Biography For Boys

Into a memoir that is gripping, funny, heartbreaking, and unforgettable, Walter Dean Myers richly weaves the details of his Harlem childhood in the 1940s and 1950s: a loving home life with his adopted parents, Bible school, street games, and the vitality of his neighborhood. Although Walter spent much of his time either getting into trouble or on the basketball court, secretly he was a voracious reader and an aspiring writer.

In this installment, boys travel to the ancient world, following such famous figures as Alexander the Great and Hannibal, learning about the military battles that changed history. Beginning in Ancient Greece, the battles storm across the known world and into the Middle Ages, ending with the Spanish Armada's attempted invasion of England.

Dennis Nilsen was jailed for life in 1983 after the murders of 12 men and the attempted murders of many more. Seven years after his conviction, Nilsen began to write his autobiography, and over a period of 18 years, he typed 6,000 pages of introspection, reflection, comment, and explanation. History of a Drowning Boy - taken exclusively from these astonishing writings - uncovers, for the first time, the motives behind the murders, and delivers a clear understanding of how such horrific events could have happened, tracing the origins back to early childhood.

When Andrew Bridge was seven years old, he and his mother - a mentally unstable woman who loved her child more than she could care for him - slid deeper and deeper into poverty, until they were reduced to scavenging for food in trash bins. Welfare officials did little more than threaten to take Andrew away, until a social worker arrived with a police escort and did just that while his mother screamed on the sidewalk.

Growing up in suburban Detroit, David Hahn was fascinated by science. While he was working on his Atomic Energy badge for the Boy Scouts, David's obsessive attention turned to nuclear energy. Throwing caution to the wind, he plunged into a new project: building a model nuclear reactor in his backyard garden shed. Posing as a physics professor, David solicited information on reactor design from the US government and from industry experts. Following blueprints he found in an outdated physics textbook, David cobbled together a crude device that threw off toxic levels of radiation.

Funny Boy: The Richard Hunt Biography tells the life story of a gifted performer whose gleeful irreverence, sharp wit, and generous spirit inspired millions. Richard Hunt was one of the original main five performers in the Muppet troupe. He brought to life an impressive range of characters on The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock, and various Muppet movies, everyone from eager gofer Scooter to elderly heckler Statler, groovy girl Janice to freaked-out lab helper Beaker, even early versions of Miss Piggy and Elmo.

Early in the morning of Monday, July 8, 1895, 13-year-old Robert Coombes and his 12-year-old brother, Nattie, set out from their small, yellow-brick terraced house in East London to watch a cricket match at Lord's. Their father had gone to sea the previous Friday, the boys told their neighbors, and their mother was visiting her family in Liverpool. Over the next 10 days, Robert and Nattie spent extravagantly, pawning their parents' valuables to fund trips to the theatre and the seaside. But as the sun beat down on the Coombes house, a strange smell began to emanate.

The Boy They Tried to Hide is the startling true account of how truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.... Shane Dunphy was working as a resource teacher in a rural town when he was approached by the mother of one of his pupils, seeking help. She is worried for her troubled young son, who has been found leaving the house late at night to go deep into the woods near their home. He has spoken of meetings with a friend, Thomas, but no one else has seen him or knows who he is.

There are few people Gyles Brandreth doesn't know or hasn't met. Now a grandparent, he traces his steps back to being a three-year-old tearing around 1950s London on his tricycle, to boarding school where he had an appendix removed simply to get out of football, to Bedales, where he met Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, to balancing his growing love of theatre with his love for educating, the 'woolly jumper years', the stint as an MP, the years of close friendship with the queen, to becoming a septuagenarian Twitter star and stalwart fixture in British entertainment.

Nancy Cartwright, the ultimate Simpsons insider, gives voice to the boy immediately recognizable as none other than Bart Simpson. In this memoir, Nancy traces The Simpsons’ rapid rise to wild popularity, offers hilarious anecdotes about cast members and guest stars, and reveals what it’s like to be at the center of an American institution - one that reinvented the sitcom, rocked the TV networks to the core, and forever changed the face of television.

In her New York Times opinion column, Jennifer Finney Boylan wrote about her relationship with her beloved dog Indigo, and her wise, funny, heartbreaking piece went viral. In Good Boy, Boylan explores what should be the simplest topic in the world, but never is: Finding and giving love. Good Boy is a universal account of a remarkable story: Showing how a young boy became a middle-aged woman - accompanied at seven crucial moments of growth and transformation by seven memorable dogs. "Everything I know about love," she writes, "I learned from dogs."

Fritz Kleinmann was fourteen when the Nazis took over Vienna. Kurt, his little brother, was eight. Under Hitler’s brutal regime, their Austrian-Jewish family of six was cruelly torn apart. Taken to Buchenwald concentration camp, Fritz and his Papa, Gustav, underwent hard labor and starvation. Meanwhile, Kurt made the difficult voyage, all alone, to America, to escape the war.

In the 1980's, George HW Bush imported cocaine to finance an illegal war in Nicaragua. Governor Bill Clinton’s Arkansas state police provided security for the drug drops. For assisting the CIA, the Clinton Crime Family was awarded the White House. The #clintonbodycount continues to this day, with the deceased including Jeffrey Epstein. This audiobook features harrowing true stories that reveal the insanity of the drug war. The lives of Linda Ives, Gary Webb, Freeway Rick Ross and Kiki Camarena are shattered by brutal experiences. Not all of them will survive.

Throughout his young days at school and just afterwards, a number of things happened to Roald Dahl, which made such a tremendous impression he never forgot them. Boy is the remarkable story of Roald Dahl's childhood; tales of exciting and strange things - some funny, some frightening, all true.

In the summer of 1995, at the largest Boy Scout camp in Ohio, a night of sexual violence ended with one counselor dead and another hospitalized. The death was ruled "accidental." It wouldn't be the last death associated with Seven Ranges Reservation. James Renner, too, was a counselor at Seven Ranges that year. He was always sure there must be more to the story of Mike Klingler's death, because Renner also knew firsthand that the 900-acre camp was not the safe getaway it was portrayed to be.

An artist who helped define a period in popular culture, Johnny Marr tells his story in a memoir as vivid and arresting as his music. The Smiths, the band with the signature sound he cofounded, remains one of the most beloved bands ever and have had a profound influence on a number of acts that followed - from the Stone Roses, Suede, Blur, and Radiohead to Oasis, The Libertines, and Arctic Monkeys.

In this posthumous memoir, Joanie Holzer Schirm elegantly recreates her father's youthful voice as he comes of age as a Jew in interwar Prague, escapes from a Nazi-held army unit, practices medicine in China's war-ravaged interior, and settles in the United States to start a family. Introducing us to a diverse cast of characters ranging from the humorous to the menacing, Holzer's life story is an inspirational account of survival during wartime, a cinematic epic spanning multiple continents, and ultimately a tale with a twist-a book that will move listeners for generations to come.

Mikey is a Romany Gypsy and grew up living in a caravan on sites across the UK. He adored his family and the rich and vibrant Romany culture he'd inherited. Eventually though he was forced to make a heartbreaking decision - to stay and keep secrets, or escape and find somewhere to finally belong. But Mikey quickly discovers that life in the outside world isn't all he expected.

You are about to go back in time to the Wild West of the 1800s. These true, real-life adventures were told first-hand by Elijah Nicholas Wilson. He was a cavalry spy, hired to track down murdering bands of Indians. Before that he was a stagecoach driver on roads filled with outlaws. Before that he was one of the first Pony Express riders and was chased by Indians who nearly killed him with arrows. And before that he was a bronc buster who accepted a bet to ride the meanest bucking horse in the west.

Houston, Texas, in the early 1970s was an exciting place—the home of NASA, the city of the future. But a string of more than two dozen missing teenage boys hinted at a dark undercurrent that would go ignored for too long. While their siblings and friends wondered where they had gone, the Houston police department dismissed them as runaways, fleeing the Vietnam draft or conservative parents, likely looking to get high and join the counterculture.