It was 1961 and I was in the fifth grade. My marks in school were miserable and, the thing was, I didn't know enough to really care. My older brother and I lived with Mom in a dingy multi-family house in Detroit. We watched TV every night. The background noise of our lives was gunfire and horses' hoofs from 'Wagon Train' or 'Cheyenne', and laughter from 'I Love Lucy' or 'Mister Ed'. After supper, we'd sprawl on Mom's bed and stare for hours at the tube. But one day Mom changed our world forever. She turned off the TV. Our mother had only been able to get through third grade. But she was much brighter and smarter than we boys knew at the time. She had noticed something in the suburban houses she cleaned -- books. So she came home one day, snapped off the TV, sat us down and explained that her sons were going to make something of themselves. 'You boys are going to read two books every week,' she said. 'And you're going to write me a report on what you read.' We moaned and complained about how unfair it was. Besides, we didn't have any books in the house other than Mom's Bible. But she explained that we would go where the books were: 'I'll drive you to the library.' So pretty soon there were these two peevish boys sitting in her white 1959 Oldsmobile on their way to Detroit Public Library. I wandered reluctantly among the children's books. I loved animals, so when I saw some books that seemed to be about animals, I started leafing through them. The first book I read clear through was Chip the Dam Builder. It was about beavers. For the first time in my life I was lost in another world. No television program had ever taken me so far away from my surroundings as did this verbal visit to a cold stream in a forest and these animals building a home. It didn't dawn on me at the time, but the experience was quite different from watching TV. There were images forming in my mind instead of before my eyes. And I could return to them again and again with the flip of a page. Soon I began to look forward to visiting this hushed sanctuary from my other world. I moved from animals to plants, and then to rocks. Between the covers of all those books were whole worlds, and I was free to go anywhere in them. Along the way a funny thing happened: I started to know things. Teachers started to notice it too. I got to the point where I couldn't wait to get home to my books. Now my older brother is an engineer and I am chief of pediatric neurosurgery at John Hopkins Children's Center in Baltimore. Sometimes I still can't believe my life's journey, froma failing and indifferent student in a Detroit public school to this position, which takes me all over the world to teach and perform. critical surgery. But I know when the journey began -- the day Mom snapped off the TV set and put us in her Oldsmobile for that drive to the library. We can learn from the beginning of the passage that