Teen Memoirs

Hayley Okines is like no other 13-year-old schoolgirl. In Old Before My Time, Hayley and her mum, Kerry, reflect on her unusual life. Share Hayley’s excitement as she travels the world meeting her pop heroes Kylie, Girls Aloud, and Justin Bieber and her sadness as she loses her best friend to the disease at the age of 11. Now as she passes the age of 13 - the average life expectancy for a child with progeria - Hayley talks frankly about her hopes for the future and her pioneering drug trials in America which could unlock the secrets of ageing for everyone....

This book of autobiographies by Korean middle-school students is something that is needed for Korean studies and Korean-American studies, in my opinion. Because this book contains our voices, this book is very powerful. In a sense, we are documenting our own history. Because our lives are like the lives of other middle-school students who are Koreans, I believe that this book contains an important history for everyone who listens to this book.

Author Stephen Young - a seaman on the battleship Oklahoma when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor - recounts his terrifying experience with incredible realism.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the only four-term president in American history, and the man who fearlessly guided the United States through both the Great Depression and the Second World War. Although left partially paralyzed by polio, he persevered and became a powerful leader during a difficult period in U.S. history.

Here are the life stories of eight remarkable people who were born and grew up in America and who made their mark upon American history. They represent the remarkable individuality and sense of enterprise and courage that has marked the American hero.

I am leaking these journals because I'm tired and I know you are too. The success bar is too high and pretending has become the only way to reach it. Instagrams are filtered, Facebook profiles are embellished, photos are shopped, reality TV is scripted, body parts get upgraded like software, and even professional athletes are cheating. The things we believe in aren't real.

Kære dagbog. Daniel lagde en arm om mig. Han svedte meget. Så bøjede han sit ansigt ind mod mit. Denne gang ramte han plet første gang. Det var så smukt. Jeg var lige ved at græde. Det var han også. Længe sad vi med vores pander sammen. Mie har været smaskforelsket i Daniel siden sidste sommer. Nu er det ferietid igen, og Mie finder mors dagbog.

The biggest hit show of 2010 for Nickelodeon now hits the comic page! Four friends from Minnesota started a pop-singing group on the show, and now you can learn the back story of these four young men and their co-stars. Find out where Kendall, Logan, Carlos, and James came from, and see what brought these four young men into the limelight for all the world to see. Be here as you join the phenomenon that is sweeping the nation.

The five most popular students at Noble High have secrets to hide; secrets they wrote down in their journals. Now one of their own exposes the private entries. When our parents were growing up they were encouraged to make mistakes. That's how they learned. But us? Our mistakes go viral. There is no delete button on the Internet. What kind of future do we have if we can't escape our embarrassing pasts? I must come off as quite the hypocrite; complaining about our overexposed lives in a book of secret journals I have leaked. But these pages hold proof of how this pressure affects the "best" of us.

What can you do, what can you say, when your child becomes discouraged? I said nothing. I wrote this letter to her instead. Tell your child you care. That she's wonderful and special. Because...she is.

Beard's stunning debut is an epistolary novel written from 15-year-old Tess DeNunzio to her little sister Zoe. After Zoe's accidental death on September 11, 2001, a day so many others died, Tess' family is numbed by their personal tragedy. Already acutely aware of her odd place in a home where her mother and stepfather now have children of their own, Tess begins her letter as a means of figuring out her own life, from her two-hour-a-day hair and makeup ritual to her complicity in Zoe's death.

When Charles S. Stratton was born in 1838, he seemed perfect in every way. But then he stopped growing. At age four, though a happy and mischievous child, he was just over two feet tall and weighed 15 pounds - the exact size he had been as a seven-month-old baby. It was then that P. T. Barnum persuaded Charley’s family to allow him to exhibit their son in his museum and tour him around the world as a curiosity. Tom Thumb, as Barnum dubbed him, was a natural performer.

Korean American teenagers from New Jersey write about their own experiences and reflections. This book, containing nine essays by Korean American youths from junior and senior high schools in New Jersey, gives an excellent picture of the hopes and fears of Korean American youth throughout the United States of America.

In curiously parallel lives, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr were both orphaned at an early age. Both were brilliant students who attended college - one at Princeton, the other at Columbia - and studied law. Both were young staff officers under General George Washington, and both became war heroes. Politics beckoned them, and each served in the newly formed government of the fledgling nation. Why, then, did these two face each other at dawn in a duel that ended with death for one and opprobrium for the other?

Meet our ninth U.S. President before his famous victory over the Native American chief Tecumseh in the Battle of Tippecanoe. Young readers will thrill to hear young Billy Harrison's dramatic rescue of his sister Sally as she struggles to stay afloat after falling into a river, and admire his courage when he captures a British soldier at the age of eight. Find out more about these and the rest of Billy's boyhood adventures in William Henry Harrison: Young Tippecanoe.

Tales of brave and selfless deeds used to be part of every boy's education. We grew up sharing stories with our fathers, uncles, and grandfathers of how other men had lived their lives, met their challenges, reached their goals, and faced their deaths. Becoming a man was about comradeship and standing by your friends whatever the circumstances. And it meant that sometimes it was more important to die a hero than live a coward's life. Through Neil Oliver's vivid, stirring accounts we can rediscover the stories that inspire men to perform acts greater than themselves.

Almost anything scares young Eleanor: mice, the dark, and a host of imaginary dangers. But she learns to hide her feelings - her father disapproves of fear, and she longs only to please him. She knows she will always disappoint her beautiful, socialite mother, because Eleanor is painfully shy and plain.

As a young debutante in Manhattan, she spends her days teaching needy children and touring crowded tenements.

From her childhood in China to the moment she won her first National Book Award, literary icon Katherine Paterson shares the personal stories that inspired her children's books. Told with her trademark humor and heart, Paterson's tales reveal details about her life from her childhood with missionary parents, to living as a single woman in Japan, to raising four children in suburban Maryland with her minister husband.

Inspired by his nearly-deaf mother and a father who developed a "visible alphabet" of all the possible sounds a human being can make, Alexander Graham Bell spent the greater part of his life trying to improve the way people communicated with one another. It was this desire that led him to create his most famous invention, the telephone, and turned him into one of the most well-known names of all time.

Here is a tale that concerns the incredible power of friendship. The movie Tennessee's Partner (1955), starring John Payne and Ronald Reagan, was based on this story.