The TeachingBooks Blog
Each month we feature free and fun book contests and giveaways. We hope you will enjoy the following opportunities as well as the author and book resources available via TeachingBooks.net.
The answer to what happened at Ebenezer Creek during General William Tecumseh Sherman’s historic March to the Sea in 1864 sent me reeling, had me weeping inside.
I thought a lot about the impact of violence as I wrote Burn Baby Burn (Candlewick 2016). My protagonist Nora Lopez would have seen a lot that year, both inside her own family and in situations all around her.
For years, I heard bizarre, thrilling stories about Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony; how it was written by the Soviet composer in the besieged city of Leningrad as the Nazis bombed the city; how it was performed there by a starving orchestra while the Red Army shelled the Germans to protect the concert hall; and how it was put onto microfilm and slipped out of the USSR, flown to Tehran, driven across the desert to Cairo, and finally brought to America to interest the United States in the Soviet cause. 
