Giving Us Hope
 

Sanders, Scott Russell.  Hunting for Hope. Beacon Press Books: Massachusetts, 1998. 200p, $23.00.
 

 Scott Russell Sanders’ Hunting for Hope is an inspirational book.  It takes us through his personal journey to find hope it what he thought was a world that was filled with despair. Sanders poses the questions that he has been asked in the first essay, “Where the Search Begins”, like “Suppose your daughter is engaged to be married and asks if she ought to have children, given the sorry state of the world”, and “Suppose your son is starting college and asks why he should study at all when the world looks o bleak?”  These are questions that bother Sanders and he searches to find answers for them.
  In his essay “Leaping for Expectation” Sanders gives us examples of hope in this world.  He tells a story about a woman from Chicago that he met. This woman “was astonished to reach the age of thirty.  She started doing drugs at the age of ten, joined a gang at twelve, killed a rival and went off to prison at fifteen, and never expected to reach eighteen.”  She was then entered into a rehabilitation program that took into the wilderness.  “Having seen parts of the earth that promised to endure, she came to believe that she herself might endure, and that belief saved her.”  At the end of this essay Sanders says, “I can’t give them hope…, but I can show them where I have searched for it, and where, in moments of grace, I have found it.”  This is what Sanders is doing in this book.  He is showing people that there is hope in the world.  His stories and examples prove to us that this is not a world filled with despair.  He shows that all we have to do is to look a little harder and we will find hope.
 This is a book that is filled with hope.  Through Sanders writing and story telling we can realize that there is hope.  Sanders’ essays bring the reader in and makes them explore into their own world to see if they can find hope.  There are many different stories and subjects dealing with the idea of hope in this book.  Sanders never loses the readers attention from this book.  This book draws you in and does not let go until you realize that we do not live in a hopeless world.
In this book Sanders writes about his trips in the mountains with his son.  This is where they try to solve problems that they have had over the years.  His son, Jesse, challenges his father’s bleak outlook on life.  Sanders says, “My struggles with Jesse had convinced me of the need for hope.”  By watching Sanders struggle with hope, we realize that there is hope is this world and that it is not bleak.
 Sanders ends his essay “Fidelity” with, “And if we receive the strength to carry on the work we believe in, with people we love, in a place we cherish, what else do we need?”  This did hope.  This is believing that we do not need anything else.  What Sanders does in this book is challenge us to find hope in our lives through his own personal experiences.
 Scott Russell Sanders’ Hunting for Hope is a spiritually moving book.  It makes us come to grips with the world around us and then it makes us see that there is hope in a world that seems so bleak at times.  This book is inspirational to people because it gives hope when it seems that there is not any hope.  Sanders never answers the questions that he was asked, but he does instill hope into his book.