What It Takes to Pull Me Through

• About the Book
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• Comments
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• Excerpt
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• Main Characters

About the Book

A Pulitzer Prize-winning writer untangles the mysteries of the
teenage mind as he witnesses troubled kids transformed by fourteen
months at a school that offers therapy for adolescents in
crisis.

Millions of parents struggle to grasp what goes on in their kids' heads,
on their computers, and among their friends. As an education correspondent
for U.S. News & World Report, David L. Marcus wrestled with similar
questions while reporting on the welter of pressures American teenagers
now face – a resurgent drug culture, proliferating temptations and threats
on-line, skyrocketing suicide rates (three times higher than in the
1960s).

To find answers, Marcus gained unfettered access to students, staff,
and parents at the Academy at Swift River in the hills of western
Massachusetts. The kids at Swift River had already ventured down a
number of perilous paths all parents fear their own children might
take – drug use, violence, theft, internet addictions, eating disorders,
promiscuity. Known for combining intensive academics, a wilderness
program and group therapy, the school helps troubled teenagers emotional
health.

He focuses on four remarkable kids who run the demographic gamut:

• a Southern girl whose privileges cannot save her from sinking into
  drug abuse and unsafe sex;
• the self-destructive son of teachers grappling with his anger about
  being adopted;
• a black kid from a tough New York neighborhood who is silenced by
  consuming depression;
• a once high-achieving Florida girl "broken" by the death of her mother.

While uncovering what drove these kids and their parents to Swift River,
Marcus opens the black box of the teenage mind. As he reveals the intense,
dramatic process that sets (most of) these kids right, he weaves a taut,
absorbing tale. And he charts a path to hope that any kid, any parent,
whether or not in crisis, can take.

David L. Marcus has been a foreign correspondent and education reporter
for U.S. News & World Report, the Boston Globe, Miami Herald, and Dallas
Morning News, where he shared a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles on
violence against women around the world. Marcus also was a Nieman Fellow at
Harvard. After a twenty-four year career in journalism, he spent a year as
a high school teacher at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts.

He was a visiting scholar at Ithaca College’s Park School of Communications. Then he joijned Newsday and reluctantly moved to Long Island, home of too many traffic jams. Most recently, Marcus authored ACCEPTANCE, a book about a extraordinary guidance counselor helping seven students get into college (Penguin Press).

For more information, see
www.davemarcus.com.

What It Takes to Pull Me Through:

Why Teenagers Get in Trouble – And How Four of Them Got Out

INFO FOR BOOK GROUPS AND JOURNALISTS:

Contact Dave Marcus: bookdave //at// gmail.com