In post-World War II London, two street-tough children attempt to build a hidden garden, an act that awakens hidden courage in the children and profoundly disrupts the neighborhood.

This book recounts the three months of protest that took place before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s landmark march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery to promote equal rights and help African-Americans earn the right to vote.

It is 1970 in Red Grove, Alabama, and at Lu Olivera's school the white kids and black kids sit on different sides of the classroom. Six-grader Lu just wants to get along with everyone, but growing racial tensions will not let Lu stay neutral about the racial divide in school. Her old friends have been changing lately--acting boy crazy and making snide remarks about Lu's newfound talent for running track. Lu's secret hope for a new friend is fellow...

After passing a series of mind-bending tests, four children are selected for a secret mission that requires them to go undercover at the Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened, where the only rule is that there are no rules.

"She stood at a crossroads, half-aware that her choice would send her down a path from which there could be no turning back. But instead of two choices, she saw only one-because it was all she really wanted to see ... Current day, Oxford, England. Young American scholar Kendra Van Zant, eager to pursue her vision of a perfect life, interviews Isabel McFarland just when the elderly woman is ready to give up secrets about the war that she has kept for...

Spanning the lifetime of one woman (1896-1962), The Toss of a Lemon brings readers intimately into a Brahmin household, into an India in the midst of social and political upheaval. Married at ten, widowed at eighteen, left with two children, Sivakami must wear widow's whites, shave her head, and touch no one from dawn to dusk. She is not allowed to remarry, and in the next sixty years she ventures outside her family compound only three times ...

""The time has come for this Nation to fulfill its promise." John F. Kennedy was born one hundred years ago. As America's thirty-fifth president, he often took bold actions: establishing a peace corps and challenging Americans to land on the moon. But on civil rights, it took the urging and the example of other courageous people--leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Jackie Robinson, and even students and children--to help him realize that the...

On December 7, 1941, thirteen-year old Alice's life changes completely as she experiences an act of war, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and her father's imprisonment in a Japanese internment camp, leaving Alice and the rest of her family struggling to adjust to life without him.

"A new Ku Klux Klan arose in the early 1920s, a less violent but equally virulent descendant of the relatively small, terrorist Klan of the 1870s. Unknown to most Americans today, this 'second Klan' largely flourished above the Mason-Dixon Line--its army of four-to-six-million members spanning the continent from New Jersey to Oregon, its ideology of intolerance shaping the course of mainstream national politics throughout the twentieth century. As...

"In May of 1945, German forces surrendered to the Allied powers, effectively putting an end to World War II in Europe. But the aftershocks of this global military conflict did not cease with the signing of truces and peace treaties. Millions of lost and homeless POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and concentration camp survivors overwhelmed Germany, a country in complete disarray. British and American soldiers gathered the malnourished and...