Chosen as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, USA Today,Washington Monthly, and Booklist

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."

In the opening pages of "A Hope in the Unseen," Cedric Jennings sits alone, angry and ashamed, in an empty high school chemistry classroom. He is playing hooky from the assembly that will mark him, again, as his school's highest achiever and, as such, the target of his classmates' ridicule and hate.