Seniors in Mississippi

A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League

Description

At Ballou Senior High, a crime-infested school in Washington, D.C., honor students have learned to keep their heads down. Like most inner-city kids, they know that any special attention in a place this dangerous can make you a target of violence. But Cedric Jennings will not swallow his pride, and with unwavering support from his mother, he studies and strives as if his life depends on it--and it does. The summer after his junior year, at a program for minorities at MIT, he gets a fleeting glimpse of life outside, a glimpse that turns into a face-on challenge one year later: acceptance into Brown University, an Ivy League school.

At Brown, finding himself far behind most of the other freshmen, Cedric must manage a bewildering array of intellectual and social challenges. Cedric had hoped that at college he would finally find a place to fit in, but he discovers he has little in common with either the white students, many of whom come from privileged backgrounds, or the middle-class blacks. Having traveled too far to turn back, Cedric is left to rely on his faith, his intelligence, and his determination to keep alive his hope in the unseen--a future of acceptance and reward that he struggles, each day, to envision.

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

Reviews

Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2010-06-24
Summary: "A Hope in the Unseen"

Gripping, wrenching, a clear concise description of growing up poor and black and very very smart.

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Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2010-06-10
Summary: "Faith and Hope"

Nonfictional account of a youth from Southeast Washington, D. C. as he endures the effects of inner city poverty to stay in school, graduate, and go on to complete college. Gives the reader a real close up view of the obstacles confronting youth in the inner city. Offers hope that the impossible may be possible with faith and a stern belief in God. Inspirational and enlightening. Every parent should read with their high school teen. Recommended additional title by this author: Song Yet Sung

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Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2009-09-20
Summary: "Wonderful story!"

A riveting tale of a yound man's struggle to overcome tremendous adversity and achieve his full potential. Very well written.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2009-09-01
Summary: "Narrative in a grand American tradition"

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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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2009-08-28
Summary: "About a boy2man...FOR EVERYONE"

This book is inspiring, after you read it you will have gone through the emotions of anger, sadness, happiness, and hope. Suskind captured a photographic of this life that is vivid, and embedded seeds that are grown, shared and relished.... LOVE IT!