Cassidy Cud Chewing: YALSA Excellence Award Winners

The Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults, administered by YALSA, is for the best nonfiction book published for young adults (ages 12-18) during a November 1 – October 31 publishing year.

2014 Winner

Bascomb, N. (2013). The Nazi hunters: How a team of spies and survivors captured the words’s most notorious Nazi. New York, NY: Arthur A. Levine Books.

The SS official who organized and ran the Holocaust is sought and captured by an elite team of spies. Adolf Eichmann, the head of operations for the Nazis’ Final Solution, vanished from the world’s view at the end of World War II. Fifteen years later, an international team led by the Israelis keep him under surveillance and then capture him at a bus stop in Argentina, where he has been living under an alias with his wife and sons. He is smuggled into Israel to stand trial for the murder of millions of Jews. The story is meticulously researched and information is enhanced with photographs, extensive bibliography and source notes.

Follow-up: Unleashing Readers (http://www.unleashingreaders.com/?p=1261) provides teaching tools and discussion questions.

If you liked this book read these other nonfiction works:

Persico, J. E. (1994). Nuremberg: infamy on trial. New York: Viking.

Walters, G. (2009). Hunting evil: the Nazi War criminals who escaped and the quest to bring them to justice. New York: Broadway Books.

Wiesel, E., & Wiesel, M. (2006). Night. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

2011 Winner

Angel, A. (2010). Janis Joplin: Rise up singing. New York, NY: Abrams Books.

Janis Joplin’s story, her successes, her failings, her joys, and her sorrows are depicted with plain speech, interviews, and photographs. During her extraordinary, but short lived music career, she became a rock-and-roll legend with her blues-inflected voice and an electric stage presence. Joplin’s life was often out of control, yet she was hardworking and disciplined about her art. She died tragically from a drug overdose at age twenty-seven.