Baseball, basketball, football, tennis, track and field — no matter the game or competition, Jackie Robinson hit it out of the park. His exceptional talents should have easily landed him a career in pro sports. But in the United States in the 1930s and ’40s, opportunities like those were closed to athletes like Jackie: his skin was the wrong color.
Jackie settled for playing baseball in the Negro Leagues but chafed at being unable to prove himself in the majors. Then in 1946, Branch Rickey, manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, decided that he was going to break segregation in the Major Leagues and recruited Jackie. Jackie accepted the offer, knowing that it would be rough going. Again and again, he exhibited courage, restraint, and phenomenal talent, despite being the target of cruel and sometimes violent hatred.
In this compelling biography, award-winning author Doreen Rappaport chronicles the extraordinary courage and dignity of Jackie Robinson, who not only broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball but also changed white Americans’ perceptions of black Americans. His impact reached beyond the world of sports: he won over the hearts of all Americans and became an American hero.
Under the noses of the German military and French police, Georges Loinger smuggles Jewish children out of occupied France into Switzerland. In Belgium, Youra Livchitz and two other resisters ambush a train destined for a death camp, allowing scores of Jews to flee from the cattle cars. Four brothers lead more than 1,200 ghetto refugees deep into the Byelorussian forest, where they build a partisan fighting force and self-sufficient village. Forced to make detonators for German bombs, Estusia Wajcblum smuggles out gunpowder, grain by grain, to be used to blow up the crematoriums in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Despite debilitating wounds to both his feet, fourteen-year-old Idel Kagan helps dig an escape tunnel out of a forced labor camp in Poland. Sarika Yehoshua forms an all-girl unit of guerrilla fighters in the mountains of Greece, teaching them to shed their traditional ways and become soldiers. And twelve-year-old Motele Shlayan entertains German officers with his violin moments before setting off a bomb. Through meticulously researched and stirring accounts - some well known and some chronicled here in book form for the first time - Doreen Rappaport brings to light the defiance of tens of thousands of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II. These resisters answered the genocidal madness and unspeakable depravity that was Hitler's Holocaust with the greatest weapons of all - courage, ingenuity, the will to survive, and the resolve to save others or to die trying.
Using quotes from some of his beloved speeches, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. comes to life in stunning collage art and vibrant watercolor paintings in this profound and important biography about beliefs and dreams and following one's heart. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his own words, will inspire and affect you, too. Narrated by Michael Clarke Duncan, with music by Crystal Taliefero. Read-Along feature included.
