What Made Me Who I Am by Bernie Swain

-Griffin

The book starts off with a brief summary of what the rest of the book entails, and gives an example of the many stories you will encounter in the other chapters.

The stories in each chapter are all written from a first person point of view, and all have a brief introduction to who the person is for each story.  This book is definitely a good read for anybody who loves to be inspired by others overcoming struggle and becoming a great person.  Personally, that is not me, and I don't really find a person overcoming big obstacles inspiring; however, this is perfect for those who do as it gives 35 stories of just that.

The story I enjoyed the most was probably the story of Ben Carson's life.  I could connect with his story more because I know who the man is, and I have some previous exposure of his backstory from the movie about him.  There were some other good stories, but his was definitely my favorite based upon the factors of being more familiar with him ad the story expanding upon my previous knowledge rather than just learning about some new person I didn't know.

What killed the book for me is that it is simply a bunch of Wikipedia pages made into a book.  Each author wrote their own story, and it is completely factual; however, you could get almost the same information from Wikipedia.  It's a great book, don't get me wrong.  For me, it just wasn't something I could really get into.  Plus, many of the people in this book would probably be unknown to anyone under the age of twenty.