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Showing 1–14 of 14 books

  • Award year: 1998
  • All Over but the Shoutin'

    All Over but the Shoutin'

    By Rick Bragg

    Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize winning correspondent, didn't start out to be a writer. In fact, he sort of fell into it. He recalls this personal journey in a rags-to-riches memoir, which begins in 1959 in Alabama, where white people had it hard and black people had it harder than that, because what are the table scraps of nothing? In vivid prose, by turns comic and affecting, he recalls growing up white and poor in the South, his difficult relationship with his abusive, alcoholic father, and his love for his courageous mother, who raised him and taught him what really mattered.
  • Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster

    Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster

    By Jon Krakauer

    Only a handful of people have stood atop Everest. Krakauer is one of them, but the story he tells here is not of glorious triumph. Rather, it is a true account of survival and death that will grab YA readers from the very first page. Krakauer had a front-row seat to the headline-making 1996 climbing disaster that resulted in the deaths of five people, and his account of the unfolding tragedy, filled with keenly observed details, is not only a transfixing drama but also an inquiry into survivor guilt and the outer limits of human strength and responsibility.

  • Lest We Forget: The Passage from Africa to Slavery and Emancipation

    Lest We Forget: The Passage from Africa to Slavery and Emancipation

    By Velma Maia Thomas

    In a cleverly designed interactive book, the creator of the Black Holocaust Exhibit relates the pain of my people. Her simple yet descriptive words tell the story of slavery and the struggle for freedom—from the African villages to the boats, from the plantations to the end of the Civil War and Jubilee, the day of freedom. Letters and newspaper clippings personalize the story, and reproductions of documents, meant to be pulled from envelopes and pouches attached to the pages, bring the past directly into the present.
  • Meet the Austins

    Meet the Austins

    By Madeleine L'Engle

    The life of the Austin family is changed by the arrival of self-centered young Maggy Hamilton, orphaned by the sudden death of her pilot father. L'Engle tells stories that uniquely blend scientific principles and the quest for higher meaning.
  • Only Twice I've Wished for Heaven

    Only Twice I've Wished for Heaven

    By Dawn Turner Trice

    Eleven-year-old Tempest doesn't like her new home in Lakeland, a planned community for African Americans. Most of her school classmates are boring, and their prissy airs anger and puzzle her. What saves her is a friendship with troubled Valerie, an outsider like herself, and the secret trips she makes each day to Miss Jonetta's liquor store on fascinating Thirty-fifth Street, where she discovers great courage and caring—and terrible secrets about the world of grown-ups and about her best friend.
  • The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men against the Sea

    The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men against the Sea

    By Sebastian Junger

    In 1991, as Halloween nears, a cold front moves south from Canada, a hurricane swirls over Bermuda, and an intense storm builds over the Great Lakes. These forces converge to create the cruelest holiday trick of all, a 100-year tempest that catches the North Atlantic fishing fleet off guard and unprotected. Readers weigh anchor with sailors struggling against the elements; they follow meteorologists, who watch helplessly as the storm builds; and, by helicopter and boat, they navigate 100-foot seas and 120-mph winds to attempt rescue against harrowing odds.
  • A Ring of Endless Light

    A Ring of Endless Light

    By Madeleine L'Engle

    During the summer when her grandfather is dying of leukemia and death seems all around, 15-year-old Vicky finds comfort with the pod of dolphins with whom she has been doing research. L'Engle tells stories that uniquely blend scientific principles and the quest for higher meaning.
  • The Secret Family: Twenty-four Hours inside the Mysterious Worlds of Our Minds and Bodies

    The Secret Family: Twenty-four Hours inside the Mysterious Worlds of Our Minds and Bodies

    By David Bodanis

    With surprises and information on every page, Bodanis' book peels back the layers of our minds and bodies to reveal a churning world of tiny, invisible components, living and inanimate, in ourselves and in our surroundings, that silently and secretly affect us. By following the activities of a family—mom, dad, baby, young son, and teenage daughter—through a typical day, from breakfast to bedtime, Bodanis makes readers active partners in a mysterious and fascinating science adventure. If teens are shocked to discover that there's embalming fluid on postage stamps, just wait till they find out what's floating around the local mall.
  • Snow in August

    Snow in August

    By Pete Hamill

    A piece of history comes to life for young adults in a vivid novel about prejudice, love, courage, and miracles. Eleven-year-old Michael Devlin lives with his widowed mother in a working-class neighborhood in 1940s Brooklyn, in the shadow of Ebbets Field. The last thing he expects to find is a friend in Rabbi Judah Hirsch, a refugee from Prague, who trades wonderful stories from Jewish folklore for lessons in English and American culture, especially the sport of baseball. When religious prejudice rears its ugly head, Michael's real world and Hirsch's fantastical one fold together in a powerful, unexpected way.
  • Sugar in the Raw: Voices of Young Black Girls in America

    Sugar in the Raw: Voices of Young Black Girls in America

    By Rebecca Carroll

    Carroll captures the voices of the next generation of African American women in this collection of interviews. Teenagers will hear themselves plainly and powerfully echoed in the honest, unfiltered words of fifteen young black women, who range in age from eleven to twenty. From a variety of backgrounds and in very different ways, they speak candidly about their personal lives, their race, their gender, and their future as black women. A paperback format and a winning cover adds to the YA appeal.
  • A Swiftly Tilting Planet

    A Swiftly Tilting Planet

    By Madeleine L'Engle

    Fifteen-year-old Charles Wallace and the unicorn Gaudior undertake a perilous journey through time in a desperate attempt to stop the destruction of the world by the mad dictator Madog Branzillo. L'Engle tells stories that uniquely blend scientific principles and the quest for higher meaning.
  • To Say Nothing of the Dog

    To Say Nothing of the Dog

    By Connie Willis

    Part time travel, part mystery, part comedy of errors, this clever fantasy has lots to offer YAs, not the least of which is a chance to sink deeply into a piece of history they won't know much about. The year is 2057, and rich Lady Schrapnell has promised to finance Oxford University's time-travel project if she's assisted in her endeavors to rebuild Coventry Cathedral, which was destroyed by the Nazis in 1940. The grueling search for church artifacts has given time-traveler Ned Henry an advanced case of time lag. But it isn't rest he gets when he's sent back to the year 1888; it's another time-traveler's mistake, which he must help correct before it alters the entire course of history.
  • What Girls Learn

    What Girls Learn

    By Karin Cook

    This poignant, honest novel calls up themes that teenagers will easily recognize from reading young-adult books—family relationships, sibling rivalry, the death of a parent. In fact, this reads as if it were written just for teens. With a fine ear for dialogue and a firm grasp on the concerns of adolescent girls, Cook tells the story of two sisters—Tilden, quiet and good; Elizabeth, the family rebel—and their relationship with their beloved mother, Frances. When Frances marries Nick, the girls must adjust; when Frances is diagnosed with breast cancer, the girls' lives change in ways they never expected.
  • A Wrinkle In Time

    A Wrinkle In Time

    By Madeleine L'Engle

    Meg Murry and her friends become involved with unearthly strangers and a search for Meg's father, who has disappeared. L'Engle tells stories that uniquely blend scientific principles and the quest for higher meaning.