Silver People: Voices from the Panama Canal

Description

by Margarita Engle

• Reading age: 12 years and up          Grade level: 7 to 10

  In 1914, the world celebrated the opening of the Panama Canal, which connected the world’s two largest oceans and signaled A merica’s emergence as a global superpower. It was a miracle, this path of water where a mountain had stood—and creating a miracle is no easy thing. Thousands lost their lives, and those who survived worked under the harshest conditions for only a few silver coins a day.

From  the young “silver people” whose back-breaking labor built the Canal to the denizens of the endangered rainforest itself, this is the s ory of one of the largest and most difficult engineering projects ever undertaken, as only Newbery Honor-winning author Margarita Engle could tell it.