What It Takes To Pull Me Through:
Why Teenagers Get in Trouble and
How Four of Them Got Out by David
L. Marcus
A Real Look Into The Minds Of Some Troubled Teens
The Academy at Swift River specializes in one of the toughest tasks a
school can undertake: helping teenagers in crisis regain their bearings.
During a fourteen-month academic term at the school, the Pulitzer Prize-
winning journalist David L. Marcus witnesses the intense process that
turns these kids around.
In his time on campus, Marcus gets to know a diverse and remarkable
group of teenagers: a former straight-A student reeling from the death of
her mother, a teachers son grappling with anger over being adopted, a

southern girl immersed in drug abuse and unsafe sex, and a boy from
Queens overwhelmed by depression. Granted full access to the Swift River
proceednigs, Marcus is given the rare chance to observe the students
struggles and see their transformations from the inside. In What It Takes to
Pull Me Through, he charts a path to redemption that any teen, any parent,
can follow.
Personal Review: What It Takes To Pull Me Through: Why
Teenagers Get in Trouble and How Four of Them Got Out by
David L. Marcus
Although my children are grown, I'm still interested in learning about
adolescence in this country, not the least because we now have four
grandchildren. This book chronicles 14 months in a "therapeutic" school for
"troubled" teenagers. It sheds a lot of light not only on how these types of
school work with kids, but on the young people themselves, as well, of
course, as their families. I am always taken by books that fairly portrays all
sides of an issue. This book does this extremely well. While the therapeutic
school in question is a profit making one, the teachers and some
administrators are passionate in their desire to help the students.
Unfortunately, as this is real life, while most kids seem to improve, not all
do, and even among those who do, the "outcome" is not necessarily what
the parents would hope. Sometimes there are truly miraculous "recoveries"
and if I were a parent at the point of sending my child to this type of an
institution, I could do nothing, but hold our hope that my child would be one
of those. At the end of the book, the author outlines the key questions to
which he sought the answers through writing the book. He addresses what
he learned and can pass on to other parents through his writing. He also
lists the warning signs the parents of the Swift River students he wrote
about realized their kids had displayed by eighth or ninth grade. These are
things that every parent should open his or her eyes to if they wish to help
their kids sooner rather than later. (pg 314 of the hardcover edition).
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