Showing titles in Biographies

With over a dozen books now in the wildly popular Soup series, Robert Newton Peck started it all with this hilarious account of the nonstop mischief he and his best friend Soup got into as children in 1920s Vermont. You'll learn all about the time Soup taught Rob how to whack apples, only to wind up breaking a church's stained-glass window! Sure, the 2 pals have lots of fun doing things like rolling down a steep hill in barrels, but they just can't seem to stay out of trouble.

From DaVinci to Rembrandt, van Gogh to Matisse, and Picasso to Warhol, you'll learn about both their artistic masterpieces and their personal messes. Fun and lighthearted, yet full of solid information, trivia, and provocative commentary, Lives of the Artists presents objective, 3-dimensional biographies of the world's great artists.

This is no stuffy music appreciation lesson. Author Kathleen Krull makes these great artists come alive. From Bach to Mozart, George Gershwin to Woody Guthrie, Beethoven to Gilbert and Sullivan, you'll learn all about their lives and music, what they were really like and what inspired these geniuses of musical expression. Filled with interesting trivia and gossip, Lives of the Musicians is the ultimate guide to the great composers.

Twenty literary luminaries, ranging from Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare to Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain, are profiled in this entertaining and informative collection. Winner of A School Library Journal's Book of the Year Award, Lives of the Writers is both an indispensable reference tool and an exhilarating gossipfest. Author Kathleen Krull makes learning fun, painting realistic portraits of Hans Christian Andersen, Edgar Allan Poe, Frances Hodgson Burnett, the Brontë sisters, Emily Dickinson, E.B. White, Jack London, Murasaki Shikibu, Miguel de Cervantes, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jane Austen, and more. Krull serves up an outstanding introduction to the classics of literature for the whole family, while telling us all the real stories behind their writers.

Here are the stories of nine people whose energy, imagination, courage, and determination changed the world.

One of America's favorite African-American storytellers remembers her childhood in tender, unforgettable new stories. Jackie Torrence, a frequent headliner at the National Storytelling Festival, is known to audiences nationwide as The Story Lady.

Here are the remarkable life stories of nine famous people who have left their mark upon the world: Alexander the Great, Joan of Arc, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, George Washington, Ludwig van Beethoven, Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie, and Mahatma Gandhi.

Lives of Extraordinary Women turns the spotlight on the women who have wielded power, revealing their feats - and flaws - for all the world to see. You'll hear about 20 of the most influential women in history: queens, warriors, prime ministers, first ladies, revolutionary leaders. Some are revered. Others are notorious. And what were they really like?

At 23, Jane Goodall made her first voyage to Africa and began her determined steps to achieve her goal of studying animals by living among them. In My Life with the Chimpanzees, she shares the remarkable journey which took her from her childhood in London to the realization of her dream in the wilds of Gombe, Tanzania.

Before he won stunning acclaim as one of today's most gifted southern writers, Larry Brown was a firefighter with the Oxford, Mississippi, Fire Department. On Fire, his powerful and unflinching account of this experience, catapults listeners into the daily trauma all firefighters face, from the blistering heat of burning homes to the crunch of broken glass at crash scenes.

In preparing the Life of Lee for Children, for use in the public schools, I beg leave to place before teachers good reasons for employing it as a supplementary reader.

Welcome to the bizarre court of Henry VIII, where even a princess fears losing her head like her mother. Elizabeth hides her tenacious personality from everyone, especially her father. Your 21st-century kid will enjoy Elizabeth's "treasonous thoughts" and glimpse the daily life of a young woman who ascended the throne at 25 and went on to rule her country for 45 years.

Children will enjoy listening to early evidence of young Clara Barton's calling such as when Patch, her beloved dog, is injured, and Clara nurses him back to health. They will sympathize with her boarding school days when she is snubbed because she is too shy to talk to other girls. But her shyness disappears when she assists the local doctor.

In a heartwarming first-person account, dePaola retells his experiences at home and in school when he was a boy. 26 Fairmount Avenue is full of humor, drama, suspense and just the day-to-day ups and downs of a little boy's life.

In this delightful sequel, award-winning author-illustrator dePaola shares engaging childhood memories about siblings, school, and life as a five-year-old.

Lew Wallace gained world-wide fame as the author of the best-selling novel, Ben Hur. But did you know that as a boy, he played hooky from school? Governor, foreign minister, Civil War general, inventor, artist, and author, Lew Wallace spent his boyhood in the fields and rivers of his native Midwest. Join Lew as he rescues his baby brother from beneath the wheels of a carriage and entertains friends with portraits from his "magic pencil".

When noted English writer William Somerset Maugham set off for the South Seas to regain his health, he gathered the materials and wrote the stories represented here. These are among Maugham's best, and the best stories ever written about the exotic South Seas.

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.

Every schoolchild knows the story of how Pocahontas saved the life of Captain John Smith, but that's not the whole story. The Native American princess Pocahontas was born near the end of the sixteenth century as the daughter of Powhatan, chief of the Powhatan confederacy. It was Pocahontas, known as Matoaka by her clan, who interceded on behalf of John Smith in 1608 and then persuaded her father to bring food to the starving colonists at Jamestown.

Esme tells us about the night she and her mother became "egg vigilantes" against an illegally parked car; her freewheeling first school, where kids sat on sofas instead of at desks and could choose disco dancing instead of math; her dangerous neighborhood, which her father made seem friendly and wondrous; the Passover dinner when she stole a matzoh right out from under a rabbi; the awe-inspiring, life-threatening Chicago snowstorms; and lessons about love from tea-reading gypsies and Popeye cartoons.