Literary Nonfiction. In these pages you will encounter gamblers and adventurers, conmen and conwomen, rodomontades and ragamuffins, outright fools and outrageous liars. SCALAWAGS, the lot of them. But you can be an adventurer, a conman or conwoman, a fool, liar, gambler, rodomontade or ragamuffin and not be a scalawag. Many adventurers are not even interesting, come to think of it, let alone scalawags. There is an ineffable quality, an indefinable something or other that sets some people apart, places them in the special category that Jim Christy calls "scalawag." You might call them something else; nuts, perhaps. And quite frankly in many instances—George Francis Train, for instance, or Louis De Rougemont—you'd probably be right. In 2008, it was a CBC Radio Toronto pick for one of the best nonfiction books of year.

Author City: TORONTO, ON CAN

Born in Richmond, Virginia, Jim Christy grew up in South Philadelphia, a tough area featured in his autobiographical novel Streethearts (Simon and Pierre, 1981), and also featured in Sylvester Stallone's Rocky movies. "Boxing was in the air," he once recalled. "You knew people who had boxed; if Dickens had been around he would have written about boxing." Christy later wrote about boxing as a business and a subculture, in his book Flesh & Blood (HarperCollins Canada, 1990). Christy began running away from home around age twelve, once getting as far as the outskirts of Buffalo. He befriended one of his closest friends and mentors, Floyd Wallace, a hobo, a former boxer and a former soldier of fortune, and learned to ride the freights at a young age. Most recently, he is the author of SCALAWAGS: ROGUES, ROUSTABOUTS, WAGS & SCAMPS-NE'ER-DO-WELLS THROUGH THE AGES (Anvil Press, 2008).

Reviews and Other Links
Steven Schelling @ Westender
Grant Shilling @ The Globe and Mail
Emily Donaldson @ The Star