My Name Is America: The Journal Of Otto Peltonen, A Finnish Immigrant [Hardcover]

William Durbin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2000 | Age Level: 9 and up | Series: My Name Is America

In 1905 fifteen-year-old Otto describes in his journal how he travels from Finland to America, joining his father in a dreary iron mining community in Minnesota and becoming involved in a union fight for better working conditions.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Gr. 6-12. In this entertaining entry in the My Name Is America series, teenager Otto Peltonen uses his journal to describe life in a Minnesota mining town at the start of the last century. Accompanied by his mother and two sisters, Otto survives a horrendous journey across the Atlantic to join his father in America, where he anticipates idyllic opulence. Instead he is faced with life in a shantytown where the division by wealth looms ominously before him. As Otto changes from a dedicated student to a labor-worn miner, his parents go through their own fascinating battles, which add dimension to the plot: Otto's father joins a miners' strike against United States Steel, the first billion-dollar industry in U.S. history; Otto's mother becomes a vigilant suffragette. As in his earlier series book Journal of Sean Sullivan (1999), about the Transcontinental Railroad, Durbin enriches his historic backdrop with references to Twain, Carnegie, and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Historical notes and authentic photos round out this captivating, dramatic view of the past. Roger Leslie
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 9 and up
  
• Hardcover: 171 pages
• Publisher: Scholastic Inc.; 1st edition (September 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 043909254X
• ISBN-13: 978-0439092548
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,051,164 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

William Durbin is an award-winning author and a former teacher who lives at the edge of Minnesota's Boundary Waters Wilderness. A winner of the Great Lakes Book Award and a two-time winner of the Minnesota Book award, Mr. Durbin has published eleven novels for young readers. His novel El Lector was optioned for film by Jane Startz Productions; and his most recent work, The Winter War, deals with Stalin's invasion of Finland in 1939. His other honors include a Junior Library Guild Selection, Bank Street College Children's Book of Year list, the ALA's Amelia Bloomer list, New York Library Books for the Teen Age list, Maud Hart Lovelace nomination, Jefferson Cup Series of Note Award, America's Award commended title, and a Book Sense Summer Pick.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellant addition to the My Name is America series., June 28, 2000

By 

Rebecca Herman (USA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: My Name Is America: The Journal Of Otto Peltonen, A Finnish Immigrant (Hardcover)

In 1905 Otto Peltonen, his two younger sisters, and their mother leave their home in Finland and travel to Hibbing, Minnesotta, to join their father, an iron miner there. Although Otto attends school at first, he soon has to go to work in the mines to help provide for his family, living in a tiny shack in the mining town. Although their conditions are miserable and men die daily, Otto and his father work toward the day when they will have saved enough money to buy a farm of their own. The story is told through Otto's journal entries over two and a half years, as he describes everything that happens to him. I highly reccomend this book to historical fiction fans who enjoyed the previous books in this series.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great account on the hardships of Immigrants, July 31, 2001

By 

hiphopgirl_1000 - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Name Is America: The Journal Of Otto Peltonen, A Finnish Immigrant (Hardcover)

Otto Peltonen and his family leave all their relatives in Finland hoping to find a better life and to join his father. Otto dreams America will be great but when he reaches to the town he finds America is not at all great. At first Otto goes to school but soon finds that his family needs him to work in the coal mines to help them survive. Otto finds work hard in the dusty coal mines and the working conditions are horrible. What Otto can't understand is why some miners are much richer than his family. When Otto learns the truth he was sorry he ever asked. However even with the bad working conditions Otto and his family dream one day they will save up enough money so they will have their own farm like in Finland. This is a great accound by William Durbin on the harships of coal workers live. I highly recommend reading it!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars social history of labor for kids, October 16, 2008

By 

J. Stout (Portsmouth, Ohio) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: My Name Is America: The Journal Of Otto Peltonen, A Finnish Immigrant (Hardcover)

My 8 year old daughter and I read this aloud to one another for a Social Studies homeschool lesson, and I have to say that this book stands far above others in the historical fiction journals for children genre. William Durban, a resident of Hibbing, Minnesota, the setting of the book, crafted the story with such care that I do not doubt this book was several years in the making. I was unable to determine if the narrator, Otto Peltonen, was a real life person because unlike other books in the genre where the main character is supposed to represent "everyman" and hit on all of the politically correct multicultural themes, Otto and his family are quite believable. According to the acknowledgements page, Durban conducted a great deal of interviews with Finns living locally as well as back in Otto's hometown in Finnland, and these undoubtedly lend the story some of its authenticity.

Labor and the immigrant experience are the major themes. I appreciated how Durban carefully drew his characters such that none of them appeared to be literary archetypes, just real Americans. There were no heroes or villains, per se. I picked up this volume by virtue of it being one of the few fiction titles for young readers dealing with the Finnish experience, but beyond simply being in a different location (Minnesota) and having different ethnic players, this book seems to me to be far superior to other stories dealing with labor history of miners in Pennsylvania or West Virginia. Socialism is given not only fair treatment but one thing I appreciated was how the author doesn't really use the book as quite the soap box he could have, keeping the story tied to Hibbing and the unionism as it happened there without leaving out details about a few local radical eccentrics and smaller socialist attempts to organize, for example, a cooperative grocery store.

Vocabulary that is introduced are concepts like "replacement workers," contracts, wages, wildcat strikes, pickets, and opportunities to discuss the mining technology of the era present themselves throughout the book. Opportunities to launch other units on American history or economics or politics on U.S. Steel or Andrew Carnegie are presented, as well as ties to literature classics, including works by Mark Twain, Jack London, and O. Henry.