Biography For Boys

Bright, attractive, and both from good families, University of Texas college student Colton Pitonyak and vibrant redhead Jennifer Cave had the world at their beckoning. Cave, an ex-cheerleader, had just landed an exciting new job, while a big-money scholarship to UT's prestigious business school lured Pitonyak to Austin. Yet the former altar boy had a dark, unpredictable streak. When Jennifer failed to show up for work on August 18, 2005, her mother became frightened. Sharon Cave's search led to Colton's West Campus apartment, where Jennifer's family discovered a scene worthy of the grisliest horror movie.

Read by the author, The Boy Who Walked Himself Home is a powerful memoir of healing, self-discovery, and reclaiming joy. After being raised in a strict religious cult, Peter was taught that love was conditional and silence was survival. This is the true story of how he broke—and how he rose. Through heartbreak, therapy, sacred medicine, and the slow work of inner healing, he learned that home was never out there. It was within him all along.

FULLY REVISED AND UPDATED. In this new audiobook, radio broadcaster and music writer Alan Cross narrates the definitive history of The Beastie Boys. Cross succeeds once again in revealing the fascinating history behind the music in the same compelling way we've come to expect from his long broadcasting career.

Learn about the birth of the Z-Boys skateboarding team and how they influenced modern skateboarding.

The Newbery Honor-winning author of Hatchet and Dogsong shares surprising true stories about his relationship with animals, highlighting their compassion, intellect, intuition, and sense of adventure. Gary Paulsen is an adventurer who competed in two Iditarods, survived the Minnesota wilderness, and climbed the Bighorns. None of this would have been possible without his truest companions: his animals.

As a founding member of The Beach Boys, Mike Love has spent an extraordinary 55 years, and counting, as the group's lead singer and one of its principal lyricists. The Beach Boys, from their California roots to their international fame, are a unique American story - one of overnight success and age-defying longevity; of musical genius and reckless self-destruction; of spirituality, betrayal, and forgiveness - and Love is the only band member to be part of it each and every step.

The tragic death of 13-year-old Danny Croteau in 1972 faded from headlines and memories for 20 years until the Boston abuse scandal - a string of assaults taking place within the Catholic Church - exploded in the early 2000s. Despite numerous indications, including 40 claims of sexual misconduct with minors, pointing to him as Croteau's killer, Reverend Richard R. Lavigne remains "innocent." Drawing on more than ten thousand pages of police and court findings and interviews with Danny's friends and family, fellow abuse victims, and church officials, the author uncovers the truth.

Detailing full story of the Moors Murders and the search for Ian Brady and Myra Hindley's fifth victim, Keith Bennett, whose grave has never been found, this new edition of The Lost Boy sets out the proof that the police always knew there were five victims, and that Brady and Hindley had a system—one decoded by officers at the time—by which they recorded where all their victims were buried.

In a tough neighborhood on the outskirts of Toronto, miles away from wealthy white downtown, Omer Aziz struggles to find his place as a first-generation Pakistani Muslim boy. He fears the violence and despair of the world around him, and sees a dangerous path ahead, succumbing to aimlessness, apathy, and rage. In his senior year of high school, Omer quickly begins to realize that education can open up the wider world.

Every memoir is a battle between reality and invention - but in her follow up to Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys., Viv Albertine has reinvented the genre with her unflinching honesty. To Throw Away Unopened is a fearless dissection of one woman's obsession with the truth - the truth about family, power and her identity as a rebel and outsider. It is a gaping wound of a book, both an exercise in bloodletting and psychological archaeology, excavating what lies beneath: the fear, the loneliness, the anger.

Mark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa’s most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Like every other child born in the hopelessness of apartheid, he learned to measure his life in days, not years. Yet Mark Mathabane, armed only with the courage of his family and a hard-won education, raised himself up from the squalor and humiliation to win a scholarship to an American university.

Britain's most popular cook describes his personal culinary odyssey, from dangerous encounters with his mother's weevil-seasoned cakes to being harangued by readers who think he deliberately styles Yorkshire puddings to look like a woman's private parts.

You are about to go back in time to the Wild West of the 1800s. These true, real-life adventures were told first-hand by Elijah Nicholas Wilson. He was a cavalry spy, hired to track down murdering bands of Indians. Before that he was a stagecoach driver on roads filled with outlaws. Before that he was one of the first Pony Express riders and was chased by Indians who nearly killed him with arrows. And before that he was a bronc buster who accepted a bet to ride the meanest bucking horse in the west.

John Creedon’s scenes from an Irish childhood paint a colourful and sometimes hilarious picture of a changing Ireland and the growing pains of boyhood. Set in a city-centre household bustling with humanity, the cast includes a dozen children and another dozen adults, including aunts, an American writer, an African doctor, and a Scottish bookie. The streets outside overflow with brewery horses, beat clubs, dance halls, nuns, priests, a Turkish delight shop and a pub where a child could sit up on a high stool and smoke his cigarette in peace.

Torn from home to home and running from heist to heist, his childhood was marked by violence, betrayal and upheaval. Faced with a heart-wrenching decision at just 12 years old, Peter had to choose between following his father's criminal path or seizing a lifeline. Ultimately, Peter rose from the ruins of his troubled past, embarking on a remarkable journey of self-discovery and growth.

Houston, Texas, in the early 1970s was an exciting place—the home of NASA, the city of the future. But a string of more than two dozen missing teenage boys hinted at a dark undercurrent that would go ignored for too long. While their siblings and friends wondered where they had gone, the Houston police department dismissed them as runaways, fleeing the Vietnam draft or conservative parents, likely looking to get high and join the counterculture.

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., Editor-in-Chief of The American Spectator, traces the formative influences on the young, fatherless Clinton by the hustlers and rogues who populated his boyhood hometown of Hot Springs, Arkansas.

Mohsin grew up in a deprived pocket of East London; his family was close-knit but very religiously conservative. From a young age Mohsin felt different, but in a home where being gay was inconceivable, he also felt very alone. Outside of home Mohsin went to a failing inner city school where gang violence was a fact of life. As he grew up, life didn’t seem to offer teenage Mohsin any choices: he was disenfranchised as a poor brown boy, and he was isolated from his family as a closet gay Muslim.

After Baz Luhrmann’s movie, Elvis, hit theaters, audiences and critics alike couldn't help but question the Black origins of Elvis Presley’s music and style, reigniting a debate that has been circling for decades. In Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King​, author Preston Lauterbach answers these questions definitively, based on new research and extensive, previously unpublished interviews with the artists who blazed the way and the people who knew them.

You won't find any stories of slaying dragons or saving princesses here. In Stories for Boys Who Dare to Be Different, author Ben Brooks - with the help of Quinton Wintor's striking full-color illustrations -offers a welcome alternative narrative: one that celebrates introverts and innovators, sensitivity and resilience, individuality, and expression. It's an accessible compilation of 75 famous and not-so-famous men from the past to the present day, every single one of them a rule-breaker and stereotype-smasher in his own way.