The difficult journey from hopelessness to "hope in the unseen," to, that is, faith that a better life awaits, is an often told story. In America, we have the "Autobiography" of Benjamin Franklin; slave narratives, like Frederick Douglass's "Narrative"; poverty-to-riches fiction like Horatio Alger's; immigrant narratives, like David Eggers's "What is the What." There is more than one account of minority students and their path to the Ivy League. For a writer with this sort of "redemption" material, the difficult task is to shape a story whose ending we might guess at but whose details are so compelling that a reader can't put the book down. And this Ron Suskind has done. Because he tells Cedric Lavar Jennings's story in the voices not only of Cedric, but also of his mother, Barbara; his father, Cedric Gilliam; his classmates and teachers at Ballou High school and at Brown University; his pastor, Bishop Long; and many others, the book has a complexity that a similar story told in a single voice could not have. Suskind presents these people exactly as they are, with not only their strengths but their weaknesses in full view: Barbara's difficulties with money management; Cedric's standoffishness when his dorm mates attempt to befriend him; the father's struggle to stay off heroin. It is difficult to call this book "inspirational," as some have done. As Suskind points out, he chose to profile Cedric Jennings precisely because "the basic appeal of Cedric's story was never rooted in his exceptionalism . . .he is, in his basic makeup, so very much like countless other young people . . .". And Suskind does not spare the institutions that fail students like Cedric every day: the bleak public school where learning is almost impossible, the "sink-or-swim approach for poorly prepared minority students at places like Brown. Throughout the book, Suskind explores both the positive and negative aspects of affirmative action, letting the details of Cedric's experience make a case for it. This book is one family's experience. It does not--it cannot--encompass the experience of every inner city child who hopes for the unseen. But it does offer powerful testimony not just for broad prescriptions or programs, but for the incremental powers of love and determination. Recently on NPR, I heard a review of "A Hope in the Unseen" as one of those books not to be missed. The reviewer was right.
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