A strikingly innovative and powerful story. Death Coming Up the Hill portrays the momentous events of the year 1968-the escalating war in Vietnam, the explosive Democratic Convention in Chicago, the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations, the menace of the draft, and rampant racism-as seen through the eyes of a perceptive seventeen-year-old American male. Told in verse with 52 episodes-one for each week of the year. It’s 1968, and war is not foreign to seventeen-year-old Ashe. His dogmatic, racist father married his passionate peace-activist mother when she became pregnant with him, and ever since, the couple, like the situation in Vietnam, has been engaged in a senseless war that could have been prevented.
When his high school history teacher dares to teach the political realities of the war, Ashe grows to better understand the situation in Vietnam, his family, and the wider world around him. But when a new crisis hits his parents’ marriage, Ashe finds himself trapped, with no options before him but to enter the fray. AGES: 14 and up AUTHOR: Chris Crow, a professor of English at Brigham Young University, has published award-winning fiction and nonfiction for teenagers, poetry, essays, books, and many articles for academic and popular magazines. He is a popular speaker and writer in librarian and teacher circles.