The World Is Waiting for You: Graduation Speeches To Live by from Activists, Writers, and Visionaries

Grove (education editor, the New Press) and Ostrer (recent Harvard Univ. graduate) present 19 college and university commencement speeches from the 21st century by a diverse selection of authors and notable figures—Howard Zinn, Barbara Kingsolver, and Wynton Marsalis, to name but a few—with one well-chosen outlier from the 1980s. The focus on current addresses ensures that readers comprehend context regarding these troubled times, but a bit more historical perspective may have been useful. While compilations of inspirational commencements abound, greater breadth in this volume could have enhanced the speakers' messages of hopefulness by showing readers that, despite the urgency of today's woes, this is not the first crop of graduating classes to face an uncertain future. A few contributors do include that viewpoint, and nearly all successfully bring it around: "it" being their narrative and "around" meaning moving from bleak realities to luminescent possibilities, just as a graduation speech ought.