From Amazon.com
Ron Suskind won the
Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1995 for his stories on Cedric Jennings, a talented black teenager struggling to succeed in one of the worst public high schools in Washington, D.C. Suskind has expanded those features into a full-length nonfiction narrative, following Jennings beyond his high-school graduation to Brown University, and in the tradition of Leon Dash's
Rosa Lee and Alex Kotlowitz's
There Are No Children Here, delivers a compelling story on the struggles of inner-city life in modern America. While it appears to have a happy ending (with Jennings earning a B average in his sophomore year),
A Hope in the Unseen is not without a few caveats (at times, Jennings feels profoundly alienated from his white peers). Trite as it may sound to say, this book teaches a lesson about the virtue of perseverance, and it's definitely worth reading.
--John J. Miller
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
An offshoot of Suskind's Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal articles on students at a crime-ridden Washington, DC, high school, this chronicles the journey of one of those students?Cedric Jennings?out of the ghetto through his first year at Brown. With mesmerizing detail, Suskind weaves Cedric's story: his illegitimacy, his fiercely protective mother, the black Pentecostal church that imbues him with a trust in God, the taunts and threats he suffers at Ballou High because he is a model student, the strangeness he feels at Brown, both culturally and socially, his academic unpreparedness, despite being the best at Ballou, and his survival at Brown against the odds. Suskind uses his reporter's skills brilliantly, portraying Cedric's outer and inner life and making an eloquent though unstated plea for affirmative action. Essential reading that provides some small hope for our social ills.
-?Francine Fialkoff, "Library Journal"Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
