Showing titles in Biographies

Ten-time Oscar-nominated Walter Lantz was one of Hollywood's most prolific directors and producers of animation. Over six decades, his studio produced more than 800 cartoons, including over 600 theatrically released cartoons, more than any other Hollywood animation studio, and set high standards for the art of animation in its fledgling years. Lantz is renowned for producing cartoons starring the world-famous Woody Woodpecker.

Gary Soto writes that when he was five "what I knew best was at ground level." In this lively collection of short essays, Soto takes his listener to a ground-level perspective, recreating in vivid detail the sights, sounds, smells, and textures he knew growing up in his Fresno, California, neighborhood. The "things" of his boyhood tie it all together: his Buddha "splotched with gold", the taps of his shoes, and the "engines of sparks that lived beneath my soles", his worn tennies smelling of "summer grass, asphalt, the moist sock breathing the defeat of baseball". The child’s world is made up of small things - small, very important things.

A peaceful summer night is shattered by gunfire as an unseen assailant tries to murder police officer John Busby. Though horribly wounded, Busby survives. But the perpetrator remains at large, meaning neither Busby, nor his wife, nor their three children are safe. In separate chapters John and his daughter, Cylin, who was nine at the time, recount the story of that year. John writes graphically, and movingly, of his wounds, his pain, his multiple surgeries, and his rage.

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.

Christian teens care very much about their connection and relationship with God, but they are also experiencing all the ups and downs of teenage life, with the attendant joys and sorrows of growing up. This book, filled with stories written by Christian teens for Christian teens, helps teens who care about their faith navigate their teenage years.

Christian teens care very much about their connection and relationship with God, but they are also experiencing all the ups and downs of teenage life, with the attendant joys and sorrows of growing up. This book, filled with stories written by Christian teens for Christian teens, helps teens who care about their faith navigate their teenage years.

Christian teens care very much about their connection and relationship with God, but they are also experiencing all the ups and downs of teenage life, with the attendant joys and sorrows of growing up. This book, filled with stories written by Christian teens for Christian teens; it will help teens who care about their faith navigate their teenage years.

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.

In this personal, moving essay, youth activist Hannah Testa shares with listeners how she led a grassroots political campaign to successfully pass state legislation limiting single-use plastics and how she influenced global businesses to adopt more sustainable practices. Through her personal journey, listeners can learn how they, too, can follow in Hannah's footsteps and lower their carbon footprint by simply refusing single-use plastics.

Aimed at listeners 12 and up and co-authored by award-winning children's book author Nic Stone, How to be a (Young) Antiracist empowers teen listeners to help create a more just society. Antiracism is a journey—and now young adults will have a map to carve their own path. Kendi and Stone have revised this work to provide anecdotes and data that speaks directly to the experiences and concerns of younger listeners, encouraging them to think critically and build a more equitable world in doing so.

Explore the many facets of your identity through hundreds of big and small questions. In this affirmations audiobook created for Black girls, M. J. Fievre tackles topics such as family and friends, school and careers, body image, and stereotypes. By reflecting on these themes, you confront the issues that can hold you back from discovering your inner Black joy. Embrace authenticity and celebrate who you are. Finding the courage to live as you are is not easy, so Badass Black Girl is designed to help you nurture creativity and positive self-awareness.

Finding Edith: Surviving the Holocaust in Plain Sight is the coming-of-age story of a young Jewish girl chased in Europe during World War II. Like a great adventure story, the book describes the childhood and adolescence of a Viennese girl growing up against the backdrop of the Great Depression, the rise of Nazism, World War II, and the religious persecution of Jews throughout Europe.

Through the Pacific Northwest forests and along the rugged coastal shores of California, Wolf Girl is a young environmentalist's coming-of-age story about learning, discovery, and survival. Wolf Girl takes listeners on Doniga’s journey: from the wilderness immersion school where she was taught by Indigenous elders and wildlife trackers, to hitchhiking across the Pacific Northwest, to Alaska, where she fell in love with tracking wolves. These experiences shaped and inspired Doniga to become the leader in the regenerative agricultural movement that she is today.

In this unsparing exploration of one of the most powerful Americans of the 20th century, accomplished historian Marc Aronson unmasks the man behind the Bureau: his tangled family history and personal relationships; his own need for secrecy, deceit, and control; and the broad trends in American society that shaped his world. Hoover may have given America the security it wanted, but the secrets he knew gave him—and the Bureau—all the power he wanted.

Born in 1857 and raised in oil country, Ida M. Tarbell was one of the first investigative journalists and probably the most influential in her time. Her series of articles on the Standard Oil Trust, a complicated business empire run by John D. Rockefeller, revealed to readers the underhanded, even illegal practices that had led to Rockefeller's success.

Daniel Boone opened up the American west; more than 200,000 settlers poured into Kentucky on the Wilderness Road he helped establish. John Mason Brown's classic biography brilliantly depicts Boone's life and times, delving into all the complexities of this fascinating man as well as the landmark historical events he lived through - including the Revolutionary War and Louisiana Purchase.

With her election to the vice presidency, her election to the US Senate, and her position as attorney general of California, Kamala Harris has blazed trails throughout her entire political career. But how did she achieve her goals? What values and influences guided and inspired her along the way? In this young listeners edition of Kamala Harris' memoir, we learn about the impact that her family and community had on her life, and see what led her to discover her own sense of self and purpose.

In his meteoric, 13-year rise to fame, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a mass movement for civil rights - with his relentless peaceful, non-violent protests, public demonstrations, and eloquent speeches. But as violent threats cast a dark shadow over Dr. King's life, Swanson hones in on James Earl Ray, a bizarre, racist prison escapee who tragically ends King's life.

Could any story be more inspiring than that of Joan of Arc, the courageous maiden who fought for the glory of France and God? Guided by what she firmly believed were visions of saints, this young Frenchwoman - still just 16 years old - led her people in battle against the British occupiers. Though she proved victorious in war, Joan ultimately became a martyr when some of her own countrymen betrayed her to the English.

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.