by Deborah Hopkinson (2004)
ngela and her family have arrived in New York City from their village in Italy to find themselves settled in a small tenement apartment on the Lower East Side. When her father is no longer able to work, Angela must leave school and work in a shirtwaist factory. Against the backdrop of the birth of the labor union movement in the early 1900s, Angela plays a part in the drama and turmoil that erupt as the workers begin to strike, protesting the terrible conditions in the sweatshops. And she records the horrors of the Triangle Factory fire and the triumphs and sorrows of the labor movement.
Kathryn Lasky
After her family immigrates to America from Italy in 1903, ten-year-old Sofia is quarantined at the Ellis Island Immigration Station, where she makes a good friend but endures nightmarish conditions. Includes historical notes.
Sarah Ellis
Mai 1926. Originaires d'Angleterre, Evelyn Weatherall, 11 ans, et sa famille émigrent en Saskatchewan après avoir été influencées par la publicité idyllique de l'immigration au Canada. Dans son journal, la fillette relate le quotidien de sa famille (les difficultés de ses parents à trouver un travail stable, l'obligation de son frère aîné à travailler pour payer les dettes de son oncle, les différences entre l'Angleterre et son pays d'accueil, etc.), tout en décrivant les moeurs et les coutumes de cette époque. La jeune fille ponctue également son témoignage de références littéraires. -- Rédigé sous forme de journal intime, ce roman à saveur didactique lève le voile sur un pan important de l'histoire canadienne, celui des premiers immigrants. Le tout se conclut sur un dossier photographique et historique. [SDM].
Anatole Broyard
"Nineteen forty-six was a good time - perhaps the best time - in the twentieth century. The war was over and there was a terrific sense of coming back, of repossessing life. Rents were cheap, restaurants were cheap, and it seemed to me that happiness itself might be cheaply had." Broyard made his first bid for happiness by moving in with a young painter, the difficult and challenging Sheri Donatti - a protegee of Anais Nin - who never wore underpants and who "embodied the new trends in art, sex, and psychosis." Broyard tells their story; by turns comic and poignant, while describing along the way his meetings with Caitlan and Dylan Thomas, Delmore Schwartz, Dwight MacDonald, Maya Deren, William Gaddis, and other writers and artists just beginning their careers. He opens a bookstore on Cornelia Street ("If it hadn't been for books we would have been entirely at the mercy of sex. Books steadied us, they gave us gravity."). He goes to the New School and listens to Eric Fromm, Karen Horney and Meyer Shapiro ("I went to him as students, twenty years later, would go to India."). He tries going to a psychoanalysist ("I never gave him a chance. l had a literature rather than a personality."). In dazzling prose, Broyard captures with crystalline clarity the feeling of a particular time and place "when everything mattered, everything was serious." With economy, style, wit, flair, and astounding powers of observation, Broyard has left us a most remarkable memoir.
Kym Ragusa
"A memoir of astonishing delicacy and strength about race and physical beauty. Kym Ragusa's stunningly beautiful, brilliant black mother constantly turned heads as she strolled the streets of West Harlem. Ragusa's working-class white father, who grew up only a few streets (and an entire world) away in Italian East Harlem, had never seen anyone like her. At home their families despaired at the match, while in the streets the couple faced taunting threats from a city still racially divided--but they were mesmerized by the differences between them. From their volatile, short-lived pairing came a sensitive child with a filmmaker's observant eye. Her two powerful grandmothers gave her the love and stability to grow into her own skin. Eventually, their shared care for their granddaughter forced them to overcome their prejudices. Rent parties and religious feste, baked yams and baked ziti--Ragusa's sensuous memories are a reader's delight, as they bring to life the joy, pain, and inexhaustible richness of a racially and culturally mixed heritage."--Publisher's website.