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Set during the Sixties during the Vietnam War, this story is about 12-year-old Nakri when the Khmer Rouge takes over Cambodia. She and her siblings are forced to work in a labor camp until the Vietnamese army liberates the camp, and two surviving family members go to a refugee camp on Thailand’s border. Eventually they immigrate to the U.S. and it is Nakri’s prowess in dancing that helps her survive the trauma.

Kang recounts his life as a boy growing up in Pyongyang during the Sixties after his Korean family returns to North Korea from their affluent lives in Japan. After Kang’s grandfather is accused of high treason, Kang spends ten years of his life surviving in a remote labor camp or gulag. Kang was only nine years old when he was first imprisoned at the Yodok camp in 1977.

Many people are ignorant of the Turks’ Armenian Genocide that occurred in 1915, killing over a million innocent people. David captures the voice of his mother, Vernon Dumehjian Kherdian, who was born into a fine family just prior to the systematic killings.

Thirteen-year-old Azad knows nothing but war while growing up in a predominantly Kurdish town in Sardasht, Iran. Iran’s new religious leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini wants to eliminate the Kurds while Iraq’s Saddam Hussein’s would like to occupy that part of Iran. Readers get a glimpse into the heart of this young Kurdish refugee and will experience the loss and hope of emigration.

Eight teenagers who fled from Ethiopia and Rwanda tell how they got to America and Canada only to receive more prejudicial treatment.

Imagine being asked to be one of the first black students to integrate an all-white school in the Fifties. Such is the case for Sylvia Patterson when she must decide whether or not to be an agent of social change or to stay in the comfort of her inferior all-black school. Readers may want to refer to Melba Pattillo Beals’s memoir Warriors Don’t Cry, for her personal account of what happened when she was one of the nine teenagers who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957.

This true account of 1960s desegregation tells the inspiring story of the Carters, black Mississippi sharecroppers who sent their children to integrate an all-white school system.

In 1972, President Ida Amin had a dream that he believed was a message from God. Based on that dream, this dictator decides to eliminate all foreign Indians — the “Jews of Uganda” — in 90 days. Fifteen-year-old Sabine thinks that she and her family will be spared since they are citizens of Uganda, but eventually no one is spared from the effects of this mandate. When there is a governmental shift in power by an extremist, no one is spard.

Piri, now 17, resides with a Swedish family while she searches for news of family and friends who also might have survived the Nazi concentration camps. Although the Swedes accept her as their own daughter, she strives to hold on to her own identity and dreams of finding her blood relatives. The novel is dedicated to the many people who assisted the Jews in their efforts to find their families after the war.

Parkland Middle School is a place the students call Darkland, because no one in it does much to stop the daily harassment of kids by other kids. Three bullied seventh graders use their smarts to get the better of their tormentors by starting an unofficial e-mail forum at school in which they publicize their experiences. Unexpectedly, lots of other kids come forward to confess their similar troubles, and it becomes clear that the problem at their school is bigger than anyone knew. 

This book examines the treatment of Japanese Americans before, during, and after World War II by the U.S. government. From Pearl Harbor to the Japanese Internment camps, and the victories attained by an all Asian battalion, these stories give readers insight into the dichotomy felt by Japanese Americans during this shameful time in history. Photographs capture much what cannot be adequately expressed in words.

Lily is looking forward to spending another summer at her family’s vacation home with her grandmother on the shore in Rockaway, New York, when her father drops the news that he must go to Europe with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during World War II. Angry at her widower father for leaving, Lily refuses to say goodbye to him and is certain that this summer will be lonely. Then she meets Albert, a Hungarian refugee who lost most of his family to the war and had to leave his sickly sister behind in Europe. The two friends rely on each other to overcome their feelings of guilt in this story of how war affects the children at home.

Based on historical fact, this is a story that brings World War II home, just off the coast of Maine where Jill Winters has been sent to live with her grandmother. With her mother traveling the Atlantic to visit a sick brother and German submarines stalking in the nearby waters, Jill is feeling very nervous about the war, especially after finding a carrier pigeon transporting a note written in German. After she hears her grandmother and a German friend repeat the message on the note, she becomes suspicious. Determined to find the Nazi spy and solve the mystery, Jill finds herself in her own deep waters.

Pulitzer Prize winner John Hersey interviewed survivors of Hiroshima’s bomb while the ashes were still warm. Hersey describes the lives of six people — a clerk, a widowed seamstress, a physician, a Methodist minister, a surgeon, and a German Catholic priest — shortly before and for about a year after the bombing. While describing the ordeals of these individuals, Hersey manages to convey the devastation and the suffering experienced by the people of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. A final chapter was added in 1985 that continues with the lives of these six people.

Fourteen-year-old Louise Keller and her family leave Ohio for the Philippines in order to join a missionary camp in 1941. Soon after their arrival, the Japanese have invaded and established internment camps that Louise avoids for a time in the jungle but is later captured. This story is a bit different in that it is an American version of being held in a Japanese Internment camp established by the Japanese in the Philippines.

This is the true story of one spirited Japanese-American family’s attempt to survive the indignities of forced detention as seen through the eyes of Jeannie, the youngest daughter of the Wakatsuki family. The family was detained for four years at the Manzanar Internment Camp during World War II.

Sumiko and her family are shipped to a Japanese internment camp in one of the hottest places in California after the events of Pearl Harbor. She was raised in California on a flower farm and now instead of flowers, she must endure dust storms regularly. In her old life she was accustomed to being the only Japanese girl in her class. Now they find themselves on an Indian reservation and are as unwelcome there as anywhere. She finally finds a friend in one Mohave boy. There they do their best to rebuild their lives and create a community.

A chronicle of the incredible correspondence between California librarian Clara Breed and young Japanese American internees during World War II. These actual letters, replete with spelling and grammar mistakes, show how one person can make a positive difference in the lives of so many.

A 6-year-old boy whose mother is working in a munitions factory in Chicago during World War II is sent to live in Minnesota with his grandmother, Alida. Since all of the men are in Europe fighting, the women have to work the farm, and there are plenty of animals to look after to keep the young boy busy. But he is out of his element when his cousin, Kristina, goes into labor. While waiting for the delivery, the women work on a quilt that reveals the family stories of love and loss.

Readers first met young Yuki and her Japanese American family in Journey to Topaz, a story based on the author’s experience of having her own family uprooted and sent to the Relocation Center in Topaz, Utah. This novel continues their story after they are released into a society full of prejudice and fear.