Biography Girls

An investigative journalist uncovers a hidden custom that will transform your understanding of what it means to grow up as a girl. In Afghanistan, a culture ruled almost entirely by men, the birth of a son is cause for celebration and the arrival of a daughter is often mourned as misfortune. A bacha posh (literally translated from Dari as dressed up like a boy) is a third kind of child - a girl temporarily raised as a boy and presented as such to the outside world.

Sola Mahfouz was born in Afghanistan in 1996. That same year, the Taliban took over her country for the first time. They banned television and photographs, presided over brutal public executions, and turned the clock backwards on women’s rights, practically imprisoning women within their own homes and forcing them to wear all-concealing burqas. As time passed, Sola began to understand that she was condemned to the same existence as millions of women in Afghanistan. Driven by this devastating realization, Sola began a years-long fight to change the trajectory of her life.

A través de testimonios escalofriantes y conmovedores, las autoras de este libro ofrecen explicaciones contundentes para entender por qué nuestros niños y niñas se vuelven criminales ante la indiferencia social, corrupción policiaca y la intolerancia del gobierno. Más aún se detalla la incompetencia de las autoridades, los vacíos legales y la incapacidad de las instituciones para ofrecer a estos adolescentes opciones para alejarse del delito, la drogadicción, las relaciones violentas o evitar la puerte por defender -o estar en contra- algún cártel.

Her first violin was tiny, harsh, factory-made; her first piece was "Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star". But from the very beginning, Min Kym knew that music was the element in which she could swim and dive and soar. At seven years old, she was a prodigy, the youngest ever student at the famed Purcell School. At 11, she won her first international prize; at 18, violinist great Ruggiero Ricci called her "the most talented violinist I've ever taught". And at 21, she found "the one", the violin she would play as a soloist: a rare 1696 Stradivarius.

Clare Bowditch has always had a knack for telling stories. Through her music and performing, this beloved Australian artist has touched hundreds of thousands of lives. But what of the stories she used to tell herself? That 'real life' begins only once you're thin or beautiful, that good things happen only to other people. Your Own Kind of Girl reveals a childhood punctuated by grief, anxiety and compulsion and tells how these forces shaped Clare's life for better and for worse. This is a heartbreaking, wise and at times playful memoir.

Chicago, 1924. There was nothing surprising about men turning up dead in the Second City. Life was cheaper than a quart of illicit gin in the gangland capital of the world. But two murders that spring were special - worthy of celebration. So believed Maurine Watkins, a wanna-be playwright and a "girl reporter" for the Chicago Tribune, the city's "hanging paper".

Amid the excitement of the early twentieth century, hundreds of young women spend their days hard at work painting watch dials with glow-in-the-dark radium paint. The painters consider themselves lucky—until they start suffering from a mysterious illness. As the corporations try to cover up a shocking secret, these shining girls suddenly find themselves at the center of a deadly scandal. The Radium Girls: Young Readers Edition tells the unbelievable true story of these incredible women, whose determination to fight back saved countless lives.

Captured in the 1930s before the words psychopath and pedophile were part of common vernacular, notorious serial killer Arnold Sodeman murdered four young girls with little thought of remorse. Without guilt, the evil serial killer strangled them to death with their own clothing and left their small bodies alone in the Australian brush, earning himself a chilling position in the annals of Australian crime.

Secrets of a Good Girl pulls back the curtain on an erotic world hiding in plain sight - a world where women are in control. In this erotic memoir, listeners will follow the real journey of “Josie”, as she goes behind closed doors into European sex clubs, aboard private yachts, and to exclusive erotic enclaves around the world.

For over two decades the identity of Melissa Witt's murderer has been hidden among the dense trees and thorny undergrowth rooted deeply in the uneven ground of a remote mountaintop in the Ozark National Forest. Determined to find answers, LaDonna Humphrey has spent the past seven years hunting for Melissa's killer. Her investigation, both thrilling and unpredictable, has led her on a journey like no other.

Bryony Gordon has OCD. It's the snake in her brain that has told her ever since she was a teenager that her world is about to come crashing down: that her family might die if she doesn't repeat a phrase five times, or that she might have murdered someone and forgotten about it. It's caused alopecia, bulimia, and drug dependency. And Bryony is sick of it. Keeping silent about her illness has given it a cachet it simply does not deserve, so here she shares her story with trademark wit and dazzling honesty.

With a number-one album in multiple countries and more than 53 million Instagram followers, Billie Eilish is a global star. She has collaborated with Justin Bieber and Khalid, headlined at Glastonbury and Coachella, and has appeared in Calvin Klein ad campaigns. In a short career, she has become an icon to Generation Z. Billie grew up in a close-knit family - her brother, Finneas, still writes and produces her songs - in Highland Park, a suburb of LA.

What can drive a young and seemingly innocent child to kill? Murder is horrible enough when perpetrated by adults, and yet the concept takes on a whole new level of chilling morbidity when a murderer is revealed to be a young boy or girl. Is it the result of severe trauma manifesting itself in the most macabre of ways? Is it the progeny of some severe mental disorder? Or were they influenced by the actions of the people they grew up with? Most of the time, the answers to such a question are simple but no less horrific.

Amelia Earhart captured the hearts and imaginations of people around the world when she became the first woman to cross the Atlantic by airplane. This audiobook, her personal account of the historic flight, sparkles with her high-spirited charm and adventurous determination.

Miss Unlikely takes you through Betty’s unconventional childhood, the surprising pageant journey, an incredible year as Miss America, a fairy-tale wedding, and everything in between. She offers wisdom on school, boys, self-esteem, choices, disappointments, insecurities, mentors, cyberbullies, and more. Behind-the-scenes moments and previously untold stories show how her faith and family ultimately carried her through difficult times. Betty’s personal and sincere account will remind you the only way to get where you want to go is through God’s unique plan.

Kathleen Rooney draws on her own experiences working as an artist's model, as well as the famous, notorious, and mysterious artists and models through the ages. Through a combination of personal perspective, historical anecdote, and witty prose, Live Nude Girl reveals that both the appeal of posing nude for artists and the appeal of drawing the naked figure lie in our deeply human responses to beauty, sex, love, and death.

Nobel Peace Prize winner and New York Times best-selling author Malala Yousafzai introduces some of the people behind the statistics and news stories we read or hear every day about the millions of people displaced worldwide.

Babe Walker, center of the universe, is a painstakingly manicured white girl with an expensive smoothie habit, a proclivity for Louboutins, a mysterious mother she's never met, and approximately 50 bajillion Twitter followers. But her "problems" have landed her in shopping rehab - that's what happens when you spend $246,893.50 in one afternoon at Barneys. Now she's decided to write her memoir, revealing the gut-wrenching hurdles she's had to overcome in order to be perfect in every way, every day.

Urbana, Ohio, was not a utopia when Beth Macy grew up there in the ’70s and ’80s, certainly not for her family. Her dad was known as the town drunk, which hurt, as did their poverty. But Urbana had a healthy economy and thriving schools, and Macy had middle-class schoolmates whose families became her role models. Though she left for college on a Pell Grant and then a faraway career in journalism, she still clung gratefully to the place that helped raise her.

As featured in the Oscar-nominated documentary Crip Camp, and for fans of I Am Malala, one of the most influential disability rights activists in US history tells her story of fighting to belong.