclass.

"This book explains why so many efforts by liberals to help the black underclass not only fail but often harm the intended beneficiaries. The intentions behind welfare programs may be noble, but in practice they have slowed the self-development that was necessary for other groups to advance. Minimum-wage laws may lift earnings for people who are already employed, but they also have a long history of pricing blacks out of the labor force. Affirmative...