Biography For Boys

Jürgen Klopp is the charismatic German manager who single-handedly overthrew the accepted order in German football, taking Borussia Dortmund from nowhere to back-to-back Bundesliga titles and the Champions League final. He had long been admired in the Premiership and was finally wooed by Liverpool in the belief he could bring back the glory days to the Kop. Klopp is revered as a master tactician with his own unique playing philosophies.

The life and death of the legendary lead singer of INXS, as remembered by his sister Tina. He died at only 37, but his fans are legion. INXS singer/songwriter Michael Hutchence was the celebrated front man of a band that was the biggest in the world. Michael's big sister, Tina, adored him from the start. From a 12-year-old holding him in her arms as a newborn, to being his teenage nanny, Tina remained Michael's trusted confidante until his sudden death.

Pretty Boy Floyd was a perplexing character as abhorred as he was revered. To the feds, Pretty Boy Floyd was a venomous, manipulative scoundrel who was egregiously lionized as an antihero with a heart of gold. A career bank robber supposedly associated with up to 40 bank robberies, his face would soon be plastered on the 1934 poster of the FBI's Most Wanted alongside John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Alvin Karper.

Long before hitting the stage as the lead singer of the iconic glam rock band Scissor Sisters, Jake Shears was Jason Sellards, a teenage boy living a fraught life, resulting in a confusing and confining time in high school as his classmates bullied him and few teachers showed sympathy. It wasn’t until years later, while living and studying in New York City, that Jason would find his voice as an artist and, with a group of friends and musicians who were also thirsting for stardom and freedom, form the band Scissor Sisters.

While tracking down his tormentor, the author encounters an improbable cast of characters that includes an elocution teacher with ill-fitting dentures, a gang of faux-royal swindlers, a crime investigator with "paper in his blood", and a monocled grand master of the Knights of Malta. Yet for all its global exoticism and comic exuberance, Kurzweil's riveting account is, at its core, a heartfelt and suspenseful narrative about the "parallel lives" of a victim and his abuser.

Is any superhero cooler than Batman? He’s a crime-fighting vigilante with a tragic past, a lawless attitude, and a seemingly endless supply of high-tech gadgetry. In this memoir, author Michael E. Uslan recalls his journey from early childhood fandom through to the decades he spent on a caped crusade of his own: to bring Batman to the silver screen as the dark, serious character he was at heart.

Waite "Schoolboy" Hoyt's improbable baseball journey began when the 1915 New York Giants signed him as a high school junior, for no pay and a five-dollar bonus. Based on a trove of Hoyt's writings and interview transcripts, Tim Manners has reanimated the baseball legend's untold story, entirely in Hoyt's own words. Over his twenty-three-year professional baseball career, Hoyt won 237 big league games across 3,845 2/3 innings—and one locker room brawl with Babe Ruth. He writes at length about the art of pitching and how the game and its players changed—and didn't—over his lifetime.

In Harrier Boys, Volume One: Cold War Through the Falklands, 1969-1990, Robert Marston, who flew Harriers for many years, draws together accounts from others who worked with this unique jet through its history. The excitement, camaraderie, and pride of Harrier operators shine through in the personal stories of those whose lives were changed by their experience of this iconic aircraft, both on land and at sea.

1967 explores how that pivotal slice of time tastes to a bright, obsessive/compulsive boy who is shipped off to a hothouse academic boarding school as he reaches the age of thirteen—just as Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited starts to bite, and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band explodes. When he arrives in January 1966 Robyn Hitchcock is still a boy pining for the comforts of home and his family’s loving au pair, Teresa. By December 1967 he’s mutated into a 6'2 tall rabid Bob Dylan fan, whose two ambitions in life are to get really stoned and move to Nashville.

Willi Langbein was just thirteen when the Nazis took him away from his parents under the pretense of protecting him. Their real reason was to turn him into cannon-fodder for use against Hitler’s enemies. Deployed to the collapsing Eastern Front in the last days of the war, Willi, now aged fourteen, and his schoolmates were ordered to stave off the relentless Russian advance. None were expected to return alive from the final battles of the Third Reich.

A chilling investigation into the unsolved “boy in the woods” murder; journalist Jim Cosgrove chronicles his decades-long struggle to uncover the truth of a family friend’s disappearance and death — perfect for fans of I'll be Gone in the Dark and Memorial Drive.

Those Boys on the Hill is a biographical coming-of-age story about three inner-city, African American brothers growing up in a group home in a farming community in Pennsylvania. Elliott Glover uses a mix of humor, sadness, and raw situational honesty to share the harrowing experiences that shaped the men he and his brothers Jacque and Iszel have become.

In June 1943, after long years of hardship and persecution, 13-year-old Thomas Geve and his mother were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Separated upon arrival, he was left to fend for himself in the men’s camp of Auschwitz I. During 22 harsh months in three camps, Thomas experienced and witnessed the cruel and inhumane world of Nazi concentration and death camps. Nonetheless, he never gave up the will to live. Miraculously, he survived and was liberated from Buchenwald at the age of 15.

After Baz Luhrmann’s movie, Elvis, hit theaters, audiences and critics alike couldn't help but question the Black origins of Elvis Presley’s music and style, reigniting a debate that has been circling for decades. In Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King​, author Preston Lauterbach answers these questions definitively, based on new research and extensive, previously unpublished interviews with the artists who blazed the way and the people who knew them.

In this uniquely American memoir, Homer "Sonny" Hickam beautifully captures a moment when a dying town, a divided family, and a band of teenage dreamers dared to set their sights on the stars. Looking back after a distinguished NASA career that fulfilled his boyhood ambition, Hickam shares the story of his youth, taking listeners into the life of the little mining town and the boys who came to embody both its tensions and its dreams.

THE RIVALS is a lightly fictionalised account of the meeting and subsequent friendship of two schoolboys in the autumn of 1977. When Stephen and Adrian begin their new life at Rose Bank Comprehensive School in Burnton, Lancashire they instinctively stick together from the very first day. Both clever, capable and easily influenced boys, their rivalry begins right away and soon comes to permeate their lives in and out of school, involving things ranging from running and swimming to Subbuteo, singing and coin snatching. A light-hearted trip down memory lane, THE RIVALS takes the reader back to...

Street and the Street Boys broke up, as everyone grew up and went their separate ways to pursue their own careers. He was alone, as he lost contact with almost everyone, including family members. Years passed. He continued on his roller-coaster journey to fulfill his passion. He found love. He lost it. He renewed his faith. He questioned it, until... Many obstacles came along as he walked alone through the twists and turns in his life, with eye-popping experiences as he became a grown man. Some were so powerful and frightening that only the strongest would survive.

Meet Osamah Sami: a schemer, a dreamer and a madcap antihero of spectacular proportions whose terrible life choices keep leading to cataclysmic consequences...despite his best laid plans to be a good Muslim boy. By the age of 13, Osamah had survived the Iran-Iraq war, peddled fireworks and chewing gum on the Iranian black market, proposed 'temporary marriage' not once but three times, and received countless floggings from the Piety Police....

The Boys in the Light follows the parallel journeys of Company D and Eddie Willner, the author’s father, as they experience two sides of World War II. This is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the strength of the bonds forged during war; a must-listen for fans of Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand and Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile.

Learn about the birth of the Z-Boys skateboarding team and how they influenced modern skateboarding.