Each year, as many as 25,000 teenagers "age out" of foster care, usually when they turn eighteen. For years, a government agency had made every important decision for them. Suddenly, they are on their own, with no one to count on. What does it mean to be eighteen and on your own, without the family support and personal connections that most young people rely on? For many youth raised in foster care, it means largely unhappy endings, including sudden...

Rodríguez's life was once held in the grip of gang brotherhood and rivalries. Here he patiently traces the emotional and spiritual terrain that ultimately allowed him to understand his milieu and skillfully negotiate a sound future for himself and his family. Empowered by his experiences as a peacemaker with gangs in Los Angeles and Chicago, Rodríguez makes concrete suggestions on how to approach the violence facing youth today. He warns that we...

"For the majority of young adults today, the transition to independence is a time of excitement and possibility. But 4.5 million young people--or a stunning 11.5 percent of youth aged sixteen to twenty-four--experience entry into adulthood as abrupt abandonment, a time of disconnection from school, work, and family. For this growing population of Americans, which includes kids aging out of foster care and those entangled with the justice system, life...

A rebellious 17-year-old, who is contemplating suicide, is sent to her grandparents house for the summer. She soon begins a interracial romance with a young cook who has a criminal past, confronts a tragic family secret, and just may discover the promising young woman hidden beneath her sarcastic shell. Just when she is looking for a way out, she just may find her way back in.

A Comedy & A Tragedy is the story of one young man's effort to teach himself to read. Complex and many-leveled, this book is also a manifesto about the acquisition of intellectual independence. It is a plea for better understanding of the impact of dysfunctional family dynamics in education, and a passionate indictment of a broken school system that lets so-called problem kids slip through the cracks.

"The prize-winning author of Fire Season returns with the heartrending story of his troubled years of flight. Philip Connors's Fire Season, an account of the decade he spent working in a fire-lookout tower high above the remotest part of New Mexico, won the Banff Mountain Book Grand Prize and the Reading the West Book Award, and Amazon named it the Best Nature Book of the Year. Now Connors returns with the story of what drove him up to the tower in...