Berthoud Community Library District

Boy, Roald Dahl's bestselling autobiography, is full of hilarious anecdotes about his childhood and school days. With fabulous new line drawings by Quentin Blake. "An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details. This is not an autobiography". (Roald Dahl). This reissue includes 30 delightful new line drawings by the inimitable Quentin Blake. Throughout his young days at school and...

"After sixteen novels, Jacqueline Winspear has taken the bold step of turning to memoir, revealing the hardships and joys of her family history. Both shockingly frank and deftly restrained, her memoir tackles such difficult, poignant, and fascinating family memories as her paternal grandfather's shellshock, her mother's evacuation from London during the Blitz; her soft-spoken animal-loving father's torturous assignment to an explosives team during...

"Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was “just” an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn’t? Her life is fascinating for its mysteries and its passions and, as Lucy Worsley says, "She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern." She went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fast cars, and she was intrigued by the new science of psychology, which helped her through devastating mental illness. So why—despite all the evidence...

As a young man working in East Africa for the Shell Company, Roald Dahl recounts his adventures living in the jungle and later flying a fighter plane in World War II.

A young reader's biography of Beatrix Potter, the author-illustrator of The Tale of Peter Rabbit.

"The robust, imaginative works of J.R.R. Tolkien have sparked the imaginations of readers around the world. From World War I soldier to bestselling author, trace the life of the man behind Middle Earth"--

"In 1936, originally intending merely to report on the Spanish Civil War as a journalist, George Orwell found himself embroiled as a participant-as a member of the Workers Party of Marxist Unity. Fighting against the Fascists, Orwells account of life in the trenches-with a democratic army composed of men with no ranks, no titles, and often no weapons-and of his near fatal wounding, is painfully vivid and occasionally comic. As the politics became...

On a train trip from Manchester to London in 1990, a young single mother named Joanne Rowling conceived the idea of a children's book about a boy wizard named Harry Potter. Five years later, that idea became the basis for the most successful book franchise in the history of publishing. Here is the rags-to-riches story of J.K. Rowling, who overcame numerous hardships to rise seemingly overnight from a destitute welfare mother in England to one of the...

In Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, one of the towering figures of English literature is revealed with unparalleled immediacy and originality, in a biography to which we owe much of our knowledge of the man himself. Through a series of richly detailed anecdotes, Johnson emerges as a sociable figure, vigorously engaging and fencing with great contemporaries such as Garrick, Goldsmith, Burney and Burke, and of course with Boswell himself. Yet anxieties...