Up from Adams Street: A Memoir

A boy comes of age in a whistle-stop town in Illinois. The favorite, of whom much is expected, naïve to a fault, decked out in high school football gear, all 120 pounds of him, perched on the roof of a freight car hurtling toward a bridge over the Mississippi, and into jail for a night. He falls for a girl, becomes the inevitable star-crossed lover, and discovers that the life he wants to live is the life he's living. Isn't it?