num_pages: 160
description: A Globe and Mail Top 100 Pick of 2006 In this, the first volume of Difficulty at the Beginning , John Dupre is a student at Raysburg Military Academy, where his best friend Lyle Ledzinski is training him to be a perfect Socratic A sound mind in a sound body. Together they want to experience all of life athletics, philosophy, beer, the quest for Truth, and most of all, those mysterious creatures that seem to come from another girls. By their junior year they've taken to hitch-hiking around, fired up on Kerouac, James Dean and St. Augustine, and their horizons begin to expand like an endless sunrise. They're out for experience and suffering , and that's just what they're going to get. Written as though on the back of the pages of Gloria (shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, 1999), Running depicts the lives of young men in late-1950s America with humour, pathos, and muscle. Taken on its own or as the prelude to Difficulty at the Beginning, it's a memorable and invigorating piece of writing that shows how the smug, grey culture of the 1950s was shattered forever with three little words.
language: English
title: Running
titlecomplete: Running (Difficulty at the Beginning)
genres: Modern
ratings_count: 53
publisher: Brindle and Glass Publishing