A Survival Story of the Cambodian Genocide

Half Spoon of Rice: A Survival Story of the Cambodian Genocide

by Icy Smith, Sopaul Nhem

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Book Description
Nine-year-old Nat is forced out of his Cambodian home and marched into the countryside when the Khmer Rouge comes into power. Nat is separated from his family and endures forced labor in rice fields from dawn to midnight with little food. Over the next four years, Nat confronts starvation, fear, and brutality. With the help of his friend Malis, Nat finds hope and the strength to escape, eventually reuniting with the family he loves. Half Spoon of Rice is based on true stories of courage, friendship, survival, and the triumph of the human spirit. The book features vivid illustrations and historical photographs documenting the Cambodian genocide from 1975 to 1979.

About the Author
Icy Smith is the award-winning author of The Lonely Queue: The forgotten history of the courageous Chinese Americans in Los Angeles and Mei Ling in China City. The Lonely Queue received the Clarion Award for best nonfiction book in 2002. Mei Ling in China City received the 2009 Chinese American Librarian Association Best Children s Book Award, 2008 Moonbeam Children s Book Award and the Independent Publisher Book Award in the Multicultural Fiction.

Child of the Civil Rights Movement

Starred Review, Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 2009:
“Civil rights can be a difficult topic, even for adults, so finding simple language to explain the complexity of injustice and oppression to children is challenging. Shelton, daughter of Andrew Young, accepts the challenge and rises to meet it...Essential.”

Child of the Civil Rights Movement

by Paula Young Shelton, Raul Colon

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Book Description
Paula Young Shelton, daughter of Civil Rights activist Andrew Young, brings a child’s unique perspective to an important chapter in America’s history. Paula grew up in the deep south, in a world where whites had and blacks did not. With an activist father and a community of leaders surrounding her, including Uncle Martin (Martin Luther King), Paula watched and listened to the struggles, eventually joining with her family and thousands of others in the historic march from Selma to Montgomery.

Poignant, moving, and hopeful, this is an intimate look at the birth of the Civil Rights Movement.

About the Author
Paula Young Shelton is the daughter of civil rights leader and former U.N. ambassador Andrew Young. She is a teacher in Washington, D.C., and a member of the National Black Child Development Institute. Her husband, Hilary O. Shelton, is the director of the NAACP Washington Bureau.

Raul Colón is the acclaimed illustrator of numerous children’s books.

The Story of Bird Woman and the Lewis & Clark Expedition

Sacajawea: The Story of Bird Woman and the Lewis and Clark Expedition

by Joseph Bruchac

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Book Description
Captured by her enemies, married to a foreigner, and a mother at age sixteen, Sacajawea lived a life of turmoil and change. Then in 1804, the mysterious young Shoshone woman known as Bird Woman met Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Acting as interpreter, peacemaker, and guide, Sacajawea bravely embarked on an epic journey that altered history forever. Hear her extraordinary story, told by Sacajawea and by William Clark, in alternating chapters and including parts of Clark's original diaries.

• Authentic telling by an American Book Award winner and winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Native Writers Circle of The Americas
• Includes a black-and-white map showing Lewis and Clark's trail
• Told in the compelling voices of Sacajawea and William Clark in alternating chapters for two unique viewpoints
• Sacajawea will be commemorated in the year 2000 with a U.S. Treasury dollar coin bearing her likeness

Review
Grade 6 Up-This intelligent, elegantly written novel weaves Sacajawea's recollections of the Lewis and Clark expedition with those of William Clark, the American captain who developed a deeply spiritual bond with her and became a surrogate uncle to her son. Beyond recounting the thrills and hardships of the legendary two-year mission, the alternating first-person narratives show the respect that develops between the young "Bird Woman" and the Corps of Discovery. Sacajawea begins her chapters with excerpts from Native American folktale, providing insight into her religious and cultural upbringing and its impact on her interpretation of events. Clark begins his with entries mostly from his journal, underscoring his keen awareness of the importance of the expedition and his desire to record even its most mundane details. Balancing the eyewitness accounts of these two people is not just a clever literary device. Clark's account is crucial to supplying information about Sacajawea that she herself cannot provide. Her narrative is devoid of self-praise and self-promotion; they would be unnatural impulses for a Shoshone female. So Bruchac uses Clark to chronicle Sacajawea's extraordinary bravery and endurance, and his voice repeats what she cannot even attempt to mention: that the mission would have been a certain failure without her. This is an engaging book to share with young adults, who will find it all the more fascinating to learn that Sacajawea was a teenager when she made history with Lewis and Clark.

About the Author
JOSEPH BRUCHAC is a poet, storyteller, and author of more than sixty books for children and adults who has received many literary honors, including the American Book Award and the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. He is of Abenaki and Slovak heritage, and lives in Greenfield Center, New York.

When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom

Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom (Caldecott Honor Book)

by Carole Boston Weatherford, Kadir Nelson

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Book Description
Grade 2-5. Tubman's religious faith drives this handsome, poetic account of her escape to freedom and role in the Underground Railroad. The story begins with Tubman addressing God on a summer night as she is about to be sold south from the Maryland plantation where she and her husband live: I am Your child, Lord; yet Master owns me,/drives me like a mule. In resounding bold text, God tells her He means for her to be free.

The story is sketched between passages of prayerful dialogue that keep Tubman from giving up and eventually call upon her to be the Moses of [her] people. Deep scenes of night fill many double pages as the dramatic paintings follow her tortuous journey, arrival in Philadelphia, and later trip to guide others. Shifting perspectives and subtle details, such as shadowy forest animals guarding her while she sleeps, underscore the narrative's spirituality. Whether filled with apprehension, determination, or serenity, Tubman's beautifully furrowed face is expressive and entrancing. A foreword briefly explains the practice of slavery and an appended note outlines Tubman's life. The words and pictures create a potent sense of the harsh life of slavery, the fearsome escape, and one woman's unwavering belief in God.

My Name Is Sangoel

This simple story puts a child-friendly spin on a common immigrant experience as the child's classmates respond with similar puzzle pictures of their own names.

My Name Is Sangoel

by Karen Lynn Williams

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Book Description
Sangoel is a refugee. Leaving behind his homeland of Sudan, where his father died in the war, he has little to call his own other than his name, a Dinka name handed down proudly from his father and grandfather before him.

When Sangoel and his mother and sister arrive in the United States, everything seems very strange and unlike home. In this busy, noisy place, with its escalators and television sets and traffic and snow, Sangoel quietly endures the fact that no one can pronounce his name. Lonely and homesick, he finally comes up with an ingenious solution to this problem, and in the process he at last begins to feel at home.

Claudette Colvin, Jane Addams Honor Book

“When it comes to justice, there is no easy way to get it. You can’t sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, ‘This is not right.’” – Claudette Colvin

Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (Jane Addams Honor Book (Awards))
by Phillip M Hoose

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Book Description
On March 2, 1955, an impassioned teenager, fed up with the daily injustices of Jim Crow segregation, refused to give her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Instead of being celebrated as Rosa Parks would be just nine months later, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin found herself shunned by her classmates and dismissed by community leaders. Undaunted, a year later she dared to challenge segregation again as a key plaintiff in Browder v. Gayle, the landmark case that struck down the segregation laws of Montgomery and swept away the legal underpinnings of the Jim Crow South.

Based on extensive interviews with Claudette Colvin and many others, Phillip Hoose presents the first in-depth account of an important yet largely unknown civil rights figure, skillfully weaving her dramatic story into the fabric of the historic Montgomery bus boycott and court case that would change the course of American history.

Review
“Phil Hoose’s profile of the remarkable Claudette Colvin is MUST reading for anyone still imbued with hope. She is a lighthouse in a stormy sea.”  — Studs Terkel, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Good War

“Today, thanks to Hoose, a new generation of girls and boys can add Claudette Colvin to their list of heroines.”  — Christian Science Monitor

“This inspiring title shows the incredible difference that a single young person can make.”  — Starred, Booklist

“Smoothly weaves excerpts from Hoose’s extensive interviews with Colvin and his own supplementary commentary.” —Starred, Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

“Hoose makes the moments in Montgomery come alive, whether it’s about Claudette’s neighborhood, her attorneys, her pastor or all the different individuals in the civil rights movement who paths she crossed . . . . An engrossing read.” —Chicago Tribune

About the Author
PHILLIP HOOSE’s distinguished nonfiction includes the National Book Award Finalist We Were There, Too!: Young People in U.S. History and The Race to Save the Lord God Bird, winner of the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for Nonfiction. He lives in Portland, Maine.