Biography For Boys

Throughout the '80s and early '90s, Lizzie Webb inspired the nation to get up and move as TV-am’s resident fitness guru. The music featured in her routines shot to the top of the charts, resulting in hits for the likes of Take That, Sonia, and George Harrison. She also collaborated with Simon Cowell for several years. Filled with heartfelt stories of the wonderful people she has helped along the way, as well as fond reminiscences and hilarious stories from her time on breakfast TV, Mad About the Boys reveals the fascinating two sides to Lizzie’s extraordinary and inspiring life.

If you ask people about their earliest memories, most will recall holidays and family parties. But for Arthur, many of his earliest memories include going with his parents to regular hospital visits and staying overnight for blood transfusions. These treatments have been a frequent part of his life since birth because he has beta-thalassemia major: a rare genetic disorder that reduces his body’s ability to produce enough healthy red blood cells.

When Helen Keller was very young, she got a rare disease that made her deaf and blind. Suddenly, she couldn't see or hear at all, and it was hard for her to communicate with anyone. But when she was six years old, she met someone who changed her life forever: her teacher, Annie Sullivan. With Miss Sullivan's help, Helen learned how to speak sign language and read Braille. Armed with the ability to express herself, Helen grew up to be come a social activist, leading the fight for people with disabilities and so many other causes.

‘Have kids, will travel’ is veteran travel journalist Kate’s mantra. Her intrepid spirit is infectious in this warm, engaging account of her family’s adventures and misadventures. She shares the life lessons learnt on their travels, from overcoming disappointment in Thailand to saying sorry in Japan, discovering perseverance in Borneo and learning about conservation in Malaysia.

The true story of Deng Adut - Sudanese child soldier, refugee, man of hope. Movingly narrated by Blessing Mokgohloa. Deng Adut's family were farmers in South Sudan when a brutal civil war altered his life forever. At six years old, his mother was told she had to give him up to fight. At the age most Australian children are starting school, Deng was conscripted into the Sudan People's Liberation Army.

The powerful and timely story of Peter Hain's political life fighting South African apartheid and modern-day corruption. Peter Hain has had a dramatic 50-year political career, in Britain and his native South Africa. This is the story of that extraordinary journey, from Pretoria to the House of Lords. Hain vividly describes his anti-apartheid parents’ arrest and harassment in the early 1960s, the hanging of a close white family friend, and enforced London exile in 1966.

Henry Markram is the Elon Musk of neuroscience, the man behind the billion-dollar Blue Brain Project to build a supercomputer model of the brain. He has set the goal of decoding all disturbances of the mind within a generation. This quest is personal for him. The driving force behind his grand ambition has been his son Kai, who has autism. Raising Kai made Henry Markram question all that he thought he knew about neuroscience, and then inspired his groundbreaking research that would upend the conventional wisdom about autism, expressed in his now-famous theory of Intense World Syndrome.

The Real Top Boys reveals the lives of the street gangs who have taken over, and now rule, dozens of corners of the UK's capital. Best-selling true crime author Wensley Clarkson takes us on a tour of the housing estates and volatile neighbourhoods where pride, rivalry and revenge are the codes people live and die by.

Orphaned by losing his mother at three and his father–who went missing at eight–Sydney author Francis Ravel Harvey avoided the Welfare State by being raised by four older sisters in the colorful environs of Sydney in the 1930s. The search for his cultivated English father is a constant thread throughout the book and reaches an amazing and heartbreaking conclusion when the author finally uncovers the truth surrounding his father’s death.

The mockery invented by Philip’s father, because he was badminton-mad and useless (said father) at all else, lingered with him through school in Malaysia. It travelled with him on an Aeroflot to England in 1970, aged 18, functioning on adrenaline. It stuck through his navigation of parochial middle England—washing backsides in a mental hospital, law practice, sports, and professional and personal relationships.

The story of one of the most controversial figures in all of hip-hop history, Dummy Boy tells the tale of Tekashi 6ix9ine and his meteoric rise to fame. In tracing Danny "Tekashi 6ix9ine" Hernandez's life from Bushwick to the heights of the rap scene, Complex reporter Shawn Setaro illuminates the story of the young rapper who forged an alliance with a notorious street gang to bolster his image and boost his internet clout.

From an outspoken feminist, a leader of the Women's Movement in the 1960s and '70s—a candid, wide-ranging and deeply personal memoir that is, as well, an illuminating historical document of a time and a fight for profound societal change. Brenda Feigen has lived many lifetimes within one—lawyer, wife and mother, civil rights activist, politician, Hollywood movie producer—and in each she has faced down the specter of discrimination against women.

Because Johnny Cash cut his classic singles at Sun Records in Memphis and reigned for years as country royalty from his Nashville-area mansion, people tend to associate the Man in Black with Tennessee. But some of Cash’s best songs—including classics like “Pickin’ Time,” “Big River,” and “Five Feet High and Rising”—sprang from his youth in the sweltering cotton fields of northeastern Arkansas.

From the depths of financial despair to the glittering celebrity world of the rich and famous, Theo Fennell's journey has been anything but predictable. With humour, candour and self-depreciation, Fennell charts the highs and lows of his remarkable career, from dealing with hardened criminals to designing for Elton John, Lady Gaga and Madonna.

An eight-year-old boy survives triple-limb amputation by freight train. One of America’s famous yet untold stories of overcoming the stigma of disability and responding with inspirational resilience. To change your perspective on life, listen now! Boy Interrupted takes the listener on Ricky’s remarkable journey of miraculous survival, the power of kindness, humor, mistakes, post-traumatic growth, and other surprises.

Acclaimed historian and New York Times best-selling author of Tour of Duty Douglas Brinkley brings the riveting account of the brave U.S. Army Rangers who stormed the coast of Normandy on D-Day and the President, 40 years later, who paid them homage.

Take a trip back in time to rural East Texas in the 1960s through early '80s. In this memoir of his childhood, Jim Largent takes you back to a simpler time, where television had three channels, kids played outside all day without fear, and no one had ever heard of a cell phone. From mischief with childhood friends, games on the school playground, pre-teen romances, and holiday traditions, take a deep dive into the daily lives and activities during that time.

Tales from the estates of Middlesbrough over the last 50 years.... These are the memoirs of Paddy Moloney's very colourful life. From a two up two down in Cannon Street to Grovehill and the luxury of an inside lav! Going from a "quiet lad" at St Joseph's to his first spell in borstal. This is a brutally honest account of Paddy's journey from an Altar boy to a Criminal, spanning four decades including his dealings with some of Middlesbrough's notorious characters to the big guns from further afield. This book pulls you in from the very first chapter.

Glen Walsh and Steven Alward were childhood friends in their tight-knit working-class community in Shortland, on the outskirts of Newcastle, New South Wales. Both proud altar boys at the local Catholic church, they went on to attend the city's Catholic boys' highs schools: Glen to Marist Brothers and Steven to St Pius X. Both did well: Steven became a journalist, Glen a priest. But when Glen discovered another priest was sexually abusing boys, he reported the offending to police, breaking Canon Law and his vows to the Catholic 'brotherhood' in the process.

From a garden shed laboratory where he manufactured the greatest stink in the world to a tent high in the Arctic in pursuit of fossils, this is a story of obsession and love of nature, flavoured with the peculiarities and restrictions of post-war Britain. Fortey tells the story of following his father down riverbanks to fish for trout, and also of his father's shocking death. He unfolds his early passions–fungi, ammonite hunting and eyeing up bird's eggs. He evokes with warmth and wit how the natural world started out as his playground and refuge, then became his life's work.