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Pre AP/GT Biography Suggested Book Choices
Parents and students, the following is a list of recommended biography books for the next independent book assignment. Please be advised that some of the books contain strong language and content, due to the struggles each person has endured in their lives. Therefore we are requesting that each parent give approval for the book chosen for this assignment (please see attached form). Finally, these books are suggested reading, therefore upon teacher and parent approval, another biography may be chosen. Requirements for books: 200+ pages, school-appropriate, and on grade level.
Suggested Biographies:
Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
At age nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer. When she returned to school with a third of her jaw removed, she faced the cruel taunts of classmates. Vividly portraying the pain of peer rejection and the guilty pleasure of wanting to be special, Grealy captures with unique insight what it is like as a child and young adult to be torn between two warring impulses: to feel that more than anything else we want to be loved for who we are, while wishing desperately and secretly to be perfect.
All but My life by Gerda Weissman Klein
A classic in Holocaust literature, Gerda Weissman Klein’s celebrated memoir tells the story of a young woman’s three frightful years as a captive in a Nazi concentration camp. The Nazi's have taken everything she holds dear, family, home, and friends and now she will fight for all that remains, her life and dignity. This story chronicles her life as she wades through the atrocities of a Nazi occupation, concentration camps, and a death march amidst freezing temperatures, and her liberation her one true love.
Angela’s Ashes by Frank Mc Court
Despite impoverishing his family because of his alcoholism, McCourt's father passed on to his son a gift for superb storytelling. He told him about the great Irish heroes, the old days in Ireland, the people in their Limerick neighborhood, and the world beyond their shores. He recounts his desperately poor early years, living on public assistance and losing three siblings, but manages to make the book funny and uplifting. Stories of trying on his parents’ false teeth and his adventures as a post-office delivery boy will have readers laughing out loud.
In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer by Irene Gut Updike
When World War II began, Irene Gutowna was a 17-year-old Polish nursing student. Six years later, she writes in this inspiring memoir, "I felt a million years old." In the intervening time she was separated from her family, raped by Russian soldiers, and forced to work in a hotel serving German officers. Sickened by the suffering inflicted on the local Jews, Irene began leaving food under the walls of the ghetto. Soon she was scheming to protect the Jewish workers she supervised at the hotel, and then hiding them in the lavish villa where she served as housekeeper to a German major. The author presents her extraordinary heroism as the inevitable result of small steps taken over time, but her readers will not agree as they consume this thrilling adventure story, which also happens to be a drama of moral choice and courage.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angleou
In this first of five volumes of autobiography, poet Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence. Sent at a young age to live with her grandmother in Arkansas, Angelou learned a great deal from this exceptional woman and the tightly knit black community there. These very lessons carried her throughout the hardships she endured later in life, including a tragic occurrence while visiting her mother in St. Louis andher formative years spent in California--where an unwanted pregnancy changed her life forever.
Hawk: Occupation Skateboarder by Tony Hawk
Tony Hawk has been one of the most influential and popular professional skateboarders in the history of skateboarding. He turned pro at an early age and has been changing the perception of the sport and has been instrumental in creating the idea of skateboarding that we have today. His autobiography gives detailed information about his experiences within the industry, his evolution as a skater, and his thoughts and feelings about where skateboarding has been, is now, and should be in the future.
Ryan White: My Own Storyby Ryan White, Ann Marie Cunningham, and Jeanne White
Although Ryan White was born with hemophilia, the boy and his family were determined that he live as normal a life as possible. But, given contaminated blood in a transfusion, Ryan contracted AIDS. Most Americans are familiar with the ensuing headline-making facts: his school barred his attendance, neighbors and former friends shunned him and his family. Moving from Kokomo, Ind., to friendlier Cicero, Ryan struggled for the right to be educated and treated like any other kid even as he fought a daily battle against AIDS and hemophilia.
The Greatest: Muhammad Ali by Walter Dean Myers
This is an introduction to Ali's life from his childhood to the present day, focusing on his career and the controversies surrounding him. Both his talent in the boxing ring and his showmanship earned him international fame, while his refusal to accept the stereotypical role of a black athletic star in the 1960s and his membership in the Nation of Islam brought him notoriety.
Rosa Parks: My Story by Rosa Parks and Jim Haskins
This well-known story is considerably refreshed by Parks's personal narrative, punctuated by numerous black-and-white photographs. In simple, gracious, compelling language she describes her childhood, family life, and elusive educational opportunities. She explains how her husband encouraged and supported her participation in civil rights activities, and provides with clarity the generally paltry regard for the contributions of black women by the movement's organizers.
Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter by Adeline Yen Mah
Blamed for the loss of her mother, who died shortly after giving birth to her, Mah is an outcast in her own family. When her father remarries and moves the family to Shanghai to evade the Japanese during WWII, Mah and her siblings are relegated to second-class status by their stepmother. Mah finds escape from this emotionally barren landscape at school, but the academic awards she wins only enrage her jealous siblings and stepmother, and she is eventually torn from her aunt, her one champion, and shipped off to boarding school. That Mah eventually soars above her circumstances is proof of her strength of character.
Soul Surfer by Bethany Hamilton
Readers may not recall the name Bethany Hamilton, but after a glance at the cover photo, they'll recognize her as the girl who lost her arm to a shark while surfing. Hamilton tells her own story, beginning with the moment a giant white shark chomps off her arm. She then goes back to discuss the events leading up to the attack and to describe what her life was like before the tragedy--home-schooling in a strong Christian household and lots of competitive surfing. Hamilton's account is suffused with her feelings for God and His impact in her life. Perhaps because of this relationship, she never seems depressed about her situation; in fact, she is surfing again.
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldierby Ishmael Beah
This gripping story by a children's-rights advocate recounts his experiences as a boy growing up in Sierra Leone in the 1990s, during one of the most brutal and violent civil wars in recent history. Beah, a boy equally thrilled by causing mischief as by memorizing passages from Shakespeare and dance moves from hip-hop videos, was a typical precocious 12-year-old. But rebel forces destroyed his childhood innocence when they hit his village, driving him to leave his home and travel the arid deserts and jungles of Africa. After several months of struggle, he was recruited by the national army, made a full soldier and learned to shoot an AK-47, and hated everyone who came up against the rebels. The first two thirds of his memoir are frightening: how easy it is for a normal boy to transform into someone as addicted to killing as he is to the cocaine that the army makes readily available. But an abrupt change occurred a few years later when agents from the United Nations pulled him out of the army and placed him in a rehabilitation center. Anger and hate slowly faded away, and readers see the first glimmers of Beah's work as an advocate. Told in a conversational, accessible style, this powerful record of war ends as a beacon to all teens experiencing violence around them by showing them that there are other ways to survive than by adding to the chaos.
Small Steps: The Year I Got Polioby Peg Kehret
In l949, there were 42,000 cases [of polio] reported in the U.S.; the author was the only one stricken in her hometown that year. The author details her diagnosis, treatment, frustration, and pain. Perhaps the most startling part of the book is her description of the sudden onset of the illness, coming with no warning and leaving her paralyzed. Although this is an excellent record of the progress of the disease, it is also a fascinating account of how an ordinary girl with crushes and homecoming dreams had to live for part of her adolescence in an artificial, restricted environment. In the epilogue, Kehret describes her current battle with post-polio syndrome, and brings readers up to date on the lives of her fellow patients and friends at the ShelteringArmsHospital.
Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . OneSchool at a Timeby Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
Some failures lead to phenomenal successes, and this American nurse's unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, the world's second tallest mountain, is one of them. Dangerously ill when he finished his climb in 1993, Mortenson was sheltered for seven weeks by the small Pakistani village of Korphe; in return, he promised to build the impoverished town's first school, a project that grew into the Central Asia Institute, which has since constructed more than 50 schools across rural Pakistan and Afghanistan. As the book moves into the post-9/11 world, Mortenson and Relin argue that the United States must fight Islamic extremism in the region through collaborative efforts to alleviate poverty and improve access to education, especially for girls.
Escape from Slavery: The True Story of My Ten Years in Captivity and My Journey to Freedom in Americaby Francis Bok and Edward Tivnan
As a seven-year-old boy growing up in the southern Sudan, Bok was caught up in a raid on a regional market center when marauders from the north set upon the market, killing the men and kidnapping the women and children to work as farm slaves. He went from a loving and supportive extended family to the brutality of slavery in a strange land and culture, dominated by Muslims who considered him a Christian infidel. After enduring 10 years of slavery, Bok escaped to freedom in Cairo, where he became a U.N. refugee, eventually making his way to the U.S. at the age of 21. Having learned Arabic in Northern Sudan and English in America, Bok, with incredible determination, became involved in the antislavery movement, speaking around the country while seeking to earn a high-school degree. Yet it is his simple account of being a child cut off from his family and culture that shows the inhumanity of slavery. Bok's saga provides another--more contemporary--perspective on slavery for Americans reckoning with their own troubling history of such inhumanity.
Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime SarajevoRevised Edition by Zlata Filipovic
From September 1991 through October 1993, young Zlata Filipovic kept a diary. When she began it, she was 11 years old, concerned mostly with friends, school, piano lessons, MTV, and Madonna. As the diary ends, she has become used to constant bombing and snipers; severe shortages of food, water, and gas; and the end of a privileged adolescence in her native Sarajevo. Zlata has been described as the new Anne Frank. The entire situation in the former Yugoslavia, however, is of such currency and concern that any first-person account, especiallyone such as this that speaks so directly to adolescents, is important and necessary.
Beckham: Both Feet on the Ground: An Autobiographyby David Beckham and Tom Watt
The legendary soccer player and cultural icon takes readers on a tour of his life, from the streets of Chingford, England, to his role as star player on the world's most famous professional soccer team, with all the struggles and stadiums, and daring exploits, in between. As the inspiration for the hit movie Bend It Like Beckham, the subject of endless tabloid fodder, and the husband of a former Spice Girl, Beckham has captured the minds and hearts of not only the people of his native country, but of those around the world as well.
My Life and the Beautiful Game: The Autobiography of Soccer's Greatest Starby Pele
While kicking a ball through the dusty streets of his Brazilian hometown, young Edson Arantes do Nascimento was given the nickname Pelé so casually that no one remembers its meaning. Today, the name is famous worldwide as belonging to history’s greatest soccer player. Here, in Pelé’s own words, is his incredible life story: his five goals in the last two games of the 1958 World Cup at the tender age of 17, his glory years with his Brazilian club FC Santos, his role in four World Cup tournaments, his comeback as a member of the storied New York Cosmos, and his lifelong role as goodwill ambassador for the world’s favorite sport.
Lakota Womanby Mary Crow Dog
Mary Crow Dog narrates the story of her youth in this anguished account of growing up Indian in America. After participating in AIM (the new American Indian Movement), she joined the stand-off at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, where she gave birth to a [son]. Her marriage to Leonard Crow Dog, a medicine man who revived the sacred Ghost Dance, was a learning experience for her; she was assimilated into his family. A unique account of a way of life unknown to most Americans, this pulls readers in and holds them. By no means a pretty account--the author is graphic in her accounts of drunkenness, lawlessness, killings, and drug use--the book is an important bridge to cultural understanding, and a volume that should be in every library.
The Middle Placeby Kelly Corrigan
Newspaper columnist Corrigan was a happily married mother of two young daughters when she discovered a cancerous lump in her breast. She was still undergoing treatment when she learned that her beloved father, who'd already survived prostate cancer, now had bladder cancer. Corrigan's story could have been unbearably depressing had she not made it clear from the start that she came from sturdy stock. Growing up, she loved hearing her father boom out his morning HELLO WORLD dialogue with the universe, so his kids would feel like the world wasn't just a safe place but was even rooting for you. As Corrigan reports on her cancer treatment—the chemo, the surgery, the radiation—she weaves in the story of how it felt growing up in a big, suburban Philadelphia family with her larger-than-life father and her steady-loving mother and brothers. She tells how she met her husband, how she gave birth to her daughters. All these stories lead up to where she is now, in that middle place, being someone's child, but also having children of her own.
Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addictionby David Sheff
From as early as grade school, the world seemed to be on Nic Sheff's string. Bright and athletic, he excelled in any setting and appeared destined for greatness. Yet as childhood exuberance faded into teenage angst, the precocious boy found himself going down a much different path. Seduced by the illicit world of drugs and alcohol, he quickly found himself caught in the clutches of addiction. Beautiful Boy is Nic's story, but from the perspective of his father, David. Achingly honest, it chronicles the betrayal, pain, and terrifying question marks that haunt the loved ones of an addict. Many respond to addiction with a painful oath of silence, but David Sheff opens up personal wounds to reinforce that it is a disease, and must be treated as such. Most importantly, his journey provides those in similar situations with a commodity that they can never lose: hope