Julius Lester
2) John Henry
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English
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Description
Retells the life of the legendary African American hero who raced against a steam drill to cut through a mountain.
3) Guardian
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English
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There are times when a tree can no longer withstand the pain inflicted on it, and the wind will take pity on that tree and topple it over in a mighty storm. All the other trees who witnessed the evil look down upon the fallen tree with envy. They pray for the day when a wind will end their suffering.
I pray for the day when God will end mine.
In a time and place without moral conscience, fourteen-year-old Ansel knows what is right and what is...
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Julius Lester was born the son of a black Methodist minister in the south. His book Lovesong is a beautifully written account of his spiritual journey away from the conventions of his Southern heritage and Methodist upbringing, culminating in his personal self-discovery through a conversion to Judaism.
Growing up in the turbulent civil rights era South, Lester was often discouraged by the disconnectedness between the promises of religion and the...
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A boy sent by an African god to tend the spirits of the dead struggles to fulfill his duty from within the bonds of slavery in Time's Memory, by National Book Award finalist Julius Lester.
Amma is the creator god, the master of life and death, and he is worried. His people have always known how to take care of the spirits of the dead — the nyama — so that they don't become destructive forces among the living. But amid the chaos of the African...
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In a gray fieldstone house in Nashville, Tennessee, the Reverend Joshua Smith Sr.--the staunch and gentle man known to thousands in black churches throughout the South as the Singing Evangelist and to one white reporter as "the Colored Billy Graham"--is trying to compose his own obituary on what will be the last day of his life. In doing so, he looks back over that life--from his childhood in rural northern Mississippi to the civil rights movement...
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When John Calvin Marshall graduated from Harvard in 1956, he was prepared for a life of teaching and relative tranquility. But history had another plan for him: here, a veteran author re-envisions the Martin Luther King Jr. story in fearful, exciting, and violent terms. Political and provocative, And All Our Wounds Forgiven is both a compelling political fable and a striking and tender love story about one of this century's most charismatic black...
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Rebecca Nachman is a Rabbi without a synagogue. Having resigned from her dwindling congregation, she now works as a college counselor at a small Vermont college advising students about private matters and offering the "Jewish perspective" on issues raised at faculty dinner parties.
Deeply lonely and on the edge of losing her faith, she comes into possession of a Torah, the last relic of Czechowa, a village of Polish Jews who were exterminated by...
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It seems animals are like people in many ways-they just can't get along with one another. And Brer Rabbit has the most trouble of all. Maybe it's his mischievous ways, or maybe it's because adventures always come looking for him. There was the frightening day that Brer Rabbit found himself attached to a baby made of sticky tar. Brer Fox would have had a tasty barbecue that evening if Brer Rabbit hadn't been such a quick thinker. Then there was the...
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Siblings Jenna and Jeremy have known for a long time that their parents don't get along. They find out just how bad it is when they are pulled out of class and told their father just shot and killed their mother. Jenna was always her father's favorite, while Jeremy was his mother's. Now a painful silence has fallen between them. They have trouble agreeing on just about everything at a time when they need each other more than ever. Where are they going...
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English
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As did his father before him, Pierce Butler treats his plantation slaves like family. But massive gambling debts force him to sell 429 "family" members. When the auction begins, torrential rain falls-not stopping until the final slave is sold the next day. The ominous rainfall prompts these words: "This ain't rain. This is God's tears." Based on the largest slave auction in U.S. history, this poignant montage is the fictionalized account of that 1859...