Best Books for Young Adults

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About the Best Books for Young Adults

Administered by:

Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) logo

Nonfiction

2001 Selection(s)

Darkness Over Denmark: The Danish Resistance and the Rescue of the Jews

by Ellen Levine. Holiday House, $18.95.

Retells events in Denmark during WW II as the Danes risked their lives to protect and rescue Jews from the Nazis.


First They Killed My Father : A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers

by Loung Ung. HarperCollins, $23.

Memoir of a young girl whose life and family was torn apart by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.


In the Line of Fire: Presidents' Lives at Stake

by Judith St. George. Holiday House, $18.95.

Details surrounding the four successful and seven unsuccessful assassination attempts on the lives of American presidents. Four chapters focus on the deaths of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy. The fifth chapter, includes brief sketches of botched or foiled assassination attempts against Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan.


Learning to Swim

by Ann Turner. Scholastic Press, $14.95.

A series of poems convey the feelings of a young girl whose sense of joy and security at the family's summer house is shattered when an older boy who lives nearby sexually abuses her.


Pedro and Me

by Judd Winick. Henry Holt and Co., $15.

Told in graphic format, Winick chronicles his friendship with AIDS educator Pedro Zamora and their time on MTV's Real World.


Sitting Bull and His World

by Albert Marrin. Illustrated. Dutton, $27.50.

Explores the life and times of Sitting Bull and provides a context for historical events in the West.


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