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Carson was born in Detroit, Michigan, on September 18, 1951, the second son of Sonya and Robert Solomon Carson.
His mother was raised in Tennessee in a very large family and dropped out of school in the third grade. -
Carson was 8 and Curtis, his brother, was 10 when Sonya began to raise them as a single mother.
Sonya also taught her boys that anything was possible. -
Both Carson and his brother experienced difficulty in school. Carson fell to the bottom of his class and became the object of ridicule by his classmates.
His mother, required them to read two library books a week and give her written reports. -
Carson graduated with honors from Southwestern, having also become a senior commander in the school's ROTC program. He earned a full scholarship to Yale.
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In 1975, he married Lacena "Candy" Rustin.
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Carson earned his medical degree, and the young couple moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where he became an intern at Johns Hopkins University.
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His excellent eye-hand coordination and three-dimensional reasoning skills made him a superior surgeon early on. By 1982, he was chief resident in neurosurgery at Hopkins.
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He has also written several books, including the popular autobiography Gifted Hands (1990). Other titles include—Think Big (1992), The Big Picture (1999), and Take the Risk (2007).