Childhood Biography

Long before he starred on some of television’s most beloved and long-running series such as Taxi and Who’s the Boss? and went on to distinguish himself in a variety of film and stage roles, Tony Danza was a walking contradiction: an indifferent student who dreamed of being a teacher. Inspiring a classroom of students was an aspiration he put aside for decades until one day it seemed that the most meaningful thing he could do was give his dream a shot. What followed was a year spent teaching 10th-grade English at Northeast High - Philadelphia’s largest high school with 3,600 students....

Discover the untold story of Gene Hackman, Hollywood’s rugged everyman and cinematic icon. Dive into The Everyman’s Hero: The Life and Legacy of Gene Hackman, an in-depth biography that chronicles the extraordinary journey of one of the greatest actors of all time. From his nomadic childhood in Illinois to his Oscar-winning triumphs in The French Connection and Unforgiven, this book unveils the authentic details behind Gene Hackman’s rise to stardom, his versatile career, and his quiet retirement. Written by C.D.

Every great artist started out as a kid. Forget the awards, the sold-out museum exhibitions, and the timeless masterpieces. When the world’s most celebrated artists were growing up, they had regular-kid problems just like you. Jackson Pollock’s family moved constantly - he lived in eight different cities before he was 16 years old. Georgia O’Keeffe lived in the shadow of her “perfect” older brother Francis. And Jean-Michel Basquiat triumphed over poverty to become one of the world’s most influential artists.

Before their experiments, inventions, and discoveries that changed the world, the world’s most celebrated scientists had regular-kid problems just like you. Stephen Hawking hated school and preferred to spend his free time building model airplanes, inventing board games, and even building his own computer. Jane Goodall got in trouble for bringing worms and snails into her house. And Neil deGrasse Tyson had to start a dog-walking business to save up money to buy a telescope.

Pat Conroy's memoirs and autobiographical novels contain a great deal about his life, but there is much he hasn't revealed to readers and listeners - until now. My Exaggerated Life is the product of a special collaboration between this great American author and oral biographer Katherine Clark, who recorded two hundred hours of conversations with Conroy before he passed away in 2016. In the spring and summer of 2014, the two spoke for an hour or more on the phone every day. No subject was off limits, including aspects of his tumultuous life he had never before revealed.

These are bittersweet and sometimes funny true Romany Gypsy stories from my childhood, from 1943 to 1959. These are true Romany Gypsy stories from my childhood as I remember them, with a little bit of the author’s artistic license to make them more enjoyable. If you are looking for stories that romanticize a Romany Gypsy life on the open road, then this audiobook is probably not for you. However, if you are interested in the true life of Romany Gypsy's, you may find this audiobook interesting.

This is the tale of a girl who sets out on a moving journey toward womanhood in the quiet corners of an ever-changing world. Her footsteps mirror the tides of a time when political unrest and the ominous threat of war ruled the day. Life takes on shades of gray, never completely happy nor sad, as she makes her way through the byway of life. Witness the gradual transformation of not just one life but an entire landscape molded by the permanent traces of history through the prism of her changing viewpoint. Let her take you on a journey filled with love, sacrifice and resilience.

For rural England, the 1950s and 1960s was a time of dramatic transition and change as we moved from wartime austerity with the radio and the local cinema as our entertainment, into the age of TV and the motor car. Social changes and changes in attitudes to sex, religion and the class system were also to have a major impact on rural life. This book attempts to capture this time of change as it affected the small hamlet of Fawler in North Oxfordshire, and to record for posterity a way of life now largely lost. It deals, sometime frankly, but sensitively with life as experience by the author ...

Angela's Ashes is Frank McCourt's sad, funny, bittersweet memoir of growing up in New York in the late '30s and in Ireland in the '40s. It is a story of extreme hardship and suffering, in Brooklyn tenements and Limerick slums; too many children, too little money, his mother Angela barely coping as his father Malachy's drinking bouts constantly brought the family to the brink of disaster. It is a story of courage and survival against apparently overwhelming odds.

When Claire Hoffman's alcoholic father abandons his family, his desperate wife, Liz, tells five-year-old Claire and her seven-year-old brother, Stacey, that they are going to heaven - Iowa - to live in Maharishi's national headquarters for Heaven on Earth. For Claire's mother, Transcendental Meditation - the Maharishi's method of meditation and his approach to living the fullest possible life - was a salvo that promised world peace and enlightenment just as their family fell apart.

This audiobook reveals the main facts about the magical childhood and teenage years of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, the youngest son of a humble farmer, born in a remote Tibetan village, who became the political and spiritual leader of his homeland when he was only a kid. Its surprising content sheds light on the main facts and events that shaped his amazing early life, including: the Tibetan prophecy that announced his reincarnation; the magic lake that described the place where he was born; how the high lamas found him in a small farming village when he was two; and more!

Throughout history, people have experimented, invented, and created new ways of doing things. Kid Innovators tells the stories of a diverse group of brilliant thinkers in fields like technology, education, business, science, art, and entertainment, reminding us that every innovator started out as a kid. Florence Nightingale rescued baby mice, Alan Turing was a daydreamer with terrible handwriting, and Alvin Ailey felt like a failure at sports.

Michaela DePrince was born in Sierra Leone and grew up in the United States. She rose to fame as a ballet dancer in the late 2000s. Learn more about DePrince's life as a famous ballerina!

John Lister-Kaye has spent a lifetime exploring, protecting and celebrating the British landscape and its wildlife. Lister-Kaye's joyous childhood holidays - spent scrambling through hedges and ditches after birds and small beasts, keeping pigeons in the loft and tracking foxes around the edge of the garden - were the perfect apprenticeship for his two lifelong passions: exploring the wonders of nature and writing about them. Warm, wise and full of wonder, The Dun Cow Rib is a captivating coming of age tale by one of the founding fathers of nature writing.

Professor Randy Pausch's moving and inspirational book based on his extraordinary Last Lecture. 'We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.'

In this memoir, Natasha takes on the therapist's role with her past selves to drag her social anxiety into the open. From feisty Miss 6, lonely Miss 14 reeling from a tumultuous childhood, and defiant Miss 18 pushing back against a world where she didn't fit, through to her present self, Natasha explores the way social anxiety colored her experiences and finds healing through self-acceptance.

In Spirit of a Hummingbird, Felicia Thai Heath, the daughter of Vietnamese and Chinese immigrants who met in the United States, gives us a disquieting, eventful memoir based on her early childhood on the run with her father—a notorious Vietnamese kingpin and escaped convict—and her conflicted mother. Clever and mature beyond her age, young Felicia experienced poverty and witnessed abuse as her dysfunctional family bounced around in the United States and Canada. Amid all the tumult and terror, she found ways to love her family, educate herself, navigate her world, and discover her potential.

On the heels of the cult television hit Friday Night Lights, The New York Times best-selling author of The Junction Boys pens the story of Texas high school football integration, and the three men who put together a championship team.

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.

Kit de Waal grew up in a household of opposites and extremes. Her haphazard mother rarely cooked, forbade Christmas and birthdays, worked as a cleaner, nurse and childminder sometimes all at once and believed the world would end in 1975. Meanwhile, her father stuffed barrels full of goodies for his relatives in the Caribbean, cooked elaborate meals on a whim and splurged money they didn't have on cars, suits and shoes fit for a prince. Both of her parents were waiting for paradise. It never came.