Rosa Parks: The Woman Who Ignited a Movement is one of a growing series of books and e-books that succinctly cover events in world history and/or the people who caused or influenced major events and changes in the world over a very broad range of time. These books are designed to be read in about an hour, and the authors are all listed as “Hourly History” (I don’t know yet if this is one person or a pool of authors).

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the book, but Rosa Parks is a person I was interested in learning more about. The Kindle version of this book and many of the volumes in the series are free at the time of this writing, so trying it out was a no-brainer! This book was actually more about the events that led up to Rosa Parks becoming an activist and how her refusal (in 1955) to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, AL had such a powerful affect on the Civil Rights Movement in the US. There wasn’t a lot of information about her life on a more personal level - before or after the bus incident - but it was a very interesting read and covered a lot of information about the Civil Rights Movement in more depth than I expected.

I thought possibly these short volumes would be geared more to kids with short attention spans, but they are expressed with an adult or older teen intelligence and provide a really nice introduction or overview/review of the subject at hand. I plan to explore more of them!