"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…
In the 1930s and '40s in California, Satomi is the only girl with one white parent and one Japanese parent. There are Japanese families, but Satomi is neither a part of the white community nor the Japanese one. Things get worse for Satomi--and all people with even a drop of Japanese blood--when Japan poses a threat to the United States. Her father joins the Navy, in part to fight for his countr…