1st Edition
Talented Young Men Overcoming Tough Times An Exploration of Resilience
Talented Young Men Overcoming Tough Times features the life stories of five gifted, high-achieving young men who overcame serious adversity in their lives. Their stories, captured through qualitative interviews, help us to better understand the factors that shaped their resilience and enabled them to overcome difficult challenges, including learning disabilities, homelessness, poverty, bullying, dysfunctional families, and abuse. The five young men succeeded in overcoming their difficult circumstances in adolescence and met strong success in higher education, obtaining advanced graduate degrees and moving on to productive professional careers. The author presents the five life stories by dedicating an individual chapter to each young man featured in the book and concludes by synthesizing the consistent themes that are woven throughout the five inspirational life stories.
Biography
Thomas P. Hebert, Ph.D., is Professor of Gifted and Talented Education in the College of Education at the University of South Carolina. He has more than a decade of K-12 classroom experience working with gifted students and 25 years in higher education training graduate students and educators in gifted education. He has also conducted research for the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented (NRC/GT).
Dr. Hebert's powerful, user-friendly Talented Young Men Overcoming Tough Times is rare in focusing on only five complex cases, in the expert application of qualitative research methods, and in the depth of findings. The described adversity varies in type and context, provoking thought about what might lurk behind the faces in any classroom. The book also underscores the importance of alert and compassionate adults in troubled kids' survival, as well as crucial strengths in children and teens that help them thrive in spite of extreme challenges. Beyond being a potential supplemental textbook in several fields, this book can be valuable to adolescents who are struggling—and their parents, guardians, coaches, case workers, and court advocates.
,Jean Peterson,Purdue University, 1/10/19
