Monday, November 28, 2011

Nonfiction Monday

The Nonfiction Monday Round-up is at A Curious Thing this week.

Kent, Deborah. The Vietnam War: From DaNang to Saigon
This is part of the Enslow Publishers' The United States at War series. Since the Vietnam Conflict (as it was known until at least 1995!) started before I was born and ended when I was in grade school, the details have always been foggy to me. I'm pretty sure it was not covered in my high school history class; I don't know that we even got to Korea. This is an excellent book that lays out the causes of unrest in this area of the world, the development of the US involvement, and the particulars of battles, conditions, and public opinion during that time. Well-illustrated with period photographs and supporting documentation, this will interest my students who have an insatiable need to read about war as well as those trying to understand this point in US history. I have a lot of students now whose grandfathers fought in Vietnam.


Samuels, Charlie. Propaganda. (World War II Sourcebook)
This Brown Bear Books series includes the titles Soldiers, Spying and Security, Home Front, and Life Under Occupation. These brief (48 pages) volumes do a nice job of breaking down specific areas of the war. The Propaganda volume was of especial interest to my 8th grade social studies and language arts teachers, since both have a unit on propaganda. With its period posters and descriptions of various information campaigns, this was a good book to share with classes to explain what was meant by "propaganda". The Soliders volume covered everything from volunteering or conscription to demobbing. The only thing that was a little odd was that a lot of British military information was included, and there is no mention anywhere in the book of a publisher's web site.

3 comments:

  1. I've just read Thanhha Lai's Inside Out and Back Again - as I was doing my review of the book, I managed to read up a little bit on the Vietnam War and saw some of the photos posted on the internet. I just thought that this nonfiction book would be a good supplementary material to Lai's fictionalized biographical account.

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  2. Two great titles - the Vietnam War comes up often in my sixth grade class, and this will be a good book to have in our library. Thank you for sharing.

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  3. The book about propaganda sound intriguing. Thanks for the recommendation.
    Tammy
    Apples with Many Seeds

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