by Dennis Kimbro

"As anyone who has ever achieved the impossible can tell you, to move forward you've got to step out and do or say something that may make zero sense to anyone but you." This advice from Lucille Singleton, who first ran (and completed) the New York City Marathon at age 76, exemplifies the kind of astringent wisdom offered in this volume. Kimbro asked a thousand grandmothers to write letters to the next generation, and he reprints their responses here. A project that could have resulted in a mawkish collection of truisms is saved by the voices of the women themselves: these women have lived long, and sometimes hard, and they write forcefully-sometimes with grace and always with conviction. Although some of the authors' lives can seem distant in their hardship (growing up picking cotton in Jim Crow Louisiana, for example), they are examined unsentimentally, with an appreciation for what can be gained through tough circumstances. "Today, when my children ask, 'What is success?,' I answer, 'It ain't standing still.' Quit crying and shuffling your feet. Show up, stand up, suit up, speak up, and fight the good fight." Faith plays a crucial role in these women's lives, as does family, education and good works. Many are appalled at what they see as a lack of morality today-too much violence, too many drugs and the dissolution of the family. Some, after raising one generation, are now raising their children's children as well. If there's a false note in this volume, it's brought in by Kimbro. The author of such books as Think and Grow Rich and What Makes the Great Great, Kimbro writes introductions that are too reminiscent of Dale Carnegie ("Fulfilling your potential is not your choice, it is your divine obligation"), and that feel like the only inauthenticities in an otherwise honest book.

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