Multicultural Reading
 

Across The Nightingale Floor, Vol. 1 (Hearn)

Set in a long-ago world resembling medieval Japan, where warring clans brutally battle it out while the nobility plots political marriages, the action starts almost immediately. Bodies are piling up by the third page, as teenage Takeo witnesses a massacre in his previously peaceful village. He seems to be writing his own ticket to the grave when he knocks an evil warlord from his horse.

All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (Angelou)

Five years after its independence from Britain. Kwame Nkrumah is Ghana's beloved ruler, and there is a sense of pride in the new country. Angelou joins a group of black Americans who have come to Ghana to be part of the great experiment. The book details her experiences within that community and as a black American confronting complex feelings in Africa, the land from which her ancestors were sold into slavery—possibly by other tribes. Angelou also writes of her emotions as a mother watching her son Guy grow to manhood. Angelou's insight and honesty about herself, and the light she sheds on emerging Africa and the American black community, make for absorbing reading.

Angela's Ashes (McCourt)

Born in the U.S. at the start of the Depression to Irish immigrant parents, McCourt suffered early and often at the hands of his father—a man who rarely got work and when he did, drank his meager wages away. When the family decided to move back to Ireland, things went from very bad to much worse. They settled in a Limerick slum and went on the dole, which was "just enough for all of us to starve on." (Indeed, neither of McCourt's two young twin brothers lived much beyond their second birthdays.) Barely old enough himself to go to school, McCourt helped his mother Angela scrounge for "bits of coal that drop from lorries" so they could at least have a fire for tea. He gathered "everything that burns, coal, wood, cardboard, paper."

It was a life so brimming with hardship and grinding poverty that when McCourt returned home from months in the typhoid ward, he longed for "the hospital where the white sheets were changed everyday and where there wasn't a sign of a flea.

After The War (Matas)

After being released from Buchenwald at the end of World War II, fifteen-year-old Ruth risks her life to lead a group of children across Europe to Palestine.

The Autobiography Of Miss Jane Pittman (Gaines)

When her story begins, Jane is a slave girl named Ticey, still working on a plantation in Louisiana as the Civil War winds down. She changes her name to Jane at the instigation of a confederate soldier, a minor rebellion against her owners that costs her a severe beating. After emancipation, she leaves the plantation and joins up with a group of ex-slaves on their way to Ohio. The group is massacred by former confederate soldiers, with only Jane and Ned, a young boy who Jane unofficially adopts, surviving. Jane then settles in Louisiana and serves as an influence for several black men who work hard to achieve dignity and economic and political equality: first Ned, who changes his name to Ned Douglass after his hero Frederick and becomes a campaigner for the most basic civil rights for blacks, but who is eventually lynched by whites; Joe Pittman, Jane’s common-law husband and breaker of wild horses, who is killed by a black stallion; and Jimmy Aaron, a young civil rights worker.

The Bean Trees (Kingsolver)

Clear-eyed and spirited, Taylor Greer grew up poor in rural Kentucky with the goals of avoiding pregnancy and getting away. But when she heads west with high hopes and a barely functional car, she meets the human condition head-on. By the time Taylor arrives in Tucson, Arizona, she has acquired a completely unexpected child, a three-year-old American Indian girl named Turtle, and must somehow come to terms with both motherhood and the necessity for putting down roots. Hers is a story about love and friendship, abandonment and belonging, and the discovery of surprising resources in apparently empty places.

Beloved (Morrison)

Before the war, Sethe, pregnant, sent her children away to their grandmother in Ohio, whose freedom had been paid for by their father. Sethe runs too, but when her "owners'' come to recapture her, she attempts to murder the children, succeeding with one, named Beloved. This murder will (literally) haunt Sethe for the rest of her life and affect everyone around her.

Black Boy (Wright)

Black Boy is a classic of American autobiography, a subtly crafted narrative of Richard Wright's journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. An enduring story of one young man's coming off age during a particular time and place, Black Boy remains a seminal text in our history about what it means to be a man, black, and Southern in America.

Black Like Me (Griffin)

Concerned by the lack of communication between the races and wondering what "adjustments and discriminations" he would face as a Negro in the Deep South, the late author, a journalist and self-described "specialist in race issues," left behind his privileged life as a Southern white man to step into the body of a stranger. In 1959, Griffin headed to New Orleans, darkened his skin and immersed himself in black society, then traveled to several states until he could no longer stand the racism, segregation and degrading living conditions. Griffin imparts the hopelessness and despair he felt while executing his social experiment, and professional narrator Childs renders this recounting even more immediate and emotional with his heartfelt delivery and skillful use of accents. The CD package includes an epilogue on social progress, written in 1976 by the author, making it suitable for both the classroom and for personal enlightenment. (Jan.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

The Black Pearl (O'Dell)

A coming-of-age story in which Ramon learns the family art of pearl diving and respect for the legend that surrounds the giant pearl he finds in a sea creature's cave.

Black Star, Bright Dawn (O'Dell)

A young Eskimo girl encounters frightening obstacles when she takes her father's place in the Iditarod, the annual 1,172-mile dogsled race in Alaska.

Bless Me Ultima (Anaya)

Antonio Marez is six years old when Ultima enters his life. She is a curandera, one who heals with herbs and magic. 'We cannot let her live her last days in loneliness,' says Antonio's mother. 'It is not the way of our people,' agrees his father. And so Ultima comes to live with Antonio's family in New Mexico. Soon Tony will journey to the threshold of manhood. Always, Ultima watches over him. She graces him with the courage to face childhood bigotry, diabolical possession, the moral collapse of his brother, and too many violent deaths. Under her wise guidance, Tony will probe the family ties that bind him, and he will find in himself the magical secrets of the pagan past—a mythic legacy equally as palpable as the Catholicism of Latin America in which he has been schooled. At each turn in his life there is Ultima who will nurture the birth of his soul. Enhanced by four full-color paintings by noted New Mexican artist Bernadette Vigil, this book will be treasured by all admirers

The Blessing Way (Hillerman)

When Lt. Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police discovers a corpse with a mouth full of sand at a crime scene seemingly without tracks or clues, he is ready to suspect a supernatural killer. And what he must stalk is the Wolf-Witch along a chilling trail between mysticism and murder.

Bluish (Hamilton)

Ten-year-old Dreenie feels both intrigued and frightened when she thinks about the girl nicknamed Bluish, whose leukemia is making her pale and causing her to use a wheelchair.

The Brave (Lipsyte)

Having left the Indian reservation for the streets of New York, seventeen-year-old boxer Sonny Bear tries to harness his inner rage by training with Alfred Brooks, who has left the sport to become a policeman.

The Broken Bridge (Pullman)

Over the course of a long summer in Wales, sixteen-year-old Ginny, the mixed-race, artist daughter of an English father and a Haitian mother, learns that she has a half-brother from her father's earlier marriage, and that her own mother may still be alive.

Buried Onions (Soto)

When nineteen-year-old Eddie drops out of college, he struggles to find a place for himself as a Mexican American living in a violence-infested neighborhood of Fresno, California.

Carlota (O'Dell)

A young girl relates her feelings and experiences as a participant in the battle of San Pasqual during the last days of the war between the Californians and Americans.

Chain Of Fire (Naidoo)

When the villagers of Bophelong are forced to leave their houses and resettle in a barren "homeland," thirteen-year-old Naledi and her younger brother join in a school demonstration and learn that the South African government treats even children who dissent with brutality.

Children Of The River (Crew)

Having fled Cambodia four years earlier to escape the Khmer Rouge army, seventeen-year-old Sundara is torn between remaining faithful to her own people and enjoying life in her Oregon high school as a "regular" American.

China Boy (Lee)

Kai Ting is the only American-born son of an aristocratic Mandarin family that has fled China in the wake of Mao's revolution. Woefully unprepared for life on the streets of San Francisco and speaking a patchwork of Chinese and English that no one but his relatives comprehends, Kai spends a blissful early childhood with his sophisticated older sister and his wonderfully eccentric mother. But Kai's idyl comes to an abrupt end with his mother's death. Suddenly plunged into American culture by his new stepmother, a Philadephia society woman who tried to erase every vestige of China from the household, young Kai desperately searches for somewhere to belong. Warm, funny, and deeply moving, China Boy is a brilliantly rendered novel of family relationships, culture shock, and the perils of growing up in am American of sharp differences and shared humanity.

The Confessions Of Nat Turner

Turner's Rebellion took place in the long hot summer of 1831, in the state of Virginia. When it was over, 59 white people were dead; the insurgents were rounded up and either hanged or worse; and Nat Turner, a preacher, confessed to his part in the only effective revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery.

The Contender (Lipsyte)

After a successful start in a boxing career, a Harlem high school dropout decides that competing in the ring isn't enough of life and resolves to aim for different goals.

Cry, The Beloved Country

Cry, the Beloved Country is a beautifully told and profoundly compassionate story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set in the troubled and changing South Africa of the 1940s.

The Cure (Levitin)

A sixteen-year-old boy living in 2407 collides with the past when he finds himself in Strasbourg in 1348 confronting the anti-Semitism that sweeps through Europe during the Black Plague.

Dance Hall Of The Dead (Hillerman)

Two Native-American boys have vanished into thin air, leaving a pool of blood behind them. Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police has no choice but to suspect the very worst, since the blood that stains the parched New Mexican ground once flowed through the veins of one of the missing, a young Zuni. But his investigation into a terrible crime is being complicated by an important archaeological dig ... and a steel hypodermic needle. And the unique laws and sacred religious rights of the Zuni people are throwing impassable roadblocks in Leaphorn's already twisted path, enabling a craven murderer to elude justice ... or, worse still, to kill again.

The Dark Wind (Hillerman)

A corpse whose palms and soles have been "scalped" is only the first in a series of disturbing clues: an airplane's mysterious crash in the nighttime desert, a bizarre attack on a windmill, a vanishing shipment of cocaine. Sgt. Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police is trapped in the deadly web of a cunningly spun plot driven by Navajo socery and white man's greed.

Darkness Before Dawn (Draper)

In her senior year, things are finally looking a little brighter for Keisha. Still haunted by the suicide of her ex-boyfriend, Andy, she finds comfort in the attentions of the new track coach, twenty-three-year-old Jonathan Hathaway, the principal's son. How can Keisha not be swept off her feet by a tall, dark, handsome "lemon drop wrapped in licorice" who treats her like a woman, not a girl?

But suddenly this intoxicating relationship takes a frightening turn, and Keisha is once again plunged into the darkness she's fought so hard to escape. Will Keisha ever be able to find her way back into the light?

Dave At Night (Levine)

When orphaned Dave is sent to the Hebrew Home for Boys where he is treated cruelly, he sneaks out at night and is welcomed into the music- and culture-filled world of the Harlem Renaissance.

The Diary Of Anne Frank (Frank)

Anne Frank and her family, fleeing the horrors of Nazi occupation, hid in the back of an Amsterdam warehouse for two years. She was thirteen when she went into the Secret Annex with her family.

The Education Of Little Tree (Carter)

The super-seller memoir of a Cherokee boyhood in the 1930s. The most sensitive and evocative autobiographical account ever of the Cherokee way, as seen through the eyes of a young boy in the Appalachian Mountains.

Exodus (Uris)

The story of an American nurse, an Israeli freedom fighter caught up in a glorious, heartbreaking, triumphant era.

Face At The Edge Of The World (Bunting)

Haunted by the suicide of a gifted young black writer who was his best friend, Jed pursues the reason for it.

Fallen Angels (Myers)

Seventeen-year-old Richie Perry, just out of his Harlem high school, enlists in the Army in the summer of 1967 and spends a devastating year on active duty in Vietnam.

The Fallen Man (Hillerman)

Legions of devotees will cheer the return of Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee in Tony Hillerman's most intricate and atmospheric novel yet. The Navajo policemen whose exploits are now published in sixteen languages are brought together by the need to know how a man met his death on Ship Rock, almost seventeen hundred feet above the desert floor. Why had he climbed this mountain sacred to Navajos and why had he been killed there - or, even worse, left to die a lonely death? The fallen man lay sprawled on a ledge under the peak of Ship Rock mountain for eleven years - visited only by the ravens that had picked his bones clean and scattered his rock-climbing gear. That peaceful period ended, appropriately, on Halloween, when a climbing party stumbled upon his bones and began a chain of events that would ultimately link Leaphorn and Chee. As Chee and Leaphorn join to investigate why the fallen man fell, they set off across the high desert landscape of the Navajo reservation and into the l

Farewell To Manzanar (Houston)

During World War Two a community called Manzanar was hastily created in the high mountain desert country of California, east of the Sierras. Its purpose was to house thousands of Japanese Americans. One of the first families to arrive was the Wakatsukis, who were ordered to leave their fishing business in Long Beach and take with them only the belongings they could carry. For Jeanne Wakatsuki, a seven-year-old child, Manzanar became a way of life in which she struggled and adapted, observed and grew. For her father it was essentially the end of his life. At age thirty-seven, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston recalls life at Manzanar through the eyes of the child she was. She tells of her fear, confusion, and bewilderment as well as the dignity and great resourcefulness of people in oppressive and demeaning circumstances. Written with her husband, Jeanne delivers a powerful first-person account that reveals her search for the meaning of Manzanar. First published in 1973, this reissue of

Finding Moon (Hillerman)

Hillerman trades in his usual American Southwest venue for Southeast Asia, 1975, in this novel of a man who is plunged into a series of life-altering events by his brother's death in Nam and the news of a baby girl fathered overseas.

The First Eagle (Hillerman)

When Acting Lt. Jim Chee catches a Hopi poacher huddled over a butchered Navajo Tribal police officer, he has an open-and-shut case—until his former boss, Joe Leaphorn, blows it wide open. Now retired from the Navajo Tribal Police, Leaphorn has been hired to find a hot-headed female biologist hunting for the key to a virulent plague lurking in the Southwest. The scientist disappeared from the same area the same day the Navajo cop was murdered. Is she a suspect or another victim? And what about a report that a skinwalker—a Navajo witch—was seen at the same time and place too? For Leaphorn and Chee, the answers lie buried in a complicated knot of superstition and science, in a place where the worlds of native peoples and outside forces converge and collide.

The First Part Of Last (Johnson)

Bobby is a typical urban New York City teenager -- impulsive, eager, restless. For his sixteenth birthday he cuts school with his two best buddies, grabs a couple of slices at his favorite pizza joint, catches a flick at a nearby multiplex, and gets some news from his girlfriend, Nia, that changes his life forever: He's going to be a father. Suddenly things like school and house parties and fun times with friends are replaced by visits to Nia's pediatrician and countless social workers who all say that the only way for Nia and Bobby to lead a normal life is to put their baby up for adoption. Then tragedy strikes Nia, and Bobby finds himself in the role of single, teenage father. Because his child -- their child -- is all that remains of his lost love.

The Fixer (Malamud)

Set in Kiev in 1911 during a period of heightened anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young Russian boy. Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev, and after denying his Jewish identity, finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society. When the boy is found nearly drained of blood in a cave, the Black Hundreds accuse the Jews of ritual murder. Arrested and imprisoned, Bok refuses to confess to a crime that he did not commit.

Forged By Fire (Draper)

Teenage Gerald, who has spent years protecting his fragile half-sister from their abusive father, faces the prospect of one final confrontation before the problem can be solved.

Gather Together In My Name

Maya Angelou’s sequel to, I Know why The caged Bird Sings, tells the story of a young black woman growing up and trying to find her way through life. Gather Together in My Name, is a wonderful story of Maya Angelou’s life, trials, tribulations, and triumphs.

The Good Earth (Buck)

Wang Lung, rising from humble Chinese farmer to wealthy landowner, gloried in the soil he worked. He held it above his family, even above his gods. But soon, between Wang Lung and the kindly soil that sustained him, came flood and drought, pestilence and revolution....

Through this one Chinese peasant and his children, Nobel Prize-winner Pearl S. Buck traces the whole cycle of life, its terrors, its passion, its persistent ambitions and its rewards. Her brilliant novel—beloved by millions of readers throughout the world—is a universal tale of the destiny of men.

Go Tell It On The Mountain (Baldwin)

Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.

The Grapes Of Wrath (Steinbeck)

Although it follows the movement of thousands of men and women and the transformation of an entire nation, The Grapes of Wrath is also the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads, who are driven off their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisons against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots, Steinbeck created a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its insistence on human dignity.

Heart Of A Woman (Angelou)

In this fourth volume of her highly acclaimed autobiographical series, the esteemed poet and author continues the story of her remarkable and sometimes turbulent life, beginning with her days as a singer-dancer in New York City, when her love for writing blossomed at the Harlem Writers Guild. Then there were fiery times as the northern coordinator of Martin Luther King's history-making quest and more impassioned moments when she promised her heart to one man only to have it stolen, virtually on her wedding day, by an African freedom fighter. Through her eloquent prose, Angelou shares her fondest dreams, her heartfelt disappointments, and her loving relationship with her teenaged son. Filled with unforgettable vignettes of famous figures, from Billie Holiday to Malcolm X.

Hiroshima (Hersey)

On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city. This book tells what happened on that day, told through the memoirs of survivors.

House Of The Spirits (Allende)

Trueba family's passions, struggles, and secrets span three generations and a century of violent change, culminating in a crisis that brings the proud and tyrannical patriarch and his beloved granddaughter to opposite sides of the barricades. Against a backdrop of revolution and counterrevolution, Allende brings to life a family whose private bonds of love and hatred are more complex and enduring than the political allegiances that set them at odds.

The House On Mango Street (Cisneros)

Esperanza Cordero, a girl coming of age in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago, uses poems and stories to express thoughts and emotions about her oppressive environment.

How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (Alvarez)

Four lively latinas plunged from a pampered life of privilege on an island compound into the big-city chaos of New York, they rebel against Mami and Papi's old-world discipline and embrace all that America has to offer.

The Hundred Secret Senses (Tan)

Set in San Francisco and in a remote village of southern China, this is the story of a young American woman's pragmatism, shaken and soothed by Chinese ghosts she swears she doesn't believe in.

I Heard The Owl Call My Name

Amid the grandeur of the remote Pacific Northwest stands Kingcome, a village so ancient that, according to Kwakiutl myth, it was founded by the two brothers left on earth after the great flood. The Native Americans who still live there call it Quee, a place of such incredible natural richness that hunting and fishing remain primary food sources. But the old culture of totems and potlatch is being replaces by a new culture of prefab housing and alcoholism. Kingcome's younger generation is disenchanted and alienated from its heritage. And now, coming upriver is a young vicar, Mark Brian, on a journey of discovery that can teach him — and us — about life, death, and the transforming power of love.

Island Of The Blue Dolphins

Left alone on a beautiful but isolated island off the coast of California, a young Indian girl spends eighteen years, not only merely surviving through her enormous courage and self-reliance, but also finding a measure of happiness in her solitary life.

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (Angelou)

An unforgettable memoir of growing up black in the 1930s and 1940s in a tiny Arkansas town where Angelou's grandmother's store was the heart of the community and white people seemed as strange as aliens from another planet. 2 cassettes.

In The Time Of The Butterflies (Alvarez)

Set during the waning days of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republica in 1960, this extraordinary novel tells the story the Mirabal sisters, three young wives and mothers who are assassinated after visiting their jailed husbands.

The Inn At Lake Devine (Lipman)

It's 1962 and all across America barriers are collapsing. But when Natalie Marx's mother inquires about summer accommodations in Vermont, she gets the following reply: The Inn at Lake Devine is a family-owned resort, which has been in continuous operation since 1922. Our guests who feel most comfortable here, and return year after year, are Gentiles. For twelve-year-old Natalie, who has a stubborn sense of justice, the words are not a rebuff but an infuriating, irresistible challenge.

Invisible Man (Ellison)

This book chronicles the existential journey of an unnamed black man attempting to discover his identity and role in a hostile and confusing world that refuses to acknowledge his existence.

Journey Of The Sparrows (Buss)

Maria and her brother and sister, Salvadoran refugees, are smuggled into the United States in crates and try to eke out a living in Chicago with the help of a sympathetic family.

To Kill A Mockingbird (Lee)

A little girl whose father defends a black man accused of rape views the explosion of racial hate in an Alabama town.

Kiss The Dust (Laird)

Her father's involvement with the Kurdish resistance movement in Iraq forces thirteen-year-old Tara to flee with her family over the border into Iran, where they face an unknown future.

Laughing Boy (LaFarge)

The lyrical and poignant story of a Navajo couple. An American classic that won the 1929 Pulitzer Prize.

The Last Of The Mohicans (Cooper)

Recounting the story of the bloody conflict between the British and the French on the early North American frontier, this classic narrative was written in 1826 by the man who is today considered our first great American novelist.

A Lesson Before Dying (Gaines)

Set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940s, A Lesson Before Dying is a novel of one man condemned to die for a crime he did not commit and a young man who visits him in his cell. In the end, the two men forge a bond as they both come to understand the simple heroism of resisting--and defying--the expected.

Like Water For Chocolate (Esquivel)

This classic love story takes place on the De la Garza ranch, as the tyrannical owner, Mama Elena, chops onions at the kitchen table in her final days of pregnancy. While still in her mother's womb, her daughter to be weeps so violently she causes an early labor, and little Tita slips out amid the spices and fixings for noodle soup. This early encounter with food soon becomes a way of life, and Tita grows up to be a master chef.

Lonesome Dove (McMurtry)

Set in the late nineteenth century, Lonesome Dove is the story of a cattle drive from Texas to Montana -- and much more. It is a drive that represents for everybody involved not only a daring, even a foolhardy, adventure, but a part of the American Dream -- the attempt to carve out of the last remaining wilderness a new life.

Love Medicine (Erdrich)

A multigenerational portrait of new truths and secrets whose time has come, of strong men and women caught in an unforgettable drama of anger, desire, and the healing power

My Antonia (Cather)

Willa Cather's masterful portrait of prairie culture, based on her own life. Against Nebraska's panoramic landscape, Cather recreates the life of an immigrant girl who becomes, in the memories of narrator Jim Burden, the epitome of strong and dignifed womanhood.

Night (Wiesel)

The true and terrifying story of the author, and his life as a Jew under the Nazis.

One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Garcia)

The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. It is a rich and brilliant chronicle of life and death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the noble, ridiculous, beautiful, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America.

Pigs In Heaven (Kingsolver)

When 6-year-old Turtle Greer witnesses a freak accident at the Hoover Dam, her insistence on what she has seen leads to a man's dramatic rescue. But Turtle's moment of celebrity soon draws her and everyone in her life into a conflict of historic proportions.

The Pioneers

In this classic novel, James Fenimore Cooper portrays life in a new settlement on New York's Lake Otsego in the closing years of the eighteenth century. He describes the year's cycle: the turkey shoot at Christmas, the tapping of maple trees, fishing for bass in the evening, the marshalling of the militia. But Cooper is also concerned with exploring the development of the cultural and philosophical underpinnings of the American experience. He writes of the conflicts within the settlement itself, focusing primarily on the contrast between the natural codes of the hunter and woodsman Natty Bumppo and his Indian friend John Mohegan and the more rigid structure of law needed by a more complex society.

Poisonwood Bible (Kingsolver)

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.

The Power Of One (Courtenay)

Set in a world torn apart, where man enslaves his fellow man and freedom remains elusive, THE POWER OF ONE is the moving story of one young man's search for the love that binds friends, the passion that binds lovers, and the realization that it takes only one to change the world. A weak and friendless boy growing up in South Africa during World War II, Peekay turns to two older men, one black and one white, to show him how to find the courage to dream, to succeed, to triumph over a world when all seems lost, and to inspire him to summon up the most irrersistible force of all: the Power of One.

The Prairie (Cooper)

The fifth and final volume of The Leatherstocking Tales brings an exciting close to the career of the famous frontiersman and scout named Natty Bumppo.

The Return (Levitin)

Desta and the other members of her Falasha family, Jews suffering from discrimination in Ethiopia, finally flee the country and attempt the dangerous journey to Israel.

Shabanu: Daughter Of The Wind (Staples)

When eleven-year old Shabanu, the daughter of a nomad in the Cholistan Desert of present-day Pakistan, is pledged in marriage to an older man whose money will bring prestige to the family, she must either accept the decision, as is the custom, or risk the consequences of defying her father's wishes.

Shiva's Fire (Staples)

In India, a talented dancer sacrifices friends and family for her art.

Shogun: A Novel Of Japan (Clavel)

A bold English adventuer. An invincible Japanese warlord. A beautiful woman torn between two ways of life, two ways of love. All brought together in a mighty saga of a time and place aflame with conflict, passion, ambition, lust and the struggle for power.

The Skin I'm In (Flake)

Thirteen-year-old Maleeka, uncomfortable because her skin is extremely dark, meets a new teacher with a birthmark on her face and makes some discoveries about how to love who she is and what she looks like.

Skinwalkers (Hillerman)

Navajo Tribal Police Officer Jim Chee and Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn investigate murders that lead them into spine-tingling and mystical world of Navajo witchcraft.

Three unsolved homicides and an attempt on Chee's life have left the Navajo Tribal Police baffled. Are the murders somehow connected, although they occurred 120 miles apart? Or are they random acts of violence? Chee and Leaphorn's efforts to solve the seemingly unrelated individual crimes leave them with clues that point toward one suspect, in this suspenseful mystery.

Shizuko's Daughter (Mori)

After her mother's suicide when she is twelve years old, Yuki spends years living with her distant father and his resentful new wife, cut off from her mother's family, and relying on her own inner strength to cope with the tragedy.

Sounder (Armstrong)

Angry and humiliated when his sharecropper father is jailed for stealing food for his family, a young black boy grows in courage and understanding by learning to read and through his relationship with his devoted dog Sounder.

Talking God (Hillerman)

A grave robber and a corpse reunite Navajo Tribal Police Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee. As Leaphorn seeks the identity of a murder victim, Chee is arresting Smithsonian conservator Henry Highhawk for ransacking the sacred bones of his ancestors. As the layers of each case are peeled away, it becomes shockingly clear that they are connected, that there are mysterious others pursuing Highhawk, and that Leaphorn and Chee have entered into the dangerous arena of superstition, ancient ceremony, and living gods.

Tears Of A Tiger (Draper)

The death of high school basketball star Rob Washington in an automobile accident affects the lives of his close friend Andy, who was driving the car, and many others in the school.

A Thief Of Time (Hillerman)

A noted anthropologist vanishes at a moonlit Indian ruin where "thieves of time" ravage sacred ground for profit. When two corpses appear amid stolen goods and bones at an ancient burial site, Navajo Tribal Policemen Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee must plunge into the past to unearth the astonishing truth behind a mystifying series of horrific murders.

Uncle Tom's Cabin (Stowe)

On June 5, 1851, Uncle Tom's Cabin began as a serial in the abolitionist weekly, The National Era. Uncle Tom's Cabin quickly became the world's second-best seller, outranked only by the Bible. The importance of Harriet Beecher Stowe's monumental work was as evident at the time it was first published as it is today. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe at the White House and referred to her as "the little lady who started this big war." Lincoln knew better than anyone the irony in this. There was nothing diminutive about the issues she brought before the nation's conscience. A story of suffering and compassion, Uncle Tom's Cabin depicts slavery as honestly as it denounces it.

The Water Is Wide (Conroy)

The island is nearly deserted, haunting, beautiful. Across a slip of ocean lies South Carolina. But for the handful of families on Yamacraw island, America is a world away. For years the people here lived proudly from the sea, but now its waters are not safe. Waste from industry threatens their very existence–unless, somehow, they can learn a new life. But they will learn nothing without someone to teach them, and their school has no teacher.

When The Legends Die (Borland)

When his father killed another brave, Thomas Black Bull and his parents sought refuge in the wilderness. There they took up life as it had been in the old days, hunting and fishing, battling for survival. But an accident claimed the father's life and the grieving mother died shortly afterward. Left alone, the young Indian boy vowed never to retum to the white man's world, to the alien laws that had condemned his father.

Your Blues Ain't Like Mine (Campbell)

Set in the recent American past, this is a timeless tale of racism, murder, and redemption. A black Chicago-born teen goes Deep South for the summer and is murdered for saying the wrong thing to a white woman. Repercussions are felt by everyone involved, both black and white, for generations.

Zia (O'Dell)

A young Indian girl, Zia, caught between the traditional world of her mother and the present world of the Mission, is helped by her aunt Karana whose story was told in the Island of the Blue Dolphins.
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