Boys of Grit, in both volumes, are wonderful stories of boys who overcame life-changing, debilitating obstacles to take not pity from the world but give to the world their own special gifts.

An average blacksmith masters 20 languages and works for world peace. A boy who grows up in rugged poverty astonishes the world with his fantasies for children. A fatherless, penniless boy struggles to eat - and winds up the benefactor to thousands. A fever strikes and cripples a boy who learns to conquer the world with words and his imagination. A slave's young grandson works like a full-grown man and sings like an angel. A deeply religious wheelwright prophecies his son will one day be a great musician - and so Franz Joseph Haydn was.

In story after story, each short enough for bedtime reading and thoughtful remembering, you and your children will meet boys who overcame and overcame and overcame. It's not enough to flippantly toss out words like "trial and tribulation and overcoming" when you're speaking of starvation and sudden blindness and backbreaking labor and other such terrors heaped upon mere children. You will detect no whining in these stories, no blaming, and no crying about how life is unfair to them. You will simply see boys who grew into men with a determination to persevere and make a difference. Many of the men you likely have never heard of before; others are quite famous. Each will inspire your sons - and daughters - to master hard times that come to each of us and not let those hardships master them.