About OMOB 2008

The OMOB 2008 selection, A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind, is rich and multilayered. The book focuses on the odyssey of Cedric Jennings and his personal and academic struggles as he journeys from Washington D.C.'s worst public high school to Brown University. It was selected not only because it offered the opportunity to discuss important and highly relevant topics such as education and socioeconomics, but also because it presented the opportunity to talk about race and race relations in Maryland and in America.

About the Author

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author Ron Suskind has written several important works of nonfiction that have framed national debates while exploring the complexities of the human experience. His first book, A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League (1995), is based on a series of articles written for the Wall Street Journal that earned Suskind the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1995. He has since written two other best-selling works of nonfiction, The One Percent Doctrine (2006), a journey deep inside America’s battles with violent terrorists, and The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O’Neill (2004), both critically acclaimed works.

Mr. Suskind currently writes for various national magazines, including Time Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire and The Wall Street Journal, appears on network television, and spends summers as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Cornelia Kennedy Suskind, and their two sons, Walter and Owen.

About the Book

It is 1993, and Cedric Jennings is a bright and ferociously determined honor student at Ballou, a high school in one of Washington D.C.’s most dangerous neighborhoods, where the dropout rate is well into double digits and just 80 students out of more than 1,350 boast an average of B or better. At Ballou, Cedric has almost no friends. He eats lunch in a classroom most days, plowing through the extra work he has asked for, knowing that he’s really competing with kids from other, harder schools. Cedric Jennings’s driving ambition—which is fully supported by his forceful mother—is to attend a top-flight college. In September 1995, after years of near superhuman dedication, he realizes that ambition when he begins as a freshman at Brown University. A Hope in the Unseen chronicles Cedric’s odyssey during his last two years of high school, follows him through his difficult first year at Brown, and tells the story of his subsequent successes in college and the world of work.

Buy It Now

Purchase A Hope in the Unseen today from Barnes & Noble. MHC will receive a donation for every copy purchased online via this link! Click on the book to start shopping.