Biography Work

Leaving Western culture and their German home far behind, Amiira Ann and her husband, Chris, responded to the prompting of God to move to one of the most thoroughly Muslim cultures on earth, Yemen. The 9/11 attacks in the United States created the dangerous backdrop for reaching out to their Yemeni hosts with the love of Christ. With a commitment to work in relief and development, they would find, despite the threat of death, that their hearts would be forever knit together with this people so different from themselves.

The Talking Badge is a collection of true stories, fictionalized as necessary, by a cop who worked the streets for 30 years—twenty as a K-9 and bomb squad officer. Straight from the heart, self-described “crazy cop” Mike Garner tells you what it’s like to serve and protect the public. You'll experience what it's like to go on some of the funniest, saddest, and most exciting radio calls that can be imagined,

Over the course of his sixty-year career, Elmore Leonard, “the Dickens of Detroit,” published forty-five novels that have had enduring appeal to readers around the world. Revered by Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Raymond Carver, and Stephen King, his books were innovative in their blending of a Hemingway-inspired noirish minimalism and a masterful use of realistic dialogue over exposition—a direct evolution spurred by his years as a screenwriter.

Miriam Therese Winter, an award-winning musician and four-time Catholic Book Award-winner, shares her experiences of becoming a Sister, working with starving children in Ethiopia and with refugees in Cambodia, of exploring the mysteries of India and the wonders of God in her own backyard, of having breast cancer and having hope. She also illumines new aspects of community, Eucharist, the word and spirit, water and the stars, spiritual blessedness, and much more.

On July 4th, 2013, Connor Sparrowhawk, also known as Laughing Boy or LB, was found dead in a specialist NHS unit. Connor, who had autism and epilepsy, had a seizure while in the bath, and no member of staff was on hand to stop him from drowning. An entirely preventable death. Sara Ryan presents a frank, sometimes funny and touching account of her son's early life and preventable death and the unfolding #JusticeforLB campaign.

When Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin signed up for Teach for America right after college and found themselves utter failures in the classroom, they vowed to remake themselves into superior educators. They did that and more. In their early twenties, by sheer force of talent and determination never to take no for an answer, they created a wildly successful fifth-grade experience that would grow into the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), which today includes 66 schools in 19 states and the District of Columbia.

To ArcelorMittal Steel, Eliese is known as #6691: Utility Worker, but this was never her dream. Fresh out of college, eager to leave behind her conservative hometown and come to terms with her Christian roots, Eliese found herself applying for a job at the local steel mill. The mill is everything she was trying to escape, but it's also her only shot at financial security in an economically devastated and forgotten part of America. In Rust, Eliese brings the listener inside the belly of the mill and the middle American upbringing that brought her there in the first place.

Thoughts on the Jungle Trail is the story of the Maxey family in Papua Indonesia. It is a story of adventure, challenge, tragedy, and victory as they worked among remote tribal people. It is the local people's story as well. You will hear Nomarlok tell of his first encounter with the White people, and Oa'dak tell of the day the people came to kill the Maxey family, and Amene tell his stories of war and cannibalism. This audiobook will inspire fellow pilgrims to press on. As you listen, marvel at the sovereignty of God and how He is building His people in Papua Indonesia.

In Double Crossed, historian Matthew Avery Sutton tells the extraordinary story of the entwined roles of spy-craft and faith in a world at war. Missionaries, priests, and rabbis, acutely aware of how their actions seemingly conflicted with their spiritual calling, carried out covert operations, bombings, and assassinations within the centers of global religious power, including Mecca, the Vatican, and Palestine.

This honest and laugh-out-loud funny collection of essays tells the story of one woman's work-life, which spans four countries and dozens of jobs ranging from chasing bears out of campsites in Yosemite National Park, to serving popcorn in a pot-smoke filled cinema in Canada, to researching digital literacies in a British university. These essays cover workplace topics we're all familiar with: bat-shit crazy bosses; boring, mundane, "bullshit jobs;” annoying office drama.

In its early years, Duluth was a gold mine for lumber barons. Men were employed as lumberjacks and worked like beasts, only to be tossed aside like used equipment when no longer needed. The grand forests were raped for their prime timber, the balance burned wastefully. The men were coarse and hard, but they had to be to survive. More than any other people that ever lived in our land, these old-time lumberjacks could truthfully say, "No man cared for my soul." That is, until God sent three men to the great Northwoods of our country - Frank Higgins, John Sornberger, and Al Channer.

A single woman missionary, Becky Ruland, vividly writes about death defying adventures in communist nations where she lived for 14 years. From the challenges of learning Russian to understanding how to live cross-culturally in spiritually dark lands, Becky's words tell the stories of real people.

When she was a young girl, Jadie (and her missionary family) experienced a brutal attack while on the island of Palau in the South Pacific. That one hellish night left her physically, emotionally, and spiritually damaged. Jadie had the choice to live the life of a victim or to walk the hard road of healing that leads to wholeness in Christ. Though she faced physical injury, emotional scarring (including avoidance, memory loss, and regression), and spiritual attacks, Echoes of Darkness is a story of hope.

Ida Tarbell's earliest ambition was to be a biologist. While she put away her microscope in her youth, she continued to investigate people and situations of interest to her throughout her long and productive life. Tarbell was among the first American women to earn a college degree, graduating in 1880. Fiercely independent, she first took a job at a school in a different state. After returning to her family home, she fell into a writing and research assignment with a monthly newsletter.

Cheryl and her siblings are the offspring of an eccentric professor father and unflappable mother. Mindful of their ever-expanding family’s need for cash, her parents begin acquiring tumbledown houses in the campus town to renovate and rent. Dad, who changes out of his suit and tie into a carpenter’s battered white overalls, like Clark Kent into Superman, is supremely confident his offspring can do anything, whether he’s there or not.

Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) was one of the most influential African-American leaders of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born a slave in Hale's Ford, Virginia, Washington moved to West Virginia after the Civil War, where he learned to read while working in a coal mine. After several years of part-time schooling, he enrolled full-time at the Hampton Institute, a secondary school for African Americans, and graduated in 1875.

This audiobook is a history of my father, Giles Holtom’s life. He was a member of the Royal Army Veterinary Corps. Giles told me and my brothers these wild, imaginative and exciting stories as children, sitting at the dinner table. I believed them because, well, I was seven at the time, and he was my dad. It was only in later life, when I retold the stories to other people, that I realized their inherent lack of believability. So it was down to me to investigate the details of his life and the places he visited.

Who was Carolus Linnaeus, and what did he do to be dubbed as the "Father of Modern Taxonomy"? Listen to find out. Biography books are meant to inspire you to persevere and to act on the things you’re curious about. So go ahead and get your child this book today.

The Herbert Fuller, a three-masted sailing ship loaded with New England lumber, left Boston bound for Buenos Aires on July 8, 1896 with 12 people on board. Just before 2 a.m. on the sixth day at sea, the captain, his wife, and the second mate were slaughtered in their individual bunkrooms with the ship's axe, seven or eight blows apiece. Laura Nash was found with her thin nightgown pushed above her hips, her head and upper body smashed and deformed. Incredibly, no one saw or heard the killings...except the killer.

On a snowy November day in 1997, in Flint, Michigan, police found the body of 45-year-old waitress Nancy Billiter. Her corpse had survived a botched attempt to burn it. An autopsy revealed that she'd been bound, beaten, sexually violated, and then injected with a lethal mixture of battery acid and heroin. Police suspected Nancy's friend, Carol Giles, 26, and Giles' boyfriend, Tim Collier, who had often boasted of a murderous gangland past.