Classics, Nonfiction, and Children's Literature
Kristin Hannah has done it again. Her novel, The Four Winds (published 2025) captures a unique era of America history within a loveable story about strong a strong woman overcoming hardship. The Four Winds is a primarily a novel of the Dust Bowl, and how one family sought for their own American dream in the
I greatly enjoyed the compact On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder (reviewed here), which gave a brief look at twenty ways tyranny begins to appear in government. So, I was hoping for something similar in Timothy Snyder‘s On Freedom (published 2025). He gave a nice explanation of what freedom means and entails, but it was not
Max in the Land of Lies by Adam Gidwitz (published 2025) is a continuation of Max in the House of Spies. Now Max must fulfill his spy mission in Berlin while also secretly searching for his parents. His story is surprisingly partially educational but foremost it is an action-packed historical fiction story about a clever
The Women by Kristin Hannah (St. Martin’s Press, 2024) is a painful look at the Vietnam War from the perspective of the women nurses serving in the traumatic emergency surgery’s. Frankie McGrath joins the war in order to bring respect and honor to her family, since patriotic service is a family tradition. But from her
It is perfect timing to discuss the history of authoritarianism in the world! On Tyranny: Twenty lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder (first published in 2017) is a brief overview of the things that have happened in the past century that led to the regimes with totalitarian leaders, including the events in Nazi
Grace Goes to Washington by Kelly DiPucchio (illustrated by LeUyen Pham; Little Brown Books for Young Readers, 2019) is a friendly picture book introduction to government. It begins with a school lesson about the branches of government, making correlations between the principal and the president as well as between the student council and the Congress.
The Leadership Journey: How Four Kids Became President by Doris Kearns Godwin (Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers; September 3, 2024) is a fantastic nonfiction volume with four presidential biographies, all tied together with a focus on the qualities of leadership that these presidents portrayed and how they developed these qualities from childhood. The
The Tyranny of Printers by Jeffrey L. Palsey (University of Virginia Press, 2001) is a scholarly history of, as the subtitle says, Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic. With an abundance of research and a readable set of examples in each chapter that focus on specific newspaper printers and situations, the book opened my
The Apartment: A Century of Russian History by Alexandra Litvina (illustrated by Anna Desnitskaya; Harry Abrams, 2017) illustrates 100 years of Russian history through the lives of the changing residents in a Moscow apartment and the lives they lead. With the Muromstev family as a connecting link, the reader learns of the dozens of children
In Predicting the President: The Keys to the White House (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024), historian Allan Lichtman lays out the historical reasons the presidents won their elections in history since the 1800s, using his own system of “keys” to predict which candidate or political party will win for the upcoming election. Even after reading the
I really enjoyed reading The Embattled Vote in America by Allan Lichtman (Harvard University Press, 2018). It began with an examination of the Constitution and how it does not guarantee the right to vote to any particular people. The book continued by discussing the different ways voting has changed through the years of of the
The Boy Who Was by Grace Hallock (published 1928) is a uniquely organized story about the history of the Bay of Naples through the ages, each chapter using the same young goat boy (who has eternal life as a young man) as a key character. The prologue introduces the boy, named Nino, in the present
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