DAVID L. MARCUS
What It Takes To Pull Me through: Why Teenagers Get in Trouble and How Four of Them Got Out

The title, the clean-cut, appealing child smiling on the cover, and the lively prose all seem to promise that “What It Takes To Pull Me Through” (Houghton Mifflin, 325 pages, $25) will be an inspirational success story. It’s not. It’s about a group of teenagers at risk, prey to drugs and alcohol and violence, eating disorders and promiscuity and abusive boyfriends, isolation and self-mutilation and attempted suicide. They are exemplars of a generation in which, suggests the author, no teenager is not at risk.

The book follows a cohort of teenagers through their 15-month stay at a therapeutic boarding school called the Academy at Swift River in western Massachusetts, from the orientation camping trip in the woods to graduation. The days consist of counseling, behavior modification, and peer support sessions, the chores, the classes, and the occasional celebrations. Fifteen months is not very long to transform a dangerous life, and the story feels like a race against time. Will he cooperate? Will he stay the course? When he returns to his old environment, will he survive?

The book’s four chief protagonists are DJ, an adopted child who started fires and ran away from his schoolteacher parents; Tyrone, a black boy from a bad Queens neighborhood (his mother gets the New York City Department of Education to pay the Academy’s tuition); the rich and athletic Mary Alice, whose father opened her diary to discover a terrifying secret life of hard drugs and abusive boyfriends; and Bianca, former star of both the debate and the soccer teams, who rages against a history of loss, rape, and the miscarriage she suffered at 14.

We hear their conversations (and their parents’ as well), read excerpts from their letters and journals, even see their bright-eyed baby pictures. The names are changed, but these are not composites – they are real kids, and real parents. The author, David Marcus, is a real presence, too. A Pulitzer-prize winning foreign correspondent who reluctantly accepted an assignment to describe therapeutic boarding schools, he “fell in love” with these youngsters and moved to Massachusetts to write this book and teach.

Mr. Marcus is a cool-eyed reporter whose perceptions we trust, who knows the children lie to him, as to all adults, though he admits he can’t always tell when. On the other hand, he responds openly to them as individuals. The combination makes the book gripping. In among the dramatic scenes, Mr. Marcus weaves some scary data about the “adolescent therapy business.”

In recent years, he points out, the number of psychiatric drugs prescribed for children and adolescents has doubled, and the teenage suicide rate has tripled. Corporations are coming to dominate treatment, though there is some evidence that outdoor wilderness programs succeed better than anything else. There are dedicated creative professionals in the field – some figure vividly in this book – but no one has figured out how to protect them from burnout.

What’s to be done? Mr. Marcus points to adoption, loss, and above all a “socially toxic environment” as dangers. But it’s not clear why some children survive while some succumb, even within the same family. In a “Memo to Parents” at the end, he offers a checklist of warning signs. He also mentions some things that are good for children – all the usuals, including taking responsibility, learning consequences, being listened to.

All in all, no miracles, no magic. The four principals in this book, plus some of their classmates, do save their lives, though they will never have the futures their parents dreamed for them. And others in the cohort, whom the reader has also gotten to know, drop out or go back to old self-destructive ways after graduation. One dies within a year.

-Nahma Sandrow

STELLA RIMINGTON
At Risk

While failure in this Age of Terror is all too visible and spectacular, success is rarely measurable and, more often, invisible. The notion of in visibility is at the heart of Stella Rimington’s “At Risk” (Alfred A. Knopf, 367 pages, $24). Ms. Rimington headed up the MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, and she brings an insider’s view to her story of the workings of intelligence and security. Her book is a page-turner, with none of the slickness that typically characterizes spy stories.

Ten-year MI5 veteran Liz Carlyle is an agent-runner: the contact for informers and double-agents, and a member of Joint Counter-Terrorism Group (consisting of representatives from the MI5, MI6, police, Home Office, and Foreign Office), a group established by the prime minister in the aftermath of 9/11.

When MI6 brings news of the sudden movement of a bagman for an Al Qaeda like outfit in Pakistan, a spectacular operation is set in motion involving the usual suspects and most disturbingly an “invisible”: a trained operative who is English and can move about without drawing any attention or suspicion to him or herself. This is the nightmare of all intelligence organizations, for no matter how many closed-circuit security cameras there may be, he or she will remain invisible.

The invisible, who calls herself Lucy Wharmby (the name on the driver’s license stolen in Pakistan), arrives at Waterloo Station and quickly rents a car to drive to the country. Then she awaits the arrival of the young operative who will direct her further. The nature of the terror plot is unknown to the invisible. Her own role is barely understood by her. She is the product of a broken home and her search for fulfillment has brought her into the arms of those who trade on such desires.

In taut, economical chapters, “At Risk” jumps back and forth between Liz and her team and the terrorists, who make their way slowly toward their target, which remains a mystery until the book’s climax. Ms. Rimington effectively establishes a psychological connection between Lucy Warmby and Liz, who is pursuing her. By the end of the novel, it’s almost as if Liz Carlyle has willed her invisible opponent to shed her cloak of invisibility and embrace the person she might have been but for circumstances.

Ms. Rimington does a good job serving up the explosive world in which we live: the potent nexus of arms, terror, illegals, drugs, and smuggling, and the strange things that happen when you cross those wires. She gives a convincing view of the intelligence process, dependent as it is on information from unreliable informants and methodical investigative work. Ms. Rimington, like her heroine Liz, likes having “more pieces of the jigsaw than anyone else.”

Sometimes, she lays out too many, and it slows the story down. But that is the flaw of many a first novel. Most importantly, Ms. Rimington has an insider’s grasp of the poisonous mix of ideology, history, and motives of revenge and honor that is at the heart of Mideast and Islamic politics. In doing so, she’s brought the hidden and the invisible out into the open.

-Robert Rosenberg