Rodgers, Growing Up on Fox Street Page 22 of 179 Growing Up on Fox Street is full of warm and uplifting stories from an era gone by. Informative, nostalgic, and engaging at its core, it is written from the viewpoint of a little girl enjoying carefree youthful days with her brothers, cousins, and friends in a small American town during the 1960s. It was a time when moms stayed home and parents allowed their children to play freely in the neighborhood. There was only one car in the driveway, and family mealtimes meant eating home-cooked meals together around the kitchen table. There were bikes to ride, ball games to play, creeks to swim in, forts to build, and neighborhood quarrels to settle. Families went to church on Sundays and Vacation Bible School in the summer. The boys played Little League Baseball as the parents cheered them on from the bleachers. They watched parades every year in town and anticipated Santa's visit and Christmas festivities each December. Even though the times are different today, for the Fox Street kids (and all kids everywhere), the idea of growing up seemed so far away. Their personalities were shaped by their families and friends and the world around them. It is their childhood memories that now seem far away. Growing Up on Fox Street features charming illustrations by the author and helpful annotations for the younger reader. The reflection questions for each chapter will help the reader tell their own story and stimulate meaningful conversations with family members about their childhood recollections.

“You can’t help but see people die when you live on Fox Street,” says the protagonist of the novella Fox Street. The worst was when there was nothing you could do, like when a kid was hit by a car, and she and her friends stood around and watched him die. The police drew a chalk mark around his body, and when he was taken away, they “could still see the shape of that kid, marked out in chalk and filled with dried blood.” In this poignant and often humorous account of growing up in the Bronx in the 1950s, Yolanda Gallardo’s mischievous young character vividly recalls her childhood as the neighborhood changed from Jewish to Latino. She and her siblings swam in the East River, despite the rats and garbage; watched police beat up local kids; and got involved in gangs, like the Royals and Young Sinners. Their family was financially impoverished, but there were many happy times as they watched their parents dance to “hick Spanish records,” helped their mom cook pasteles and learned to dance the mambo and cha-cha. Although set in a specific time and place, the novella and ten stories in this collection depict universal experiences, from girls and women having to prove themselves equal to the boys and men around them to the loss of a child.

This memoir describes what it was like growing up as the youngest member of a large, boisterous Irish-American family in Massachusetts during the 1940s and 1950s. The author also tells about his experiences as a young naval officer during the Cuban Missile Crisis, his work in international communicable disease control as a Commissioned Officer of the U.S. Public Health Service, and later teaching and research involvement at several universities in the development and application of computer-based individualized instruction, and emerging K-12 classroom technologies.

From the co-authors of the classic Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: A fascinating oral history of record spinning told by the groundbreaking DJs themselves. Acclaimed authors and music historians Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton have spent years traveling across the world to interview the revolutionary and outrageous DJs who shaped the last half-century of pop music. The Record Players is the fun and revealing result—a collection of firsthand accounts from the obsessives, the playboys, and the eccentrics that dominated the music scene and contributed to the evolution of DJ culture. In the sixties, radio tastemakers brought their sound to the masses, while early trendsetters birthed the role of the club DJ at temples of hip like the Peppermint Lounge. By the seventies, DJs were changing the course of popular music; and in the eighties, young innovators wore out their cross-faders developing techniques that turned their craft into its own form of music. With discographies, favorite songs, and amazing photos of all the DJs as young firebrands, The Record Players offers an unparalleled music education: from records to synthesizers, from disco to techno, and from influential cliques to arenas packed with thousands of dancing fans.

What does it mean to be young and transgender today? Growing Up Trans shares stories, essays, art and poetry created by trans youth aged 11 to 18. In their own words, the works illustrate the trans experience through childhood, family and daily life, school, their bodies and mental health. Together the collection is a story of the challenges, big and small, of being a young trans person. At the same time, it’s a toolkit for all young people, transgender or not, about what understanding, acceptance and support for the trans community looks like. In addition to the contributed works, there are questions and tips from experts in the field of transgender studies to challenge the reader on how to be a trans ally. Growing Up Trans came out of a series of workshops held in Victoria, British Columbia, to bring together trans youth from across the country with mentors in the community.

Eleven-year-old Clay must find a home on the streets of New York City in this award-winning, heartbreakingly honest novel. He was eleven years old, and he had never felt so alone in his life. Clay Garrity lived a normal life until his father lost his job and abandoned the family. Now his pregnant mother has deserted him too, leaving Clay alone in a welfare hotel with a jar of peanut butter and half a loaf of bread. Fearing being placed in foster care, Clay runs away. Alone in the city, Clay wanders down streets with boarded-up buildings and through dark alleys, until he comes to a small triangular park that looks like an island in a stream. In the light of a street lamp, he sees cardboard boxes, blankets, bundles—and people. Some are lying on benches, others inside boxes. Two of the men, Calvin and Buddy, offer to share their shelter, and Clay is grateful to have a place to stay during the bitter November cold. Before long, Calvin, Buddy, and Clay form a family amid the threatening dangers and despair of the streets. Clay knows that leaving the streets and going into foster care means that he may never see his parents again. But if he stays, he may not survive at all. An ALA Best Book for Young Adults, this acclaimed novel offers an intensely moving and candid look at the all-too-real lives of homeless teens.

From his bawdy and brave fellow firefighters to the hopeful, hateful, beautiful and beleaguered residents of the poverty-stricken district where he works, Dennis Smith tells the story of a brutalising yet rewarding profession.

This book tells the stories of 11 American gay men who tried to make sense of their identities in the years before the modern gay movement began. In their own words, these men recollect fascinating accounts of what it was like negotiate their desires within a social and psychological context in which homosexuality was marginalized. The editors carefully situate the lifestories in US culture before Stonewall and skillfully raises the issues and problems in presenting such stories.

One man’s “curiously thrilling joyride” of travelogue, history, and climatology, across a planet on the brink of cataclysmic transformation (Donovan Hohn). As the planet warms, winter is shrinking. In the last fifty years, the Northern Hemisphere lost a million square miles of spring snowpack and in the US alone, snow cover has been reduced by 15-30%. On average, winter has shrunk by a month in most northern latitudes. In this deeply researched, beautifully written, and adventure-filled book, journalist Porter Fox travels along the edge of the Northern Hemisphere's snow line to track the scope of this drastic change, and how it will literally change everything—from rapid sea level rise, to fresh water scarcity for two billion people, to massive greenhouse gas emissions from thawing permafrost, and a half dozen climate tipping points that could very well spell the end of our world. This original research is animated by four harrowing and illuminating journeys—each grounded by interviews with idiosyncratic, charismatic experts in their respective fields and Fox's own narrative of growing up on a remote island in Northern Maine. Timely, atmospheric, and expertly investigated, The Last Winter will showcase a shocking and unexpected casualty of climate change—that may well set off its own unstoppable warming cycle.