"For Ta-Nehisi Coates, history has always been personal. At every stage of his life, he's sought in his explorations of history answers to the mysteries that surrounded him -- most urgently, why he, and other black people he knew, seemed to live in fear. What were they afraid of? In Tremble for My Country, Coates takes readers along on his journey through America's history of race and its contemporary resonances through a series of awakenings -- moments...

After his parents are lost at sea, Evan Barrett and his older brother leave their seaside home in West Hook to escape bad memories, but years later even worse questions emerge when Evan is asked to help a fellow student deal with another sea-related tragedy. A haunting search for truth from a Printz-Honoree Annotation. On a rainy night eight years ago, Evan Barrett's parents were lost at sea. In horror, he listened to their frantic Mayday calls on...

In The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck paints an indelible portrait of China in the 1920s, when the last emperor reigned and the vast political and social upheavals of the twentieth century were but distant rumblings. This moving story of the honest farmer Wang Lung and his selfless wife O-Lan is must reading to fully appreciate the sweeping changes that have occurred in the lives of the Chinese people during the last century. Though more than eighty years...