Lina is a fifteen-year-old Lithuanian girl. She paints, she draws, she gets crushes on boys. She's just like any other girl. Until one night in 1941, when Soviet officers barge into her home, tearing her family from the comfortable life they've known. Separated from her father, forced onto a crowded train car, Lina, her mother, and her young brother are taken slowly north to a Siberian work cam…
In the late summer of 1831, in a remote section of southeastern Virginia, there took place the only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery... The revolt was led by a remarkable Negro preacher named Nat Turner, an educated slave who felt himself divinely ordained to annihilate all the white people in the region. The Confessions of Nat Turner is narrated by Nat …
"On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." With this celebrated sentence, Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world. By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper seeks to prove that it was div…
Suddenly I became aware of another person in the room. I sat upright, totally alert, straining to see in the dark. That's when it happened. A boy - small, thin, dressed in mud brown clothes - leaned out from behind the radio and whispered, "Johnny, will you help me?"
A nazi led us up the stairs and into a small room at the end of a hall. Two boys younger than me and girl closer to Jaro's age followed me, and we joined about a dozen other Lidice children already standing in what looked like a science classroom. I stopped in the doorway, amazed by what 1 saw. It wasn't who was there that surprised me. I recognized most everyone from school. But all of us had…
Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston are Thomas Jefferson's children by one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, and while they do get special treatment - better work, better shoes, even violin lessons - they are still slaves, and are never to mention who their father is. The lighter-skinned children have been promised a chance to escape into white society, but what does this mean for the children who…