The World Turned Upside Down: My Brother Martin and Martin's Big Words

Making meaningful the deeds of a famous man or woman for very young children is not an easy task for an author. Here are two outstanding biographies in picture book format which bring the boy Martin and the mature Martin's words to life for young readers.

"As the sole survivor of the family into which Martin Luther King, Jr., was born, I feel it is important to share some true, funny, and intriguing elements of Martin's earlier days," writes older sister Christine King Farris, and in her picture book memoir My Brother Martin: A Sister Remembers Growing Up with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Aladdin, 2003) she fulfills that promise well.

"Our days and rooms were filled with adventure stories and Tinkertoys," she writes, of her childhood on "Sweet Auburn" Avenue in Atlanta as she grew up with her two younger brothers, Martin and A.D. Although their parents worked hard at their careers as pastor and musician, the King children were always looked after by their grandmother and their Aunt Ida, who filled them with "grand memories of their childhoods." Even though they were preacher's kids, the three were not always angelic: one of her stories of the two boys has them loosening the legs to the piano bench to bring their piano lessons to an uncomfortable crescendo as their teacher crashed to the floor. Another prank involved sneaking out their grandma's lifelike fox fur stole, complete with feet and glass eyes, and dropping it down suddenly on unwary pedestrians from their hiding place in the bushes along the sidewalk.

Christine also tells the poignant story of Martin's being turned away by his white playmates' mother, who told him that since he was "colored," it was time for them to go their separate ways. When his mother comforted the saddened little boys by explaining the ways of segregation, Martin asserted, "One day I'm going to turn this world upside down."

And so he did.

Christine King Farris describes a close extended family who valued their children well, giving them good educations and a strong sense of their own value. Her simple but elegant narrative is beautifully illustrated by Chris Soentpiet, who used young relatives of Martin Luther King as models for the three King children, with Mrs. Farris portraying her own grandmother and her granddaughter posing as the young Christine King herself. The Rockwellesque portrayals of the King family and the detailed paintings of the Auburn neighborhood are alive with the warm glow of memory.

"When I grow up, I'm going to get to use big words too," the young Martin Luther King, Jr., once said.

Doreen Rappaport uses a unique format in her picture biography, Martin's Big Words: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Hyperion, 2001)

An eyewitness to some of the major events in King's life, Rappaport takes his well-known words and uses them to tell the story of his times and work. With each double-page spread she pairs a quotation with a period in King's life. For example, in the spread telling the story of King's study of Gandhi's non-violent philosophy, we see his words:

"Hate cannot drive out hate.
Only love can do that."

In the two-page spread dealing with the march from Selma and the 1963 March on Washington, we see

"Wait! For years I have heard the word 'Wait.'
We have waited more than 340 years for our rights."

This format, ably illustrated by Brian Collier's evocative collages, tells the story of King's short life simply but meaningfully, so that children can understand that although Martin is gone, "his big words are alive for us today."

The World Turned Upside Down II: Books on Martin Luther King, Jr., for Middle Readers

Although the title of David A. Adler's A Picture Book of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Picture Book Biography) suggests that it is a picture book, its text is closer to that of a beginning chapter book (at Accelerated Reader Level 3.8) and its illustrations are less than full-page style, placing it in a transitional position. It is short enough to read aloud to a group in less than a quarter hour, with illustrations large enough for a group to share, but it covers King's life chronologically from birth to death rather than focusing upon a few key episodes as do most true picture books. Adler includes the familiar childhood events that shaped King's life, but also discusses his preschool ability to read and entrance into college at age 16, the significance of his choice to return as a pastor to the deep South as the best path to helping his people, and the influence of his non-violent philosophy upon the early Civil Rights Movement, focusing especially upon the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the March on Washington. Because of its excellent illustrations and engaging overview of King's life, Adler's book is an excellent beginning point for observances of the holiday for the early elementary grades.

For an excellent "you-are-there" experience of the March on Washington and the significance of the "I Have a Dream" speech, Stephen Marchesi's Martin Luther King, Jr. and the March on Washington (All Aboard Reading) (Grosset & Dunlap, 2001) provides a stirring narrative of the event coupled with black-and-white period photos and color illustrations. Marchesi's exposition and historical interpretation of King's pivotal speech give the beginning chapter reader an understanding of the historical setting and profound influence which the March on Washington had on the nation.

Margaret Davidson's I Have A Dream: The Story Of Martin Luther King (Scholastic Biography) has as its strong point her attention to events in Martin Luther King's formative years which led him to his personal philosophy of non-violent civil disobedience to bring about change. She begins with the familiar incident in which Martin's neighbor turned him away from the door when, as a six-year-old, he went to fetch his best friends to play ball with him and his brother.

"It was all right for you to play together when you were younger," she says. "But now you're all in school, so it's best that you go your separate ways."

"Why?" whispered Martin.

"Because you're colored and we're white." Then she shut the door.

Davidson also includes King's thoughts on his first experience with a bi-racial discussion group as a teen-aged college student. At first, she reports, King was angry with whites as a group, but after getting to know white students in this discussion club, he wrote,

"My anger softened. I began to see that they weren't the enemy. The evil was segregation."

This short biography offers young readers insight into the early experiences King had as a young person which led to great changes for the nation.

For somewhat older students than the books listed above, Amy Pastan's Martin Luther King, Jr. (DK Biography) (DK Publishing, 2004) offers very good coverage of the basic facts and themes of King's life, liberally illustrated with photos on most pages in DK's trademark spot-art style. A real bonus for Pastan's book is the generous back matter in this biography, including an illustrated timeline of life events, a full bibliography, a list of "works cited," and a recommended reading list titled "For Further Study" for those middle-grade students who may be using this book as a source for reports.

Getting to the Promised Land: March On: The Day My Brother Martin Changed the World by Christine King Farris

My brother worked very hard on his speech. He understood how important each and every one of his words would be. He wrote them, and scratched them out, and wrote down some more.

He stayed up all night in his hotel room. Not once did he stop to eat, or even lay his head down on his pillow for a nap. Even if he wanted to sleep, he couldn't--his speech wouldn't let him rest.

It has been almost forty-six years since Martin Luther King, Jr., led the 1963 March on Washington and delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. Many of those who played a part in this historic day have passed from the scene. But one eyewitness with a special perspective on that time, King's older sister Christine King Farris, author of the noted picture book My Brother Martin: A Sister Remembers Growing Up with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., has shared her unique memory and insight on this memorable day with us in her new illustrated memoir March On!: The Day My Brother Martin Changed The World.

As the national holiday celebrating King's birthday falls memorably this year on the eve of the inauguration of our first African-American president, the best-known words of Martin's address seem more eerily prophetic than ever:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

Christine Farris, while not physically present in Washington that day (she was with her elderly parents in Atlanta), was emotionally present with her brother as she watched the events on television. She describes the crowd, growing larger and larger through the day, the other leaders of the movement--James Farmer, John Lewis, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young--who pushed through the swelling crowd with Martin as he walked to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and the voice of Mahalia Jackson as it soared over the throng massed on the Mall and as later, in the midst of his address, she poignantly called out, "Tell them about your dream, Martin."

At this point, Farris writes, King departed from the text of his studiously prepared speech, and this extemporaneous portion became his best-remembered message:

"I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

Of these hopeful words which now seem indeed to have changed our nation, Farris says,

"I could see the legacy of our family of ministers coming through Martin. Today he was preaching to the nation. He was on fire. He was giving the kind of sermon that moved people to tears.

My brother was making history. He was changing the world. And reminding everyone that we are all God's children, and all from a great nation that believes in liberty."

As in her earlier book, Farris gives us special insight into the family values which prepared King for his later role in life--his parents' warnings against "chesty pride," their rules about dressing in your best when going before the public, and their solid belief in their own abilities and rights. Farris writes simply and unself-consciously from her unique point of view as the big sister of an American hero in language which will resonate with her intended readers.

Many substantial books for young readers have been written on the subject of the civil rights era and the March on Washington in particular. (For some of them, see my posts of January 15 and 16, 2008, here). Coming from a sister who shared King's formative years and knew him as only a sibling can, Christine King Farris' March On!: The Day My Brother Martin Changed The World is an invaluable addition to the historical record of that period. Wonderfully illustrated by London Ladd, this book belongs in every library to be read on every Martin Luther King Day.

On Our Way: We March by Shane W. Evans

THE MORNING IS QUIET.

WE PRAY FOR STRENGTH.

It's a morning like most in August, with a strong sun rising on a day fifty years ago, as a mother and father wake their young son. With dawn breaking through the window, they dress and assemble with a few others in front of their church, where a pastor leads them in prayer. From there they board a bus and drive to a place where many buses are emptying of their passengers.

WE COME FROM ALL OVER.

TO MARCH.

Crowding in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the family hears singers-Mahalia Jackson, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez--and prayers, and then the father lifts his boy to his shoulders to hear a speaker, Dr. King, who says

"I HAVE A DREAM..."

Shawn Evan's We March (Roaring Brook, 2012) takes young readers along on on the March on Washington in 1963, seeing it through the eyes of a family who witnessed the day that has come to be seen as a landmark in American history. With the sparest of texts and simple, almost monumental illustrations, Evans captures the moment through the eyes of a young boy who knows what he's watching is important.

Evans provides some context to the event in his appended author's note, but this is a book that requires some prior knowledge of the March on Washington to set the stage for a reading. That given, this book is a fine introduction to the events of that day and those that preceded and followed in the history of the civil rights movement. Named a Best Children's Book of 2012 by Kirkus Reviews, We March has been universally praised by other reviewers, cited by Publishers Weekly as "A moving introduction to a historic day."

For Black History Month presentations to young primary grades, couple this one with Christine King Farris' My Brother Martin: A Sister Remembers Growing Up with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and March On!: The Day My Brother Martin Changed the World (see my review here).

For slightly older (second and third graders) add Kadir Nelson's epic I Have a Dream (Book & CD). and Doreen Rappaport's celebrated Martin's Big Words: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.And for February book reports, there is certainly David A. Adler's evergreen A Picture Book of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Picture Book Biography) or, to take students back to the beginning, his A Picture Book of Rosa Parks (Picture Book Biographies) (Picture Book Biography).

Leading with Light: Martin Luther King, Jr. by Jon M. Fishman

About 250,000 people gathered in front of the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963. The huge crowd included different races, ages, and social classes. They were participating in the March for Jobs and Freedom.

King was noted for his ability to inspire with his words. Yet as his prepared speech went on, some felt it wasn't having much of an impact. Singer Mahalia Jackson called out to him. She told him to stop reading and speak from his heart.

That speech was, of course, the "I Have A Dream" speech that moved the crowd and the nation. Athough it was not a long speech, it had been a long time coming. Little Martin first experienced racial segregation when his friend, the son of the owner of the store across the street, told him that they couldn't be friends anymore because they were different colors and going to be starting to different schools. As the son of the pastor of a large church, Martin had been shielded from much of the racial discrimination in Atlanta. His well-educated mother taught him to read and play piano before he was school age, and yet when he needed new shoes, he learned that there were stores and plenty of other places where he could not go. Still, he was a brilliant student, beginning at Morehouse College at the age of fifteen, Crozier Theological Seminary, and graduate school at Boston University, where he was inspired by Thoreau and Gandhi's writings on passive dissent, earning advanced degrees with honors at each. Still, especially in the South, there were places he couldn't go and things he was not allowed to do.

One of those things black people were not allowed to do was sit in any seat on the bus, and when Rosa Parks attempted to integrate the public buses in Montgomery, Alabama, Martin King, now Reverend King, was drawn into the bus boycott. His house was bombed, his family threatened, but eventually the city relented and people were allowed to sit wherever they could find a seat. It was the first victory over public accommodations and soon King became a national leader in what came to be called the Civil Rights Movement. Over the next decade King participated in the Birmingham school desegregation campaign, beaten and arrested, resulting in his famous "Letter from the Birmingham Jail," the sit-ins for integration of public accommodations, the "I Have a Dream" speech in the Washington Mall, and his eventual assassination in Memphis by a white segregationist shooter.

Jon M. Fishman's recent Martin Luther King Jr.: Walking in the Light (Gateway Biographies) (Lerner Publications, 2019) covers this turbulent period in American history in a succinct but comprehensive account of Martin Luther King's short life and its effects on American history with fast-moving prose written for middle readers in need of materials meant to widen their understanding of their recent past. Illustrated with ample illustrations from the period, and with a supplemental appendix with a timeline, source notes and bibliography, further reading, websites, and detailed index. Perfect for January book reports and research report, this book in Lerner's dependable Gateway series, is a good choice for classroom and school and public libraries.

Always Singin': Coretta Scott by Ntozake Shange and Kadir Nelson

Some Southern morning
the moon
sits like an orange
sliver between the treetops.

Coretta and her siblings
walking all
of five miles
to the nearest colored school
in the darkness
with the dew dampening
their feet.

White school bus
leaves a
funnel of dust
on their faces.

Coretta Scott (Amistad/HarperCollins, 2009) begins and ends with a march. In Ntozake Shange's poetic text, we see Coretta Scott and her brother and sisters on their own freedom march--the long, long walk from their home to the colored school where they earn a hard-won education. We see Coretta joining Martin Luther King, Jr., as they begin their long walk together, from their studies in Boston through the Montgomery bus boycott. Then we see the public marches, the march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights, to Birmingham and Chicago, and the historic walk up the Mall to the Lincoln Memorial in the March on Washington, 1963.

Shange's spare but moving text and Kadir Nelson's art, inevitably described as "strong" and "monumental," portray the steel magnolia sweetness and strength of their subject masterfully. Despite an informative historical "Author's Note" appended, however, Coretta Scott is not a junior biography meant for those book report assignments which require a two-page recitation of facts about the subject. Instead, this one is a feeling, listening, visual experience which requires a bit of background knowledge to appreciate, but should join the many powerful picture books--An Apple for Harriet Tubman, My Brother Martin: A Sister Remembers Growing Up with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Martin's Big Words: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., or Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom (Caldecott Honor Book), to name just a few--which tell so well that part of the American story highlighted during Black History Month.

Getting to the Mountain: Martin Luther King, Jr., Peaceful Leader by Sarah Albee

Once Martin's father took him to buy new shoes. The white salesman told them to move to the back of the store.
They left.

Martin grew up in a pretty yellow house with plenty of books and music. He was firmly disciplined but encouraged to ask questions. His parents and the members of his father's church were supportive, and he became a bright student, entering Morehouse College at age fifteen.

Martin was a happy child. But as he grew older, he realized that black and white people were treated differently.

After briefly considering studying law, Martin finally chose to become a minister, finally graduating with a Ph.D. from Boston University, and soon became the minister at a large church in Montgomery, Alabama, where Rosa Park's bus boycott had just beginning. He was chosen by his fellow black ministers as leader of the movement, and the rest is history.

Sarah Albee's just published Martin Luther King Jr.: A Peaceful Leader (I Can Read Level 2) (Harper, 2018) traces King's biography and the development of his philosophy of nonviolent resistance through many of the watershed moments of his life, from the desegregation of city buses in Montgomery through the Brown vs. Board decision of the Supreme Court, the sit-ins, the Birmingham marches and bombing, the March on Washington, his winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and his assassination in Memphis.

Albee's account for newly independent readers is written to appeal to early primary students, mentioning little Martin's loss of his best friend, a white neighbor boy, when he had to attend a black school while his friend went to a white school. Without dwelling on the violence of the period, Albee shows that King's choices were not easy during his life, and that standing up for equal rights brought both honors and an early death.

Dr. King had known that he might not live to see liberty and justice for all.
But he believed there were things worth dying for.

Artist Chin Ko provides realistic illustrations that reinforce the text well, and the author includes a timeline and photos from family and public events that catch the flavor of the times of King's life. For Black History Month, young history buffs, or biography books reports, this informative easy biography is perfect for young readers who are just learning to add to their knowledge of how the world they live in came to be.

Tell Me Why... Why Did the Whole World Go to War? and Other Questions about. World War II by Martin W. Sandler

HOW DID THE WAR CHANGE LIFE IN AMERICA?

Those who went off to war faced many hardships. But those they left behind had a hard time, too.

Food was in short supply at home. The government rationed sugar, milk, eggs, butter, and meat.

No new cars were made during the war. Gasoline was strictly rationed. There were no tires for sale.

The war greatly changed the lives of women. Most men were away fighting. Hundreds of thousands of women went to work. They did most of the work men had done. They made airplanes, ships, and guns.

The most singular event of the twentieth century, World War II is a vast subject with great complexities. Still, children have to start somewhere, and Sterling Books' Why Did the Whole World Go to War?: And Other Questions About... World War II (Good Question!) (Sterling, 2013) is a good nutshell view in question-and-answer format which introduces the period and piques a young reader's interest.

Author Martin Sandler avoids the obvious temptation to jump from one battle to the next: While he hits the big events--Hitler's Blitzkrieg invasion of Poland, Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Britain, the Battle of the Atlantic, Battle of the Bulge, Stalingrad, D-Day, Hiroshima--he also gives thumbnail sketches of other  fascinating bits of  history--the Tuskegee airmen, the spies who cracked the German communications code, resistance fighters, Anne Frank and the Holocaust, and the personalities of the opposing leaders. Simple, color-coded maps, such as the one showing Nazi occupation of Europe in 1941, tell the story in a glance, and Robert Barnett's full-page dramatic sepia-toned illustrations and inset period photographs set off each double-page spread. A one-page timeline appendix puts the big events in historical perspective.

World War II is a fascinating subject, the knowledge of which is essential to understanding current world events, and each topic in this brief survey opens up an area--the home front, the Blitz, the race to build the  bomb, the generals and the spies, the air war-- for further reading in a myriad of great books, fiction and nonfiction on all levels, a good springboard for a whole summer's reading. "Concise, accessible, comprehensive looks at important eras and events in U.S. history," says School Library Journal.

Other books in the kid-friendly Good Questions series include Did It All Start with a Snowball Fight?: And Other Questions About...The American Revolution (Good Question!), What Was Your Dream, Dr. King?: And Other Questions About... Martin Luther King Jr. (Good Question!), and How Many Planets Circle the Sun?: And Other Questions about Our Solar System (Good Question!).

Gettin' the Groove On: Hip Hop Speaks to Children: A Celebration of Poetry with a Beat, edited by Nikki Giovanni

Poetry has it roots in song and dance and the natural rhythms of hands and feet and voice, and editor Nikki Giovanni's Hip Hop Speaks to Children with CD: A Celebration of Poetry with a Beat (A Poetry Speaks Experience) captures these qualities in her new anthology of African American poetry, song, rap, and rhythm.

This work, featuring fifty-one contributors and illustrated by five artists, includes celebrated poets from the Harlem Renaissance to modern times--W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Grimes, Walter Dean Myers, Lucille Clifton, and of course Giovanni herself. But there are also creations by those not thought of as poets at all, hip hop and rap performers such as Tupac Shakur, Mos Def, and Queen Latifah. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech is also included for its poetic use of language.

In addition to the printed words of these artists, this volume is particularly outstanding for its archival compact disc of the poets reading their own works, such as Hughes' "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and both King's original delivery and Giovanni's moving performance of the well-known portion of King's "I have a Dream."

A natural for Poetry Month and a New York Times bestseller also named a ALA Booklist's Top Ten Art Books, this volume belongs in every school and public library for its archival recordings of noted poets now gone and the toe-tapping inspirations of popular artists now writing and performing.

The companion book to Hip Hop Speaks to Children with CD: A Celebration of Poetry with a Beat (A Poetry Speaks Experience) with its own historic CD, is Poetry Speaks to Children (Book & CD) (Read & Hear).

A New Birth of Freedom: Abe's Honest Words by Doreen Rappaport and Kadir Nelson

Abraham Lincoln is my name,
And with my pen I wrote the same.
I wrote in both haste and speed,
And left it here for fools to read.

The things I want to know are in books. My best friend is the man who'll git me a book I ain't read.

In both of these earliest writings of Abraham Lincoln, his love of reading and writing and his noted sense of humor shine forth. In her timely Abe's Honest Words: The Life of Abraham Lincoln Doreen Rappaport, award-winning author of Martin's Big Words: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. has put together a compendium of his own words at pivotal moments in his lifetime in a moving tribute to Lincoln, whose two-hundredth birthday is honored this year. Here are Lincoln's own thoughts when, as a very young man, he traveled down the Mississippi to New Orleans and witnessed a slave auction in progress:

"Twelve Negroes, chained six and six, strung together like so many fish on a trotline, being separated forever from their childhood and friends, their fathers and mothers, their brothers and sisters, from their wives and children, into perpetual slavery."

We also hear the consummate drive that Lincoln brought to his own self-education:

"Upon the subject of education, I view it as the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in."

But Lincoln's time in the White House was mostly taken up with issues of war and the end of slavery. Although the decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, with all its implications for the war and peace to follow, came hard, Lincoln's mind was at last firmly fixed:

"I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper. My whole soul is in it.... In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free."

And in the second inaugural address came a message to the future nation which has haunted and inspired us to this day:

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds."

Abe's Honest Words: The Life of Abraham Lincoln pairs Lincoln's well-known but still striking words with Kadir Nelson's strong and stunning illustrations which visually echo the President's thoughts perfectly. Of all the many good books for children on Honest Abe, this one stands out artistically and thematically as an extraordinary portrait of our most honored president through his own powerful words.

Passing the Torch: America in the 1960s by Edmund Lindop

"THE TORCH HAS PASSED TO A NEW GENERATION OF AMERICANS."
--John F. Kennedy, First Inaugural Address

In his address in January of 1960, John Kennedy uttered a lot of memorable phrases. This one, actually referring to his own generation born just before the First World War, actually had a double meaning, both historic and prophetic. For it was in the decade of the 1960s that the "Baby Boom" generation, born in the post-World War II years, began to come of age in unprecedented numbers, a tsunami of population which was bound to change the nation through its simple magnitude.

In some ways like the turbulent and energetic 1920s (see my previous post here), the events of the decade were recorded and written about massively in their own times and since and have echoed mightily through the decades that followed. America went to the moon, experienced repeated economic shakeups, entered and began to withdraw from a war in southeast Asia that it could neither win nor admit as unwinnable. Women sought "liberation" and moved into the mainstream more completely than ever before, and racial inequality set in law was overturned largely through the nonviolent movement of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was then ironically murdered by a Southern racist near the end of the decade, giving rise to the more violent "Black Power" movement and urban riots on a scale never before known in America.

And as if that wasn't enough change, the mass of people under thirty changed the music and social mores of the nation. Just as in the 1920s, there was a radical change in popular music and dress: rock and roll pushed the crooners of the previous decade off the radio waves, hemlines rose dramatically, and patched jeans, tie-dyes, and mini-skirts replaced the more sedate long, crinolined skirts, starched plaid shirts, and muscle tees of the late 1950s as cool costumes for the young. The young were in rebellion, a "counter-culture" as "flaming youth" have always sought to be, but their sheer numbers crowded the schools and colleges, tried some old and some new recreational drugs, protested the military draft, flooded into the work force, and ultimately prompted a new round of consumerism-driven inflation that outdid that of the 1920s and the 1950s.

Edmund Lindop's newest, America in the 1960s (The Decades of Twentieth-Century America) (Twenty-First Century Books, 2010), is a good starting point for middle and high school students whose knowledge of the decade is limited to familiarity with pop icons such as Elvis and the Beatles. "Profiles" provide one-page biographies of significant figures, from Malcolm X to Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Betty Friedan to Marshall McLuhan, Nikki Giovanni to Jackie O., and the "Turning Points" text boxes throughout the text highlight significant moments such as the 1963 March of Washington, the Nixon-Kennedy debates, the Tet Offensive, and earthrise from the moon. "In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes," said Andy Warhol, and it seemed as if that prophecy was coming true as television flooded the land with images of the sit-ins, Robert Kennedy dying from an assassin's bullet, helicopters lifting off with the wounded in Vietnam, hippies in the "summer of love" burning draft cards, and women burning their bras. As the author summarizes this hopeful, deadly, chaotic and creative period...

In the first decade of the 2000s, more than half of all Americans alive were born after the 1960s ended. These Americans get their ideas about the 1960s from books, movies, music, and television. but learning secondhand about a time period is never the same as living through it. No matter what their political persuasion, everyone who lived through the 1960s will likely agree--it was a time like no other. And after it was over, the United States would never be the same.

To understand the present, it is necessary to understand something about the past, and getting a handle on a tumultuous decade such as the Sixties is difficult, given the overwhelming information available from reference books to Youtube. Lindop's America in the 1960s (The Decades of Twentieth-Century America) does an admirable job of organizing and presenting some of the seminal events of this time. Complete with a supplementary appendices--a timeline, extensive source notes, bibliography, selected books, films, web sites, recommended reading and iconic films, and an full index to pull it all together. this book, one of the The Decades of Twentieth-Century America series is a good jumping-off point for students doing research or for kids who are simply curious about what it was really like back in the Sixties.