The Horn Book » Kathleen T. Isaacs http://www.hbook.com Publications about books for children and young adults Tue, 14 May 2013 13:27:31 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.4.2 Review of To the Mountaintop: My Journey Through the Civil Rights Movement http://www.hbook.com/2012/02/choosing-books/review-of-the-week/review-of-to-the-mountaintop-my-journey-through-the-civil-rights-movement/ http://www.hbook.com/2012/02/choosing-books/review-of-the-week/review-of-to-the-mountaintop-my-journey-through-the-civil-rights-movement/#comments Wed, 15 Feb 2012 15:45:53 +0000 Kathleen T. Isaacs http://www.hbook.com/?p=10057 To the Mountaintop: My Journey Through the Civil Rights Movement [New York Times Books] by Charlayne Hunter-Gault Middle School, High School    Flash Point/Roaring Brook    195 pp.    1/12    978-1-59643-605-3    $22.99 One of the first two students to successfully desegregate an all-white college in the South looks back at six pivotal years of the U.S. civil rights [...]

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]]> 11339238 Review of <i>To the Mountaintop: My Journey Through the Civil Rights Movement</i>To the Mountaintop: My Journey Through the Civil Rights Movement [New York Times Books]
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault
Middle School, High School    Flash Point/Roaring Brook    195 pp.    1/12    978-1-59643-605-3    $22.99
One of the first two students to successfully desegregate an all-white college in the South looks back at six pivotal years of the U.S. civil rights movement. Charlayne Hunter-Gault weaves her own experience integrating the University of Georgia and the first few years of her writing career into a larger history of the movement, from lunch counter sit-ins in 1960 to the Selma-to-Montgomery march and Voting Rights Act of 1965. The veteran journalist opens with a moving account of her feelings at the inauguration of Barack Obama. Then, year by year, she chronicles events of the early 1960s to tell the story of some of the thousands whose actions paved a way for his election. She goes beyond well-known events to discuss some precursors — a 1946 ruling against segregation on interstate buses, and a 1950s South Carolina voting rights program, for example. Beginning each chapter, and occasionally throughout, are reproductions of partial pages from the New York Times; the book is also illustrated with photographs from the period. The back matter includes the complete texts of the relevant Times stories as well as a timeline. This gracefully written history affirms the importance of the struggle, the difficulties, and the efforts of so many, echoing an Obama campaign statement, “I stand on the shoulders of giants.”

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