The Prize Read Online Free PDF

approved the plan, and Booker began pitching it to major donors.
    In those pitches, Booker portrayed the Newark schools as a prize of a very different sort: a laboratory where the education reform movement could apply its strategies to one of the nation’s most troubled school districts. He predicted that Newark would be transformed into “a hemisphere of hope,” catalyzing the spread of reform throughout urban America.

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Seduction in Sun Valley
    July–September 2010
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    A FEW WEEKS LATER , in July of 2010, Cory Booker found himself in the company of billionaires and multimillionaires at the posh and secluded Sun Valley Resort, in the mountains of central Idaho, for a ritual mixing of big business and pleasure. The invitation-only extravaganza of deal-making and schmoozing for media moguls and investors, hosted by New York banker Herbert Allen, drew the richest and most famous people in the business. That year’s guest list for the first time included twenty-six-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. Booker had his sights set on Zuckerberg to fund his and Christie’s plans for the Newark schools. As it turned out, Zuckerberg wanted to meet him, too.
    The Newark mayor had an extraordinary social network of his own, but for this particular connection, Booker once again had his Yale Law School classmate Ed Nicoll to thank.
    When Booker was still a city councilman, Nicoll introduced him to one of his investors, a venture capitalist named Marc Bodnick. Booker remembered Nicoll briefing him: “This guy’s a diehard Democrat and also hates the failures in education and heard that you believed in everything from vouchers to charter schools, whatever, and wants to meet you.” They clicked in the first meeting.
    In what turned into a networking trifecta for Booker, Bodnick later married Michelle Sandberg, whose sister Sheryl became chief operating officer of Facebook in 2008. In mid-2010, according to Booker, Bodnick tipped him that the Facebook founder was planning a significant philanthropic move, “something big” in education. Then Bodnick learned that Sandberg, Zuckerberg, and Booker all would be at Allen’s annual Sun Valley mixer, and Booker got another alert. “He said, ‘Make sure you connect with Sheryl and her husband out there, because they want to connect you with Mark,’” Booker said.
    As always at the Sun Valley event, the panel discussions featured some of the most interesting and compelling people in the country and the world. It was not surprising that a discussion on the future of cities included leaders from centers of commerce, culture, and influence, like Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York, and Richard Daley, mayor of Chicago. The third panelist, whose city had long ago lost its wealth and influence, was Booker. Like Zuckerberg, Booker was a first-timer at Sun Valley, and he poked fun at the incongruity of his presence. He felt, he said, like a community college sitting beside the Harvard and Yale of mayors.
    But the incongruity was what made Booker intriguing. He was in fact completely at ease among the rich and powerful. For years, he had been a regularly featured guest at Manhattan celebrity galas and Hollywood premieres, a sought-after speaker around the country at political fundraisers, charity events, and college commencements, a frequent chatting partner on late-night talk shows. Wherever he traveled, he made rich people want to write checks for causes in Newark: Brad Pitt financed housing for low-income veterans, Jon Bon Jovi for HIV/AIDS patients, Oprah Winfrey for battered women. Shaquille O’Neal was developing a twelve-screen movie complex and high-rise apartments. Even United States senators marveled at the way thismayor of an impoverished city coaxed money from the wealthiest donors.
    Booker and Zuckerberg met at a buffet dinner one night on the deck of Herbert Allen’s Sun Valley townhouse, overlooking a golf