class reunions

Assigned to work together to plan a former class's 10th-year reunion, two overachieving rivals with Ivy League ambitions begin to realize that their longtime competition is being gradually replaced by mutual affection.

As a member of a Georgia Christian commune, Koinonia, Greg Wittkamper was publicly and devoutly in favor of racial integration and harmony. When Georgia's Americus High School was integrated, he refused to participate in the insults and violence aimed at its black students. He was harassed and bullied and beaten but stood his ground. In the summer after his senior year, as racial strife in Americus reached its peak, Greg left town. Forty-two years later, in the spring of 2006, a dozen former classmates wrote letters to Greg, asking his forgiveness and inviting him to return for a class reunion. Their words opened a vein of painful memory and unresolved emotion. The long-deferred attempt at reconciliation started him on a journey that would prove healing and saddening. The Class of '65 transcends the ugly things that happened decades ago in the Deep South. This book is also the story of four other people--David Morgan, Joseph Logan, Deanie Dudley, and Celia Harvey--who reached out to their former classmate. Why did they change their minds? Why did it still matter to them, decades later? Their tale illustrates our capacity for change and the ways in which America has--and has not--matured in its attitudes about race. At heart, this is a tale about a pariah and the people who eventually realized that they had been a party to injustice.

The decades melt away as newly divorced Dorothy Shauman, class beauty Candy Armstrong, veterinarian and widower Lester Hessenpfeffer, and other classmates gather for a fortieth reunion.

At Will James' tenth high school reunion, Will discovers that an old friend committed, and covered up, a violent crime their senior year, forcing him to choose between revealing the truth and protecting his friend.

Alexandra Gordon, Kay Lenox, Jessica Pierce, and Maria Franconi, students together at the prestigious Anya Sedgwick School of Decorative Arts in Paris, go their separate ways after graduation having severed their ties of friendship, but their old ties are rekindled and the past revisited when they return to celebrate Anya Sedgwick's eighty-fifth birthday.

Twenty-five years after they were graduated from Radcliffe and Harvard a small group of attractive, privileged people seem to be living the lives they were intended for.

College dean and prominent historian Jean Sheridan heads to her hometown of Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, where she is slated to be honored at her twenty-year class reunion, not realizing she is the target of a former classmate who has concocted a plan to get even with all the people who tortured him as a youth.

Ten friends from Minnesota's Darton Hall College class of 1969 come together thirty years later to reminisce, nurse wounds, and look for hope despite disillusion and regrets.