Fighting Words

“I’ve learned that some things are almost impossible to talk about because they’re things no one wants to know,” says Delicious Neveah Roberts, the narrator of Newbery Honor author Kimberly Brubaker Bradley’s magnificent Fighting Words. The 10-year-old, who goes by Della, already sports a tattoo and openly admits that she has a “big mouth” and…

During the 1920s and ’30s, Americans who wanted to learn what was happening in other parts of the world depended on newspapers, magazines and books. In her beautifully crafted and engrossing Fighting Words: The Bold American Journalists Who Brought the World Home Between the Wars, Harvard historian Nancy F. Cott vividly portrays the important work…