"At its heart, this book is a collection of personal accounts that speak to a variety of social concerns, from youth crime and domestic violence to public education and health care. Told by children as well as adults, these stories offer illuminating if sometimes disturbing testimony about the circumstances of life in the contemporary United States. One story, for example, depicts the precarious world of a thirteen-year-old drug dealer.

Another presents the searing narrative of a woman convicted of killing her abusive husband. Still another tells the painful saga of an atomic war veteran fighting the ravages of a disease induced and then denied by his own government."--BOOK JACKET.