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Loading... Strong Voices: Fifteen American Speeches Worth Knowingby Tonya Bolden
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I did the audiobook for this one. I thought that the audiobook would be fitting for famous speeches (one would hope with superb narrators) for which I was not disappointed. This was narrated by Prentice Onayemi and Lisa Renee Pitts who were magnificent. The speeches (while a majority are white men...as is everything in U.S history) there was a surprising amount of diversity among the speeches selected. Each speech was prefaced with historical context to the individual, the time, and the reason/events surrounding giving the speech. I will say as a historian I was quite ashamed that I had only known about half of these and had heard of about 75% of these. So, I will say this book was a delight and a fancy to behold the change in rhetoric over time. The was a portion at the end in which the illustrator talked about their journey of illustrating the book which made me sad I did not have a physical copy. Speeches included: Patrick Henry, “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” George Washington, Farewell Address Red Jacket, “We Never Quarrel about Religion” Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” Sojourner Truth, “I Am a Woman’s Rights” Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address Theodore Roosevelt, “Citizenship in a Republic” Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself” Lou Gehrig, “Farewell to Baseball” Langston Hughes, “On the Blacklist All Our Lives” John Fitzgerald Kennedy, “We Choose to Go to the Moon” Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream” Fannie Lou Hamer, “I Question America” Cesar Chavez, Address to the Commonwealth Club of California, 1984 Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights” no reviews | add a review
A collection of speeches that showcases the voices of those at the reins of power and of those who are not. Read the original words, sometimes abridged and sometimes in their entirety, that have shaped our cultural fabric. Introductions provide historical context and critical insights into the meaning and impact of every speech. For each speech, writer and history lover Tonya Bolden provides an introduction-- telling us what was going on at the time, who the person was, and what it all meant. And along the way, Bolden provides many fascinating insights. Understanding what a speech meant at the time can help us unlock what it means for us today. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)815Literature American literature in English American speeches in EnglishLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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This collection treats readers not only to well-known oratory, such as Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream,” Frederick Douglass’ “What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July,” and Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” (rendered here in standard English as “I Am a Woman’s Rights”), but also to some that are not as famous but still a necessary part of the discourse about what the American experiment meant and still means to different people affected by it. Seneca chief Red Jacket’s explanation to white American missionary Jacob Cram that “we do not wish to destroy your religion, or take it from you; we only wish to enjoy our own” is powerfully resonant today, for instance. What separates this collection from other anthologies that celebrate spoken patriotism is the way Bolden gives readers a critical historical context—explaining, for example, that Patrick Henry was enslaving black people even as he fiercely opposed Britain's enslaving the white colonists with unreasonable taxes. Velasquez contributes luminous oil portraits, rather disappointingly portraying Truth as an angry black woman but otherwise ably giving strong faces to these strong voices.
A golden celebration of the multicultural voices who demand that the U.S.—and the world—do better. (author’s note, illustrator’s note, timeline, sources, permissions) (Nonfiction. 10-14)
-Kirkus Review