A Most Beautiful Thing: The True Story of America's First All-Black High School Rowing Team

One of the overarching themes running throughout A Most Beautiful Thing is the role of education and personal growth in overcoming adversity. Author Arshay Cooper’s narrative takes place on Chicago’s West Side in the late 1990s, where virtually every child is born into adversity because of rampant drug abuse, gang violence, and poverty. In Chapter 1, Cooper explains, “At fourteen years old in my neighborhood, kids had experienced what most soldiers witnessed in war. At fifteen, I had already run for my life, had bullets fly straight past my head, skipped over pools of blood, and witnessed dead bodies on the street” (1). Additionally, because of his mother’s addiction to drugs when he was younger and the childhood that he missed out on, he argues that “bitterness was stamped on the tablet of [his] heart” (2). Later in the book, after he meets a woman who knows his father, Cooper explains that he never knew his father and had only met him once. The adversity that Cooper has faced throughout his life was not uncommon for kids on the West Side, but his ability to continue to grow and take advantage of opportunities is unique.