Redemption Song

I’m going to do something I’ve never done before, and write a book review. I recently read A Quantum Life: My Unlikely Journey from the Street to the Stars by Hakeem Oluseyi and Joshua Horowitz and I feel like I have to recommend it to everyone I know — especially those in the education industry.

Mild spoilers ahead.

Oluseyi is a well-known figure on cable tv science shows such as How the Universe Works. Listening to him breaking down cosmic phenomena so simply and clearly for non-scientists, you’d have no idea that he wasn’t born for that life. 

He wasn’t.

Instead, he entered this world with all the cards stacked against him. Born James Plumber, Jr. in New Orleans’ poor Ninth Ward in the late ‘60s, his parents fought, sometimes violently. When he was four, his mother set her bed on fire in the middle of the night. With gasoline. With his father still asleep in it. 

I was fighting back tears within the first five pages.

Young James’ mother had a difficult time getting along with people, and frequently uprooted the family to travel across the country to stay with a boyfriend, a sister, a friend. James attended many schools, all underfunded and in dangerous areas. He survived a period in East L.A. during a period of heightened gang violence only because his older cousins who lived there were in gangs themselves and looked after him.

James kept finding chances to escape the troubled world he was born into. He lived with his father for a time in Mississippi, and somehow convinced his teachers to let him borrow the school’s only computer — a donation from the state — to use for a science fair project. James was particularly fascinated by astronomy and physics, and created a computer program to model the effects of special relativity. He did well in the contest and got some invitations to apply for colleges — perhaps the first time he’d ever even considered college.

Living with his father was a blessing and a curse. On the plus side, he was away from his mother’s chaos. His father lived on a peaceful farm in the country, with a large extended family, and James became close to them. It was his first relatively safe and stable home environment. That said, his father and aunt were in the drug business. The farm’s primary crop was marijuana, and, for years, James’ household chores mostly involved helping to weigh and package drugs.

It was a poor, permissive, and drug-friendly environment. By the end of high school, James had gotten a girl pregnant and become addicted to drugs. The universities who’d tried to recruit him at the science fair were out of the question, but he managed to enroll at nearby Tougaloo College. He spent his early college years working at a motel making a few dollars an hour, getting high, and nearly failing out of school.

Through tremendous personal dedication — and the help of some educators who believed in him — James quit drugs and graduated from college. At that time, Stanford University’s graduate school of physics had a tradition of admitting one candidate each year from what they considered to be a “diverse” background, and he earned the spot.

He faced more challenges of all kinds, which I won’t spoil. But he overcame them, eventually to become a rocket scientist (literally) and one of our leading popular explainers of science — officially changing his name along the way to symbolize his personal growth.

A Quantum Life is brutally honest. It describes the facts of Oluseyi’s life without self-pity, excuses, or cheerleading. I think that’s what makes it so uplifting. The odds stacked against him were so high, and the book’s “just the facts” prose makes the narrative seem so intensely real. Before long, you’ll be sucked into his world and rooting for him with all your heart (even though you already know he’ll be a success in the end). It’s part A Beautiful Mind and part Hidden Figures. It’s naturally cinematic and it would make an incredible movie. (I reached out to Dr. Oluseyi and he was kind enough to respond and tell me that there are plans to make it into a movie!)

I followed up A Quantum Life with Tara Westover’s Educated. It’s a really terrific book as well. It was a best-seller and many of you probably already know of it. Briefly, Westover grew up in a large family in a compound in rural Idaho. She describes her parents as religious fanatics and end-of-world preppers who believed that schools and hospitals were government conspiracies — and so wouldn’t send their children to either. Instead, they “home-schooled” them (not really) and had them work all day in service of their father’s metal-scrapping business and other odd jobs. 

Like Oluseyi, Westover was able to poke her head high enough above the world she was born into that she could see that there was a far larger world above it. And the way to reach that world was through education.

The books are twins of a sort, and I recommend reading them back-to-back if you can. They are stories of children overcoming extreme poverty, chaos, and abuse, and somehow figuring out by themselves that education was their ticket out. The stark contrasts between the lives of the two protagonists make the books even better as a matching set. 

If you work in or care deeply about education, if you are a teacher or a school administrator, you owe it to yourself to read these books (particularly A Quantum Life, which focuses much more on traditional schooling). Both books demonstrate, once again, that education is THE ANSWER. It’s always the answer — whether for individuals or great societies or anything in between. A Quantum Life and Educated are both absorbing page-turners, both fascinating glimpses into poor America through the prism of different races and backgrounds. But, for me anyway, their lasting legacy is as glorious paeans to the transformative and redemptive power of education.

(PS–a new edition of A Quantum Life, adapted for young adults, has just been published.)