Perspective

Ron Suskind, author of A Hope in the Unseen, is a journalist and staff writer for The Wall Street Journal. Living in Washington, D.C., Suskind, in 1995, wrote a two-article series on Cedric Jennings' high school career, a work for which he received a Pulitzer Prize. So struck was Suskind by the struggles of an inner-city black kid to survive and thrive, Suskind followed Cedric into college, to discover the specific challenges that such a young person faces in the Ivy League world of middle and upper-class college students. Because Suskind leads the reader through the myriad of Cedric's struggles, successes and failures through Cedric's own eyes, the reader is given a first-person, omniscient account of events, experiences, emotions and thoughts of a young man struggling to survive and, indeed, thrive, in a "foreign" world. Within the context of Cedric's story, however, Suskind is able to inject provocative...