Showing results for "Running" in Coming of Age

Zach meets Samm, a seventh-generation Manhattanite whose brother has returned from Vietnam with PTSD. Together they explore protest, friendship, music, faith, and love during a time littered with hope and upheaval around the globe.

Growing up in the mill slums of Pittsburgh, Daniel Robinson was a punching bag for his drunken father, ignored by his mentally ill mother, and trapped in the grip of poverty. He’s finally freed from the torture of that home only to crash land in another hell when he’s abused by the pastor who takes him in. Daniel escapes once again, spending the next decade wandering homeless throughout the country during the turbulent 1960s.

All his life, Max Lerner has watched from the stands as the heroes and villains of professional wrestling do battle in the ring. Max happens upon the hand-painted sign outside Barry’s Flea Market: Live Pro Wrestling Tuesdays. His passion drives him to step out from the crowd and step through the ropes to experience the world of pro-wrestling for himself. Now, he just needs to figure out who to be.

Elenore struggles to heal emotionally from an accident years before that killed her boyfriend and uses substances to get through. When she becomes pregnant and her current boyfriend beats her, she flees to a man who has just been biding his time, waiting to make her life a living nightmare of which she sees no way to escape.

Phillip I. Elkins, a.k.a. Señor Felipe, is a storyteller, salsa maker, father, son, educator, author, musician, and radio host of "LA Sounds" on KZFR, Chico, California. Running from the Fire is a coming-of-age story that begins with a skinny, nearsighted Jewish kid trying to find a home and identity among white and Latino peers in East Los Angeles, an emotional voyage that takes him through love affairs and fistfights and ends with him drafted by the Army and en route to Vietnam. The book is intense, frequently funny, and deeply poignant as he describes his youth and adolescence.

Along the Intracoastal waterways of North Florida, Daniel and Aubrey navigated adolescence with the electric intensity that radiates from young people defined by otherness: Aubrey, a self-identified "Southern cracker", and Daniel, the mixed-race son of Jamaican immigrants. When the news of Aubrey's death reaches Daniel in New York, years after they'd lost contact, he is left to grapple with the legacy of his precious and imperfect love for her. At ease now in his own queerness, he is nonetheless drawn back to the muggy haze of his Palm Coast upbringing.

In the summer of 1967, Sebastian (“Bass”) Ramsay is a young man content to be growing up secure in the love of his parents and companionship of his first cousin, his feet firmly planted on the fertile soil of their families; dual farms in mid-Michigan. His life begins to change after a chance encounter with an itinerant family convinces his cousin to run away from home.

All Leila wants is to get through her senior year at her new high school without drawing undue attention. Not that she has any big secret to protect, but her unconventional upbringing has made her very private. At seventeen, she realizes just how odd it was that two men raised her-one black, one white-and no mother. Not to mention they were blues musicians, always on the move. When her father died, he left her with a fear of foster care and a plan that would help her fall between the cracks of the system.