Read for a Lifetime/Abraham Lincoln Award
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Previous years: Read for a Lifetime List 2005-06         Read for a Lifetime List 2006-2007

	READ FOR A LIFETIME 2007-2008 Booklist from Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White and Waldenbooks
	Across Five Aprils - Irene Hunt Young Jethro Creighton grows from a boy to a man when he is left to take care of the farm in Illinois during the difficult years of the Civil War.
	Alice On Her Way - Phyllis Naylor Alice is adjusting to her new stepmother, her brother's new apartment, her ex-boyfriends, and getting a driver's license.
	Armageddon's Children - Terry Brooks  In a futuristic world in which civilization is near total collapse, evil forces control the ruins of the former United States , killing and enslaving the survivors, until Logan Tom embarks on a missions to find a child who bears a powerful magic that could save the world.
	American Born Chinese - Gene Young  As alienated kids go, Jin Wang is fairly run-of-the-mill: he eats lunch by himself in a corner of the schoolyard, gets picked on by bullies and jocks and develops a sweet-inducing crush on a pretty classmate. And, oh, yes, his parents are from Taiwan .
	The Body of Christopher Creed - Carole Plum-Ucci  Torey Adams, a high school junior with a seemingly perfect life, struggles with doubts and questions surrounding the mysterious disappearance of the class outcast.
	Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee  - Dee Alexander Brown  First published in 1970, this extraordinary book changed the way Americans think about the original inhabitants of their country. Beginning with the Long Walk of the Navajos in 1860 and ending 30 years later with the massacre of Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, it tells how the American Indians lost their land and lives to dynamically expanding white society.
	Chicago Poems - Carl Sandburg Pulitzer Prize winning poet Carl Sandburg, was virtually unknown to the literary world when, in 1914, a group of his poems appeared in the nationally circulated Poetry magazine. His work found beauty and glory in the simple America that surrounded him: the farms, industry, landscape, culture, and most importantly, the people.
	Dreams From My Father: A Story Of Race And Inheritance - Barak Obama  In this memoir, Barack Obama learns that his father-a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man-has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey: first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother's family to Hawaii; then to Keya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father's life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.
	Elsewhere - Gabrielle Zevin Liz, having been killed by a hit and run driver, lives in Elsewhere with the grandmother who died before she was born. Initially mad at the driver and sad that she will not have a boyfriend and attend the prom, Liz misses her family and is sullen and depressed. Gradually, she begins to realize that life is not so bad in the hereafter.
	Fair Weather - Peck Richard Three farm children take on the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. During the first 48 hours in Chicago , the Beckett clan manages to run off the household help and embarrass their aunt in front of some of Chicago 's most prominent ladies.
	Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling Harry has been burdened with a impossible task: that of locating and destroying Voldemort's remaining Horcruxes. He must leave the warmth, safety, and companionship of The Burrow and follow without fear or hesitation the inexorable path laid out for him.  In this final, seventh installment of the Harry Potter series,  J.K. Rowling unveils the answers to the many questions that have been so eagerly awaited.
	Heart Of A Soldier - James B. Stewart Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author Stewart aims to capture the enormity of the World Trade Center attack by retracing one of the lives lost in the disaster: that of Rick Rescorla, head of security for Morgan Stanley. On September 11, after safely evacuating the Morgan Stanley offices in the south tower (he kept people calm by singing into his megaphone), Rescorla went back into the building minutes before it collapsed to search for stragglers.
	I'll Always Remember You.Maybe - Stella Pevsner The Last thing in the world she wanted was somebody new.  For Darien , the thought of Paul going off to college and leaving her to finish senior year alone was unbearable. But then suddenly it was their last few days together, and Paul was talking about dating other people. It was like a nightmare come true.
	The Jungle - Upton Sinclair This is the flipside to the American Dream. Jurgis Rudkus, the main character, is a Lithuanian immigrant who is awed by his new homeland, America . Jurgis and his family travel to Chicago and settle in Chicago's Packingtown, one of the largest meat packing cities in the United States . As Jurgis and most of his family are employed in their inhospitable jobs, their ignorance about the American Dream is agonizingly chipped away as they experience first hand.
	Mergers - Stephen Layne Four "deviant" teenagers, each with a special power, struggle to survive in a future where the Legion for World Alliance has merged all the earth's peoples into one combined race.  One is psychic, another empathic, another can morph into other forms, and the final one can travel through and control time. They live in a society in which their very faces will get them killed, a merged world where race has been eliminated and all people are the same combination of races.
	Motherland: Beyond The Holocaust: A Mother-Daughter Journey To Reclaim The Past  - Fern Schumer Chapman In an attempt to repair a fragile mother-daughter relationship, Fern Schumer Chapman agreed to accompany her mother, Edith, on an unexplained journey to Germany in 1990.  The voyage took them to Edith's hometown from which she had escaped at the age of 12 in 1938. After a lifetime of silence and secrets, Fern had the sudden opportunity to discover her own family history.
	Native Son - Richard Wright Bigger Thomas, is a 20-year-old black man, living in Chicago 's South Side ghetto.  Unemployed, Bigger hangs out with his pals; they occasionally commit petty crimes to get spending money and prove their manhood. Bigger expresses his pent-up feelings mainly through violence.  He gets a chance for a better life when the Daltons , a family of rich white liberals, hire him as a chauffeur. Disaster strikes on his first night on the job.
	Of Beetles And Angels: A True Story Of The American Dream - Mawi Asgedom This is the true story of a young boy's remarkable journey from a refugee camp in Sudan to an affluent Chicago suburb where his family survives on welfare. Following his father's advice to "treat all people - even the most unsightly beetles - as though they were angels sent from heaven," Mawi Asgedom overcomes racial prejudice, language barriers, and financial disadvantage, eventually realizing his dream of a full-tuition scholarship to Harvard University.
	A Raisin In The Sun - Lorraine Hansberry Dreams!  Everyone dreams! Each one in the family has dreams and one of the dreams is moving into a home, but the house is in an all-white neighborhood. Their future neighbors hire a man named Karl Lindner as a "welcoming committee" to try to buy them out.  However, Walter takes a stand and refuses to be intimidated or bought out.
	A Shortcut In Time - Charles Dickinson Would you travel in time if you knew that your entire life might be altered? What if you could prevent a tragedy from happening to someone you love? Josh Winkler's settled life changes when he chooses a shortcut to town and ends up 15 minutes in the past. On the same path, he meets Constance, another bewildered time traveler from the year 1908. No one believes them, especially Josh's doctor wife, who orders neurological tests.
	Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury Story of two young boys, Jim Nightshade and William Halloway, who have a harrowing experience with a nightmarish carnival. that comes to their Midwestern town one October. The carnival's leader is the mysterious "Mr. Dark" who bears a tattoo for each person who, lured by the offer to live out their secret fantasies, has become bound in service to the carnival.
	The Squared Circle - James Bennett The seamier side of big-time college athletics and the painful maturation of a young man are portrayed through the experiences of Sonny Youngblood, high school All-American. As he enters Southern Illinois University on full scholarship, his sole focus is on basketball. His cousin, Sissy is an art professor at SIU and becomes reacquainted with Sonny when she helps him get an independent credit he needs to stay eligible for the team. Though she is totally cynical toward the University's basketball program, a strong bond begins to form between them.
	The Story Of My Life: An Afghan Girl On The Other Side Of The Sky - Farah Ahmedi When Farah, now a 17-year-old high school senior living just outside Chicago, was a 7-year-old living in war-torn Afghanistan, she used to daydream about climbing a towering ladder to see what was on the other side of the sky. That's why when she woke up late one morning, she decided to take a shortcut to school. She didn't want to miss a moment of class. What happened along the way would change her life forever.
	Touching Spirit Bear - Ben Mikaelsen Cole Matthews is angry, defiant and smug--in short, a bully!  His anger has taken him too far this time, though. After beating up a ninth-grade classmate to the point of brain damage, Cole is facing a prison sentence. But then a Tlingit Indian parole officer named Garvey enters his life, offering an alternative called Circle Justice, based on Native American traditions, in which victim, offender, and community all work together to find a healing solution.
	Where The Sidewalk Ends - Shel Silverstein Shel Silverstein's world begins where the sidewalk ends. In this collection of humorous poetry illustrated with the author's own drawings, you'll meet a boy who turns into a TV set, and a girl who eats a whale. It is a place where you wash your shadow and plant diamond gardens, a place where shoes fly, sisters are auctioned off, and crocodiles go to the dentist.

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