Marc Straus will discuss his newly published memoir, One-Legged Mongoose, Secrets, Legacies and Coming of Age in 1950’s New York The book documents two pivotal years of his childhood on Long Island, beginning with him being forced by his parents to leave public school and commute four hours a day to a Yeshiva in Queens. Marc Straus will share his unflinching look at child abuse in the home and his ability to rise above it, One-Legged Mongoose reminds us of the bonds between siblings, the power of family secrets, and the way we learn to protect ourselves by protecting each other. He chronicles the physical abuse at the hands of his mother and the eventful start of his adolescence—which included a battle with polio, a surgery-requiring eye-injury, and an almost-fatal hit-and-run—Straus explores the Anti-Semitism he encountered in public school, in the community at large, and even in the Boy Scouts. And it’s the Scouts that lend the book its title—a nod to a campfire story about a half-man, half-mongoose that’s almost the height of a full-grown man, and that Straus and the other boys of Troop 300 are tasked with locating. As Straus explains, “I was willing to face it. I know all about monsters.”