About the Book
From wearing a ‘WWJD’ cap around Jacksonville, Florida (assuming it was the moniker of a local radio station) to an unfortunate car accident on the first day of kindergarten, to trying to fill out a muscle T-shirt at age 51 in the gay mecca of Provincetown, Massachusetts, Judah Leblang’s journey of discovery blends comedy and drama. In this episodic memoir, Leblang sketches the world he comes from, a world of poppyseed kuchen, Indians baseball, and the great industrial city of Cleveland, Ohio, which seemed to be imploding in the 1960’s and ’70’s-and the world he inhabits today, as a hard of hearing man with a funny name, navigating middle age.
Listen to excerpts from the book:
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“Finding My Place: One Man’s Journey from Cleveland to Boston and Beyond” – order now!
“Finding My Place” Book
“Finding My Place” CD
“Finding My Place” Book and CD Set
Clips on YouTube: Here’s a video clip from the show: Voices
Advance praise for the book:
“In these winning vignettes, Judah Leblang lets us know in spare, humble prose what it’s like to be the perpetual outsider: Cleveland Indians devotee, gay man, aging baby boomer in a youth worshipping culture. Yet there’s nothing whiny in these chronicles that take the reader from 1960’s Cleveland to present-day Provincetown and Boston. Most emblematic is his mid-life name change to Judah and his discovery that his chosen name means “gratitude.”
– Robin Hemley, author of Do-Over! Director of creative-nonfiction program, University of Iowa
“These memoir pieces collectively read like a novel, and the reader will be hard-pressed to ‘eat just one.’ Leblang does an excellent job of sharing with us his falls, his rises, and his subsequent falls as he seeks to eke out a place in this thing called life. What emerges is a highly satisfying portrait of a boy becoming a man becoming an adult, navigating the outrageous slings and arrows life tosses his way–it is, in short, the story of us all, told with astonishing intimacy.”
– J.G. Hayes, author of This Thing Called Courage, Now Batting for Boston, and A Map of the Harbor Islands