Songs of Myself: Episodes from the Edge of Adulthood

In "Song of Myself," Walt Whitman writes "I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise...a child as well as a man, stuff'd with the stuff that is course, And stuff'd with the stuff that is fine." His words epitomize the often ambiguous, usually frustrating, always criss-crossed worlds of college freshmen who find themselves stranded somewhere between childhood and adulthood. Scharper's collection of thirty-eight memoirs written by her students reveals a world where young people encounter, often for the first time, life's vital issues and big questions. Scharper's students gravitated toward their passions and familiar, yet transitional, experiences: high school, pregnancy and abortion, coping with illness, near-fatal injuries, sports and drugs, soul-making and religion, family, and the future.