Books: Two Worlds BEST INTENTIONS: THE EDUCATION AND KILLING OF EDMUND PERRY

In every way but one, it was the sort of spasm of urban violence that gets a glancing, one-shot story in the local papers. On a steamy June night in 1985, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a white plainclothes policeman shot and killed a young black man named Edmund Perry. The cop said Perry and another man had assaulted and attempted to rob him. But Eddie Perry was no down-and- out hood. Only days before, he had graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, one of the nation's most exclusive prep schools. He would have entered Stanford in the fall had...