I CHANGED my thinking about affirmative action. I was against it, and now I'm for it. The agent of change was a mind-opening book - "A Hope in the Unseen," by Ron Suskind. The subtitle is: "An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League."

The story is true, although it reads like a gripping novel. Author Suskind, a Wall Street Journal reporter in Washington, befriended a kid named Cedric Jennings whom he met four years ago at one of the city's worst high schools. Young Jennings was a bright, striving junior whose mother, Barbara, a devout churchwoman, instilled in him a profound belief in God and an iron will to succeed.

Suskind spent much of the next three years with the family to tell how Cedric, armed with faith and hope and his mother's tough love, triumphs over inferior schooling, hostile peer pressure and a drug-ridden, violent neighborhood, and is admitted to elite Brown University despite an SAT score hundreds of points below the Brown average.

Before leaving for Brown, Cedric meets with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas - who regularly reaches out to promising poor kids in the nation's capital - and gets this wise advice: "One thing you'll find when you get to a school like Brown is a lot of classes and orientation on race relations. Try to avoid them. Say to yourself, I'm not a black person, I'm just a person. You'll find a lot of so-called multicultural combat, a lot of struggle between ethnic and racial groups - and people wanting you to sign on, to narrow yourself into some group identity or other. You have to resist that, Cedric. You understand?"

Cedric takes that good counsel to heart. In his first week at Brown, with dorm mates at an orientation session called "Community Values: Pluralism and Diversity," Cedric endures a babble of politically correct newspeak that seems to reduce personal identity to race and sexual orientation. He speaks up: "I think your identity should come from something you take pride in. It shouldn't be something that just sets you apart from other people, it should be one of those things that, you know, people generally understand is a good thing, something we all share, rather than what separates us. I mean, the things that make up identity are a lot deeper than skin color or whatever. Things, I don't know, like character or our faith or how we treat other people. And if we talked, instead, about that stuff, I'm sure we could agree on what was good or, at least, on the way we ought to be."

Cedric struggles at Brown, but his intellect and sense of purpose prevail, and he'll be a senior there this fall. Right now he and Suskind are giving interviews about the just-published book that's sure to make readers think anew about affirmative action, race, class, religion and even abortion.

It's a sad book in many ways, and not only because Cedric Jennings is the rare inner-city kid who overcomes a degrading environment. A reader is forced to contemplate all the children lost to drugs and violence.

It's sad, too, because the ending suggests that Cedric may lose the faith that brought him so far. The secularism of the Ivy League could sap his spirit and drag him down. Cedric is too good for Brown, ironically.

Maybe his mother will bring Cedric back to faith. Just bringing him into the world was heroic. After he was conceived, his father (a career criminal who is in jail during the part of Cedric's life described in the book) insisted that she have an abortion.

She went to an abortion clinic, but then she changed her mind and walked out and never looked back. Cedric Jennings, an exemplary American life, barely escaped death before birth.