100 books like Stand Up! Speak Up!

This picture book memoir based on her New York Times best-selling adult memoir, How to Be a Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals, introduces young readers to some of the incredible animals that have influenced the author throughout her lifetime and challenges us all to look at our relationships with animals differently.

What lessons have animals taught us—whether it’s our domesticated pets at home or animals you’ve seen in nature? How can animals make us better versions of ourselves? This beautifully told story by one of the greatest nature writers of our time shows us simply just how much animals have to teach us if we only pay close attention.

Facts matter to kids, of course, and library shelves groan with attempts to distill climate causes and effects down to child-sized volumes. For middle graders, visual encyclopedia-style nonfiction can work well, covering broad ranges of information from atmospheric chemistry to statistics on carbon emissions sources in photo-rich chunks. 

But I’ve seen younger readers wince at graphic pictures of bleached coral or violent wildfires. Pen and acrylic drawings soften this book’s approach, supporting student learning by avoiding traumatic imagery. The polar bear theme draws readers in yet gradually widens to encompass people and places affected near home.

My special kudos for spreads that explain scientific concepts, like the greenhouse effect, with accurate prose and illustrations abounding with life. 

As a lifelong biography reader and sometime biography writer, I planned to recommend one of the many fine children’s works about Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. The teen’s brave protests have sparked an international movement demanding climate action for the sake of today’s and tomorrow’s children.

But this book is even better. Greta’s story launches this collective biography (“Bravely alone, she stood on the Parliament steps of stone. . . But she wasn’t alone for long”), inspiring young people around the world. Fifteen profiled boys and girls are planting trees, collecting compost, raising funds, and packing buses for demonstrations to reduce climate emissions.

By featuring youth leaders from Uganda, Colorado, Indonesia, and elsewhere, the book embodies the global reach of the movement and the reassuring reality that none of us, not even Greta, must face the crisis alone. 

What happens when a cartoonist-television writer and a distinguished earth science professor team up to write about climate change? To me, the result is pure synergy.

Rollicking watercolors and humor-leavened text make hard climate truths accessible and empowering. Yes, the once-climate-unaware protagonist suffers at first as she learns about drought, species endangerment, and other perils accelerating our way.

But knowledge truly is power for the determined heroine, who personifies the kind of persistence and resilience we will all need in the coming decades. She doesn’t claim to have all the answers but insists that together we can find them.

The Instructions blew my mind from the moment I read the first page. At the time the novel was released, it took place in a near future recently reached.

We quickly dive into bullies, othering, and also the concept of judging without knowing focused on the lives of pre- and young teens, specifically Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, our main character. The novel is over 1,000 pages but I will never forget diving deep into the story quickly and hungrily, wanting to devour every sentence.

“It is dangerous to exist in the world. To exist is to be threatened. We must live with threats.” The quote exudes Jewish anger, a possible messiah, but also fear, history, and violence making the pages feel magical and shocking, yet grounded firmly in our world. 

Philip J. Cunningham joined his Chinese friends from May 3 to June 4 in 1989, as a supporter, journalist, and witness in the Tiananmen Square protests. Tiananmen Moon chronicles the protests, hunger strike, students’ leadership, their internal friction, and Cunningham’s meeting with Chai Ling before the massacre. From an American bystander’s perspective, Cunningham voices his concerns about the peer pressure among students, and a few self-claimed radical leaders using the same rhetoric and tactic as the regime to seize power and escalate conflicts. To this day, the Tiananmen Square protests are obliterated by the propaganda machine in mainland China. Tiananmen Moon is a remarkable testament capturing the plaintive and lyrical beauty of a dream that continues to haunt China today.

This is easily one of the most shocking and upsetting books I've read in a long time, considering I knew next to nothing about this massacre. I grew up in Columbus (a bit south of Kent, OH) and was born a year after these events, but now I'm informed, angry, and grateful–thanks to Mr. Backderf. The book is exhaustively researched, well-constructed, and beautifully drawn.

Kang’s sentences are short and tidy and clearly well-translated into English from Korean, and I was immediately drawn into the novel through the almost staccato rhythms of the prose. A small warning: this story comes with ghosts.

The plot is a fictionalization of a horrific event in Korean history in which soldiers opened fire on thousands of students protesting the 1980 military coup, killing somewhere between 600 and 2,300 civilians. The story was actively suppressed by the Korean government—hence the uncertainty over numbers.

Using this as a backdrop, Kang personalizes the violence and political upheaval of Korea in the 1980s, giving us memorable characters and the anguished and marginalized voices of the dead. It’s a novel I can’t quite shake, even years after first reading it.

Here’s the only full-scale biography of the most important student activist in American history. Mario Savio registered Black voters during the Freedom Rides in Mississippi and then led the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964, when the university tried to prevent civil-rights demonstrators from protesting on campus. Savio’s story is yet another reminder about the radical roots of free speech, which is too often dismissed at contemporary universities as a conservative or even reactionary impulse. It wasn’t, and it isn’t. 

We’re also indebted to young minority students for pioneering free-speech rights in our schools. Most of us still associate the struggle for student rights with antiwar activists like Mary Beth Tinker, whose armband protest against the Vietnam War led to the epochal Tinker v. Des Moines Supreme Court decision declaring that teachers and students don’t shed their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse gate. But before and after Tinker, Black and Chicano students challenged racist curricula, disciplinary policies, and more. Student rights are civil rights, and vice versa. We can’t—and shouldn’t—separate them.