"If poverty is a disease that infects an entire community in the form of unemployment and violence, failing schools and broken homes, then we can't just treat those symptoms in isolation. We have to heal that entire community....[It may take] a few billion dollars a year. But we will find the money to do this, because we can't afford not to...."

So said Sen. Barack Obama in a speech last July in Washington, D.C. In that speech, Obama pointed to the Harlem Children's Zone, a groundbreaking anti-poverty initiative encompassing a large swath of central Harlem, as an anti-poverty model that works and vowed to replicate it nationally if elected president. But why HCZ? What had Geoffrey Canada, the visionary anti-poverty advocate and driving force behind the Zone, learned about changing the lives of poor children? And how could those lessons be applied more broadly?

Those are some of the questions Paul Tough sets out to answer in Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America. Tough, a New York Times Magazine editor and writer, first reported on Canada and his initiative in 2004 ("The Harlem Project," New York Times Magazine, 6/24/04). Intrigued by the man and his vision, Tough set out to document the story of the Zone. In the process, he became intimately acquainted with the history and causes of African American poverty in Harlem and New York and the mostly failed efforts to address it.

It is Canada's story, however, that takes center stage in Tough's book. As president since 1990 of the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families, operator of a handful of afterschool, truancy prevention, and anti-violence programs in upper Manhattan, Canada had become well known as an articulate advocate for at-risk youth in both his work and writings (Fist Stick Knife Gun; Reaching Up For Manhood: Transforming the Lives of Boys in America). By the late 1990s, however, Canada was suffering a sort of crisis of faith. Rheedlen's programs, Tough writes, were "decent programs" and "did some good" for the kids enrolled in them. But the organization couldn't keep up with demand for the programs, and the foundations and agencies that supported them didn't seem "to care whether [they] were actually working."

Geoff Canada cared, cared passionately — about the programs and, more importantly, about the kids they served. And the more Canada thought about those kids and their mostly dismal prospects, the more he realized "it wasn't the outcomes of the individual programs that he really cared about: what mattered was the overall impact he was able to have on the children he was trying to serve. He was all too familiar with the 'fade out' phenomenon, where a group of needy kids are helped along by one program or another, only to return to the disappointing mean soon after the program ends," Tough writes. Instead, Canada wanted to find a way off the treadmill....He wanted to help poor children....He wanted them to be able to grow into fully functioning participants in mainstream American middle-class life...."

Thus was born — with help from the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, a longtime supporter of Rheedlen, and the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit management consulting firm the idea for the Harlem Children's Zone. As Tough explains, the laboratory for Canada's grand experiment was a twenty-four-block area of central Harlem (later expanded to ninety-seven blocks) an area that was home to three thousand children, more than 60 percent of whom were living below the poverty line and three-quarters of whom regularly scored below grade level on statewide reading and math tests.

In the months and years that followed, Canada and his staff developed "an array of new, integrated programs that followed the life of a child": Baby College, a parenting class for Harlem residents with children under the age of three; Journey, a sort of "graduate school" version of Baby College that teaches parents about discipline, brain development, and health; Harlem Gems, an intensive pre-kindergarten program for four-year-olds; and, by 2003, Promise Academy, a K-12 charter school featuring a rigorous curriculum, comprehensive afterschool programs, an extra-long school year, and a promise from Canada: "If your child is in our school, we will guarantee that child succeeds. There will be no excuses...."

The story Tough relates is an inspiring one, and he uses a variety of sources and techniques — research data, anecdotes, interviews, and Canada's personal history — to tell it. He cites the research of Martha Farah, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, and Annette Lareau, a sociologist, to illuminate the effect that attitudes, beliefs, and values passed down by families — i.e., culture — have on academic success. And he includes the story of Cheryl Waite, a seventeen-year-old high-school dropout and unmarried mom-to-be, and her boyfriend Victor Boria to illustrate the success of Baby College, while giving readers something else to relate to: a love story. Cheryl and Victor want what every couple wants: a place to live, a safe school for their child, and enough money to afford life's necessities. But in a troubled community such as Harlem, finding a place to live and earning a steady income can be a challenge for even the most resourceful individual, and by the end of the book Cheryl, Victor, and little Victor, Jr.'s fate is very much in doubt.

Still, it's through stories like theirs that readers come to appreciate the scope and difficulty of the challenge that Canada, his colleagues, and financial supporters have set for themselves. Tough avoids the rose-colored glasses in his admirable account of that quest and he can be critical when it's called for. But he clearly admires Geoff Canada and believes Canada has something of value to teach the rest of us. And along the way he invites readers to think about the same question he once asked Geoffrey Canada: "What would it take to change the world?"