Crispin: The Cross of Lead by Avi


A history teacher's perspective

Published in 2003 by Scholastic.
Winner of the 2003 Newberry Medal

You may wonder what a high school world history teacher is doing reading a book by Avi.

Well, here's the deal - I am searching for high quality historical fiction in a variety of reading levels for a future project for my class. Avi's Crispin: The Cross of Lead fits the bill perfectly for my students with lower level reading skills.

Set in Medieval England, Avi creates an interesting story and accurately depicts the toil of a peasant's life, pointing out some of the more interesting aspects of that time in history, including the plague, the power of the church, the massive amount of illiteracy, the filth, and more. What I like about it is that Avi writes a simple book without talking down to his readers.

This book fits my classroom's need wonderfully. For all of you teachers out there I strongly recommend it.

 I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Crispin: The Cross of Lead by Avi. 

 Reviewed on November 2, 2005.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts over the last 30 days

REVENGE of the TIPPING POINT: OVERSTORIES, SUPERSPREADERS, and the RISE of SOCIAL ENGINEERING (audiobook) by Malcom Gladwell

Image
Published in 2024 by Little, Brown, and Company. Read by the author, Malcolm Gladwell. Duration: 8 hours, 25 minutes. Unabridged. Malcolm Gladwell delivers another immensely entertaining and informative rambling discussion of, well, so many things in Revenge of the Tipping Point . Ostensibly, this is a look at the opioid epidemic, but Malcolm Gladwell's style always reminds the reader that the world is inter-related and complicated and so very interesting. I plowed through this 8 hour audiobook in just a couple of days. I listened whenever I could and, honestly, I forgot that this was supposed to be a book about the opioid crisis during the 2nd hour and I did not remember he directly came back to the topic during hte 7th hour. In the meantime we had discussed medicare fraud in Florida, Cheetahs in zoos, the dangers of monocultures, Los Angeles as the country's epicenter of bank robberies, COVID superspreaders, vehicle emmissions, and more. It was all so interesting and he does ...
Read more

Strong Enough to Die: A Caitlin Strong Novel (Book One) by Jon Land

Image
Loud and strong, this book goes at it hard Published by Forge Books in 2009. William Shatner once commented that the results of his directorial efforts in Star Trek V were "loud". One could easily say the same thing about Jon Land's Strong Enough to Die . Strong Enough To Die comes at you with a gunfight on the first page, has lots of gunfights throughout and ends up with guns and explosions as well. Does it work? Well, yeah. This is not fine literature, mind you. It is loud, lock and load, over-the-top Texas Ranger action. There's some attempts at trying to tie in Bush administration anti-terrorist policies and discussions about living with the aftermath of violence but those get overwhelmed by the gunfire. But, that's okay because too much thinking about the internal incongruities of the text on these matters just spoils the fun. It's the famed Texas Rangers and a bad guy who might be a good guy against the Mexican Mafia and an evil Ame...
Read more

THE KINGDOM, the POWER, and THE GLORY: AMERICAN EVANGELICALS in an AGE of EXTREMISM (audiobook) by Tim Alberta

Image
Published by HarperAudio in December of 2023. Read by the author, Tim Alberta. Duration: 18 hours, 16 minutes. Unabridged. Tim Alberta is a writer for The Atlantic and also an Evangelical. He grew up in the faith, but is very troubled by the tendency towards Christian Nationalism. He was inspired to write this book after an incident at his father's funeral at the church he grew up in.  Alberta embarked on a cross-country exploration of the intersection of Evangelicals and politics at Christian Nationalism - and how this combination is changing Evangelicals and they way they are perceived. Alberta does not come at this as an outsider. As I already noted, he grew up in the church - and still belongs to a church. To me, this is important. I read another book with a similar theme ( The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism ) that just didn't hit the right tone and answer the right questions because the author was coming from the outside. She didn...
Read more

THE DIRECTOR SHOULD'VE SHOT YOU: MEMOIRS of the FILM TRADE (audiobook) by Alan Dean Foster

Image
Published in 2024 by Tantor Media. Read by Stephen R. Thorne. Duration: 7 hours, 1 minute. Unabridged. Alan Dean Foster is a prolific sci-fi author. He has written over 50 sc-fi novels, but he is probably most famous for his numerous novelizations of sci-fi movies and TV shows, such as the original Star Wars movie (ghost written for George Lucas), Alien , Star Trek: The Animated Series , Krull , and The Last Starfighter . The Director Should've Shot You is the story of Foster's experiences as the man who Hollywood turns to to write novelizations of sci-fi movies. He talks about how that system (usually) works, the odd experiences, his interactions with directors, producers, and faceless stuidio executives, and his various thoughts of the strengths and weaknesses of the various projects.  My experiences with Foster as a young reader start with his two Star Wars books that he wrote when George Lucas  and his team were finishing the original movie. As I noted, he ghost wrote th...
Read more

THE PRICE of HONEY (Deadly Ambition Collection #1) by Liane Moriarty

Image
Published by Amazon Original Stories in 2026. Book 1 of the Deadly Ambition Series. Synopsis The Deadly Ambition Series is a collection of six short stories about people who push too far in pursuit of their ambitions and reap the tragic rewards.  Honey Becket is the fourth wife of a naracistic tech billionaire. Technically, she is his widow. The story begins with Honey Becket riding in an Uber on the way to her husband's elaborately staged funeral.  This is a near future sci-fi story - there is discussion about how rare it is that the Uber driver is an actual person and not a self-driving car. Artificial Intelligence is clearly a much larger part of day to day life than it is in early 2026.  Honey Becket is not against technology, but she still enjoys doing things for herself. When she gets to the funeral, she goes against the plan and invites the other three ex-wives to sit with her up front. And that's when things get interesting... My Review What I like best about thi...
Read more

SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

Image
  Published in 2024 by Hourly History. Hourly History's telling of the events of September 11, 2001 is surprisingly well-told for a history that is supposed to take a person about an hour to read.  Is this a complete history? Hardly. Why not? Read the first paragraph again. But, it gets all of the elements across in broad strokes - the motives of the  hijackers, the reasons for their targets, and the mass casualties - but not as bad as they could have been thanks to the bravery and professionalism of the NYPD and FDNY. The book moves on to discuss the aftermath, including tearing down the remains of the buildings, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, beefed up airport screenings, and the invasion of Afghanistan in order to search for the Osama Bin Laden and other terrorists responsible for the attacks. All of it is tied up neatly in a bite-sized e-book that younger readers (not kids, but younger adults that simply don't remember 9/11) could read to grasp t...
Read more

One Step at a Time: A Young Marine's Story of Courage, Hope and a New Life in the NFL by Josh Bleill with Mark Tabb

Image
Published in 2010 by Triumph Books I n a sentence, this book is about a 27 year-old Hoosier Marine who lost his leg due to an explosion in Iraq, re-built his life and got a job with the Indianapolis Colts as a community spokesman. All true but the book is so much  more than that because Bleill makes his story resonate with the reader. Josh Bleill joined the Marines at age 26. He never quite finished college. He never quite got serious with his girlfriend. He never quite got serious about his career. He just never quite going with much of anything until he decided to join the Marines, much to the surprise of his family (and to the dismay of his mother). Bleill tells the story of his experiences in basic training and the special training he received for Iraq with a lot of humor and gives the reader a sense of how difficult this training can be. Bleill takes us to Iraq and tells of his "one bad day" - the day he lost his legs and two of his friends when his Humvee dro...
Read more

CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH (kindle) by Hourly History

Image
  Published in 2022 by Hourly History. The short histories produced by Hourly History are designed to read in about an hour. In some cases the size limit makes for a very incomplete history. In this case, I thought that topic and the size limit matched up pretty well. This e-book details from the beginning (spoiler alert: John Sutter of Sutter's Mill fame was clearly not a good guy) and details the good as well as the bad of the Gold Rush. Turns out there was a lot of bad, such as environmental destruction on an unprecedented level (they used mining techniques that were outlawed just a few years later. How obviously bad were they if people who let children into mines said that these techniques are clearly out of bounds?!??)  The white miners also used genocidal techniques to wipe out the local Native American populations, killed Chinese immigrants that came across the Pacific to find gold and, of course, jumped the claims of other white miners and killed them. All of the gold...
Read more

SERGEANT STUBBY: HOW a STRAY DOG and HIS BEST FRIEND HELP WIN WORLD WAR I and STOLE the HEART of a NATION (audiobook) by Ann Bausum

Image
Published in 2014 by Blackstone Audio. Read by Pam Ward. Duration: 5 hours, 12 minutes. Unabridged. Sgt. Stubby wearing his medal vest (left), marching in a parade (upper right) and wearing his special gas mask (lower right). During the quick basic training for American forces heading for France in World War I, a stray dog found its way into a Connecticut National Guard training camp at Yale University. The unit was sprawled all over the campus and this Boston Terrier mix wandered around making friends all over. His friendly nature guaranteed a lot of table scraps. He marched with the men, learned the commands and blended in as well as a dog can. Somewhere along the way, someone taught him how to salute and hold the salute until it was returned. When it came time to board a ship and head to France, the soldier that he spent the most time with, Corporal James Robert Conroy, hid him under his coat as others provided a distraction. Once aboard, Stubby ensured he got to stay with his...
Read more

WOLF PACK (Joe Pickett #19)(audiobook) by C.J. Box

Image
  Published in 2019 by Recorded Books. Read by David Chandler. Duration: 9 hours, 51 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett is back on the job and glad to be doing the mundane work of a game warden once again. The game warden in the district next to his reaches out and tells him about a fancy drone she has spotted. The drone is being used to drive winter-weakened deer and elk into groups and then panic them into stampedes, killing and maiming several of them. Of course, this is a violation of Wyoming law. But, when they go to track down the owner, they find that they are stymied everywhere they look. Once they find the owner, it turns out that they wish they hadn't found what they are looking for... Review: This is a pretty engrossing thriller with lots of action. But... Huge chunks of this book is told from the perspective of characters that are guests in this series. I don't know exactly what percentage, but it felt like Joe Pickett was mostly a guest ...
Read more