Biography Girls

On Feb. 12, 2008, at E. O. Green Junior High in Oxnard, CA, 14-year-old Brandon McInerney shot and killed his classmate, Larry King, who had recently begun to call himself "Leticia" and wear makeup and jewelry to school. Profoundly shaken by the news and unsettled by media coverage that sidestepped the issues of gender identity and of race integral to the case, psychologist Ken Corbett traveled to LA to attend the trial.

For 16-year-old Joyce, the college building she was about to enter represented privilege, wealth, a life she'd never live. As a bedder, Joyce would be making the beds of the male students, sweeping floors, dusting desks. She never expected to also find herself mothering, chastising and sometimes even covering up for 'her boys'. The Staircase Girls takes us into the lives of Joyce and other bedders, like Nance, Maud, Rose and Audrey.

This is Nadina LaSpina's story - from her early years in her native Sicily, where she contracts polio as a baby, a fact that makes her the object of well-meaning pity and the target of messages of hopelessness, to her adolescence and youth in America, spent almost entirely in hospitals where she is tortured in the quest for a cure and made to feel that her body no longer belongs to her, and to her rebellion and her activism in the disability-rights movement.

An activist calls for better support of young families so they can thrive and reflects on her experiences as a Black mother and college student fighting for opportunities for herself and her child. Pregnant Girl presents the possibility of a different future for young mothers - one of success and stability - in the midst of the dismal statistics that dominate the national conversation.

Curl Curl, Sydney, January 1978. Angie's a looker. Or she's going to be. She's only 14, but already, heads turn wherever she goes. Male heads, mainly...Jane worships her older cousin Angie. She spends her summer vying for Angie's attention. Then Angie is murdered. Jane and her family are shattered. They withdraw into themselves, casting a veil of silence over Angie's death. Thirty years later, a journalist arrives with questions about the tragic event. Jane is relieved to finally talk about her adored cousin. And so is her family.

The chilling true story of the heinous murder of Karlie Pearce-Stevenson and daughter Khandalyce and how the case was cracked. How did two girls go missing for seven years and nobody noticed? In August 2010, dirt bike riders discovered human bones in the notorious Belanglo State Forest, where Ivan Milat had so cruelly tortured and slain seven young backpackers. The remains were those of a young woman, who the police dubbed 'Angel' after a T-shirt emblazoned with the word 'Angelic' that was found near the body.

In 1938, a young German rocket enthusiast named Wernher von Braun had dreams of building a rocket that could fly him to the moon. In Ray, North Dakota, a young farm girl named Mary Sherman was attending high school. In an age when girls rarely dreamed of a career in science, Mary wanted to be a chemist. A decade later, the dreams of these two disparate individuals would coalesce in ways neither could have imagined.

Tales of Hardship, Love and Happiness in Tate & Lyle’s East End Factories. On an autumn day in 1944, Ethel Alleyne walked the short distance from her house to Tate & Lyle’s refinery on the shining curve of the Thames. Looking up at the giant gates, Ethel felt like she had been preparing for this moment all her life. She smoothed down her frizzy hair, scraped a bit of dirt off the corner of her shoe and strode through. She was quite unprepared for the sight that met her eyes …

Appetite for America is the incredible real-life story of Fred Harvey - told in depth for the first time ever. As a young immigrant, Fred Harvey worked his way up from dishwasher to household name. With the verve and passion of Fred Harvey himself, Stephen Fried tells the story of how this visionary built his business from a single lunch counter into a family empire whose marketing and innovations we still encounter in myriad ways. Inspiring, instructive, and hugely entertaining, Appetite for America is historical biography that is as richly rewarding.

With humor and honesty, Girls on Film looks at the good, the bad, and the unfairly written women in film. A celebration of the power of cinema and the hidden messages within media and culture, this collection of personal essays explores the women who inspired and confused a young film enthusiast.

From Pulitzer Prize winner Teresa Carpenter comes the captivating true-crime story of a Mafia moll - “the female counterpart of the pseudonymous Henry Hill, the star of Wiseguy.... An insider’s view of mob life that is by turns comic and chilling” (Los Angeles Times).

In 2000, millions of Australians tuned in to watch Popstars, one of the world’s first reality television competitions, in which five girls were selected from thousands to become members of a new band: Bardot. And Belinda Chapple signed a contract that would turn her life upside down. Bardot shot straight to fame and Belinda spent the following three years relentlessly rehearsing, recording and touring. But Belinda discovered that the life of a popstar could be lonely, and it came with consequences she never saw coming.

The extraordinary true story of surviving the unimaginable … In 1945, seven-year-old Barbie and her sister Eva were trapped, terrified, in wartorn Germany. With their father missing, and hundreds of miles from their mother, news of the approaching army left them confronted with an impossible choice: to face invasion, or to flee on foot.Eva, aged nineteen, was determined to find her mother.

In Buddha and the Dancing Girl, Catherine Ann Jones generously shares experiences most of us will never have: acting on the stage and screen, living for years in a South Indian hut, writing award-winning plays and screenplays, and lecturing internationally. Yet her memoir offers a deeper gift: spiritual and psychological wisdom distilled from a lifetime of reflection

Pursuing my dreams was worth all the sacrifices. Finding the secret to a happy, peaceful life in self-love was worth the 13-year journey in a foreign country, because without it, I may have never found it. Life is about the choices we make. Each choice decides about our destiny. We are in charge of our destiny, especially when it comes to love and relationships....

It's one of the most brutal unsolved murders in the Elvis Presley universe - the 1981 slaying of his beautiful Blue Hawaii co-star, Jenny Maxwell. It was reported at the time that the murder was part of a botched robbery in Beverly Hills, but that's not at all what happened. Forty years after the murder, thanks to this book, it's finally been solved. For the first time, the truth is revealed in Murder of an Elvis Girl: Solving the Jenny Maxwell Case. And the truth is incredible.

What happens when a classically trained New York chef and fearless omnivore heads out of the city and into the wild to track down the ingredients for her meals? After abandoning Wall Street to embrace her lifelong love of cooking, Georgia Pellegrini comes face to face with her first kill. From honoring that first turkey to realizing that the only way we truly know where our meat comes from is if we hunt it ourselves, Pellegrini embarks on a wild ride into the real world of local, organic, and sustainable food.

Maddie built the village orphans a shelter and a school, and she provided food and clean water. But this was just the start. Despite being bedridden, and then hospital-bound by her disease, until her dying day Maddie became an indefatigable fundraiser for her children. Maddie was recognized, in life and posthumously, with a number of awards, honors, and memorials. But, until the end, all that was important to her was providing hope and future to the village children who had filled her heart.

In 1993, U.S. women earned the right to fly in combat, but the full story of how it happened is largely unknown. The Fly Girls Revolt chronicles the actions of a band of women who overcame decades of discrimination and prevailed against bureaucrats, chauvinists, anti-feminists, and even other military women. Drawing on extensive research, interviews with women who served in the 1970s and 1980s, and her personal experiences in the Air Force, Eileen Bjorkman weaves together a tale of the women who fought for the right to enter combat and be treated as equal partners in the U.S. military.

Wryly humorous and scarifyingly honest, Coolamon Girl is a beautifully crafted memoir of a daughter terrified of her mother. Scarred by her mother's conservatism and palpable dislike of her body and her sexuality, Di escapes her fraught home life and the stultifying narrowness of her 1950s and '60s small country town. Feeling lost in the big outside world, she travels the bumpy journey into adulthood full of adolescent doubts and fears--how she looks, how others see her, how to navigate sex and love. And finally, she discovers what she values as a woman.