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The only young adult book to tell the story of Aimé Césaire, the rise of Negritude, and the crusade for Black African and Caribbean independence from colonial rule.Aimé Césaire was a poet and, later, a politician from the Caribbean island of Martinique, who spoke out against the sufferings and humiliations endured by the peoples of the former French colonies. In Aimé Césaire: No to Humiliation, we are with Césaire in 1930s Paris. The young Martinican poet and his friends Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Gontran Damas are launching the Negritude movement. Together, they celebrate their Black African roots, protesting French colonial rule and policies of assimilation. They invite West Indians, Senegalese, Guyanese, and others to reject the suffocating French colonial presence and to take pride in their accents, their cultures and their shared histories.Aimé's great book-length poem, Notebook on the Return to the Native Land, and other works, are a global inspiration. His speeches enliven the crowds back home in Martinique, and he rises in the political arena, defending Martinican identity. As a writer, as the Mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy of the French National Congress, Aimé Césaire continues to write and to fight against colonial power and for the dignity of Black peoples everywhere.

The only YA book to tell the story of George Sand and the courageous fight for women’s rights in the 19th century.George Sand was the most popular novelist of the mid-19th century, and the pen name of Amandine Aurore Dupin. Sand wasn’t looking for scandal or subterfuge by using a pseudonym, but for freedom to live and to write, which she found by dressing as a man, writing under a man’s name, and loving who and how she chose. Her actions were an affront to the prejudices of the 19th century and a formidable lesson in courage.Young Aurore grew up torn between two women and two worlds: the conventional and narrow bourgeoisie of her paternal grandmother, who raised her in the countryside, and the modest, Parisian environment of her whimsical mother. Refusing to become the stereotype of femininity, she dreams of another world, where she can breathe, uncorseted, away from the strictures of social expectation. She ignores the slander and rumors that follow her, and builds a free woman's life, deeply respected by friends and contemporaries like Victor Hugo, Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert and many others. Using her fame as a writer, she fights for women’s and workers’ rights. She is the model of an emancipated woman.

A fictionalized biography of the great Polish-German revolutionary and anti-war activist. The only book about Luxemburg for readers 12+.Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish-born German revolutionary emboldened by the necessity of acting against imperialism, colonialism, and militarism. When she was jailed in 1914 for her anti-war speeches, she continued to speak against World War I by writing pamphlets published under a pseudonym. And after her release from prison she continued campaigning for her political causes, co-founding the Communist Party of Germany. Luxemburg was assassinated by the German Freikorps (paramilitary unit), who were sent by the German Chancellor to destroy the left-wing revolt. On the night before her death, she wrote about her belief in the masses and the “inevitability of a triumphant revolution.”  After her death, Lenin praised her, calling her “an eagle of the working class,” and her writings and commitment to democracy and internationalism live on.In this fictionalized biography of the great activist and revolutionary, we see her actions and ideas through the eyes of her faithful companion, Mimi, an alley cat who has a front row view of this astonishing thinker and mover who railed against building walls between countries and people.

"Never forget that this has happened/Remember these words." Primo Levi's goal was to never let people forget the rise of Fascism and the Holocaust—so that it would never happen again.No to Forgetting is a new addition to the "They Said No" series, and the only book about Primo Levi for readers age 12 and up.The Italian chemist and resistance fighter Primo Levi emerged from the hell of the Auschwitz concentration camp at the age of 25. As a testament to survival, he wrote what have become some of the most wrenching yet life-affirming books ever written about the Holocaust experience. Levi, who died in 1987, devoted his life to maintaining our collective memory of the Holocaust–insisting that we acknowledge and remember what happened. For future generations to never forget. In the 1980s, Primo Levi met a young Italian boy, 11-year-old Vittorio. Vittorio is upset with his grandfather for refusing to explain his past experiences in the Holocaust. Because anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial ebbs and flows but never goes away, Levi understands that our memory of the Holocaust must be continually maintained, so he decides to help the boy uncover the buried secret. Primo and Vittorio's relationship is a jumping off point to tell the story of the life of one of history's greatest witnesses.

The first young adult book about the great writer and social justice activist plunges us into the heart of Victor Hugo's fierce fight against the death penalty. A new addition to the "They Said No" series.The guillotine. When Victor Hugo was a child in early 1800s France, it was common to walk down the street and see a petty thief or vagrant beheaded at the guillotine. It was a brutal punishment and also a public spectacle. Hugo was sickened and haunted by these public executions. For him, no man has the right or the power to end the life of another, whatever the crime committed.Hugo was a poet and novelist, author of Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame among many others. But equally important to him was his work that protected life, like his book The Last Day of a Condemned Man, which allowed readers to understand what it might feel like to contemplate one's impending death. He also led a fight to save an assassin named Tapner: he had "declared war on the guillotine."Many activists have taken up the fight to end the death penalty. And much progress has been made around the world. Yet many countries--China, Iran, Egypt, the United States and many others--despite calls from those around the world who continue to say no, still allow the death penalty as a form of state-sanctioned punishment.