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If you're interested in getting your child or teen to keep reading during a hot, long, lazy vacation, offer them these cool summer books. Librarian Nancy Pearl's picks all have great first lines, three-dimensional characters and strong finishes.

Seventy years ago this Sunday, people in New York City looked up in amazement to see the ill-fated zeppelin Hindenburg make its way to an airfield in New Jersey. A poem offers a boy's-eye view of that sight.

Nearly 70 years ago, Jewish refugees appealed to the United States for entry in an attempt to escape Nazi Germany. A few Washington officials had a plan to allow the Jews to live in Alaska, but the proposal never passed Congress.

Sari Nusseibeh is the president of and a professor of philosophy at al-Quds University, the only Arab university in Jerusalem. He's written a memoir, Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life; he's also co-author of the People's Voice Initiative, aimed at building grassroots support for a two-state solution in the Middle East. Until December 2002, he was the representative of the Palestinian National Authority in Jerusalem.

During World War II, in Tunisia, Khaleb Abdulwahab helped save the lives of a Jewish family. He is the first Arab nominated for a "Righteous Among the Nations" honor from Israel's Holocaust Museum.

Our body's largest organ is the skin, something many people fail to realize. The history of skin is the history of humanity and reveals much about who we are. Nina Jablonski's new book, Skin: A Natural History, takes a closer look at this intimate and universal subject.

Five years after the arrest of six young men from Lackawanna, N.Y., questions remain about whether the so-called "homegrown terrorists" are as dangerous as authorities initially suggested. A book by NPR's Dina Temple-Raston explores the subject.

Charles Reynolds teaches at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and directs research into late-life mood disorders; now he has co-written a book about depression in the elderly and how to treat it. It's titled Living Longer Depression Free: A Family Guide to Recognizing, Treating, and Preventing Depression in Later Life.

Denis Johnson's new novel, Tree of Smoke, is one of the late summer's big books in a number of ways. It covers the Vietnam War and the U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia — and the life of a CIA agent whose career grows with the war. Also, it's more than 600 pages long.

In November 1979, gunmen in Mecca seized Islam's holiest shrine to proclaim the arrival of the Muslim messiah. It took Saudi forces, aided by French commandos, two weeks to flush the rebels out of Mecca.