Free? Stories About Human Rights

Read:
Klaus Vogel and the Bad Lads by David Almond - I was wondering if this collection of stories would be too foreign for middle students to relate to, but I was completely wrong. The first story is about a small group of boys who do small pranks around town, but never anything seriously bad. Until they are joined by a slightly older, cooler guy named Joe who leads them in increasingly hateful crimes against other people. When another new student arrives from Germany, Klaus, the boys see that Joe isn't as admirable as they thought before. Klaus says very little (partially because he doesn't speak English well yet), but what he does is powerful.

These are geared at young adults, probably early teens, and some (especially the first two) are a bit too trite and simplistic -- injustice easily recognised and easily solved -- for my taste. Others, though, looked a bit more deeply into the complexities of injustice (or its absurdities, as in Mussi's Scout's Honour). Rita Williams-Garcia's poem on the quest for water after Hurricane Katrina hit a bit close to home for me (fortunately, since the book was published, the UN has declared that safe and clean drinking water and sanitation is a human right; the right Williams-Garcia quotes as inspiration for the poem is 'merely' the right to move about freely in one's country). Eoin Colfer's Christopher was a strong one, avoiding some of the show more cliches of the Not-a-Sweatshop setting and ending on a hard, but not anvilicious, note. I also very much enjoyed Ibtisam Barakat's Uncle Meena and Jamila Gavin's Wherever I Lay Down My Head. show less

What does it mean to be free? Top authors donate their talents to explore the question and the 30 articles of human rights in a compelling collection to benefit Amnesty International.