Recounts the story of Meltem and her Kurdish family from Eastern Turkey, who journey to the United Kingdom, and whose courage and resilience lead them to a new home and a new life.
Meltem’s Journey: A Refugee Diary
Biography – Autobiography- Memoir
Rattlesnake Mesa: Stories from a Native American Childhood
Chronicles the childhood of EdNah New Rider Weber as she is moved from her Pawnee home to live with her father on a Navajo reservation and then is again uprooted and placed in the Phoenix Indian School.
Quiet Hero
A biography of Native American Ira Hayes, a shy, humble Pima Indian who fought in World War II as a Marine and was one of six soldiers to raise the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima, an event immortalized in Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph.
A Boy Named Beckoning: The True Story of Dr. Carlos Montezuma, Native American Hero
This story reveals the life of a Yavapai-Apache boy named Wassaja, who was kidnapped from his tribe and sold as a slave. Adopted and renamed Carlos Montezuma, the young boy traveled throughout the Old West, bearing witness to the poor treatment of American Indians. Carlos eventually became a doctor and leader for his people.
Frida
Discusses the childhood of Frida Kahlo and how it influenced her art.
The Fabulous Flying Machines of Alberto Santos-Dumont
While the Wright Brothers were gliding over Kitty Hawk, the charming Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont was making his own mark on the history of flight. Alberto loved floating over Paris in his personal flying machine called a dirigible. He would tie it to a post, climb down, and spend the day shopping or meeting friends for coffee. But he wanted to make his invention even better. By 1906, Alberto had transformed his balloon into a box with wings! But now there was competition. Another inventor challenged Alberto to see who would be the first in flight. Alberto’s hard work paid off, and his airplane successfully soared into the air, making him the first pilot to lift off and land a completely self-propelled plane.
J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s novels were strongly influenced by his childhood both in South Africa, where lions prowled and wild beasts roamed, and in the English countryside, where he imagined that elves and gnomes dwelled. J. R. R. Tolkien wrote many stories, studied languages–even inventing one of his own–and founght bravely in World War I. He wrote The Hobbit, a children’s book about a courageous creature with pointed ears and furry feet, which was an instant success. His next book, The Lord of the Rings, made Tolkien, an ordinary man with an extraordinary imagination, one of the world’s most beloved authors.
When I Was Puerto Rican
Esmeralda Santiago’s story begins in rural Puerto Rico, where her childhood was full of both tenderness and domestic strife, tropical sounds and sights as well as poverty. Growing up, she learned the proper way to eat a guava, the sound of tree frogs in the mango groves at night, the taste of the delectable sausage called morcilla, and the formula for ushering a dead baby’s soul to heaven. As she enters school we see the clash, both hilarious and fierce, of Puerto Rican and Yankee culture. When her mother, Mami, a force of nature, takes off to New York with her seven, soon to be eleven children, Esmeralda, the oldest, must learn new rules, a new language, and eventually take on a new identity.
Arctic Son
A baby boy is given an Inupiat name to go with his English one and grows up learning the traditional ways of the Eskimo people living in the Arctic.
Orani: My Father’s Village
As a child, Claire Nivola loved summers in Orani, the village where her father grew up and where her many aunts, uncles, and 50 cousins still lived. She ran freely through the town’s cobbled streets with packs of cousins, who quizzed her about America while she took in all the simple joys and pleasures of daily life in a village where surprises met them at every turn.