Numbers 1050-1052 assigned to older reviews brought forward from LiveJournal, and numbers 1053-1055 to some very old reviews from 1975.
Liberty's Civil Rights Road Trip by Michael W. Waters -
Author Michael W. Waters founded the Dallas-based Southern Methodist University Civil Rights Pilgrimage, which annually visits sites in the Deep South important in the history of the civil rights movement. Waters has written a children's book, Liberty's Civil Rights Road Trip, about these travels. The Liberty of the title is his daughter, the youngest person on the first trip in 1968, along with her friend Abdullah, and they provide a child's viewpoint of this trip.
The illustrations by watercolorist Nicole Tadgell portray a diverse group of bus riders. People from the past, at the six historic sites they visit in Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee, are depicted in sepia tones.
While the market is listed as being for children ages 3-7, I think it would also work with children a little older. In all cases, the children would need to know just what "civil rights" are, as that is not explained in the book. An afterword provides more details about the six places visited.
Winter by Len Deighton
I'm not sure where I got this mass-market paperback. I thought my husband had read it and passed it on to me, but that's not the case. The book is historical fiction, which I like, set in Germany from 1899 through 1945. However, it was actually written as the backstory for three trilogies of spy novels set in the Cold War era, featuring the son of a minor character in this book.
German industrialist Harald Winter marries American ex-pat Veronica Rensselaer, and they have two sons, Peter and Paul. around the turn of the 20th century. The book explores the rise of Nazism. That was what kept me reading this 536-page book (it took nearly all of July), despite the lack of character development.
The parallels between the rise of Nazism and Trumpism were chilling. On page 245, Heinrich Brand, a brownshirt (member of the Sturmabteilung or SA) deliberately disobeys an army order in 1929, and, after being called out on it, afterwards, "Brand saluted with a studied care that was insolent. He had no regrets. He didn't mind if his deliberate flouting of orders had caused the failure of the river crossing....A National Socialist order was about to dawn. Brand had the warm glow of the believer, and such men suffer no doubts."
Another character, German army officer Alex Horner, who knew Brand from earlier army service and was present in the above scene, has this to say about another Nazi, Franz Esser, in 1943 (page 420): "The fact was that he could never reconcile himself to the idea that an uneducated Kerl such as Esser could be a member of the Cabinet. But most of the Nazis were such simple peasants; even Waffen-SS generals he'd worked alongside on the Eastern Front often turned out to be men without any proper schooling. Some of them had difficulty reading a map."
A few pages later (435), an American character (it would be a spoiler to say who), says, "'That's how this whole Hitler business got started. It's people like Hitler who hate foreigners, and too many Germans supported his hate program.'" Substitute Trump for Hitler and any group Trump hates for foreigners.
And finally, this sobering quote from one of the main characters, in 1944 (page 458): "'There have been plenty of chances for the workers to overthrow Hitler, and nothing has come of them, because Hitler is popular with the working class."
I'm glad I read this book, but it is rather long to recommend it unless you were planning to read Deighton's three trilogies, and the ending was too abrupt.
There are a couple other good reviews of this book, from a book review blog and from the Washington Post.
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