Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Enjoyed, but Have Never Mentioned On My Blog

This was such a hard theme this week! I talk about most of the books I read on my blog! So finding books that I haven’t mentioned before was almost impossible. Today, I decided to focus on sharing some of the great nonfiction titles I’ve read. Many of them written by some of the most reknown nonfiction authors around. I definitely love a good narrative nonfiction that reads more like a story than a list of facts. And I’ve always loved history, so nonfiction tends to be in my wheelhouse. Plus, nonfiction today isn’t anything like what it used to be! I’m always saying it, but it’s so true! Nonfiction titles are exciting to read!

And I’ll you in on a little secret! A lot of popular adult nonfiction titles will often be adapted for a younger audience. These have much of the same content, but shortened and maybe adjusted a bit for a younger audience. As an adult reader, I still prefer these young reader’s adaptations. Because it removes all the little details and gives you a broader picture, but still a great book.

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Books I Enjoyed, but Have Never Mentioned On My Blog

The Boys Who Challenged Hitler: Knud Pedersen and the Churchill Club

by Phillip Hoose

Amazon | Bookshop

At the outset of World War II, Denmark did not resist German occupation. Deeply ashamed of his nation’s leaders, fifteen-year-old Knud Pedersen resolved with his brother and a handful of schoolmates to take action against the Nazis if the adults would not. Naming their secret club after the fiery British leader, the young patriots in the Churchill Club committed countless acts of sabotage, infuriating the Germans, who eventually had the boys tracked down and arrested. But their efforts were not in vain: the boys’ exploits and eventual imprisonment helped spark a full-blown Danish resistance. Interweaving his own narrative with the recollections of Knud himself, here is Phillip Hoose’s inspiring story of these young war heroes.

Fatal Fever: Tracking Down Typhoid Mary

by Gail Jarrow

Amazon | Bookshop

This engrossing story reveals the facts behind Mary Mallon, a hardworking Irish cook hired by several of New York’s well-to-do families, who ultimately came to be known as “Typhoid Mary”.  Read how Mary unwittingly spread deadly bacteria, the ways an epidemiologist discovered her trail of infection, and how the health department ultimately decided her fate. Young readers will be on the edges of their seats wondering what happened to Mary and the innocent typhoid victims.

Lifting as We Climb: Black Women’s Battle for the Ballot Box

by Evette Dionne

Amazon | Bookshop

Susan B. Anthony. Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Alice Paul. The Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls. The 1913 Women’s March in D.C. When the epic story of the suffrage movement in the United States is told, the most familiar leaders, speakers at meetings, and participants in marches written about or pictured are generally white. That’s not the real story.

Women of color, especially African American women, were fighting for their right to vote and to be treated as full, equal citizens of the United States. Their battlefront wasn’t just about gender. African American women had to deal with white abolitionist-suffragists who drew the line at sharing power with their black sisters. They had to overcome deep, exclusionary racial prejudices that were rife in the American suffrage movement. And they had to maintain their dignity–and safety–in a society that tried to keep them in its bottom ranks.

Lifting as We Climb is the empowering story of African American women who refused to accept all this. Women in black church groups, black female sororities, black women’s improvement societies and social clubs. Those who formed their own black suffrage associations when white-dominated national suffrage groups rejected them. Women like Mary Church Terrell, a founder of the National Association of Colored Women and of the NAACP; or educator-activist Anna Julia Cooper who championed women getting the vote and a college education; or the crusading journalist Ida B. Wells, a leader in both the suffrage and anti-lynching movements.

The Plot to Kill Hitler: Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Unlikely Hero

by Patricia McCormick

Amazon | Bookshop

It was April 5, 1943, and the Gestapo would arrive any minute. Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been expecting this day for a long time. He had put his papers in order—and left a few notes specifically for Hitler’s men to see. Two SS agents climbed the stairs and told the boyish-looking Bonhoeffer to come with them. He calmly said good-bye to his parents, put his Bible under his arm, and left. Upstairs there was proof, in his own handwriting, that this quiet young minister was part of a conspiracy to kill Adolf Hitler.

This compelling, brilliantly researched account includes the remarkable discovery that Bonhoeffer was one of the first people to provide evidence to the Allies that Jews were being deported to death camps. It takes readers from his privileged early childhood to the studies and travel that would introduce him to peace activists around the world—eventually putting this gentle, scholarly pacifist on a deadly course to assassinate one of the most ruthless dictators in history. The Plot to Kill Hitler provides fascinating insights into what makes someone stand up for what’s right when no one else is standing with you. It is a question that every generation must answer again and again.

Radioactive! How Irène Curie and Lise Meitner Revolutionized Science and Changed the World

by Winifred Conkling

Amazon | Bookshop

In 1934, Irène Curie, working with her husband and fellow scientist, Frederic Joliot, made a discovery that would change the world: artificial radioactivity. This breakthrough allowed scientists to modify elements and create new ones by altering the structure of atoms. Curie shared a Nobel Prize with her husband for their work. But when she was nominated to the French Academy of Sciences, the academy denied her admission and voted to disqualify all women from membership. Four years later, Curie’s breakthrough led physicist Lise Meitner to a brilliant leap of understanding that unlocked the secret of nuclear fission. Meitner’s unique insight was critical to the revolution in science that led to nuclear energy and the race to build the atom bomb, yet her achievement was left unrecognized by the Nobel committee in favor of that of her male colleague.

A Storm Too Soon: A Remarkable True Survival Story in 80 Foot Seas

by Michael J. Tougias (Young Reader’s Edition)

Amazon | Bookshop

When a forty-seven-foot sailboat disappears in the Gulf Stream during a disastrous storm, it leaves behind three weary sailors struggling to stay alive on a life raft in the throes of violent waves eighty feet tall. This middle-grade adaptation of an adult nonfiction book tells the story of the four intrepid Coast Guardsmen who braved the sea and this ruthless storm, hoping to rescue the stranded sailors.

Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

by M. T. Anderson

Amazon | Bookshop

In September 1941, Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht surrounded Leningrad in what was to become one of the longest and most destructive sieges in Western history—almost three years of bombardment and starvation. Trapped between the Nazi invading force and the Soviet government itself was composer Dmitri Shostakovich, writing a symphony to rouse, rally, eulogize, and commemorate his fellow citizens: the Leningrad Symphony. This is the true story of a city under siege, the triumph of bravery and defiance in the face of terrifying odds. It is also a look at the power—and layered meaning—of music in beleaguered lives. Symphony for the City of the Dead is a masterwork thrillingly told and impeccably researched by National Book Award–winning author M. T. Anderson.

Ten Days a Madwoman: The Daring Life and Turbulent Times of the Original “Girl” Reporter, Nellie Bly

by Deborah Noyes

Amazon | Bookshop

Young Nellie Bly had ambitious goals, especially for a woman at the end of the nineteenth century, when the few female journalists were relegated to writing columns about cleaning or fashion. But fresh off a train from Pittsburgh, Nellie knew she was destined for more and pulled a major journalistic stunt that skyrocketed her to fame: feigning insanity, being committed to the notorious asylum on Blackwell’s Island, and writing a shocking exposé of the clinic’s horrific treatment of its patients.
 
Nellie Bly became a household name and raised awareness of political corruption, poverty, and abuses of human rights. Leading an uncommonly full life, Nellie circled the globe in a record seventy-two days and brought home a pet monkey before marrying an aged millionaire and running his company after his death.

We Had to Be Brave: Escaping the Nazis on the Kindertransport

by Deborah Hopkinson

Amazon | Bookshop

Ruth David was growing up in a small village in Germany when Adolf Hitler rose to power in the 1930s. Under the Party, Jewish families like Ruth’s experienced rising anti-Semitic restrictions and attacks. Just going to school became dangerous. By November 1938, anti-Semitism erupted into Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, and unleashed a wave of violence and forced arrests.

Days later, desperate volunteers sprang into action to organise the Kindertransport, a rescue effort to bring Jewish children to England. Young people like Ruth David had to say goodbye to their families, unsure if they’d ever be reunited. Miles from home, the Kindertransport refugees entered unrecognisable lives, where food, clothes – and, for many of them, language and religion – were startlingly new. Meanwhile, the onset of war and the Holocaust visited unimaginable horrors on loved ones left behind. Somehow, these rescued children had to learn to look forward, to hope.

The Artsy Reader Girl currently hosts Top Ten Tuesday, an original feature created by The Broke and the Bookish.Y