In these tales of remarkable people, where there's a will, there's a way

Imagine you're a kid who wants to be an Olympic diver, but you're not allowed near the water. In 1932, that was the case for Sammy Lee, a Korean-American kid only allowed to swim in his California town's public pool one day a week, when nonwhites were permitted to use it. So instead, Sammy learned to dive in a sandpit. As you'll find out in Paula Yoo's Sixteen Years in Sixteen Seconds: The Sammy Lee Story (Lee & Low, 2005), 12-year-old Sammy was set on becoming an Olympian, but his father wanted him to be a doctor. The two made a deal: Sammy could dive as long as he kept up his grades. He was an ace in the classroom and the corridors, becoming the first nonwhite student-body president and being voted most likely to succeed.

Sixteen years later, Sammy Lee won the first of his two Olympic gold medals—and became a doctor, too! Your booktalk audience will find Dom Lee's sepia illustrations both dreamy and realistic.

In the 19th century, Mattie Knight dreamed of things yet to be invented. Emily Arnold McCully's Marvelous Mattie: How Margaret E. Knight Became an Inventor (Farrar, 2006) introduces us to a curious girl with a special genius. Relying on a toolbox she inherited from her father and her sketchbook of ideas, Mattie created all sorts of objects, including a foot warmer for her mother and sleds for her brothers, who became the envy of the neighborhood.

Another of Mattie's childhood creations saved lives. After a terrible accident at the textile mill where her family worked, she invented a metal guard that kept loom shuttles from flying off and injuring mill workers.

Mattie was also the first woman to receive a U.S. patent, for an invention that almost everyone uses today. Ask your booktalk audience to guess what it is. (Hint: We get it from the grocery store, and it folds.)

5,000 Miles to Freedom: Ellen and William Craft's Flight from Slavery (National Geographic, 2006), by Dennis and Judith Fradin, opens in December 1848 in Georgia, where Ellen and William, a young slave couple, hatched a brilliant, dangerous plan for escape.

Ellen, whose father was white, disguised herself as a young white man, and William posed as her slave. William cut Ellen's hair, and she put on a man's suit and shoes. To hide her lack of whiskers, she tied a handkerchief around her face and said she had a toothache. Illiterate and afraid she might be asked to write, she faked rheumatism by putting her arm in a sling.

The couple boarded a train bound for Pennsylvania, more than 1,000 miles away. As a slave, William had to ride in the baggage train. If caught, they might be tortured or killed. This terrific book will get your audience thinking about whether the Crafts' plan was worth the risk.

Most of us have heard of Jackie Robinson. Fewer know of Hammerin' Hank, the subject of Yona Zeldis McDonough's Hammerin' Hank: The Life of Hank Greenberg (Walker, 2006). But in 1933, 14 years before Robinson broke the race barrier in professional baseball, Hank did the same for religion.

As a Jew in the 1930s, Hank faced insults, mistreatment, and humiliation while playing for the Detroit Tigers. And though he was never a natural athlete, he worked so hard that in 1935 he was voted the American League's Most Valuable Player, becoming a hero to baseball fans and Jews around the world.

As Sammy, Mattie, and Ellen and William did, Hank triumphed despite nearly impossible odds. It's like Henry Ford once said: “Whether you think you can or whether you think you can't, you are probably right.”