Every Human Has Rights: What You Need to Know About Your Human Rights
On the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this full-color photo-essay combines prize-winning poems by young people with beautiful photographs from all over the world. Unfortunately, despite the universalist message reinforced in a foreword by the UN’s former high commissioner for human rights, just about all the poems are by kids in North America. The busy, cluttered book design does not make for easy reading, with lots of pale, tiny type on colored screens. It is the big global photos on every page that will hold readers. Among the images are scenes of a family displaced by war walking across the border from Ethiopia to Eritrea; a homeless child sleeping on the street in São Paulo, Brazil; soccer players celebrating the end of apartheid; and a child picking cotton in Peru. The stirring pictures will stimulate classroom discussion about the declaration, which is quoted in full at the back. Grades 4-8. --Hazel Rochman