Marching to Freedom by Joyce Milton

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and you know what that means — a day off! [insert shower of confetti here]

Personally, I’m very happy not to be in the office today. And I’m sure you’re not overly disappointed about a break from school either. I don’t know about you, but I plan to take full advantage of the holiday — which in my case means a huge array of desserts and a marathon of the TV show Chuck.

But before rotting my teeth with sugar and rotting my brain with TV, I decided to spend a little time honoring MLK, since it is his day and all. I have to admit that I don’t do that every year. But I figured, “Hey, maybe I should recommend a book about MLK on Kidsmomo or something…” So I picked up this one: Marching to Freedom: The Story of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Joyce Milton. And it’s AWESOME!

But I know reading a biography may not be exactly the way you want to spend your day off, so I’ve done you all a little favor and reproduced my favorite part of the book here, for your reading enjoyment. (You can thank me later.) It’s definitely not light reading, but it’s really interesting — and taught me something I never knew about MLK before! This is a description of a momentous bus ride that King took with his teacher when he was 14 years old:
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Helen Keller with Anne Sullivan, July 1888

We recently received an influx of great book reviews (I suspect from a classroom in Indiana ), and a lot of them are of the Biography genre. I had a lot of fun reading and posting these book reviews to the Reviews by You(th) section of Kidsmomo, and I hope anyone visiting finds a historical figure they’d like to read about!

My favorite person to read about growing up were Helen Keller and her teacher, Anne Sullivan. Despite becoming blind and deaf at a young age, Helen Keller learned to communicate by sign language, with the help of her teacher Anne Sullivan (who was partly blind herself!)  She even learned how to speak, even though she couldn’t hear a word she was saying, and gave speeches around the country. Helen Keller eventually wrote an autobiography, The Story of My Life. But before you dive into that (it’s pretty dense), check out some of these biographies about Helen and Anne. That’s right — I know them so well, I’m on a first-name basis with them).

About Helen Keller:

• Helen Keller by Margaret Davidson
• Helen Keller: From Tragedy to Triumph by Katharine Wilkie and Robert Doremus

About Anne Sullivan, her teacher:

• Miss Spitfire: Reaching Helen Keller by Sarah Miller
• Helen Keller’s Teacher by Margaret Davidson
• Miracle Worker (a play) by Willim Gibson

When Karen gets back from vacation (Yup, it’s just me alone here, holding down the fort), we’ll brainstorm about having Biographies as a Weekly Theme!  What do you guys think of that?

And as usual — Continue submitting book reviews!

— Nancy