Biography For Boys

In 1975, Viv Albertine was obsessed with music, but it never occurred to her she could be in a band, as she couldn't play an instrument, and she'd never seen a girl play electric guitar. A year later, she was the guitarist in the hugely influential all-girl band the Slits, who fearlessly took on the male-dominated music scene and became part of a movement that changed music. A raw, thrilling story of life on the frontiers and a candid account of Viv's life post-punk - taking in a career in film, the pain of IVF, illness and divorce and the triumph of making music again - Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. is a remarkable memoir.

When William Kamkwamba was just 14 years old, his family told him that he must leave school and come home to work on the farm - they could no longer afford his fees. This is his story of how he found a way to make a difference, how he brought light to his family and village and hope to his nation.

This captivating book brings together two birds of a feather: Jean and Johnny, boys from very different worlds growing up in a small village in France. Jean is the genteel pharmacist’s son, dressed in his Sunday best; Johnny’s father is a rough, working-class sheep herder, always with the odor of animals clinging to him. Each year, over three hundred bird species visit their village, which intersects a major migratory flyway. The two boys’ stories converge when Jean enters a bird-calling contest.

Comedian, monologist, and storyteller Mike Albo takes listeners along on his quest for love in the digital age in this insightful, funny, quirky audio original.

An unflinching and luminous memoir that explores a father’s philosophical transformation when he must reconsider the questions what makes us human? and whose life is worth living? Before becoming a father, Chris Gabbard was a fast-track academic finishing his doctoral dissertation at Stanford. A disciple of Enlightenment thinkers, he was a devotee of reason, believed in the reliability of science, and lived by the dictum that an unexamined life is not worth living. That is, until his son August was born.

¡Presentamos la biografía infantil definitiva del legendario futbolista Cristiano Ronaldo! Todo niño con pasión por el fútbol sueña con ese chute perfecto, ese momento definitorio en el campo. Pero, ¿conocen la historia de uno de los mejores jugadores que el mundo haya visto jamás? Sumérgete en un relato que va más allá del deporte: trata sobre aspiración, dedicación y el viaje hacia la grandeza.

In early 1985, Michael J. Fox was one of the biggest stars on television. His world was about to get even bigger, but only if he could survive the kind of double duty unheard of in Hollywood. Fox's days were already dedicated to rehearsing and taping the hit sitcom Family Ties, but then the chance of a lifetime came his way. Soon, he committed his nights to a new time-travel adventure film being directed by Robert Zemeckis and produced by Steven Spielberg--Back to the Future.

In this delightful memoir, Jared Gulian describes the first four years of their new life in the country, its disasters, small triumphs, surprises, and pleasures. But most of all, he describes the warmth of the local community that welcomed them, saved them from certain peril, taught them how to cook, how to care for animals, and how to understand and love the land.

Notes to Boys: And Other Things I Shouldn't Share in Public is a "mortifying memoir" from best-selling author and tv/film writer Pamela Ribon. Miserably trapped in small-town Texas, with no invention of the Internet in sight, Ribon spent countless hours of her high school years writing letters to her (often unrequited) crushes. The big question is: Why did she always keep a copy for herself? You'll come for the incredibly bad poetry, you'll stay for the incredibly bad poetry about racism.

Driven by his single mother's dreams for his survival and success, Kevin Powell became the first in his family to attend a university, where he became a student leader keenly aware of widespread social injustice. But the struggle to define himself and break out of poverty continued into adulthood, with traumatic periods of homelessness and despair. As a young star journalist with Vibe magazine, Powell interviewed luminaries such as Tupac Shakur, writing influential chronicles of the evolution of hip-hop from his eyewitness view.

As a boy Matthew Waterhouse loved Doctor Who: he watched all the episodes and read all the novels and comic strips. What starts as a heart-warming story, of a boy growing up with Doctor Who as his trusted friend, engaging the listener with memories and nostalgia that will be familiar to any Doctor Who fan, takes a sudden twist when he is thrust into an alien and adult world - cast as Doctor Who's youngest ever travelling companion - for two of the series' most inventive seasons.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of A Boy in the Water, written and read by Tom Gregory. Eltham, South London. 1984: the hot fug of the swimming pool and the slow splashing of a boy learning to swim but not yet wanting to take his foot off the bottom. Fast-forward four years. Photographers and family wait on the shingle beach as a boy in a bright orange hat and grease-smeared goggles swims the last few metres from France to England. He has been in the water for 12 agonising hours, encouraged at each stroke by his coach, John Bullet, who has become a second father.

Jim Gash's comfortable life as a Los Angeles lawyer and law professor nearly ensured that he and Henry, a Ugandan boy languishing in prison for two murders he didn't commit, would never meet. Henry was losing hope and prayed for a sign from God. Halfway around the world, Jim listened to best-selling author of Love Does Bob Goff encourage lawyers to use their legal training to help imprisoned children in Africa. Jim felt an irresistible urge to respond to this call.

The image of Jonny Wilkinson's last-minute winning drop goal is etched deep into the nation's consciousness, everyone able to recall where they were during that iconic moment on the 22nd November 2003. Twenty years on, with their achievement still unmatched, the affection and respect this band of brothers command is as great as ever. There is still no modern player as beloved as Jonny Wilkinson, no captain as celebrated and respected as Martin Johnson, and no coach as revered as Sir Clive Woodward. And there is no one with the aura and drive of Lawrence Dallaglio.

In a tough neighborhood on the outskirts of Toronto, miles away from wealthy white downtown, Omer Aziz struggles to find his place as a first-generation Pakistani Muslim boy. He fears the violence and despair of the world around him, and sees a dangerous path ahead, succumbing to aimlessness, apathy, and rage. In his senior year of high school, Omer quickly begins to realize that education can open up the wider world.

On the seventy-fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht comes this untold story of a teenager whose act of defiance would have dire international consequences. On the morning of November 7, 1938, a seventeen-year-old Jewish refugee, Herschel Grynszpan, walked into the German embassy in Paris and in an act of desperation assassinated Ernst vom Rath, a low-level Nazi diplomat. He did it, he said, out “of love for my parents and for my people.”

Roald Dahl penned his first letter to his mother, Sofie Magdalene, when he was just nine years old. The origins of a brilliantly funny, subversive, creative mind were evident in boarding school, and as he entered adulthood, his penchant for storytelling emerged in his missives home from Africa, where he was stationed by Shell Oil, and then the desert camps of the Royal Air Force.

On Good Friday, 2015, a tornado rips through the countryside toward Whetstone Boys Ranch, a therapeutic boarding school in the Missouri Ozarks. Five young men sleep quietly in their upstairs rooms while two night-staff monitor the approaching threat. At 12:30 a.m., all seven souls hustle to the basement, and minutes later the windows on two levels of the 10,000-square-foot facility explode at once.

Helene Munson resurrects her father’s WWII journals and embarks on a meticulous investigation, exposing how the Nazis trained 300,000 impressionable children as soldiers. In 1937, Munson’s father, Hans, was enrolled in an elite German school whose students were destined to take leadership roles in the Reich. At fifteen, he was drafted—along with the rest of the Hitler Youth—and assigned to an SS unit. A personal lens into a nation’s shameful past, Hitler’s Boy Soldiers documents the history of the largest army of child soldiers in recent memory.

In 2005, when Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, asked why so few women, even today, achieve tenured positions in the hard sciences, Eileen Pollack set out to find the answer. A successful fiction writer, Pollack had grown up in the 1960s and '70s dreaming of a career as a theoretical astrophysicist. Denied the chance to take advanced courses in science and math, she nonetheless made her way to Yale.