Biography For Boys

In the 1600s, a boy from colonial Jamestown named Thomas Savage was traded to the Powhatans in exchange for a boy named Namontack. The English hoped this gift would prove their friendship to Chief Powhatan and allow them to teach Namontack about England. While staying with the tribe, Thomas learned their language and culture, and served as an interpreter between the Native Americans and Europeans.

Ivan Coyote is a celebrated storyteller and the author of 10 previous books, including Gender Failure (with Rae Spoon) and One in Every Crowd, a collection for LGBT youth. Tomboy Survival Guide is a funny and moving memoir told in stories, in which Ivan recounts the pleasures and difficulties of growing up a tomboy in Canada's Yukon, and how they learned to embrace their tomboy past while carving out a space for those of us who don't fit neatly into boxes or identities or labels.

When Thomas Edison was a boy, he loved performing experiments and coming up with new inventions. His curiosity sometimes got him in trouble, though, like when he accidentally burned down his dad’s barn! By the time he turned 12, he had found ways to make a living by learning how to print newspapers and send telegraphs in Detroit, Michigan. Imagine what he did as an adult!

In Wendy and the Lost Boys best-selling author Julie Salamon explores the life of playwright Wendy Wasserstein's most expertly crafted character: herself. The first woman playwright to win a Tony Award, Wendy Wasserstein was a Broadway titan. But with her high- pitched giggle and unkempt curls, she projected an image of warmth and familiarity. Everyone knew Wendy Wasserstein. Or thought they did.

The JT LeRoy scandal is a story of our times. In January 2006, the New York Times unmasked Savannah Knoop as the face of the mysterious author JT LeRoy. A media frenzy ensued as JT's fans, mentors, and readers came to terms with the fact that the gay male-ex-truck stop prostitute turned literary wunderkind was really a girl from San Francisco whose sister-in-law wrote the books.

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

Who could resist living for a year with a raccoon who is just about your best friend?

In this delightful memoir, Sterling North recalls his year with Rascal - a very mischievous and resourceful raccoon. Virtually everywhere Sterling goes, Rascal is there, and life is filled with one adventure after another.

This detailed account of his life, crimes, and death makes extensive use of FBI reports, government records, local newspapers, and contemporary journalistic accounts. Neither highly intelligent nor polished, Floyd relied on his cool demeanor, shrewd cunning, and expert gun-handling ability, but he was also considered by those who knew him to be generous and honest. During the depression, many people saw banks as enemies and Floyd as a hero, and helped screen him from the police.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had amazing talent at a very young age, forever changing the idea of what a child prodigy was.

Richard Wright's powerful and eloquent memoir of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. At once an unashamed confession and a profound indictment, Black Boy is a poignant record of struggle and endurance - a seminal literary work that illuminates our own time. The once controversial, now classic American autobiography measures the brutality and rawness of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive as a Black boy. Seventy-five years later, his words continue to reverberate.

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.

Voted by his peers as the best Western writer of all time and honored with a record seven Spur Awards, Elmer Kelton is the beloved author of such compelling tales as The Good Old Boys. A beautifully written and highly readable memoir, Sandhills Boy reveals the origins of a unique storytelling talent and Texas treasure.

The son of a Baptist pastor and deeply embedded in church life in small town Arkansas, as a young man Garrard Conley was terrified and conflicted about his sexuality. When Garrard was a 19-year-old college student, he was outed to his parents, and was forced to make a life-changing decision: either agree to attend a church-supported conversion therapy program that promised to "cure" him of homosexuality; or risk losing family, friends, and the God he had prayed to every day of his life.

It was 1945, and Romek Wajsman had just been liberated from Buchenwald, a brutal concentration camp where more than 60,000 people were killed. He was starving, tortured and had no idea where his family was - let alone if they were alive. Along with 472 other boys, including Elie Wiesel, these teens were dubbed 'The Buchenwald Boys'. They were angry at the world for their abuse and turned to violence: stealing, fighting and struggling for power. Everything changed for Romek and the other boys when Albert Einstein and Rabbi Herschel Schacter brought them to a home for rehabilitation.

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.

At first glance Gabriel Cardona is the poster-boy American teenager: great athlete, bright, handsome, and charismatic. But the streets of his border town of Laredo, Texas, are poor and dangerous, and it isn't long before Gabriel abandons his promising future for the allure of the Zetas, a drug cartel with roots in the Mexican military. His younger friend, Bart, as well as others from Gabriel's childhood join him in working for the Zetas, boosting cars and smuggling drugs, eventually catching the eye of the cartel's leadership.

Early on a May morning in 1979, six-year-old Etan Patz set off for school on his own for the first time. He vanished, and for three decades his case both frustrated and exhausted police, the FBI, and a public heartbroken by the tragedy. Then, suddenly, the police in 2012 announced that a former bodega clerk from the Manhattan neighborhood where Etan lived had confessed to killing the boy. Detectives were convinced they had the boy’s murderer, and prosecutors soon indicted the man, Pedro Hernandez.

A lyrical and authentic book that recounts the story of a border-town family in Brownsville, Texas in the 1980s, as each member of the family desperately tries to assimilate and escape life on the border to become "real" Americans, even at the expense of their shared family history. This is really un-mined territory in the memoir genre that gives in-depth insight into a previously unexplored corner of America.

Boyhood in the 1960s and ‘70s was a time for exploration and mischief. Author Michael Tougias found more than his share of misadventures in the woods and on the water: some life-threatening, but others innocently hilarious. Over time - and after reading a multitude of adventure books - these experiences took shape in his quest to be a mountain man, owning a cabin in the forest and living off the land. Part of that dream would come true, but only after a family tragedy that shook his world and forced changes in his life.

Raw, gritty, compassionate, surprising and darkly funny - Australian legend Jimmy Barnes' unforgettable childhood memoir. A household name, an Australian rock icon, the elder statesman of OzPubRock - there isn't an accolade or cliché that doesn't apply to Jimmy Barnes. But long before Cold Chisel and Barnesy, long before the tall tales of success and excess, there was the true story of James Dixon Swan - a working class boy whose family made the journey from Scotland to Australia in search of a better life.