The Children Paperback - 1999

First line

THE EVENTS WHICH WERE JUST ABOUT TO TAKE PLACE FIRST IN Nashville and then throughout the Deep South had been set in motion some three years earlier in February 1957, when two talented young black ministers, both of them strongly affected by the teachings of Mohandas Gandhi, had met in Oberlin, Ohio.

From the jacket flap

A remarkable true story of heroism, courage, and faith

Media reviews

"POWERFUL . . . TOLD WITH SUCH PASSIONATE CONVICTION THAT THE READER IS TRANSFIXED."
--The New York Times

"David Halberstam is America's Alexis de Tocqueville. . . . In The Children, he returns to his roots as a young reporter for the Nashville Tennessean, where he covered the start of the civil rights movement, the sit-ins that galvanized a generation. In following a dozen student idealists through the arc of their lives in the early 1960s to the present ambiguous moment at the end of the century, he shows how people make history and how the making of that history affects their lives. The Children is an important book, especially for today's youth, who will read in its moving and revealing pages the remarkable stories of flesh-and-blood people who were the fiber of a social movement."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review

"UNFORGETTABLE DRAMA . . . In Mr. Halberstam's hands, the early days of the civil-rights movement come to life as never before in print. . . . The Children has a rare power."
--The Wall Street Journal

"THE CHILDREN IS UTTERLY ABSORBING and contains some of the most moving passages Halberstam has ever written. . . . The civil-rights movement already has produced superb works of history, books such as David J. Garrow's Bearing the Cross and Taylor Branch's recently published Pillar of Fire. . . . David Halberstam adds another with The Children."
--The Philadelphia Inquirer

"STIRRING . . . Within this book live stories of timeless heroism. . . . Stories so fraught with hatred and hope, violence and suffering, fear and courage, that one reads the book gripping it with both hands, almost afraid to turn the page."
--The Washington Post Book World

Citations

• New York Times, 04/11/1999, Page 40
• Publishers Weekly Best Books, 01/01/1998, Page 46