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Book Reviews
What Would You Do?
HEROES AMONG US:
Ordinary People, Extraordinary Choices
By John Quiñones
272 pp. HarperCollins $24.95
Reviewed by Doris Pavlichek
John Quiñones, a well-known television journalist, happened upon a unique idea for his show What Would You Do? where he enacts scenarios that allow bystanders to be either a hero or a goat. In one such situation, he pretended to be a Mexican laborer trying to order lunch in a deli. The cashier, in on the scheme, began to harass him, ordering him out of the deli. The ordinary citizens eating their lunch mostly ignored the situation, or, in one man’s case, joined the cashier in attacking Quiñones, telling him to get out or he would call the cops. No one recognized Quiñones. One lone woman, the hero, came to his aid in broken Spanish. Soon the tide turned, and others were defending him, as well.
His work on the TV show led him to write this book about everyday heroes—not only the savers of lives, but also the ones who stand up for what is right in everyday life. The book begins somewhat predictably, with heroes we can all agree on—Christa McAuliffe and Andrew Carnegie, for example. Quiñones defines for us what he believes a hero to be, often a person who has “committed small acts of kindness and selflessness” rather than a more obvious hero “of the past [who has] failed us in the present.” O.J. Simpson, anyone?
One section that doesn’t work well in the book is the “You Make the Call” scenarios in which the reader is asked to choose from four possible responses to a given situation. For each scenario, Quiñones explains which of the possible responses he considers the most heroic. The thing is, the answer is rather obvious. The real test, one must suppose, is what one would actually do if the scenario were “live.” Would you jump into the raging river to save a stranded person? Could you stand up to racism or defend a fellow student from bullies? It might be easy to choose the correct response when you’re sitting in your living room, but true heroics occur in the heat of the moment.
Nevertheless, many of the collected stories are awe-inspiring. A young man named Chico Mendes, who had grown up as a “tapper” of rubber trees in the Amazon rain forest, fought against the big corporations coming in to clear-cut the forest to make way for the lucrative cattle industry. He and the protestors he led fought to keep parts of the forest as “extractive reserves,” a very unpopular proposal that would allow the tappers and their families to continue to make a living. It wasn’t until sometime later that the environmentalists got in on the action, recognizing that the world needed the rain forest even more than the tappers did. About this turn of events, Mendes said, “At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees, and then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rain forest. Now I realize I am fighting for humanity.” In the end, Mendes gave his life to the cause. He was shot to death one afternoon when he opened his front door. One of the ranchers who stood to lose a good deal of money because of Mendes is now in prison for the crime.
The nurse who saved all the preemies in her care during Hurricane Katrina, the former Marine who donned his uniform and went to the site of the 9/11 tragedy, helping to save the last two survivors. It’s these stories, and more, that give the book its heft and momentum, moving us from the beginning of the book, where there was a depressing sense that one person, one hero, could not truly make a dent in the world’s problems, to the end where the stories of one hero after another started to make me believe that if each of us did one kind or heroic act a day, the world might truly become a better place.
Though Quiñones focuses mainly on his home state of Texas and its border issues with Mexico, he does a fair job of ferreting out those heroes who have remained largely unsung. He wraps up with his “Hall of Heroes,” which lists his many heroes and their brief tales. One after another, they fall upon the reader like so many dominoes, convincingly presenting the case that everyday acts of heroism make lasting differences. If you needed a little nudge to get going with your random acts of kindness, this book will give you a nice shove in the right direction. It will inspire you and reassure you that there is still plenty of good in a somewhat questionable world.
Doris E. Pavlichek holds a degree in communications and is a technical writer by trade.
She’s published two books on network engineering, poetry in the StrokeNet Newsletter, and historical non-fiction in
Constellation Magazine. She assists with biannual poetry readings at the University of Maryland in College Park.
Ms. Pavlichek resides in Frederick, Maryland, with her husband, two English Bulldogs, and three cats.
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