2020 PISD Summer Reading List

"Starting in World War II and moving through to the Cold War, the civil rights movement, and the space race, [this book] follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA's greatest successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades as they faced challenges, forged alliances, and used their intellect to change their own...

Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.
 
Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town,...

Examines the lives and deaths of four members of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, and the two men who murdered them on November 15, 1959.

The personal, often painful, histories of four Chinese American women who began meeting in San Francisco in 1949 to play mah jong are revealed as the daughter of one who has died searches for her sisters in China to tell them about the mother they never knew.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A twisting, haunting true-life murder mystery about one of the most monstrous crimes in American history, from the author of The Wager and The Lost City of Z, “one of the preeminent adventure and true-crime writers working today."—New York Magazine • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • NOW A MARTIN SCORSESE PICTURE
“A shocking whodunit…What...

Ishmael Beah describes his experiences after he was driven from his home by war in Sierra Leone and picked up by the government army at the age of thirteen, serving as a soldier for three years before being removed from fighting by UNICEF and eventually moving to the United States.

My Ántonia (pronounced with the accent on the first syllable of "Ántonia"),[1] first published 1918, is considered one of the greatest novels by American writer Willa Cather. It is the final book of her "prairie trilogy" of novels, the companion volumes being O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark. The book's narrator, Jim Burden, arrives in the fictional town of Black Hawk, Nebraska, on the same train as the Shimerdas, when he goes to live with...

When seventeen-year-old Jay Reguero learns his Filipino cousin and former best friend, Jun, was murdered as part of President Duterte's war on drugs, he flies to the Philippines to learn more.