The book suggestion lists were created by teen staff members at Martin Library. If there is a genre you think we should create a list for, send an e-mail to teens@yorklibraries.org.
Non-Fiction
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Educating Esmé: Diary of a Teacher's First Year -- Esmé Raji The uncensored diary of Esmé Raji's first year teaching in a Chicago public school. She opens a window into the closed world of a real-life classroom. Refusing to let anything get in the way of delivering the education her fifth-graders deserve, this dedicated teacher finds herself battling bureaucrats, gang members, inflexible administrators, angry children, and her own insecurities |
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Hole in My Life -- Jack Gantos In the summer of 1971, Jack Gantos was an aspiring author desperate for adventure, college cash, and a way out of a dead-end job. For ten thousand dollars, he recklessly agreed to help sail a sixty-foot yacht loaded with hashish from the Virgin Islands to New York City, where he and his partners sold the drug until federal agents finally caught up with them in a bust at the Chelsea Hotel. For his part in the conspiracy, the twenty-year-old Gantos was sentenced to serve up to six years in a federal prison. |
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Look Me in the Eye: My Life with
Asperger's Ever since he was young, John Robison longed to connect with other people, but by the time he was a teenager, his odd habits—an inclination to blurt out non sequiturs, avoid eye contact, dismantle radios, and dig five-foot holes (and stick his younger brother, Augusten Burroughs, in them)—had earned him the label “social deviant.” It was not until he was forty that he was diagnosed with a form of autism called Asperger’s syndrome. That understanding transformed the way he saw himself—and the world. |
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Needles -- Andie Dominick All her life, Andie Dominick adored her older sister, Denise. She wanted to look like her, talk like her, be her. Unfortunately, she got part of her wish when, at age nine, she was diagnosed with the same disease from which Denise had suffered since age two: juvenile diabetes. Dominick recounts her transformation from a free-spirited kid who enjoyed giving shots to her stuffed animals with her sister's castaway needles to a life-long patient who must learn to inject herself twice a day. |
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Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America --
Barbara Ehrenreich Click Here For Our Review This story of Barbara Ehrenreich’s attempts to eke out a living while working as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aide, and Wal-Mart associate is a revelatory firsthand account of life in low-wage America. |
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True Notebooks -- Mark Salzman When Mark Salzman is invited to visit a writing class at Central Juvenile Hall, a lockup for Los Angeles’s most violent teenage offenders, he scrambles for a polite reason to decline. He goes—expecting the worst—and is so astonished by what he finds that he becomes a teacher there himself. True Notebooks is an account of Salzman’s first years teaching at Central. Through it, we come to know his students as he did: in their own words. |
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Warriors Don't Cry: A Searing Memoir of the
Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High -- Melba Pattillo
Melba Patillo Beals was one of nine black teenagers chosen to integrate Little Rock, Arkansas's Central High School in 1957. For Melba and her friends it marked their transformation into reluctant warriors--on a battlefield that helped shape the civil rights movement. Warriors Don't Cry is their riveting story. |
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All book descriptions are from the book jackets as listed on BarnesandNoble.com
Last updated on Thursday, September 4, 2008
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