AP World 10
Longwood High School Summer Reading List for
AP World History Grade 10
With 1968, Mark Kurlansky brings to teeming life the cultural and political history of that world-changing year of social upheaval. People think of it as the year of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Yet it was also the year of the Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy assassinations; the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; Prague Spring; the antiwar movement and the Tet Offensive; Black Power; the generation gap, avant-garde theater, the birth of the women's movement, and the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. From New York, Miami, Berkeley, and Chicago to Paris, Prague, Rome, Berlin, Warsaw, Tokyo, and Mexico City, spontaneous uprisings occurred simultaneously around the globe. Everything was disrupted.
|Born Under a Million Shadows||Andrea Busfield||
The Taliban have disappeared from Kabul's streets, but the long shadows of their brutal regime remain. In his short life eleven-year-old Fawad has known more grief than most: his father and brother have been killed, his sister has been abducted, and Fawad and his mother, Mariya, must rely on the charity of family to eke out a hand-to-mouth existence. Then Mariya finds a position as housekeeper for a charismatic western woman, Georgie, and Fawad dares to hope for an end to their struggle.
|Companero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara||Jorge G. Castaneda||
Traces the life of the Latin American communist revolutionary from his youth, to his relationship with Fidel Castro, to his untimely demise.
|The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman's Journey to Love and Islam||G. Willow Wilson||
Documents the author's conversion from all-American atheist to Islam, a journey marked by her decision to relocate to Cairo, romance with a passionate young Egyptian, and her efforts to balance the virtues of both cultures.
|Empress Orchid||Anchee Min||
Empress Orchid sweeps readers into the splendid heart of the Forbidden City to tell the fascinating story of a young Chinese concubine who becomes china's last empress. Min introduces the beautiful Tzu Hsi, known as Orchid, and weaves an epic of a country girl who seizes power through seduction, murder, and endless intrigue. When china is threatened by enemies, she alone sees capable of holding her country together. A novel of high drama and lyricism and lavish historical detail, Empress Orchid provides an extraordinary look inside the Forbidden City in its last days of imperial glory and breathes life into one of the most important women in history.
|First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers||Loung Ung||
Chronicles the brutality of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, from the author's forced "evacuation" of Phnom Penh in 1975 to her family's subsequent movements from town to town and eventual separation.
|Where Underpants Come From||Joe Bennett||The author traces the origin of inexpensive underwear back to its source, China, and explores the web of contacts and exchanges that make the global economy possible, examining the country's changing society and movement towards becoming an economic superpower.|
|Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies||Jared Diamond||Dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors he feels are responsible for history's broadest patterns.|
|Iqbal||Francesco D'Adamo||When young Iqbal is sold into slavery at a carpet factory, his arrival changes everything for the other overworked and abused chidren there. It is Iqbal who explains to them that despite their master's promises, he plans on keeping them as his slaves indefinetely. But it is also Iqbal who inspires the other children to look to a future free from toil...and is brave enough to show them how to get there.|
|Kaffir Boy: An Autobiography||Mark Mathabane||Mark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa's most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Like every other child born in the hopelessness of apartheid, he learned to measure his life in days, not years. Yet Mark Mathabane, armed only with the courage of his family and a hard-won education, raised himself up from the squalor and humiliation to win a scholarship to an American university. This extraordinary memoir of life under apartheid is a triumph of the human spirit over hatred and unspeakable degradation. For Mark Mathabane did what no physically and psychologically battered "Kaffir" from the rat-infested alleys of Alexandra was supposed to do-- he escaped to tell about it.|
|Nectar in a Sieve||Kamala Markandaya||This is the very moving story of a peasant woman in a primitive village in India whose whole life was a gallant and persistent battle to care for those she loved.|
|Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea||Mark Kurlansky||'Nonviolence' is a sweeping yet concise history that moves from ancient Hindu times to present - day conflicts raging in the Middle East and elsewhere. Kurlansky also brings into focus just why nonviolence is a “dangerous” idea, and asks such provocative questions as: Is there such a thing as a “just war”? Could nonviolence have worked against even the most evil regimes in history?|
|Plagues and Peoples||William H. McNeill||A radically new interpretation of world history as seen through the extraordinary impact--political, demographic, ecological, and psychological--of disease on cultures. From the conquest of Mexico by smallpox as much as by the Spanish, to the bubonic plague in China, to the typhoid epidemic in Europe, the history of disease is the history of humankind.|
|Shogun||James Clavell||A ship-wrecked English navigator becomes a samurai in feudal Japan.|
|To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America||Tara Bahrampour||A compelling and intimate exploration of the complexity of a bicultural immigrant experience, To See and See Again traces three generations of an Iranian (and Iranian-American) family undergoing a century of change--from the author's grandfather, a feudal lord with two wives; to her father, a freespirited architect who marries an American pop singer; to Bahrampour herself, who grows up balanced precariously between two cultures and comes of age watching them clash on the nightly news.|
(newer editions published as A School for My Village)
|Twesigye Jackson||Growing up in rural Uganda, Kaguri overcame poverty to earn a degree from the national university and worked as a human rights advocate, eventually making his way to pursue studies at Columbia University. When he returned to his village in Uganda with his wife, they were overwhelmed by the plight of his village's many AIDS orphans and vowed to open the first tuition-free school in the district for these children. Faced with many daunting obstacles, including little money, skepticism among friends in both the U.S. and Uganda, corrupt school inspectors, and a lack of supplies, he doggedly built one classroom after another until they had an accredited primary school filled with students dreaming of becoming the future doctors, teachers, lawyers, engineers, and even presidents of Uganda.|
|In the Time of the Butterflies||Julia Alvarez||Minerva Mirabal and her sisters, known as Las Mariposas (The Butterflies) suffer great hardships as they oppose the savage dictatorship of General Trujillo in the Domincan Republic.|
|Death to the Dictator!||Afsaneh Moqadam||Our pseudonymous author was a keen eyewitness in Tehran during the summer of 2009 and beyond. In this brave and true book, we see what we are not supposed to see, and learn what we are not supposed to know.|
|Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda||Romeo Dallaire||When Roméo Dallaire was called on to serve as force commander of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda, he believed that his assignment was to help two warring parties achieve the peace they both wanted. Instead, he was exposed to the most barbarous and chaotic display of civil war and genocide in the past decade, observing in just one hundred days the killings of more than eight hundred thousand Rwandans.|
|Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places||Andrew Blackwell||Visit Sunny Chernobyl fuses immersive first-person reporting with satire and analysis, making the case that it's time to start appreciating our planet as-is―not as we wish it to be. Equal parts travelogue, expose environmental memoir, and faux guidebook, Blackwell careens through a rogue's gallery of environmental disaster areas in search of the worst the world has to offer―and approaches a deeper understanding of what's really happening to our planet in the process.|
|Last updated July 2017|