Childhood Biography

A book that instantly captured the hearts of readers across the country, An American Childhood is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard’s poignant, vivid memoir of growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s.

My story starts the day that my parents told me we must leave our adopted home forever. Because of the soldiers and the drought we barely had enough to eat and we could no longer stay to help the people in our village.

Adopted at six months old by Dubliners Sean and Helen Gallagher, PJ spent much of his childhood knocking back Lucozade with the local alcoholics in his parents' northside pub. But the chaos that reigned for his first ten years was nothing compared to what happened when - having lost the pub - Helen took in psychiatric patients from the local hospital to give them 'care in the community'. Now it was a household of ten - PJ, his sister, his parents and six lost souls. Worst. Idea. Ever. Madhouse is PJ's riotous life story.

The extraordinary memoir of a childhood spent in the 'Children of God' cult. Rebel tells the story of Faith, a woman who grew up in the Children of God cult (known latterly as The Family). Now in her 40s with two teenage children of her own, Faith's first-person narrative alternates between her childhood adventures and traumas within the cult and her post-cult life following her escape at the age of 19.

This is a summary with key takeaways and analysis of Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood, television star Trevor Noah's memoir about growing up as a mixed-race child.

In this follow-up to Billy's first international best seller, an autobiography set largely in Thailand's infamous prison system, Billy sets out to explore his experience of childhood abuse that would lead to a life of drug addiction and near-constant incarceration. After Billy's sentence in Klong Prem prison was commuted as a result of his extraordinary success as a Muay Thai boxer, he returned to the UK. In this vividly told story, Liverpudlian Billy contrasts his first-hand experience of one of the cruellest prison systems in the world with his experience of UK prisons.

The inspiring stories of five people who changed history, including Leonardo da Vinci, who painted the Mona Lisa; Christopher Wren, who rebuilt London; Antoni Gaudí, who built the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona; Pablo Picasso, the famous Spanish painter; and Frida Kahlo, the famous Mexican female artist.

Tendöl Namling turned 60 in March 2019. She was born at the time when the Dalai Lama fled from Lhasa and the uprising of his people by the Chinese People's Army was brutally suppressed. She has lived for 22 years under Chinese rule. As the daughter of a high government official, she underwent the ordeal of "re-education" with full force. All she has kept from these years are painful memories and some crumpled photographs. They show her with her friends and cousins in Lhasa, smiling as if nothing had happened.

Every great author started out as a kid. Before the best sellers, fan clubs, and beloved stories we know today, the world's most celebrated writers had regular-kid problems just like you. Sam Clemens (aka Mark Twain) loved to skip school and make mischief, with his best friend Tom, of course! A young J. R. R. Tolkien was bitten by a huge tarantula - or as he called it, "a spider as big as a dragon." Toddler Zora Neale Hurston took her first steps when a wild hog entered her house and started chasing her!

In little more than 50 years the regard with which the Royal Family are held has changed out of all recognition. Their private lives are now the stuff of soap opera and it seems any one who comes into contact with them sells their story to the magazines or to the newspapers. The Little Princesses was published in 1950 to a furore we cannot imagine today. Crawfie was demonised by the press, and the Queen Mother, who had been a great friend and who had, Crawfie maintained, given her permission to write the account, never spoke to her again.

In 1975, seven-year-old Doina Cornell left England with her father Jimmy Cornell, mother and brother to spend the next six years sailing around the world on a small yacht. The author has drawn on her memories, diaries and stories, to re-create the perfect life led by a sailing child: swimming, diving and playing the days away in deserted anchorages; visiting some of the most beautiful islands in the world; falling in love with the sea in all its ever-changing moods, from balmy trade wind ocean passages to the treacherous breakers that crash onto tropical reefs.

Of Kenya's largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu, Ngugi wa Thiongo was born in 1938 in the backlands of his country (Kiambu district) to a father whose four wives bore him two dozen or so children. Ngugi was the fifth child of the third wife. His father was a peasant farmer forced to become a squatter after the British Imperial Act of 1915. Before going off to school, he had what was then considered a bizarre and inexplicable thirst for learning....

Why would the multimillionaire producer of Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, and Miss Saigon take his limo from Manhattan to the struggling former steel town of Levittown, Pennsylvania, to see a high school production of Les Misérables? To see the show performed by the astoundingly successful theater company at Harry S Truman High School, run by its legendary director, Lou Volpe. Broadway turns to Truman High when trying out controversial shows such as Rent and Spring Awakening before they move on to high school theater programs across the nation. Volpe’s students from this blue-collar town go on to become Emmy-winning producers, entertainment executives, newscasters, and community-theater founders.

Among Schoolchildren illuminates a year in the life of a fifth-grade teacher struggling to make a positive difference in the lives of her students. In Holyoke, Massachuetts, Christine Zajac toils far from the limelight. Her story, and that of her students is heart-warming and inspiring as she helps them to become full-scale human beings. We find that some are brilliant, that others are troubled, and that Ms. Zajac never gives up.

Sometimes there is an entire year that sparkles in the memory as a time brimming over with the fullness of life. By the age of 10, Annie’s intervals of awakening began to occur more frequently; the hours and minutes of the years that followed were spent reveling in the delights and the anguishes that accompany being fully alive.

Andrea Kott thought of herself as “the welfare Jew.” The daughter of a single mother whose depression and drinking pitched them into poverty, her stormy life looked nothing like that of the Jewish kids she knew: It defied every stereotype she associated with being Jewish—having an intact family and material wealth, and becoming a bat mitzvah. Alienated and ashamed, Kott felt ineligible to be Jewish, yet hungered for connection to the tradition and to God. It took a near-fatal accident, her mother’s death, marriage and motherhood, and losing a beloved brother for her to find her Jewish home.

Flora Miller Biddle was born a blue-blood. The granddaughter of the Whitney museum founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, her childhood played out in a sort of Wharton landscape as she was shielded from the woes of the world. But money itself is not the source of happiness. In this wonderfully evocative memoir, Flora Miller Biddle examines, critiques, and pays homage to the people and places of her childhood that shaped her life.

One of the most important figures in the Scots revival of the late 20th and early 21st centuries is Billy Kay. Through radio, television, plays, creative writing and especially his hugely influential book Scots The Mither Tongue, Kay’s work helped change people’s negative perception of Scots and paved the way for its acceptance as a key element in Scottish cultural identity.

When Jill Sitnick sat on her therapist’s couch trying to stop the panic attack that had lasted for months, she didn’t know she would eventually heal her deeply embedded childhood trauma with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. In Rescuing Jill, Jill shows you why it took a year, and multiple journeys, to fully heal. By describing how MDMA let her view her father’s beatings and mother’s suicide attempts from her adult perspective, she gives you a front-row seat into how psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy healed her trauma and transformed her life.

Here’s a chance to sit down with Kirk Cousins, record-setting former Michigan State Quaterback and draft pick of the NFL’s Washington Redskins. Get an inside look at high-stakes football and the experiences that helped Cousins put his values and faith into action, on and off the field. In this audiobook, Kirk Cousins tells stories from his own life under the bright lights of college and pro football.