This coming Sunday evening, April 7, marks the beginning of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Jews around the world will place candles in their windows and recite prayers to remember the six million Jews who died between 1933 and 1945…
Category: Violence/War & Peace/Refugees
SON of a GUN
SON OF A GUN –a historical contemporary novel by Anne de Graaf, an award-winning author of over 80 books translated into over 50 languages. SON OF A GUN was published in the US in 2012 by Eerdmans Publishing Co. This…
Maxie’s Turn: A Review of Fire in the Streets
When it appeared in 2009, Kekla Magoon’s The Rock and the River took historical fiction about the African-American experience out of the “safe” terrain of the Underground Railroad and the Civil Rights Movement to an armed revolutionary organization that confronted…
Being God by B.A. Binns
Happy Valentine’s Day from The Pirate Tree to you! Today I’m reviewing Being God by B.A. Binns, an unlikely choice for Valentine’s Day but a good one nonetheless. 17-year-old Malik Kaplan has a knack for making all the wrong…
When the President Looks Like Me
One of the treats of last month’s inauguration was listening to Richard Blanco read the poem he wrote especially for that day. Blanco, a gay Cuban American, is the youngest person to present a poem at a Presidential inauguration, and…
Millie Fierce
Little Millie is not exceptional. She is “too short to be tall, too quiet to be loud, too plain to be fancy.” People ignore her during show-and-tell, no one notices when she enters a room, and she always gets the…
A biography of Yoko Ono offers inspiration
Yoko Ono: Collector of Skies (Amulet Books), by Nell Beram and Carolyn Boriss-Krimsky, $24.95. We can learn how others live from reading biography. We discover how many turn to talent and art to survive lonely childhoods or empty lives.…
Children in the Spanish Civil War: A Review of A Thunderous Whisper
In her debut novel, The Red Umbrella (Knopf, 2010), Christina Díaz González mined her rich family history to tell the story of a 14-year-old girl sent with her younger brother to a refugee camp and then to a foster family…
Division and Partition: A Review of A Beautiful Lie
We’re nearing the end of an election season marked by the length and rancor of the campaign. Many on all sides long for it all to be over, but no matter who wins, I remain concerned about the level of…
Silence speaks resoundingly in Monsier Marceau
Monsier Marceau by Leda Schubert, illustrated by Gerard DuBois, $17.99. Growing up, I used to anticipate a glimpse of the mime Marcel Marceau on Sunday nights’ Ed Sullivan Show. He would step into the spotlight of a…