Escape! The Story of the Great Houdini by Sid Fleischman.

 Jim Murphy's book The Great Fire.

 any book by Russell Freedman or the

 duo Betsy Maestro and Giulio Maestro

 Keeper of the Doves by Byars

Gary Paulsen's My Life in Dog Years which is a biography.

Small Steps: The Year I got Polio by Peg Kehret.

Shutting out the Sky, Life in the Tenements of New York, by Deborah Hopkinson? 

Freeman's The Wright Brothers

anything Seymore Simon