Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales: The Underground Abductor

With all their magic wonderlands and scary dystopias, I sometimes despair that my kids will ever be interested in actual History. So I'm a little obsessed with Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales, a series of graphic books in which the Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale stalls for time on the gallows by regaling his captors with stories from his encyclopedic knowledge of history. After covering the Civil War, World War I, and the Donner Party, Hale turns in this book to American slavery in the story of Harriet Tubman. As always, Hale (the author and artist, who shares his name with his hero) streamlines but never softens the facts and adds just enough goofy middle-grade humor to focus attention on, instead of distracting from, each thrilling episode. Kids learn what happened, what it meant, and why it matters ... IN REAL LIFE! (Ages 8 to 12)