Overachiever

Tom is an overachiever.

Tom was an overachiever.

Ziri has always tried to be an overachiever.

It is the portrait of one of the great teacher-parents, a zealot of European high culture self-confidently at work before the time that turned such a parent into a selfish tyrant and such a child into an "overachiever," to use the philistine label which conveys the contemporary disdain for precocity and intellectual ardor.

But none of those is true for Mr. de Rothschild, who belongs instead to a multihyphened class of overachievers: eco-adventurer and green-evangelist.

The hyperfit athlete and the frail elderly woman are alike in that they are made in God's image. The lost rebellious teenager, the college overachiever, and the self-conscious middle schooler are all image bearers.