The Next Big Story: My Journey Through the Land of Possibilities.

• Author: Fischer, Raymond L.

THE NEXT BIG STORY: My Journey Through the Land of Possibilities BY SOLEDAD O'BRIEN NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY, NEW YORK 2011, 316 PAGES, $24.95

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When Soledad O'Brien took an internship at WBZ-TV in Boston in 1988, she found her niche in life--working where important things were happening. Since joining CNN in 2003, first as an anchor and later as a special correspondent, her hard work and dedication have garnered numerous awards and honors: an Emmy, the George Foster Peabody award, the Alfred I. DuPont award, the Gracie Allen award, and honors from the NAACP and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. The Next Big Storyconcerns the lessons she has learned about reporting and especially how to tell human stories that "give a voice to the voiceless."

As a child of a mixed-race marriage, O'Brien grew up with immigrant parents in the predominantly white Long Island suburb of Smithtown, N.Y. Her father, Edward O'Brien, had left rural Toowoomba in Queensland, Australia, to study engineering in the U.S. As a teenager, her mother, Estela Lucrecia Marquetti y Mendiete, had left her poor black family to escape the racism and isolation of pre-Castro Cuba. A Roman Catholic order of women of African descent in Baltimore reared her to adulthood.

Estela was working in a science lab at Johns Hopkins University when she met her future husband. In 1959, the two married in Washington, D.C.--both the Catholic Church and the state of Maryland refused to marry a black and a white. He wanted to settle in Smithtown, where she could teach Spanish and he mechanical engineering in nearby Stony Brook. Aware the area was hostile to blacks, O'Brien consulted William Hunting, a progressive Harvard-educated architect, a devout Quaker, and a civil rights activist. Hunting sold O'Brien a large tract with a green buffer from the rest of Smithtown. The kindness of a single stranger changed everything.

Soledad graduated with honors from high school, where she had endured racial slurs. Like all of her siblings, Soledad went to Harvard University. Although originally a premed student, by her junior year, she realized she lacked "the passion for practicing medicine." She left school to take an internship at WBZ-TV Boston, where she found her work "downright intoxicating." O'Brien was an assistant to medical reporter Jeanne Blake, who became her mentor and friend. O'Brien was determined to be like Blake, a woman who cared about her subject, whose empathy was...