Akron Public Library

Deborah Kenny discusses her life and career as an educator and businesswoman.

"I ain't knocked round the city streets all my life for nothin'," proclaims Ragged Dick, the fast-talking boy hero of Horatio Alger's classic rags-to-riches tale. Dick is a plucky street boy who smokes, gambles, and speaks ungrammatically--but he is also honest and hardworking, striving not for wealth and status, but for a steady job, a decent place to sleep, and respectability. A quintessential boy's novel of adventure, romance, and coming of age,...

Amazing Grace is a book about the hearts of children who grow up in the South Bronx - the poorest congressional district of our nation. Without rhetoric, but drawing extensively upon the words of children, parents, and priests, this book does not romanticize or soften the effects of violence and sickness. One fourth of the child-bearing women in the neighborhoods where these children live test positive for HIV. Pediatric AIDS, life-consuming fires,...

This is the true story of Hamilton, now eighteen years old, who ran away from his home in Salvador, Brazil when he was six and ended up living on the streets, begging for food and money and witnessing murder, death squad actions, and the effects of illegal drugs.

A story about a period in the childhood of Elvis Presley when his family was dirt poor and he was introduced to the soulful music of the Sanctified Church that travelled to his town.

"'Standing on the stage, I felt exposed and like an intruder. In these professional settings, my personal experiences with hunger, poverty, and episodic homelessness, often go undetected. I had worked hard to learn the rules and disguise my beginning in life...' So begins C. Nicole Mason's powerful memoir, a story of reconciliation, constrained choices and life on the other side of the tracks. Born in the 1970s in Los Angeles, California, Mason was...

"Famed director M. Night Shyamalan tells how his passion for education reform led him to the five indispensable keys to educational success in America's high-performing schools in impoverished neighborhoods"--

"A 14-year-old girl living in the Jakarta slums who longs to be a writer sees an opportunity to raise money for school fees when she survives a minibus accident and the locals begin saying she has magical good luck. But when the crowd turns against her and she discovers her father's plan to marry her off to an older man, she must summon courage and conviction to write her own story."--

A manga adaptation of the classic literary novel by Charles Dickens, a rags-to-riches tale of Pip, a young orphan and the transformation he endures through the circumstances of his life.

Explores life and social conditions near the Baghmati River on the grounds of the Pashupatinath Temple in Kathmandu, where some children eke out an existance by begging and diving for coins thrown into the river as funeral offerings for the cremated, while others on nearby streets are surrounded by drugs and disease.