Educators

A powerful and moving memoir about how the youth detention system is letting down our most desperate and damaged kids, and how one rookie teacher fought the system on their behalf. Explosive, heart-breaking, inspiring. What happens when your first teaching job isn't in a classroom - but in...

From the bestselling author of the Thrown Away Children series comes another heartbreaking story of life in foster care. Parents Angelina and Ben exist in enviable luxury: not just wealth, success and a gorgeous home, but a loving relationship and beautiful twin babies to complete the perfect...

Watching children learn is a beautiful and extraordinary experience…. It is a kind of magic, a kind of loving, a kind of art. It is teaching. Just teaching. Just what I do. What I did. Past tense.In 2014, Gabrielle Stroud was a very dedicated teacher with over a decade of experience. Months...

'Francis is doing for teaching what This is Going to Hurt did for medicine. Brutal, honest and laugh-out-loud funny.' Jimmy Carr 'A great subject covered by a guy unafraid to tell it like it is' Geoff Norcott The class weren't laughing with me, they were laughing at me and there is no lonelier...

A shockingly frank memoir from a prize-winning economist, reflecting on his remarkable personal odyssey and his changing positions on identity, race, and belief. Economist Glenn C. Loury is one of the most prominent public intellectuals of our time: he's often radically opposed to the political...

When Sky and her older sister Avril were taken into care, the social workers knew this was a case like no other. Raised by unhinged parents who hoarded compulsively, creating horrific conditions no child should live in, the two girls arrived at foster carer Louise's home, neglected, malnourished...

Fred Rogers was an enormously influential figure in the history of television and in the lives of tens of millions of children. As the creator and star of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, he was a champion of compassion, equality, and kindness....

From the bestselling author of the Thrown Away Children series comes another heartbreaking story of life in foster care. Louise has trouble on her hands from the first moment that 5-year-old Billy Blackthorn comes to stay. He is one of more than 20 children taken into care from a single family...

Brought to you by Penguin. With a foreword from Gerald Durrell In 1947, returning to the UK with two young children to support, Margaret Durrell starts a boarding house in Bournemouth. But any hopes of respectability are dashed as the tenants reveal themselves to be a host of eccentrics: from a...

They were called the Class from Hell - 34 inner-city sophomores she inherited from a teacher who'd been "pushed over the edge". She was told "those kids have tasted blood. They're dangerous." But Louanne Johnson had a different idea. Where the school system saw 34 unreachable kids, she saw young...

On January 28, 1986, NASA space shuttle orbiter Challenger lifted off into the clear blue skies over Florida on mission STS-51L, carrying a crew of seven, including teacher Christa McAuliffe. Just 73 seconds into the launch, a massive explosion tore Challenger apart....

In 1900 Denton Jacques Snider wrote about Friedrich (Frederick) Froebel and his life experiences which led to the founding of the first kindergarten.

A true crime memoir of survival and resilience, Never a $7 Whore is the story of a teenage single mother's escape from her unscrupulous lover....

Brought to you by Penguin. It could happen to anyone. One fine April day, Mary Ann Kenny’s husband died suddenly while jogging near their family home. In the months that followed, Mary Ann – who had no history of mental illness – began suffering from depression, and then from a terrifying...

Embark on an emotional journey with Joanna Johnson as she navigates life's twists and turns, encountering remarkable individuals and absorbing life-changing insights along the way.

Fans of Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died will root for Bridey Thelen-Heidel as she struggles to unshackle herself from her mother’s chaos in this triumphant debut memoir.

From the writer crowned one of the smartest, funniest voices in modern America, this hotly anticipated debut collection of essays offers “a precious glimpse into how Ziwe’s uniquely fearless mind functions” (New York Magazine)....

The students of today tell their stories of adversity and growth in letters to the original Freedom Writers—authors of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Freedom Writers Diary—who write supportive and powerful letters in response. Over twenty years ago, the students in first-year teacher...

They say we live in a democracy. We are free, and we should be grateful. But just how “free” are we? How democratic are our so-called “democracies”? Is it enough to simply elect our leaders and sit back, helpless, as they rule over us like dictators? Listen to find out more....

Criminal Class follows the journey of a teacher working inside the criminal justice system. This amazing story will both repel you, and at the same time, draw you in. The only door in the room was now closed and sitting before me was a murderer, a rapist, an armed robber and a guy serving six...

Growing up in poverty, and neglected and abused by her own mother and stepfather, Jaz Ampaw-Farr was destined to become a statistic. Her story was changed, however, by five teachers who made a point of putting human connection first, despite the challenges of the education system.

An essential guide for teachers and parents that’s destined to become a classic, The Art of Teaching Children is one of those rare and masterful books that not only defines a craft but offers a magical reading experience. After more than thirty years in the classroom, award-winning teacher...

From the New York Times bestselling author of A. Lincoln and American Ulysses comes the dramatic and definitive biography of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the history-altering professor turned Civil War hero. “A vital and vivid portrait of an unlikely military hero who played a key role in the...

A deeply resonant memoir for anyone who has loved and lost, from acclaimed poet and Pulitzer Prize finalist Elizabeth Alexander. In The Light of the World, Elizabeth Alexander finds herself at an existential crossroads after the sudden death of her husband. Channeling her poetic sensibilities...

Combining trenchant philosophy with lyrical memoir, Afropessimism is an unparalleled account of Blackness. Why does race seem to color almost every feature of our moral and political universe? Why does a perpetual cycle of slavery - in all its political, intellectual, and cultural forms -...

Take Care of Your Own Shit is the memoir of a man who grew up between California and Denmark, with a father who could charm a room and terrorize it in the same week; who drifted through janitor work and songwriting before finding his way to Tokyo; and who spent twenty years teaching immigrant students—students who had crossed deserts and sewers and borders to sit in his classroom—and learned something harder to name in return.

Bruce Benson was a man in a hurry. Born on the Fourth of July, he drew on a fierce work ethic learned on a World War II-era farm outside Chicago to propel him through his eventful and remarkable life. He overcame an early family upheaval and elusive educational success to attend an Ivy League university. Unsatisfied, he left school and hitchhiked West, where he worked as a roughneck in the Wyoming oil patch. He learned rigs from the ground up before earning a Geology degree at the University of Colorado, where he learned the science of what was below ground.

Toufiq A. Siddiqi was born in Hyderabad, India, and studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge University, England. He received his Ph. D. in Nuclear Physics from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, Frankfurt, Germany. In 1967 he and his wife Ulrike emigrated to the United States where he continued his research at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. During this time, he began to shift his focus from physics to environmental sciences, driven by the developing public environmental awareness at that time.

An inspiring story of music and history, as well as community and connection! Minnesota journalist and essayist Joy Riggs probes her own family history to reveal how 20th century Midwestern towns once competed for respect, recognition, and renown by mustering talented bands of youth and other musicians. Through times of war, peace, economic hardship, and personal tragedy, Riggs's "Crackerjack Bands and Hometown Boosters" follows the career of her great-grandfather G. Oliver, his talented wife Islea, and their children. The bandleader and former "Conn man"—a sales representative of the C.G.

A retirement book that finally tells the truth. After forty-seven years in education, including three elected terms as a County Superintendent of Schools, Michael retired in December of 2025 and began writing about the transition while it was still fresh. The result is a warm, unhurried, and quietly funny guide for anyone who is recently retired, about to retire, or quietly wondering whether retirement is going to be the thing they hoped for. This is not a financial planning book.