Without dumbing down, the famous civil rights activist has simplified her YA autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story (1991), and made it accessible to beginning readers as a Dial Easy-to-Read Book. Like the original title, this one is cowritten by Jim Haskins, and the style is clear and direct, beginning with the drama of her arrest for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on the bus. Parks shows that her personal role was part of a wider political struggle, and she relates the bus boycott to the civil rights movement and to her continuing fight against racism. The design is spacious, with big type, and Clay's paintings, some of them based on famous photographs, capture the segregation scene and the fight to end it. The first-person voice gives weight to Parks' final message: I hope that children today will . . . learn to respect one another no matter what color they are. (Reviewed May 1, 1997)

Four chapters cover the famous confrontation on the Montgomery bus; Parks's life until that defining moment; the progress and outcome of the boycott; and what has happened since, in the civil rights movement and in Parks's own life. Although bland and sometimes awkward, the illustrations aren't babyish, and they do provide some visual clues to the easy-reader text, which has a strong focus and is compactly told.

I Am Rosa Parks ($12.99; PLB $12.89; Feb. 1997; 48 pp.; 0- 8037-1206-5; PLB 0-8037-1207-3): In the Easy-To-Read series, Parks and Haskins mold for a younger readership the material in their acclaimed Rosa Parks (1992). Unlike most books in the series, this one will require adult prompting for difficult words and ideas, although the language is smoothly simple in most places. The workmanlike black-and-white illustrations complement the story of a quietly courageous heroine. (Autobiography. 5-9)"