Stepping Around the Cowcatcher: A Minneapolis Childhood

Henry Gallagher, a Minneapolis native "out east" for years, returns to his hometown. With the help of twenty-nine of his former high-school classmates (whom he calls co-storytellers), the author writes of their "wonder years" (ages five to fifteen), growing up in the south Minneapolis neighborhoods of the 1940s and '50s.

He walks down the hallways of his grade school, out onto its playground, down the alleys and into the backyards of his childhood, telling stories of the awakening years, ...