Childhood Biography

The future leader of Singapore spent his growing up years doing what other children did in the 1920s. Harry liked to play with spinning tops, marbles, kites—and even fighting fish! While he was a little mischievous as a child, Harry worked hard in school to achieve academic success, eventually winning scholarships to attend the prestigious Raffles College.

Resisting the deadening silence of his family home in the elegant yet stiflingly safe neighborhood of Gramercy Park, nine-year-old Roger imagines himself a private eye in pursuit of criminals. With the dreamlike mystery of the city before him, he sets off alone, out into the streets of Manhattan, thrilling to a life of unsolved cases. Six decades later, Rosenblatt finds himself again patrolling the territory of his youth: The writing class he teaches has just wrapped up, releasing him into the winter night and the very neighborhood in which he grew up.

These stories are specific to one legendary riverfront plateau and one boy's journey, but are emblematic of immigrant life and blue-collar aspirations during the heyday of American industry and its crash, foreshadowing one of the largest internal migrations in US history. Approximately six million baby boomers, like the narrator, fled the Rust Belt. Another six million remained and stories of their youth, struggles, and aspirations echo throughout this book.

Rosemary Penfold's beautiful and evocative memoir of her life growing up in the fields of the English countryside is a moving testament to a forgotten world and a disappearing and misunderstood people. Born in 1938 in a traditional Gypsy wagon, surrounded by the love of her parents and extended family in a small but close-knit community, Rosemary paints a vivid and touching portrait of a way of life that no longer exits.

Poland suffered terribly under the Nazis. By the end of the war, six million had been killed. On 1 August 1944 Andrew Borowiec, a 15-year-old volunteer in the Resistance, lobbed a grenade from a Warsaw apartment block onto some German soldiers below – he felt he had come of age. Over that summer Andrew faced danger at every moment. Wounded the day after his 16th birthday, he was captured as he lay in a makeshift cellar hospital. Here he learned a lesson: there were decent Germans as well as bad.

The inspiring stories of six people who changed history. Contents: Gaius Julius Caesar, the powerful Roman leader; Queen Elizabeth I, who ruled England for 45 years; George Washington, the first president of the USA; King Louis XVI, the last king of France; Winston Churchill, who led Britain in the Second World War; Che Guevara, the Argentinian doctor who fought for revolution.

Enid Elliot Linder was the daughter of a butler and a lady’s maid in service in some of England’s grandest country houses. Evoking the lost world of a childhood ‘below stairs’, Linder’s touching memoir describes how her life changed as Britain headed towards war. After the family moved to a Marylebone tenement, her father sought work in London restaurants whilst battling personal demons. Meanwhile Linder’s aunt was nanny to a high-ranking member of the British Union of Fascists as they grew in influence.

From the ghetto paved and unpaved streets of Indianapolis, Indiana, this book begins telling the story of one fat kid's rise from the projects, to his fall serving over seven years in as many prisons, and how he was able to come out a prison scholar. That led to him to writing 18 phenomenal books about redemption and attending Georgia State University, graduating number one in his undergraduate class. He earned a 4.13 GPA and went on to grad school, where he excelled, graduating at top of his class, before becoming a very popular African-American Studies professor at Georgia State University.

Aké. Los años de la niñez es el relato en primera persona de la infancia de Soyinka en una aldea de Nigeria llamada Aké, en los años en torno a la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Allí el pequeño Wole, un muchacho de una curiosidad infinita, amante de los libros y propenso a meterse en líos y aventuras, crece con la doble influencia de los aires occidentales y de las antiguas tradiciones espirituales youruba.

In this vivid memoir, Neidhardt explores her childhood in wider familial and social contexts. Drawing upon a trove of family letters and other archival material, she follows her parents’ journey from privilege to food stamps—from their formative youths, to their embrace of pioneer homemaking and rural poverty, to their sudden and wrenching return to conventional society—and explores the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s as it was, and as she lived it.

'I have just had one of those absolutely mad mornings when you go out to have a browse at tagines and end up coming home with a brand-new gas ring expander. I think I was probably as surprised as anybody. Sometimes life is just like that, isn't it?' Award-winning food writer Damien Trench takes you on a journey through his childhood and his early inspirations - culinary and otherwise - with occasional diversions to the present.

In terms of drama, my childhood memoir appears sadly lacking. It starts promisingly, Mum and Dad arguing just after my birth, but deteriorates thereafter into eighteen years of relative wellbeing. The working title 'Nothing Much Happened' always seemed appropriate and yet?

Ruth Clare's father came back from the Vietnam War a changed man: a violent, controlling parent and a dominating, aggressive husband. After escaping her difficult upbringing, Ruth went on to have a family of her own. Facing the challenges of parenting brought her past back to life, and she lived in fear that she was doomed to repeat her father's behaviour. Wanting to understand the experiences that had damaged her father, she met with other veterans and began listening to their stories of war, conscription and returning to civilian life.

This is the true story of the youngest daughter of a Sydney couple living at Lockhart River Mission for 9 years, raising their children within an Aboriginal village of five tribes. Conceived on Cape York, and finally moving to Rockhampton as a young child. A family tragedy in 1971 with the shocking death of brother Chris, two days before a family wedding, sees the upheaval of family life. Patty feels abandoned and has to educate and raise herself as well as learn to iron a cassock! Share her adventures in this gentle, humorous and insightful early memoir.

In his first nine years as a teacher, Brendan Halpin goes from wide-eyed idealist to cynical, heartbroken idealist. Unique among teaching memoirs, Losing My Faculties is not the story of a heroic teacher who transforms the lives of his hardbitten students; rather, it's the inspirational and often unpretty truth about people who choose to get up ridiculously early day after day and year after year to go stand in front of teenagers.

That afternoon was the last time the high-school Patriots would see one another for weeks; some teammates they'd never see again. Hurricane Katrina was about to tear their lives apart. Hurricane Season is the story of a great football coach, his team, his family, and their school - and a remarkable fight back from shocking tragedy.

We all know what is wrong with today’s schools - or do we? Tracy Kidder spent a year in a fifth grade class in Holyoke, Massachusetts. The teacher is excellent, but something else is very wrong. Kidder skillfully presents the problems and leaves the listener to ponder the solutions.

Nancy McCabe, who grew up in Kansas just a few hours from the Ingalls family’s home in Little House on the Prairie, always felt a deep connection with Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House series. McCabe read Little House on the Prairie during her childhood and visited Wilder sites around the Midwest with her aunt when she was 13. But then, she didn’t read the series again until she decided to revisit in adulthood the books that had so influenced her childhood.

For Clarence, a two-year-old Minnesota boy, the terrible twos were terrible. His mother was killed in an auto accident, boiling water scalded his arm, and a rooster nearly pecked out one of his eyes. Things weren’t much better at six. Tumbling into a stream, a broken bottle pierced his elbow and doctors contemplated amputating the arm. At eight, his luck changed.

Celebrated journalist Lauren St. John "bears witness to a remarkable story" ( Publishers Weekly) in this striking memoir of her African childhood. In the 1970s St. John lived on a Rhodesian farm that should have been paradise. But the specter of war hung over the land, filling every day with peril and uncertainty.