KCS+Librarians

=**Book Hook with LOC Primary Sources **=

=The Book Brooklyn Nine: A Novel in Nine Innings=

FrFrom School Library Journal
Grade 7–10—In loosely connected chapters, Gratz examines how one Brooklyn family is affected by the game of baseball. Ten-year-old German immigrant Felix Schneider arrives in America in the mid-19th century and uses his speed to good advantage both on the ball field and as a runner delivering the goods his uncle, a cloth cutter, produces. His fortunes and his family's take a turn for the worse, however, when his legs are badly injured in the great Manhattan fire of 1845 (where he encounters volunteer firefighter Alexander Cartwright, the father of modern baseball). Subsequent "innings" deal with Felix's son, Louis, who has compassion for a Confederate soldier because of their shared love of baseball; Walter Snider, a Brooklyn Superbas batboy who secures a tryout for legendary Negro Leagues star Cyclone Joe Williams and discovers the ugliness of anti-Semitism and racial prejudice; and Jimmy Flint, a 10-year-old in 1957, who worries about the class bully, Sputnik, nuclear annihilation—and the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn. Curiously, the author passes over the team's glory years from the late 1940s to the mid-'50s. For the working-class Schneider/Snider family, baseball is an important part of their history, but it does little to mitigate the gritty reality of their lives. Economic uncertainty, prejudice, and the threat of violence are ever-present concerns, and the accurate, tough-minded depiction of these issues is the novel's greatest strength.—//Richard Luzer, Fair Haven Union High School, VT// Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Alan Gratz's website: @http://www.alangratz.com/ The author's website is a wonderful resource - visit this page for a complete look at the history connection to each "Inning" - @http://www.alangratz.com/brooklyn_history.htm The wonderful thing about this page is that the author (or his webmaster) has already provided links to LOC primary sources. Bingo - jumping off points!

This is a great book to teach students about timelines. Our idea is to have them help create the timeline as you read the book together. Locate primary sources relating to each of the major "innings" and have students complete the primary source analysis with each - of course you'd want to vary things along the way.

Introductory lesson - have students examine baseball cards from the LOC collection and then have them create their own! These can be used to group students, establish new seating arrangements, random calling cards - whatever.