Beating the Odds: Raising Academically Successful African-American Males by Freeman A. Hrabowski III, Kenneth I. Maton and Geoffrey L. Greif, Oxford University Press, $25.00, 240 pages.

Written by the president of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, this book reflects much of what the author has learned about raising the academic success rate of Black males through his experiences with the acclaimed Meyerhoff Scholars program, which has operated at UMBC since 1989. The book offers lots of common -- and not-so-common -- sense strategies for keeping students on task and on the honor rolls.