all, author Rose himself is substantial evidence that students labeled as "underprepared" can yet receive a fine education and achieve professional success and prominence in a chosen field.
The clarity and straightforwardness of Rose's style helps the author get his message across effectively and movingly:
I've worked for twenty years with children and adults deemed slow or remedial or underprepared. And at one time in my own educational life, I was so labeled. But I was lucky. I managed to get redefined. The people I've tutored and taught and the people whose lives I've studied---working-class children, poorly educated Vietnam veterans, underprepared college students, adults in a literacy program---they . . . hadn't been so fortunate (xi).
Rose says that to get the heart of his story across he decided to write a personal work, although at the same time he wants to paint the picture of a "cognitive and social reality" which limits these students' progress. He says he wants to show "the brains as well as the heart of it" and in such an attempt he has written a "personal book. The stories of my work with literacy interweave with the story of my own engagement with language. Lives on the Boundary is both vignette and commentary, reflection and analysis. I didn't know how else to get it right" (xii).
Although there are certainly numerous insights and theories in this book which reflect well on the author's own educational achievements, the book cannot be called a scholastic study, by any means. If we remove the "personal" side of the book, or if we remove the "vignettes," the heart and soul of the book is lost.
The author's reliance on concrete, personal examples to illustrate his argument for better educational opportunities for these students is seen immediately in the first words of the book:
Her name is Laura, and she was born in the poor section of Tijuana. Her father was a food vendor. . . . She came to the United ...