Dear Educator,
You may not recognize the names Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan Massery, but you would almost certainly recognize their faces from a famous civil rights-era photograph that captured the full anguish of desegregation: a black high school girl, dressed in white, walks stoically toward Little Rock Central High School in 1957, as a white girl standing directly behind her, face twisted in hate, screams racial slurs.
In Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock, acclaimed journalist David Margolick tells the remarkable story of these two women through the past half-century. He recounts Elizabeth's struggle to overcome the trauma of her hate-filled school experience, and Hazel's long efforts to atone for a fateful, horrible mistake. The book follows the extraordinary journey of the two as they progress from apology to forgiveness to the complexities of reconciliation.
The Chronicle of Higher Education called Elizabeth and Hazel "engrossing," noting that it "serves to explode the simplifications of The Help and exposes the limits of apology and forgiveness." The Christian Science Monitor states that "the lesson of Elizabeth and Hazel may be that we shouldn't define other people's lives by one single moment. Instead, we can use their actions to define other lives—our own." Atlantic.com said that it is "unforgettable."
"If you read one non-fiction book during the year, it should be this one," writes a reviewer on the influential website Goodreads.com "If you have kids, or know teenagers who put every single moment of their lives on Twitter and Facebook, you should make them read this book. It shows how a picture, one picture, changed the life trajectories of two women. This is a marvelous book, and I recommend it highly."
For all these reasons, we believe that Elizabeth and Hazel would be an ideal book for your incoming freshmen to read before they arrive on campus, to raise discussions concerning the crucial history of the civil rights movement in America, and the significance of social justice and reconciliation at the most personal level. After all, the college experience turns on the importance of human decency and the ability to make peace with all sorts of new situations.
Please click here to request a free copy of this remarkable book—we urge you to read it and decide for yourself.
With best wishes for the coming academic year,
Debra Marr Bozzi
Educational Marketing Manager
Yale University Press
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