Review of Those Who Saw the Sun, by Jaha Nailah Avery

Those Who Saw the Sun

African American Oral Histories from the Jim Crow South

By Jaha Nailah Avery

Levine Querido, 2023. 277 pages.
Review written October 30, 2023, from a copy sent to me by the publisher.

Those Who Saw the Sun is a collection of interviews with African American elders, most of whom were born during the 1940s and 1950s, and all of whom were kids in the Jim Crow era.

The book feels important – hearing the voices of people who lived through those times. It harnesses their wisdom and we get insights on the things they saw during their long lives.

I was very interested that none of the interviewees were big fans of integration. Although segregation had been harmful and unjust, they had also been part of vibrant Black communities. Outstanding Black teachers taught in their schools, even though many also mentioned they always used school books passed on after white schools had used them. Once integration happened, some Black businesses failed, and some Black teachers lost their jobs.

But it’s also true that most of the elders heard about lynchings when they were kids and other racist acts of violence. So their stories were filled with progress and hope as they witnessed great changes.

Although I think this is an important book, I wish some more helpful content was added to make it more accessible to teens and, well, to me. I would have liked a timeline for each person interviewed. Each interview started by asking where they were born, but I would have also liked to know when they were born. In an oral history, folks skip around in time, so I would have liked a scaffold to fit their remarks onto.

Some of the subjects also rambled a bit and repeated themselves. Though that does communicate their personalities, a little more editing might have increased readability. After finishing the book, I don’t really remember which person said which thing, so some commentary explaining why the order was chosen or something about the subjects in the present day – with present day pictures – might have helped it all stick in my head. It was certainly fascinating while I was reading it, though!

All the interviewees were asked, “Do you believe Dr. King’s dream is possible in this country?” Eleanor Boswell-Raine’s answer catches the spirit of what most of them said:

I think anything is possible. I like his method better than the let’s-shoot-and-kill-everybody mentality. I am definitely a nonviolent person. I really thought, though, given my age and everything, that we would almost be there by now. And so I’m deeply disappointed in terms of . . . of where we are in this country. So I want to say yes, I believe it’s possible. But I would also have to say that I doubt seriously that it will be in my lifetime.

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Review of Money Out Loud, by Berna Anat

Money Out Loud

All the Financial Stuff No One Taught Us

by Berna Anat

Quill Tree Books, 2023. 258 pages.
Review written January 13, 2024, from a book sent to me by the publisher.
Starred Review
2024 Mathical Book Prize Honor Book, Grades 9 through 12

What a valuable and practical book this is! I wish I’d read something like this as a young adult.

It’s a book about managing money. She covers so much, from budgeting to bank accounts to investing to donating ethically.

She talks to the reader like a cool big sister. It works for me and I hope would work for teens. For something about money, there aren’t many numbers here, but she explains compound interest and the difference between different kinds of accounts in ways that are easy to understand and will stick in your head.

This book is for young adults, but old adults like me can learn from it, too. But like compound interest, I suspect that learning about managing money when you’re younger will yield many more benefits.

Some things I like: She talks a lot about the emotional side of money and encourages you to actually think about it and talk about it (hence the title). I’m planning to adapt one idea right away — besides my spreadsheets keeping track of my finances, I will start a money journal talking about my feelings about what’s going on with my money. I like how she encourages you to save by describing savings as “Freedom.” And she encourages you to envision Future You when you think about retirement savings.

So she’s got lots of tips and strategies, but especially encouragement to be good to yourself and your future self.

I was sent this book to consider for the Morris Award (young adult debut book), and it wasn’t really what we were looking for, but it exactly filled the bill for a Mathical Book Prize Honor Book, so I was excited to revisit it.

Here’s how the author introduces herself:

So, question: Have you ever heard of a Financial Hype Woman? Probably not, because I friggin’ made it up.

I’m Berna — I’m a financial educator, but more than that, I am a Financial Hype Woman. The whole point of a Hype Woman is to scream encouragement while you, the star, are doing your thing onstage.

So that’s what I do, but money. You follow?

A Financial Hype Woman’s job — which, again, I totally made up — is to remind you of your financial power. To keep your energy up so that you can stay center stage in your money life. To turn up the volume when you feel a little voiceless. A Hype Woman is also part of your support team — like, metaphorically, I’d help clean up when fans throw their bra at you, y’know? I got you.

Get this Financial Hype Woman on your side! There’s lots to learn here, and it’s all taught in a non-threatening, encouraging way.

heyberna.com
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Review of A Quantum Life, by Hakeem Oluseyi and Joshua Horwitz

A Quantum Life

(Adapted for Young Adults)

My Unlikely Journey from the Streets to the Stars

by Hakeem Oluseyi and Joshua Horwitz

Delacorte Press, 2023. 333 pages.
Review written January 14, 2024, from a library book
Starred Review
2024 Mathical Book Prize Winner, 9th-12th grades

I usually read nonfiction fairly slowly, a chapter at a time, interspersing with novels. I managed to start this book that way, but it didn’t last long. I took one break from it, but when I picked it up again, I couldn’t stop. The novels could wait.

This book tells the story of Hakeem Oluseyi, who began his life as James Plummer Jr., and who progressed to be a renowned astrophysicist. His road to get there was not easy. There were times reading this book when I was almost afraid to turn the page, and I’d have to remind myself that the book flap said he indeed became an astrophysicist.

Here’s how he describes his childhood in the Prologue:

As a bookish kid, I was an easy target in Watts, Houston’s Third Ward, and the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. My gangbanger older cousins taught me the rules of the street by the time I was six: who you could look at in the eyes and who you couldn’t, how to tell if the dude walking toward you was Crip or Blood, friend or foe. I developed a sixth sense, what I thought of as my “dark vision,” that let me see all the dirt in my hood: where a deal was going down and where the undercover heat was hiding. The scariest time was after sunset, when the predators came out in force.

I was intrigued by the wider universe, including the night sky. But I couldn’t see many stars from the streets where I grew up, what with the big-city lights and the smog. And for the sake of my own survival, I didn’t want to be caught staring off into space. Celestial navigation wasn’t going to help me find my way home without getting beat up or shaken down. By my early teens, I’d adopted a thug persona, walking and talking tough, carrying a gun for protection. But I never joined a gang, and no matter how hard I’d tried to straddle the gangsta-nerd divide, I was still mostly a science geek playacting a thug.

This was a Black kid with a very unstable housing situation growing up — changing schools frequently and not having reliable adults in his life. Yet this same kid taught himself quantum mechanics by reading the encyclopedia and had a prodigious memory and strong curiosity.

And here’s a spoiler that’s not really a spoiler: This kid from a drug-using family was the first in his family to graduate from high school and went on to get a PhD in Physics.

He had help along the way and got into some tight spots, but he did it. And that story is both riveting and inspiring.

I was happy to be part of the committee that gave the 2024 Mathical Book Prize for books for high school to this outstanding book.

GetUnderlined.com

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Review of America Redux, by Ariel Aberg-Riger

America Redux

Visual Stories from Our Dynamic History

by Ariel Aberg-Riger

Balzer + Bray, 2023. 294 pages.
Review written July 4, 2023, from a book sent to me by the publisher.
Starred Review
2024 YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award Finalist
2023 Kirkus Prize for Young Reader’s Literature Winner
2023 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #7 Teen Nonfiction

Finishing this book on July 4th was wonderfully appropriate, though because it’s eligible for the Morris Award, I can’t talk about it yet, which is frustrating.

America Redux is a book of visual American history for teens. What do I mean by visual history? The author and artist took mostly public domain images from the time periods of the stories she discusses and made collages. Then she hand-lettered the story on the collages.

The history here isn’t told in consecutive order. The author takes twenty-one issues that still affect us in America today and gives the history of that issue. Some go back farther than others. Some don’t have obvious implications today (though most do), but are fascinating stories.

The book is a quick read, a delight to the eyes, and incredibly interesting. I wished almost every chapter was longer – but the author has a list of resources in the back, sources of quotations, and where you can look to explore the topic more. So she gives enough to completely suck you in. Also enough to give you conversation at parties! Just last Sunday, I began talking about urban SROs – Single-Room Occupancy dwellings – how common they once were and how cities cracking down on them in the 1970s drove up the price of housing. I learned about it in this book.

This book is hard to resist. Its bright colorful images pull your eyes to the page. This is not a textbook or a replacement for a textbook, but it focuses on history you won’t necessarily learn about in school – things like freeways getting built through land owned by minorities, Sam Colt and his genius marketing abilities (paid product placement with his guns in paintings!), the history of squelching immigration, propaganda and the American Revolution, Mustafa Al-Azemmouri – a Black Muslim explorer of the Americas, the Eugenics movement and forced sterilization, Love Canal and the pollution still all around Niagara Falls – and so much more.

If the topics sound random, they felt a little random, not necessarily related to one another or in any particular order. But each one was so fascinating, I completely forgave the author for that. I came away from this book knowing much more about American history and with my curiosity piqued to find out yet more.

americareduxbook.com
arielabergriger.com
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Review of Hidden Systems, by Dan Nott

Hidden Systems

Water, Electricity, the Internet, and the Secrets Behind the Systems We Use Every Day

by Dan Nott

RH Graphic, 2023. 264 pages.
Review written September 29, 2023, from a book sent by the publisher.
Starred Review
2023 National Book Award Longlist

Hidden Systems is graphic novel format nonfiction about some essentially important – but hidden things. In three sections, the author explains, with diagrams and drawings, how the Internet works, how electricity works, and how our water systems work.

It’s interesting that the topics are approached in the opposite order from the subtitle, which is also the opposite order from how they were developed in the real world. But taking a present to the past approach does get the information across.

At the front of the book, the author talks about what hidden systems are and how he learned about them by trying to draw them. Because so much is invisible, the metaphors we use to describe them are important. Here’s a bit from that introduction, which has a small picture accompanying each line.

A hidden system is something we don’t notice
until it breaks.

But when these systems are doing what they’re supposed to,
they become so commonplace
that we hardly see them.

Hidden systems are in the news all the time.
Usually when something dramatic happens.
(especially if something explodes)
But by overlooking hidden systems the rest of the time,
we take for granted the benefits they provide for some of us,
and disregard the harm they cause others.
These systems structure our society,
and even when they’re working,
are a source of inequality and environmental harm.

Something I appreciated about this look at the Internet, Electricity, and Water Systems is that he showed the big picture, too – how these things are physically hooked up and connected around the world.

There was a lot I didn’t know about each system: The importance of data centers for the internet, almost all the physical aspects of the electricity grid, and our frequent use of dams to run the water system.

Okay, this summary doesn’t do the book justice. Let me urge you to read it – and look at it – for yourself. (So much is communicated by the drawings!) The story of how humans have built these systems helps us think about what ways we could modify them to better work with our earth.

As he finishes up (accompanied by pictures):

We often just see the surface of our surroundings,
but by understanding these systems more deeply,
we can form our own questions about their past and future.
The answers to these questions can help us not only fix these systems
but also reimagine them –
creating a world that’s more in balance with the Earth
and that provides equitably for all people.

dannott.com
RHKidsGraphic.com

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Review of The Other Pandemic, by Lynn Curlee

The Other Pandemic

An AIDS Memoir

by Lynn Curlee

Charlesbridge Teen, 2023. 164 pages.
Review written December 4, 2023, from a library book.

In The Other Pandemic, Lynn Curlee tells his own story, as a young gay man in the 1980s — when his friends and his community started dying.

He begins by setting the stage with what it was like for him to grow up as gay in the 1960s, then talks about starting his career as an artist in New York City. He talks about the connections he made and the friendships he built — and then his friends started getting sick. After several years, his own life partner passed away from AIDS.

At the back of the book, after the main story, he’s got photographs and loving tributes to eleven friends who died of AIDS. This book helps the reader understand the pain and fear of that time for gay men. He highlights the non-response of the government for many years and hopes we’ve learned something about dealing with pandemics.

Here’s an excerpt from the Epilogue:

An entire generation of gay men was decimated by AIDS, and the survivors were forever changed. We came from every walk of life: businessmen, architects, teachers, doctors, bartenders, lawyers, plumbers, actors, contractors, musicians, salesmen, designers, factory workers, composers, deliverymen, artists, athletes, and more. There had always been outspoken homosexual individuals who lived their lives openly, and throughout the entire twentieth century there was a thriving underground gay subculture, particularly in the big cities. But before Gay Pride, the vast majority of gay people were invisible. They lived their daily lives in the closet because of homophobia. While there were activists before, it was an entire generation that came of age in the late 1960s and early ’70s that asserted and then openly lived the idea that gay people should be proud of who we are, and not ashamed of our natural orientation. We were the generation that refused to hide in the shadows and insisted upon equality….

If only Americans could learn from the experience of the gay community and stop wasting time floundering in denial and wallowing in hatred. Throughout the AIDS crisis, the movement for equality and acceptance continued, but it was temporarily overshadowed by the challenge of coming to terms with the horrific carnage. Out of this struggle the AIDS generation of gay people made a community forged in pain and sorrow, tempered by compassion, and eventually resulting in a newfound strength and purpose.

This book was eye-opening for me because I was a college student in the early 1980s and had no idea this was going on. Lynn Curlee telling his own story gives a window into the lives of people who didn’t have the luxury of ignorance.

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charlesbridge.com

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Review of You Can’t Say That, compiled and edited by Leonard S. Marcus

You Can’t Say That

Writers for young people talk about censorship, free expression, and the stories they have to tell.

compiled and edited by Leonard S. Marcus

Candlewick Press, 2021. 220 pages.
Review written September 13, 2023, from a library book.
Starred Review

I’m not completely sure what took me so long to get this book read, but in 2023, the topic of censorship seems even more timely than it was in 2021. This book helps teens understand what censorship takes from them.

Leonard Marcus here collects interviews with thirteen distinguished writers for young people whose books have often been banned. Those writers are Matt de la Peña, Robie H. Harris, Susan Kuklin, David Levithan, Meg Medina, Lesléa Newman, Katherine Paterson, Dav Pilkey, Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, Sonya Sones, R. L. Stine, and Angie Thomas.

This is an examination of censorship from authors’ perspectives. Here’s a part from the introduction:

Here, then, from thirteen accomplished authors for young people are fresh perspectives on why writers write their books in the way they choose, regardless of the consequences; and on what can happen to a book once the author lets go of it and it enters the public square of our country and world’s wildly divergent panoply of ideals, beliefs, and expectations.

Here, too, is a chance to examine at close range what it means when any person or group, however well intentioned, seeks to limit the writing or reading lives of others.

I ended up reading this book little by little, one author interview at a time, getting inspired by each one’s passion for art and creativity. I think this look into their hearts will give anyone pause who wants to pull books from shelves.

Here’s something from former National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, Katherine Paterson:

When the Berlin Wall fell and Communism seemed to be on the wane, I turned to my husband and said half in jest, “Now they’ll start coming after me.” He didn’t know what I was talking about, so I explained, “There are people who have to have an enemy.” For a while after that, I did see more challenges to my books.

May this discussion of young people and art and on bringing difficult topics to young people shed light on the world of ideas and the power of reading.

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Review of 83 Days in Mariupol, by Don Brown

83 Days in Mariupol

A War Diary

by Don Brown

Clarion Books (HarperCollins), 2023. 128 pages.
Review written September 15, 2023, from a library book.
Starred Review

Don Brown has written several graphic novels about several awful historical events. I’ve reviewed The Great American Dust Bowl and Drowned City about Hurricane Katrina. I’ve read another he wrote about 9/11. When I picked up this one, I was shocked to realize it had been long enough ago for him to write and publish a graphic novel about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Specifically, this book is about the 83-day siege of the Ukrainian City of Mariupol that began February 24, 2022.

This graphic novel describes what it was like for civilians in a city under siege, how they fought back, how some escaped, and how some survived.

It’s not a happy story by any means. Mariupol is still under Russian occupation today.

At the back, there are three pages of source notes and five pages of Selected Bibliography. As in his other books, Don Brown has done the research to let teens know what it was like to live through this disaster. So although this is not a happy story, it is a true story and an important story. The graphic novel format makes the story accessible to everyone, including teens and older kids. I hadn’t realized how little I knew about it until I read this book.

The last page of the main text has a background of smoke telling us this:

The city of Mariupol is ruined. Ukrainian officials estimate that the brutal 83-day siege killed 20,000 civilians and destroyed 90 percent of the city. The World Health Organization warns it could now face outbreaks of cholera. Remaining residents are forced to work for the Russians in exchange for food while cats and dogs feast on corpses.

This book shines light on an ongoing atrocity. I recommend reading this book not for pleasure, but for awareness.

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Review of Nearer My Freedom, by Monica Edinger and Lesley Younge

Nearer My Freedom

The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano by Himself

by Monica Edinger and Lesley Younge

Zest Books, 2023. 216 pages.
Review written August 30, 2023, from a library book.
Starred Review

From the note at the back:

This book is a novel-length series of found-verse poems crafted from Olaudah Equiano’s original autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, published in March 1789.

What this means is that they took Olaudah Equiano’s written words and cut out passages — leaving behind a novel in verse.

The style for books written in 1789 was far more verbose than books written today, so the method they used renders a dense and difficult autobiography into a gripping and accessible verse novel.

Olaudah Equiano was born in Africa and kidnapped into slavery. He ended up working on British ships and eventually was able to purchase his own freedom. He continued to work on ships, but was still in danger of being enslaved again. He became an abolitionist and wrote the story of his life to further the cause.

The book begins in Africa. He and his sister were both captured at the same time. Then he traveled all over the world, both when he was enslaved and when he was free. He even went on an expedition into the Arctic hoping to find a passage to India that way. The ship was almost destroyed by ice, and they concluded the idea wouldn’t work out.

Here’s an example from when he was kidnapped:

One day when none of the grown people were nigh
two men and a woman got over our walls,
seized my dear sister and me.
No time to cry out, or make resistance.

They stopped our mouths,
and ran off with us into the woods.
They tied our hands and carried us
as far as they could, till night came.

The authors used his words, but pared it down into a modern verse novel. There are several sidebars explaining historical context. The result is a riveting and quick-reading account of what life was like as a British seafaring enslaved person in the eighteenth century.

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Review of Banned Book Club, by Kim Hyun Sook and Ryan Estrada, art by Ko Hyung-Ju

Banned Book Club

written by Kim Hyun Sook and Ryan Estrada
art by Ko Hyung-Ju

Iron Circus Comics, 2020. 198 pages.
Review written September 22, 2020, from a library book

I didn’t realize until I’d finished the book that this is a graphic memoir, not a graphic novel. Even thinking it was a novel, I realized I had no idea that free speech had been suppressed in South Korea in 1983. This book points out that I need to separate out nonfiction for teens from my children’s nonfiction page – this has gritty and difficult material, more suitable for teens and adults than children. [Note: I’m posting this much later, and did, in fact, make a page for Teen Nonfiction.]

The setting is South Korea, 1983. Yes, that’s South Korea, not North Korea. I had to go back and check. Hyun Sook was a teen wanting to start college. Her mother didn’t want her to go because there had been student protests, which were being stopped by the government. Her father was supportive, so she does head off to school, trying to separate herself from the protesters.

Sure enough, when Hyun Sook gets to college, she tries to stay out of trouble. She even joins a Masked Folk Dance Team to do something that’s not political. But she learns that they do folk dances with stories that have political ramifications and are a cover for protests. Then the friends she makes on the team pull her into a Banned Book Club with a contact at a bookstore who gets them banned books.

I was amazed at the range of books that they were not permitted to read. Both western literature and Communist literature from North Korea were on the list. There is a spy in the group, and some of her friends get arrested and beaten and she herself gets interrogated by police and I won’t say more about the plot to not give spoilers. I will say that I was shocked by basic freedoms that were violently repressed.

The book ends with a reunion of the Banned Book Club in 2016. We learn about the history of fascism in South Korea when one of her friends outlines the protests he’s been part of since 1983. In 2016, they were protesting for the removal of a president who was the daughter of the dictator they protested against in 1983.

A note on the final page tells us what happened after the close of this book:

In March 2017, President Park Geun-Hye was impeached, removed from office, and imprisoned for corruption. The final vote was struck by her own judges, many of whom she had personally placed in office. A special election was held, and the new president was Moon Jae-in.

This book is frightfully timely and tells a true story of fascism that is not from 1930s Germany. It makes the reader value their freedom to read and freedom to speak up. May we never let those go. Please don’t tolerate book banning, whatever the excuse.

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Source: This review is based on a book from Fairfax County Public Library.

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