Catalog Search Results
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.7 - AR Pts: 13
Lexile measure
1010L
Language
English
Description
The author and poet recalls the anguish of her childhood in Arkansas and her adolescence in northern slums.
"Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou's debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Sent by their mother...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.2 - AR Pts: 30
Lexile measure
950L
Language
English
Description
In the course of his wanderings from a Southern Negro college to New York's Harlem, an American black man becomes involved in a series of adventures. Introduction explains circumstances under which the book was written. Ellison won the National Book Award for this searing record of a black man's journey through contemporary America. Unquestionably, Ellison's book is a work of extraordinary intensity--powerfully imagined and written with a savage,...
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8.2 - AR Pts: 13
Lexile measure
1320L
Language
English
Description
Born a slave in Virginia in 1856, Booker T. Washington rose in prominence to become black America's foremost spokesman. This is the dramatic autobiographical account of Washington's struggle to succeed and prosper in a country that refused to acknowledge his existence. From his fight for an education to his founding of the world-renowned Tuskegee Institute, Up From Slavery is one of the most significant and defining works in American literature.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 5 - AR Pts: 8
Lexile measure
920L
Language
English
Description
"Enter the hilarious world of ten-year-old Kenny and his family, the Weird Watsons of Flint, Michigan. There's Momma, Dad, little sister Joetta, Kenny, and Bryon, who's thirteen and an "official juvenile delinquent." When Momma and Dad decide it's time for a visit to Grandma, Dad comes home with the amazing Ultra-Glide, and the Watsons set out on a trip like no other. They're heading south. They're going to Birmingham, Alabama, toward one of the darkest...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.4 - AR Pts: 3
Language
English
Description
When August, an anthropologist who has studied the funeral traditions of different cultures, revisits her old neighborhood after her father's death, her reunion with a brother and a chance encounter with an old friend bring back a flood of childhood memories. Flashbacks depict the isolation she felt moving from rural Tennessee to New York and show how her later years were influenced by the black power movement, nearby street violence, her father's...
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 9.3 - AR Pts: 32
Lexile measure
1050L
Language
English
Description
Uncle Tom, Topsy, Sambo, Simon Legree, little Eva: their names are American bywords, and all of them are characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's remarkable novel of the pre-Civil War South. Uncle Tom's Cabin was revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate indictment of slavery and for its presentation of Tom, "a man of humanity," as the first black hero in American fiction. Labeled racist and condescending by some contemporary critics, it remains a shocking,...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7 - AR Pts: 11
Lexile measure
990L
Language
English
Description
"In the Deep South of the 1950s, a color line was etched in blood across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Journalist John Howard Griffin decided to cross that line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a Southern white man for the disenfranchised world of an unemployed black man. What happened to John Howard Griffin - from the outside and within himself - as he made his way through...
Author
Series
Alex Cross novels volume 2
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.7 - AR Pts: 15
Language
English
Description
"In Los Angeles, a reporter investigating a series of murders is killed. In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a beautiful medical intern suddenly disappears. In the sequel to Along Came a Spider, Washington D.C.'s Alex Cross is back to solve the most baffling and terrifying murder case ever. Two clever pattern killers are collaborating, cooperating, competing-and they are working coast to coast."--Page [4] of cover.
10) The bluest eye
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.2 - AR Pts: 8
Lexile measure
920L
Language
English
Description
The Bluest Eye is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, a black girl in an America whose love for its blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others, who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
11) Mom & me & mom
Author
Language
English
Description
In this book, Angelou details what brought her mother to send her away, and unearths the well of emotions she experienced long afterward as a result. For the first time, she reveals the triumphs and struggles of being the daughter of Vivian Baxter, an indomitable spirit whose petite size belied her larger-than-life presence, a presence absent during much of the author's early life. When her marriage began to crumble, Vivian famously sent three-year-old...
12) The Crossover
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 4.3 - AR Pts: 2
Lexile measure
GN 750L
Language
English
Description
"With a bolt of lightning on my kicks...The court is SIZZLING. My sweat in DRIZZLING. Stop all that quivering. Cuz tonight I'm delivering," announces 12-year-old Josh Bell. He and his twin brother Jordan are awesome on the court. Josh has basketball in his blood, but he's got mad beats, too, that tell his family's story in verse in this fast and furious novel. Josh and Jordan must come to grips with growing up on and off the court to realize...
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.5 - AR Pts: 13
Lexile measure
970L
Language
English
Description
"The haunting coming-of-age story that has become a major American classic, now in an Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics hardcover edition. Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old...
15) Sounder
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 5.3 - AR Pts: 3
Lexile measure
900L
Language
English
Description
A young black boy learns the pain of humiliation and anger when his father is given an unjust jail sentence for stealing a ham from a white man. Learning to read and discovering that things do not die but become part of other things, brings the youngster new hope.
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation. After his rescue, Northup published...
17) Hope to die
Author
Series
Alex Cross novels volume 22
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.8 - AR Pts: 12
Language
English
Description
"Detective Alex Cross is being stalked by a psychotic genius, forced to play the deadliest game of his career. Cross's family--his loving wife Bree, the wise and lively Nana Mama, and his precious children--have been ripped away. Terrified and desperate, Cross must give this mad man what he wants if he has any chance of saving the most important people in his life. The stakes have never been higher: What will Cross sacrifice to save the ones he loves?"...
Author
Series
New kid (Jerry Craft) volume 2
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 2.8 - AR Pts: 2
Language
English
Description
New York Times bestselling author Jerry Craft returns with a companion book to New Kid, winner of the 2020 Newbery Medal, the Coretta Scott King Author Award, and the Kirkus Prize. This time, it's Jordan's friend Drew who takes center stage in another laugh-out-loud funny, powerful, and important story about being one of the few kids of color in a prestigious private school.
Eighth grader Drew Ellis is no
...Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 9.7 - AR Pts: 18
Lexile measure
1350L
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"Before John Glenn orbited the earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as "human computers" used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space. Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.1 - AR Pts: 26
Lexile measure
1010L
Language
English
Description
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father₇ figure he knows more as a myth than as a man₇as been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey₇irst to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of...
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