Arab American Heritage Month - Young Adults

One of the elite scholars in Baghdad's prestigious House of Wisdom, al-Khwarizmi is best remembered for his famous work Al-Jabr wa al-Muqabala, the text that defined the branch of mathematics known as algebra. He was also an accomplished astronomer and geographer. This fascinating biography describes in vivid detail the Islamic world's Golden Age, a period during the Middle Ages when learning and scientific advancement were revered and honored. Readers...

Molly Mavity and Pepper Yusef are dealing with their own personal tragedies when they are tasked by an anonymous person with solving the decades-old murder of Ava Dryman, an East German teenager whose diary was published after her death.

"Balcony on the Moon follows Ibtisam Barakat through her childhood and adolescence in Palestine from 1972-1981 and chronicles her desire to be a writer"--

Abdi Nor Iftin first fell in love with America from afar. As a child, he learned English by listening to American pop artists like Michael Jackson and watching films starring action heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger. When U.S. marines landed in Mogadishu to take on the warlords, Abdi cheered the arrival of these real Americans, who seemed as heroic as those of the movies. Sporting American clothes and dance moves, he became known around Mogadishu...

"Resisting his own urge to walk away, award-winning artist George Butler took his sketchbook and made, over the course of a decade, a series of remarkable pen-and-ink and watercolor portraits in war zones, refugee camps, and on the move. While he worked, his subjects--migrants and refugees in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and Asia--shared their stories. Theirs are the human stories behind the headlines that tell of fleeing poverty, disaster, and...

"A fictionalized account of a family fleeing war-torn Syria after their home in Aleppo is destroyed. They endure wretched refugee camps, ocean crossings, swindlers - all to find safety in the West."--

Growing up as a teenager in Amman, Jordan, in the 1980s and 90s, Mufleh knew enough to keep her sexuality a secret. If discovered, her conservative religious community wouldn't hesitate to kill her; she fears her family would cast her out. She made the tough decision to apply for asylum in the United States while attending college, causing her family to break ties with her when she refused to return home. In her memoir, Mufleh shows how she forged...

In Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, sixteen-year-old half-Hindu/half-Parsi Zarin Wadia is the class troublemaker and top subject for the school rumor blogs, regularly leaving class to smoke cigarettes in cars with boys, but she also desperately wants to grow up and move out of her aunt and uncle's house, perhaps realizing too late that Porus, another non-Muslim Indian who risks deportation but remains devoted to Zarin, could help her escape.

Follows Viola as she survives brutality in war-torn Sudan, makes a perilous journey, lives as a refugee in Egypt, and finally reaches Portland, Maine, where her quest for freedom and security is hampered by memories of past horrors and the traditions her mother and other Sudanese adults hold dear. Includes historical facts and a map of Sudan.