A Clean Street's A Happy Street

To say McSherry has lived a 'hard knock' life is an understatement but the Lehman High School teacher and Brio Award winner has crafted a Bronx version of <I>Angela's Ashes</I> that resonates with hope wit and perseverance.</BR><B>-Derek Woods</B> host of the television program <I>Bronx Magazine</I></P>Told through a series of striking vignettes <I>A Clean Street's A Happy Street: A Bronx Memoir</I> is a masterful coming-of-age tale brimming with heartache forgiveness and redemption.</P>Growing up in a tough Bronx neighborhood during the 1960s and 1970s James McSherry dreams of becoming a writer. Faced with his mother's mental illness his father's brutal murder and poverty's chokehold McSherry refuses to lose sight of his future. He struggles to survive in a fragmented world clinging to his education and his poetry when his mother's fragile grip on reality shatters.</P>The harsh consequences of his mother's debilitating mental health binds McSherry and his four siblings in a painful knot but the love and commitment they have for each other sustains them through a turbulent adolescence. Powerful and moving <I>A Clean Street's A Happy Street</I> intimately reveals one man's determination to break free from a troubling childhood and boldly create a luminous new future.</P>