A Young People's History of the United States

A Young People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

My reading of Chains and Forge has had me thinking about injustice in our country, and there is no

better book to point out who has suffered, and gained, in our American story than Howard Zinn. His basic premise is that the story of our nation is not the story we've been taught. It's not a story of equality and liberty and community. Instead, it's a story of an elite few manipulating the poor many, giving them small, superficial concessions designed to keep them from revolting against a system that allows them to get richer and richer. It's a story of these elite pitting one impoverished group against another, of racism and prejudice, and, most of all, of injustice. It's a vision of our nation's past that gives one pause when considering our new political order. Even if you don't agree with Zinn's take on history, his argument should make you consider how the current administration might fit into -- or rebut -- his argument. I very much appreciated the way Zinn adapted his book for younger readers, making very complex topics accessible to all. This should be required reading -- as long as students have the opportunity to disagree with him.

Forge

Forge by Laurie Halse Anderson

Forge picks up where Chains leaves off, which Curzon and Isabel in the middle colonies after they fled

New York City,. This book is told from the point of view of Curzon, who accidentally finds himself in a regiment of American troops who hole up at Valley Forge for the winter.

This is another well-told tale. But, as with Chains, what I liked about it most was the fact that it does not participate in the veneration of the so-called patriots that eventually earned our nation its independence. Rather, it takes great pains to point out their hypocrisy, as many of the men who espoused freedom and liberty also held hundreds of people in bondage -- and failed to see that contradiction. At the very least, this book will make you think differently about who in the American revolution should be considered heroes.

Chains

Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson

Chains tells the story of a young woman caught up in one of our nation's most troubling paradoxes: A

commitment on on the one hand to equality for everyone and a firm belief on the other that people of color are not part of the "everyone" that deserves equality, so much so that we for centuries held them in bondage.

The novel takes place at what could have been a national reckoning of that paradox, but, sadly was not. The main character, Isabel, finds herself sold from a Rhode Island farm to the household of a Tory sympathizer on the eve of the American Revolution. The slave community in New York City, where Isabel finds herself, is split on the question of which group -- the British or American rebels -- would be best for black Americans, and Isabel is forced to put her lot in with one of the groups.

I very much enjoyed this historical piece, for a number of reasons. It was, first and foremost, a lively read. But equally important, it shines a light on a little-known period of American history. We all too often think of slavery as a "southern" issue, when in fact it was at the economic heart of all of the colonies. So too is the political role slavery played in our nascent nation rather underappreciated. When I was in college, I read a book by the scholar Edmund S. Morgan called Slavery and Freedom. It makes the argument that elite whites used racism and increasingly hostile treatment of black slaves as a way to control the white population, whose social and political status rose as the status of the black people around them fell. This book makes that relationship between our unique political system and slavery quite clear and in a way that is accessible to young readers. Well worth the read.

Ghost

Ghost
By Tim Reynolds

Ghost tells the story of Castle Crenshaw, who one day winds up on an elite New York City track team, which he tells to call him "Ghost", I think to highlight that kids like him -- underprivileged and underserved -- aren't really "seen" by our society. Anyway, Ghost turns out to be a heck of a sprinter, and track winds up putting him on the straight and narrow path that we can only assume will lead to a better life for him in the future.

I really enjoyed the story. But I do wonder about it's message. I'm always skeptical about the teacher or coach-as-hero narrative. As if one person can totally turn around another person. And as if that is what we teachers/coaches are supposed to do. And what about the fact that it is athletics that save this kid? In reality, it's going to be basic literacy skills -- reading, writing, speaking and listening -- that will mean success later on. It seems like the school figures in this story are an impediment to progress rather than a vehicle for it. I, obviously, object to that. I'm trying to engage students in the world of economics, society, and politics the same way the coach in this story engages his pupils in track. But why are athletics so much more valued by students -- and society as a whole. It needs to change!

Going After Caciatto

Going After Caciatto

By Tim O'Brien

I was so impressed by Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried that I wanted to continue hearing his voice. So I picked up this novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize in the 1970s. The two are definitely different books. Going After Cacciato is quite surreal. It features a group -- squad? platoon? unit? -- who goes after a soldier named Cacciato, who simply ups and leaves the Vietnam War one day, claiming he's going to march to Paris. You'd think that Cacciato would be the main character, but he's not. Instead, it's Paul Berlin, who seems, based on The Things They Carried, to be much more like the author than Cacciato. What ensues is a crazy story of a march through Asia -- or is it a march through the mind? In the end, I enjoyed the book, but it was not nearly as poignant as O'Brien's other, much more famous work. Either way -- war is crazy.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling

So this is Harry Potter, eh? Okay. Not bad, not bad. But not great. Certainly not great. I'm not exactly

sure why so many people are so enamored with this book, even a decade or so after its first publication. It's engaging and all, but...

The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

I was deeply touched by this series of essays about the author's time in the Vietnam War. He grapples

with really big ideas, ideas that I hadn't thought of -- perhaps because his life story and mine are so different. I don't think we started out that dissimilar: good at school, a future of our own choosing. The difference is, he got drafted and I will never have to face that reality. It differs even from my father's story; he, who volunteered for the Air Force at the same time, both to avoid the combat O'Brien writes about and to see the world. His big story from the war involves the amount of effort and sweat it took to climb to the top of his bunk in Vietnam's oppressive heat. A far cry from O'Brien's story about killing a man. Then again, did he kill a man? That's the wonderful part about the book. It makes clear the difficulty of telling fact from fiction when confronted with such memories. Though the same might be true for all of us.

News of the World

News of the World by Paulette Jiles

This book takes its title from the occupation of the main character, Cpt. Kidd, an army veteran in post-

Civil War Texas who rides from town to town charging auditoriums full of people a dime to hear him read news from far-flung places, made possible only recently by the advent of the telegraph. I'm fairly certain that the profession was real, and it was something I hadn't heard of before. Kidd's humdrum existence is upended when, at one reading, a friend passes off to him a little white girl who had been kidnapped four years earlier by the Kiowa; his mission becomes to return the girl to her aunt and uncle in a little town near San Antonio. Adventure ensues! So too does compassion and empathy as the old man -- Kidd is in his 70s -- works to help the young girl, Johanna, adjust to white society in the kindest way possible.

This was certainly an interesting, captivating read. But the ending -- oh, the ending! This is the second book in a row in which the ending was just too tidy, too happy, too redemptive. Do things really work out like this in real life? Is sorrow and disappointment not a part of the human condition? It was strange to hear the book's tone change so radically near the end. I wish it had ended more abruptly many pages earlier.

The Burgess Boys

The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout

Two lawyer brothers thought they had left their Maine childhood behind, when one day they receive a call from the sister they left behind. The news isn't good: her son, their nephew, had thrown a pig's head through a mosque frequented by their hometown's burgeoning Somali refugee population. As a result, the brothers must go back home and, in doing so, confront long-buried -- and misunderstood -- truths of their childhood.

I'm a sucker for this kind of realistic fiction. Strout lets you intimately know the characters in this book, particularly the younger Burgess boy, Bob. But I think what drew me in even more was the relevance of the subject matter. Some Maine towns are, indeed, reeling from an influx of refugees, and the different culture from which they came. It's an issue that the whole country is now dealing with as a result of the current crisis in Syria (not to mention Yemen, Sudan, Myanmar, etc. etc.) The ending might have been a bit too tidy for me, but this book nevertheless had me reading long past my bedtime.

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Al Franken: Giant of the Senate

Al Franken: Giant of the Senate by Al Franken

The Stranger in the Woods

The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel

The Call

The Call by Yannick Murphy

When You Reach Me

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

I was inspired to pick up this book after reading Goodbye Stranger, one of the author's other books. I

liked that book for the authentic voice she seemed to give her characters. I found the same was true of this book. I tells the story of a young girl named Miranda, who is dealing with a "break up" from her longtime best friend -- well, only friend -- Sal, who seems to reject her one day out of the blue. In Sal, Miranda had a partner to navigate the Brooklyn landscape they both called home. Just outside their apartment lives what appears to be a crazy man, who sleeps with his head under the mail box and yells to himself. As she is dealing with the trauma of losing her best friend, Miranda starts getting mysterious notes asking her to perform some strange tasks: Write a letter to some unknown person with the whereabouts of their hidden apartment key, for one. Little by little, Miranda starts to build a new Sal-less life and the clues about the sender of the letter begin to pile up -- until one fateful day when it all makes sense.

I really, really enjoyed this book. Stead includes just enough suspense to make you want to keep reading and reading. The clues she left strewn throughout gave me a lot to think about as I was reading. In addition, there are numerous realistic subplots that keep the more fantastical elements of the story in check. A great book.

Lost on a Mountain in Maine

Lost on a Mountain in Maine by Donn Fendler

A young boy finds himself alone and lost on the side of Khatadin after leaving his friend at the summit

and losing the trail. He eventually finds his way to safety -- but only after nine days fending for himself in the woods. He endures falls, scrapes, and, most of all, exhaustion. It was a pretty riveting tale -- a bit like a real life Hatchet -- one that I couldn't put down until I finished it. It's also a simple story told in simple story, and so should be accessible to students of all reading abilities.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

The Rock and the River

The Rock and the River by Kekla Magoon

I was drawn to this book by its subject matter: the shift in the Civil Rights movement away from the sit-ins

and marches of the early 1960s to the more militant, separatist ideology of the late 1960s. At the heart of the book are two young men, Sam and his older brother "Stick", who are the sons of a prominent Civil Rights activist growing up in Chicago. The conflict centers on the older brother's move away from the methods of his father as he gravitates to the Black Panther Party.

All in all, I wasn't too impressed by this book. The characters seemed pretty flat, the dialogue stilted and unrealistic, and the storyline too simplistic. While I appreciate the author's attempt to dramatize for young readers this very important and interesting time period, she failed, for me at least, to create a realistic alternate reality that seemed life-like for me. I just couldn't get lost in the book because it didn't seem real.

Hillbilly Elegy

Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance

In this mostly memoir, Vance tries to shed some light on the plight of working class white Americans in the

midwest, the segment of the population that were largely responsible for propelling Donald Trump to the White House. He uses his own story, which was filled with family dysfunction, as a way to explore why this group of people has floundered economically in the post-industrial economy. His conclusions seem to suggest that it is the culture of the area itself that is largely to blame. He points to a discrepancy between people's expectations for life and their behavior that many inhabitants cannot see. When a co-worker at a warehouse Vance was working at to make money for law school was fired for chronic tardiness and hour-long bathroom breaks, he complains that the supervisor merely had it out for him from the beginning. But while Vance does seem to offer many causes of this demographic's state of affairs, he posits very few solutions. Vance is a good story teller, and he certainly has a personal story worth telling, and I appreciated the way he zoomed in and out from his own life to the life of his larger community. He deftly wove these two stories together.

Goodbye Stranger

Goodbye Stranger by Rebecca Stead

We read this book in advisory in the wake of our dress code "scandal" last year. I'm not exactly sure how the

two relate, but it does bring up issues of identity and gender as they relate to developing teenagers. The book contains two parallel stories. In one story, a girl named Tabitha, Tab for short, is coming to terms with how the transition from elementary school to middle school is impacting her friendships with people she's known since they were very little. These friendships are strained after one of Tab's core friends, Emily, engages in an inappropriate texting back-and-forth with a boy, which ends up shared around the school. In the other story, an unnamed girl is dealing with something she did to stab a friend in the back so that she could enter the good graces of another one of her friends, who is mean but popular.

Students seemed to find the voices in this book authentic, and enjoyed reading it. However, the topics seemed to hit a bit too close to home for them to really want to discuss it. It was almost like talking about it would reveal some uncomfortable secrets that most of the students had. Maybe I'm wrong about that one.

Another Kind of Hurricane

Another Kind of Hurricane by Tamara Ellis Smith

I used this book as an "anchor" text for our study of Hurricane Irene and its impact on our community. It's

about two boys. One, Henry, is from Vermont, and he is struggling in the wake of his best friend Wayne's death on Mount Mansfield. His grief eventually leads him to New Orleans, where he meets Zavion, who is struggling emotionally and physically in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Students LOVED this book. What I appreciated about it as a teacher is that while it is fairly "easy" in terms of its lexile, it is rich with meaning. It provided lots of opportunities to talk about symbolism and metaphors, to really dig past the plot of the book into its deeper meaning.

The Warmth of Other Suns

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

This nonfiction books is an account of the Great Migration, during which millions of black Americans fled the

South between the onset of World War I and the mid-1960s. As a student of American history, I'd been aware of this migration, but the sheer scope of the movement was astonishing. In addition, Wilkerson presents up-to-date research that debunks many of the misconceptions of those who made the migration, including that they brought disfunction to northern cities, so often promulgated by whites, often to disasterous results. In fact, most of the migrants were better educated, more likely to stay married, and more likely to be working than their counterparts born in the north. Perhaps most astonishing in the book was the reminder of just how racist the north was. After a march in Chicago to protest housing segregation, MLK mentioned that while he'd seen hate in the south, he'd never seen anything so vitriolic as what he experienced in the north.

What was great about this book was how Wilkerson told it. She intertwined the stories of three migrants -- Ida Mae, George Sterling, and Robert Pershing Foster -- who made their journeys from and to different places at different times. These characters revealed their stories in great detail, and Wilkerson told them in such a way that you were sucked in. You wanted to keep reading because you needed to know what would happen to these people. What a great way to tell history.