Every Knock Is a Boost: Book One, The Developmental Years

At age ninety-three, Melvin S. Heller, MD, retired Temple University professor, psychoanalyst and child psychiatrist with fifty years of clinical experience, candidly reveals his own childhood, adolescence and early adult development in introspective and intimate detail. Born in Boston in 1922, the author's life spans the better part of a century during an ongoing and significant time in modern history. We hunger for real-live, first-hand stories of our forebears who brought us here, telling tales of where we came from and how we got where we are. These early stories are the deep roots that sustain and live on in us. Dr. Heller's warm, witty and insightful reflections toward the end of his well-lived and full life illustrate what makes us the way we are, and how we manage to cope with life's inevitable ups and downs. "Every Knock Is a Boost: The Developmental Years," is the first book of a dynamic, self-revealing and poignantly-written trilogy of personal memoirs. Dr. Heller's stories remind us that despite our marked individual differences, we are far more alike than different. As a uniquely sentient, inventive, but recurrently troubled species, we share a threatened, but promising destiny.