"This is Richard Turere's true story of growing up on a farm in Kenya. A Maasai boy, Richard attended school when he could but more often was needed to herd his family's cattle. Richard's challenge was to protect his cows from the lions who prowled the night. Desperate Maasai farmers often killed lions, even though lions are at the core of Kenya's tourist trade and are protected. Richard noticed that lions stayed away when he was outside with a flashlight....

"Mrs. Obama offers readers a series of fresh stories and insightful reflections on change, challenge, and power, including her belief that when we light up for others, we can illuminate the richness and potential of the world around us, discovering deeper truths and new pathways for progress. Drawing from her experiences as a mother, daughter, spouse, friend, and First Lady, she shares the habits and principles she has developed to successfully adapt...

"Beautiful Country is the real deal. Heartrending, unvarnished, and powerfully courageous, this account of growing up undocumented in America will never leave you."--Gish Jen, author of The Resisters. "Ba Ba told me this and I in turn carried it in my heart: so long as we didn't stake claim to what wasn't ours--the things, our rooms, America, this beautiful country--we would be okay." An incandescent and heartrending memoir about Qian Julie Wang's...

"A powerful true story of a young girl who has never known life outside a refugee camp and a father determined to help her dream beyond the fences that confine them"--

Describes the L.A. street cook's life, including working in his family's restaurant as a child, figuring out what he wanted to do with his life, and his success with his food truck and restaurant.

"Growing up in the late 19th century, Laura Wheeler Waring didn't see any artists who looked like her. She didn't see any paintings of people who looked like her, either. So when she was offered a commission to paint portraits of accomplished African Americans, she jumped at the chance. Writers, singers, political activists, and thinkers all posed for her. Now her portraits hang in Washington, D.C.'s National Portrait Gallery, where children of all...

"In her first solo memoir, New York Times bestselling author Joanna Gaines invites us on an authentic and deeply vulnerable journey into her story--and helps shine a light on the beauty of our own--guiding us to release the weights that hold us back so we may live and share our story in truth. We've all dropped anchor in places that suited us for a time: a city, a perspective, a lie we mistook as truth. This book is an invitation to a kind of life...

You know the Super Soaker. It's one of top twenty toys of all time. And it was invented entirely by accident. Trying to create a new cooling system for refrigerators and air conditioners, impressive inventor Lonnie Johnson instead created the mechanics for the iconic toy. A love for rockets, robots, inventions, and a mind for creativity began early in Lonnie Johnson's life. Growing up in a house full of brothers and sisters, persistence and a passion...

Twelve Years a Slave (1853) is considered to be one of the most riveting and important documents recounting slavery in the United States. It is the heart-rending memoir of a free black man who is taken hostage and sold into slavery in a Louisiana plantation, his twelve years of bondage, and his remarkable escape to freedom. Since its publication, this classic has become a historical reference for its salient of depiction of life as a slave in the...

"In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave...