Island Of Hope: The Story of Ellis Island and the Journey to America
Gr. 5-7. Sandler revisits territory covered in hisImmigrants: A Library of Congress Book(1995) but expands the scope considerably: first, with a detailed station-to-station description of how immigrants were processed through Ellis Island; then with sweeping discussions of tenement life in the cities, the transformation of the midwestern prairie to farmland, and finally, the role played by immigrant laborers in the growth of railroads and heavy industry. He makes abundant use of original source material throughout, drawing hundreds of brief comments from an array of personal interviews, oral histories, and memoirs, all supplemented by dark but consistently relevant period photos. Though references to Yiddish as "the language of the Jews" and to a group of "Mohammedan priests" should not have survived editorial tweaking, this engagingly written, inspirational account will give children, particularly immigrants or descendants of immigrants, some sharp insight into the trials and triumphs of their predecessors.John PetersCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved