The Best of the Best: Becoming Elite at an American Boarding School reviewed by Amanda Cox Title: The Best of the Best: Becoming Elite at an American Boarding School Author(s): Rubén A. GaztambideFernández Publisher: Harvard University Press, Cambridge ISBN: 0674035682, Pages: 312, Year: 2009 Search for book at Amazon.com On a brisk fall day the sun glints sharply off the squash racquets that students carry as they walk beneath ivycovered archways. They make their way along welltrodden paths crossing quadrangles of marblecolumned buildings bearing Latin inscriptions. Some of their classmates sprawl comfortably on lush green grass as they read Faulkner, solve differential equations, or discuss Marx in preparation for the next class meeting of “Capitalism and its Critics.” In the distance other students run with lacrosse sticks or kick soccer balls across carefully manicured playing fields. This could be a scene from the movie Dead Poet’s Society, J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, or Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Prep. It is also what one might see on a Saturday afternoon after classes have ended for the day at the socalled “Weston School,” the elite New England boarding school that is the site for Rubén GaztambideFernández’s ethnography. The Best of the Best is a valuable new addition to the growing body of ethnographic research on elite boarding schools. Joining the company of works dating back to Cookson and Persell’s Preparing for Power (1985) and leading up to Chase’s more recent Perfectly Prep (2008), GaztambideFernández’s book explores the role that elite boarding schools such as Weston play in the reproduction of social inequality in the United States. More specifically, Gaztambide Fernández seeks to understand the process by which students at Weston internalize and justify the elite status they are granted as a result of their acceptance to and eventual graduation from the school. He argues that the process of identifying as Westonian differs for male and female students and for students from different racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds—in short, that some students are “more Westonian” than others. As GaztambideFernández puts it, “While elite status defines the experience of all students at the Weston School, not all students are equally elite” (p. 160). Through GaztambideFernández’s participantobservation, his survey of students in the senior class, and his indepth interviews and focus groups with 36 seniors, we see and hear how students construct their identification as Westonian. Taking us into classrooms, dorm rooms, and dining halls, Gaztambide Fernández skillfully reveals the internal hierarchies that differentiate students within the social landscape of the school. To make sense of the ways in which students construct their identity as Westonians, GaztambideFernández offers the notion of a discourse of distinction. The discourse of distinction is two pronged as it plays off of the two general meanings of “distinction”: one associated with rank and status, and the other associated with difference. The first prong refers to the way in which Weston students