Whatever It Takes detailed the Harlem Children's Zone project, a multi-pronged effort within a ninety-seven block area of New York City founded in 1997 by Geoffrey Canada. Tough described how Canada has "believed that he could find the ideal intervention for each age of a child’s life, and then connect those interventions into an unbroken chain of support", with the Zone functioning as a social and economic "conveyor belt" working from children's birth to their college age. The New York Times ran a supportive review by Linda Perlstein of the National Education Writers Association; she wrote, "when it comes to an introduction to the debate about poverty and parenting in urban America, you could hardly do better than Tough’s book."[5]