Publisher's Synopsis
What happens when a retired child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst turns the lens onto his own childhood, adolescence and young adult development during a significant time and place in modern history? Born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts on the heels of the Great Depression, Heller writes witty, intimate and insightful reflections toward the end of a long, full, well-lived life. He raises our own questions about what makes us the way we are, and how we manage to cope with life's inevitable ups and downs. Here, in Every Knock is a Boost: Book One, The Developmental Years, the first book of a dynamic two-part memoir that spans the better part of a century, we discover that beneath our individual differences, we are far more alike than different in our behaviors and ultimate shared destiny. Although much troubled and often violent, we are a remarkably sentient and creative species on this earth. We hunger for first-hand stories from our forebears, generations of people who brought us here, telling tales of where we came from and how we got here. These early stories are the deep roots that sustain and live on in us. Could it be that truly happy stories are not just those with happy endings, but those that live on with no ending at all?
