Customer Rating: 
Summary: ...It has changed how I think about child labor.
Comment: It hasn't only changed me but it has made me to do further reasearch and actually get-up and do something. This book is incredible! There is no way to describe this book. It has made a big impact on my life. Craig inspires you to take action and do good! It hard to describe this book....unless read it and witness his actions!
Customer Rating:
Summary: A book both to inform and to stimulate us all to action.
Comment: Someone has defined a best seller as a book that fills a need, leaves the reader a different person, and makes you want to rush out and buy one for a friend. Free the Children is all of that. Never have I been as touched by a book on social issues as I was by Kielburger's story of how he at twelve was challenged by the death of a child worker in Pakistan to invite friends to become informed about child labor around the world. Their interest quickly sparked what has become an international organization of children working on behalf of other children. Interspersed with a wealth of data on the subject, Kielburger gives numerous personal stories that take us into the lives of child laborers in Southeast Asia--carpet makers, mechanics, domestic workers, child prostitutes--we see their difficulties, but also see their courage, their dreams, their heartaches, and beneath it all, real, human children. Standard objections to ending child labor are dealt with frankly and wisely. And at the end of the book Kielburger gives information on how we all--children AND adults--can all be a part of ending child labor throughout the world. Kielburger and his co-writer Kevin Major are to be congratulated for giving us a readable, touching, real look into the child labor scene.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Book!
Comment: Read it! It will really move you!
Customer Rating:
Summary: This book shows how powerful a single soul is.
Comment: This book is a great book. I have read it 3 times. It is intresting to hear about what childhood is half way around the world. It makes me proud to be a kid because it shows even kids can try and save the world from falling apart. He is truly the most powerful kid in the world. - Scott
Customer Rating:
Summary: Free The Children: an eloquent and enlightening discussion
Comment: Free the Children is an eloquent discussion of the proper and improper roles forced on children around our planet, carried out through the story of its author, fifteen-year-old Craig Kielburger. After reading a newspaper article about a Pakistani child labour activist who was killed, likely for his activism, Craig began investigating the issue of child labour. A small band of his classmates giving speeches to local schools quickly snowballed into a lobby group of growing numbers and influence. Intent on seeing the evils of child labour first hand, Craig set off on a remarkable odyssey across Southeast Asia; most of the book is a recount of his adventures. One would be missing the point, however, if one took this book to be a travel chronicle punctuated with marvellous stories of meeting child prostitutes or raiding carpet factories. No, the point of Free the Children is not simply to tell Craig's story, it is to convince the reader that child labour is wrong, children should be listened to, and we all must do our part in achieving these two objectives. The last two chapters, the thematic heart of the book, are an overt discussion of these ideas, and it was here where I was decisively convinced of the worthiness of Craig's project. As he stresses repeatedly, we all must do more than talk about what we believe in; by serving explicitly and thematically as a call to action, his book does this. In our adult-focused world where children are forced, depending on their place of birth, either into lives of labour or lives of sedentariness, Craig's message of empowerment is crucially important, important enough that this book may well find a role in many a classroom, and regardless should constitute essential reading for the 10-18 age group.
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