Junior Literature Books

Angelou, Maya The Heart of a Woman

    The fourth volume in Angelou’s autobiography beaks her turbulent life wide open with joy as the singer-dancer enters the razzle-dazzle of fabulous New York City. There, at the Harlem Writers Guide, her love for writing blazes anew.

Angelou, Maya Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now

    Maya Angelou, one of the best authors of our time, shares the wisdom of a remarkable life in this best-selling slpiritual classic. This is Maya Angelou talking from the heart, down to earth and real bout also inspiring. This is a book to be treasured, a book about being in all ways a woman, about living well, about the power of the word, and about the power to spirituality move and shape your life. Passionate, lively, and lyrical, Maya Angelou’s latest unforgettable work offers a gem of truth on every page.

Beals, Melba Pattillo Warriors Don’t Cry

                               This book chronicles the experience of Melba Pattillo, one of the nine teenagers chosen to integrate Little Rock,                              Arkansas’s Central High School. The story chronicles the hardships and horrors Melba faced.

Ellison, Ralph Invisible Man

    An African-American man’s search for success and the American dream leads him out of college to Harlem and a growing sense of personal rejection and social invisibility.

French, Albert Billy

    A harrowing debut novel of 10-year-old Billy Lee Turner, convicted and executed for murdering a white girl in Baines, Mississippi, in 1937, is an unsentimental and ultimately heartrending vision of racial injustice.

Gaines, Ernest J. A Lesson Before Dying

    Set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940s. Jefferson, a young black man, is an unwitting part to a liquor store shootout in which three men are killed; the only survivor, he is convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

Gibbons, Kay Ellen Foster

    This is a story of a young girl who overcomes adversity. Ellen also has a friendship with an African-American girl… "one that every rule in the book says she should not have in her house."

Griffin, John Howard Black Like Me

    He trudged southern streets searching for a place where he could eat or rest, looking vainly for a job other than menial labor, feeling the "hate stare." …He was John Howard Griffin, a white man who darkened the color of his skin and crossed the line into a country of hate, fear, and hopelessness – the country of the American Black man. This book journals his experience.

Haley, Alex Autobiography of Malcolm X

    This is the personal story of the man who rose from hoodlum, thief, dope peddler, and pimp to become the most dynamic leader of the Black Revolution.

Hurston, Zora Neal Their Eyes Were Watching God

    After three marriages, Janie Crawford a fair-skinned, long haired, and dreamy as a child, grows up expecting better treatment than she gets. She meets Tea Cake, a younger man, who engages her heart and spirit in equal measure. He gives her the chance to enjoy life without being one man’s mule or another man’s adornment.

Kincaid, Nancy Crossing Blood

    It is the era of King and Wallace in Tallahassee, Florida. A young girl, Lucy Conyers, learn the realities of love, race and hatred when she enters into a forbidden friendship.

McBride, James The Color of Water

    The story of James McBride and his mother – a rabbi’s daughter, born in Poland and raised in the south, who fled to Harlem, married a black man, founded a church, and put 12 children through college.

Meriweather, Louise Daddy Was a Number Runner

    Told from the perspective of a 12-year-old girl; it documents the triumph of integrity of a black family in Harlem in the 1930s. A compelling story told with wit and compassion.

Saunders, Dori Clover

    "…Clover, a 10 year old black girl from a small town in South Carolina, chronicles her bewildering but gradually deepening relationship with her white stepmother…"

Webb, Sheyann and Rachel West Nelson as told to Frank Sikora Selma, Lord, Selma

    Sheyann Webb was eight years old and Rachel West was nine when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., arrived in Selma, Alabama, on January 2, 1965, to organize peaceful demonstrations to protest discriminatory voting laws. This book is their firsthand account of the events of the turbulent winter of 1965 – events that changed the lives of all Alabamians and of all Americans.

West, Dorthy The Wedding

    This book offers an intimate glimpse into the African American middle class. Set on bucolic Martha’s Vineyard in the 1950s, it is the story of life in the Oval, a proud, insular community made up of the best and brightest of the East Coast’s black bourgeoisie. Within this inner circle of "blue-vein society, we witness the prominent Coles family gather for the wedding of the loveliest daughter, Shelby, who could have chosen from "a whole areas of eligible men of the right colors and the right professions." Instead, she has fallen in love with and is about to be married to Meade Wyler, a white jazz musician from New York. A shock wave breaks over the Oval as its longtime members grabble with the changing face of its community.

 

Heller, Joseph Catch–22

    This is a classic satire on the murderous insanity of war. Set in the closing months of World War II in an American bomber squadron off Italy. It is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian.

Okada, John No-No Boy

    This is the experience of Japanese-Americans during and post World War II. The story is an excellent portrait of one man’s experience with the effects of racism and post-war hysteria.

Rylant, Cynthia I Had Seen Castles

    John Dante is 17 in 1941. The year the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. Rather than being judged a coward he enlists in the Army… Now an old man, John is haunted by memories of enlisting to fight in World War II, a decision which forced him to face the horrors of war and changed his life forever.

Trumbo, Dalton Johnny Got His Gun

    This was no ordinary war. This was a war to make the world safe for democracy. And if democracy was made safe, then nothing else mattered – not the millions of dead bodies, nor the thousands of ruined lives.

Uris, Leon Battle Cry

    Here are the men from the cities, farms, and whistle-stops. Here are the tough kids and the mamas’ boys, the liars and the lovers, the goldbricks and the heroes. Moving, shocking, tense, and glorious, here is a magnificent saga of men at war, the U.S. Marine Corps.

Vonnegut, Kurt Slaughterhouse-Five

    One of the greatest anti-war books centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim’s odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.

Wouk, Herman The Winds of War

    The epic of an American family during World War II. Europe, 1939: the rumblings of war grow to a terrible roar. In America the Henry clan – Navy to the bone – finds itself drawn into the very center of the maelstrom: the father at the right hand of Roosevelt, his oldest son flying over the Pacific, his youngest falling in love in Europe. From conference table to battlefield, from the rise of the Reich to the horror of Pearl Harbor.

Wouk, Herman War and Remembrance

    This is a sequel to The Winds of War. Pearl Harbor, 1941: America at last has entered the war. From the Middle East to Moscow, from the Battle of Midway to the death camps of Hitler, the members of the Henry clan will span the globe—fighting, facing the great and small players in the drama, and sometimes paying the ultimate sacrifice.

Greene, Bette Summer Of My German Soldier

    "…It was a dangerous friendship between a Jewish girl and a German soldier during World War II, when patriotic feeling was running high."

Rinaldi, Ann Keep Smiling Through

    "I was ten the year I learned that you can be good and do the right thing and sometimes it all goes bad for you… I just wish I hadn’t learned it so soon; that I could go on forever believing what our radio heroes were teaching us that Spring of 1944."

 

Guterson, David Snow Falling On Cedars

    This novel is the story of Kabuo Miyamoto, a Japanese American charged with the murder of a local fisherman. Though the man is on trial in 1954, the novel delves into Miyamoto’s memory of what happened to the Japanese residents of San Piedro during World War II.

Hchida, Yoshiko Journey To Topaz*

                                Story of a Japanese-American family that is sent to a camp in World War II.

Hchida, Yoshiko Journey Home*

    The same family leaves the camp to return home and find that things are greatly changed.

Hersey, John A Bell for Adano

    An Italian-American major in World War II wins the love and admiration of the local townspeople when he searches for a replacement for the 700 year-old town bell that had been melted down for bullets by the fascists.

Knowles, John Peace Breaks Out

    This book takes us on a nostalgic journey after World War II to the Devon Prep School in New Hampshire.

Taylor, Theodore The Bomb

    1946 – a year after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. World War II is over but the United States government says further tests of the atomic bombs are necessary…Bikini Atoll is chosen and the people believe the government…

 

Hogan, Linda Mean Spirit

    Early in this century, rivers of oil were found beneath Oklahoma land belonging to Indian people, and beautiful Grace Blanket became the richest person in the Territory. But she was murdered by the greed of white men, and the Graycloud family, who cared for her daughter, began dying mysteriously, too. Letters begging for help sent to Washington, D.C., went unanswered, until at last a Native American government official, Stace Red Hawk, traveled west to investigate.

Silko, Leslie Marmon Ceremony

    The story of a young Native American returning to his reservation after surviving the horrors of captivity as a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II. Drawn to his Indian past and its traditions, his search for comfort and resolution becomes a ritual – a curative ceremony that defeats his despair.

Tim O’Brien Going After Cacciato

    This story captures the peculiar blend of horror and hallucinatory comedy that marked the Vietnam War. Reality and fantasy merge in this fictional account of one private’s sudden decision to lay down his rifle and begin a quixotic journey from the jungles of Indochina to the streets of Paris.

Mason, Bobbie Ann In Country

    This effective novel tells the story of Samantha Hughes, a recent high school graduate who wants answers about the Vietnam War. Her father was killed in the war. Her mother can’t really tell her anything about her father since they were married only a month before his death. Her uncle, Emmett, with whom she lives, could be suffering ill effects from exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. She is attracted to another Vietnam veteran who is emotionally scarred by the war.

Myers, Walter Dean Fallen Angels**

    This novel tells the story of Richie Perry, seventeen, who enlists to fight in Vietnam as a way out of a dead-end life in Harlem. He experiences all of the horrors of war as well as the racial conflict that existed among American troops. Richie questions his religious faith and his moral values.

** Must have parental/guardian approval.

    What happens to a marriage when the darkest secrets of your past find their way into the present? "The story of a terrible fissure in a man’s life after decades of deceit…"

O’Brien, Tim If I Die in a Combat Zone

    This is considered by some as one of the most important works to come out of the war. It is the story of one soldier’s journey from safe, middle class America to the center of the horror of the Vietnam War. O’Brien emphasizes the fear and the moral dilemmas.

O’Brien, Tim The Things They Carried

    An unusual and powerful novel in which war stories are told by various characters and narrators who sometimes retell in different ways stories already told. Narrators dispute the accuracy of what they themselves are saying. Occasionally a narrator will come to the end of a harrowing tale and then insist that the protagonist did not do the terrible or heroic things he has just recited, but he himself did them.

Smith, Winnie American Daughter Gone to War: On the Front Lines with an Army Nurse in Vietnam

    Winnie was an idealistic twenty-one-year-old in the Army Nurse Corps when the war officially began in 1965. Filled with romantic notions about being a combat nurse, she requested an assignment to an intensive care unit in Saigon, where casualties were brought by helicopter just minutes from the battlefield. This is Winnie’s powerful, poignant story of a woman’s struggle to survive the bloodbath she confronted on the ward, and the trauma that filled her life afterward.

Webb, James Fields of Fire

    In this major novel of the Vietnam War, a Marine unit fights the Vietcong, endures unbelievable living conditions, confronts the dangers of the "bush," and faces death and injury. Webb explores the reasons each man became a Marine, as the reader follows him through combat. The novel also examines the difficulties veterans faced when they returned home.

 

Hahn, Mary Downing December Stillness**

    Thirteen-year-old Kelly McAllister becomes involved in the plight of a homeless Vietnam vet who takes refuge in the library each day. Interviewing him began as a social Studies project, but it takes on new meaning after her offers of food and friendship backfire into a real disaster. What had the war done to destroy this man? And what had it done to her own father, who had been to the same war…and refuses to speak of it?

** Must have parental/guardian approval.

Hodgins, Michael C. Reluctant Warrior

    This is a story about how things were when our country was at war. It is a story of a young man’s courage during the Vietnam conflict.

Kingston, Maxine Hong Kingston The Woman Warrior

    This is a pungent, bitter, but beautifully written memoir of growing up Chinese American in Stockton, California. Maxine Hong Kingston (China Men) distills the dire lessons of her mother’s memorizing "talk-story" tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upward. The author’s America is a landscape of confounding white "ghosts" – the policeman ghost, the social worker ghost – with equally rigid, but bery different rules. Like the woman warrior of the title, Kingston carries the crimes against her family carved into her back by her parents in testimony to and defiance of the pain.

Yezierska, Anzia Bread Givers

    "Only if they cooked for men, and washed for men, and didn’t nag and curse the men out of their homes; only if they let the men study the Torah in peace, then, maybe, they could push themselves into heaven with the men, to wait on them there."  Sara Smolinsky was the youngest daughter of a rabbi and these were the tenets of her world. But one day Sara rebelled. She left home, got a job as an ironer, and took a room of her own. "This door was life. It was air. The bottom starting-point of becoming a person. I simply must have this room with the shut door."

Tom Wolfe The Right Stuff

    After an opening chapter on the terror of being a test pilot’s wife, the story cuts back to the late 1940s, when Americans were first attempting to break the sound barrier. Test pilots, we discover, are people who live fast lives with dangerous machines, not all of the airborne. Chuck Yeager was certainly among the fastest, and his determination to push through Mach 1 – a feat that some had predicted would cause the destruction of any aircraft – makes him the book’s guiding spirit.

Boyle, T. Coraghessan Tortilla Curtain

    Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead an ordered existence in a newly gated hilltop community. Mexican illegals Candido and America Rincon desperately cling to their vision of the American Dream as they fight off starvation in a makeshift camp deep in the ravine. And from the moment a freak accident brings Candido and Delaney into intimate contact, these four and their opposing worlds gradually intersect in what becomes a tragicomedy or error and misunderstanding.

Morrow, Bradford Trinity Fields

    Kip and Brice were best friends, born on the same day in 1944 in Los Almos, New Mexico, the most secret place on earth. Sons of men who engineered the atom bomb. By the mid 60s they are drawn in two different directions in life. A powerful novel about innocence and guilt, atonement and healing, friendship and betrayal, this story maps the landscape of the American soul.

Lederer, William J. and Eugene Burdick The Ugly American

    Authentic, infuriation, and explosively candid, this is the daring, classic bestseller that unmasked the blundering hypocrisy of some of our top-level diplomats. It exposes the opportunism, incompetence, and cynical deceit that have become embedded in the fabric of our public relations, not only in Asia but all over the world.