Biography For Boys

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.

Empowering, insightful, and psychology-driven, Beyond Beautiful is filled with proven, no-BS strategies for proactive self-care. This stylish and practical handbook takes a deep-dive into all of the factors that make it hard to feel good about yourself, and offers sage answers to tricky questions. Beyond Beautiful is a much-needed breath of fresh air that will help you live your best life, know your worth, and stop wasting any more precious energy and mental space worrying about the way you look.

As if juggling a life with half-a-dozen kids, including triplets, isn’t enough, Steve Tate receives the life-altering news that one of his triplets, Hayes, has been diagnosed with brain cancer. The once-star collegiate football player finds himself fighting for his son’s life. This memoir takes you through the various challenges he faced raising a family of six kids and balancing a career, all while his son battled the odds. Both Steve and his high-school sweetheart, Savanna, found hope and happiness through the example of their 20-month-old son Hayes.

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.

What do King Tut, Galileo, Crazy Horse, Bruce Lee, Chico Mendes, Elvis Presley, Bill Gates, Tiger Woods, and the Dali Lama all have in common? They each left their mark on the world in a big way - and all were boys or young men when they did! This exciting and informative audiobook introduces listeners to the most fascinating boy heroes of all time and includes stories about 30 amazing individuals.

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.

Tony Hsieh’s first successful venture was in middle school, selling personalized buttons. At Harvard, he made a profit compiling and selling study guides. In 1998, Hsieh sold his first company to Microsoft for $265 million. About a decade later, he sold online shoe empire Zappos to Amazon for $1.2 billion. The secret to his success? Making his employees happy. Drawing on interviews with a wide range of people whose lives Hsieh touched, Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans craft a rich portrait of a man who was plagued by the pressure to succeed but who never lost his generous spirit.

Scarface is the celebrated rapper whose hits include "On My Block," "Mind Playing Tricks on Me" and "Damn It Feels Good to be a Gangsta" (made famous in the cult film Office Space). The former president of Def Jam South, he's collaborated with everyone from Kanye West, Ice Cube and Nas, and had many solo hits such as "Guess Who's Back" feat. Jay-Z and "Smile" feat. Tupac. But before that, he was a kid from Houston in love with rock-and-roll, listening to AC/DC and KISS.

From the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of Milk and political activist, a heartfelt, deeply personal memoir about growing up as a gay Mormon in Texas that is also a moving tribute to the mother who taught him about surviving against all odds. Mama's Boy is a stirring celebration of the connections between mother and son, red states and blue, and the spirit of optimism and perseverance that can create positive change in the world.

Britain's most popular cook describes his personal culinary odyssey, from dangerous encounters with his mother's weevil-seasoned cakes to being harangued by readers who think he deliberately styles Yorkshire puddings to look like a woman's private parts.

Pro football Hall of Famer Jim Kelly and his wife, Jill, were catapulted from a seemingly fairy-tale life of celebrity into a world of private struggle and medical uncertainty. What the public didn’t know, however, was that behind the scenes lurked more than a family’s pain at the dire prognosis of their only son. Hunter’s illness exposed the troubled depths of a marriage that had long been shadowed by uncertainties of its own.

Every memoir is a battle between reality and invention - but in her follow up to Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys., Viv Albertine has reinvented the genre with her unflinching honesty. To Throw Away Unopened is a fearless dissection of one woman's obsession with the truth - the truth about family, power and her identity as a rebel and outsider. It is a gaping wound of a book, both an exercise in bloodletting and psychological archaeology, excavating what lies beneath: the fear, the loneliness, the anger.

In visceral prose, Brorby recounts his upbringing in the coalfields; his adolescent infatuation with books; and how he felt intrinsically different from other boys. Now an environmentalist, Brorby uses the destruction of large swathes of the West as a metaphor for the terror he experienced as a youth. From an assault outside a bar in an oil boom town to a furtive romance, and from his awakening as an activist to his arrest at the Dakota Access Pipeline, Boys and Oil provides a startling portrait of an America that persists despite well-intentioned legal protections.

The Tony Award-nominated writer of The Tale of the Allergist's Wife and the long-running hit Off-Broadway play Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, and a Sundance Festival award winner Charles Busch has created a unique place in the entertainment world as a playwright, LGBT icon, drag actor, director, and cabaret performer, with his extraordinary gift for both connecting with and channeling the leading ladies of show business.

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.

It’s one of the most shocking unsolved missing-child cases in the world. Where is Kyron Horman? Why hasn’t the woman who police suspect is responsible for his 2010 disappearance - Kyron’s stepmother - been charged? That the seven-year-old disappeared from his grade school got the attention of parents around the world.

The author writes with perfect pitch as she takes us through one woman's life - from childhood to marriage and beyond - and memorably captures the collision of youthful longing and the hard intransigencies of time and fate.

Chicago Heights was long the seat of one of the major street crews of the Chicago Outfit, but its importance has often been overlooked and misunderstood. The crew's origins predate Prohibition, when Chicago Heights was a developing manufacturing center with a large Italian immigrant population. Its earliest bosses struggled for control until a violent gang war left the crew solidified under the auspices of Al Capone. For the first time, the history of the Chicago Heights street crew is traced from its inception through its last known boss.

In this hilarious and heartfelt memoir, Haley McGee sets out to calculate—with mathematical precision—the exact cost of love, and whether all of her former relationships were worth it.

Alan Kurdi’s body washed up on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea on September 2, 2015, and overnight, the political became personal, as the world awoke to the reality of the Syrian refugee crisis. Tima Kurdi first saw the shocking photo of her nephew in her home in Vancouver, Canada. But Tima did not need a photo to understand the truth - she and her family had already been living it.