Biography

At thirteen, bright-eyed, straight-A student Sara Saedi uncovered a terrible family secret: she was breaking the law simply by living in the United States. Only two years old when her parents fled Iran, she didn’t learn of her undocumented status until her older sister wanted to apply for an after-school job, but couldn’t because she didn’t have a Social Security number.

Fear of deportation kept Sara up at night, but it didn’t keep her from being a teenager. She desperately wanted a green card, along with clear skin, her own car, and a boyfriend.

At the age of nineteen, Lara Prior-Palmer discovered a website devoted to "the world's longest, toughest horse race"--an annual competition of endurance and skill that involves dozens of riders racing a series of twenty-five wild ponies across 1,000 kilometers of Mongolian grassland. On a whim, she decided to enter the race. As she boarded a plane to East Asia, she was utterly unprepared for what awaited her. Riders often spend years preparing to compete in the Mongol Derby, a course that re-creates the horse messenger system developed by Genghis Khan, and many fail to finish.

In the tradition of Anthony Bourdain and Linda Greenlaw, a long haul mover's rollicking account of life out on the Big Slab.

Did you know that as a young teen, Sally Ride was a nationally ranked amateur tennis player?  Want to know if Stephen Hawking binge-watched TV as a child?  Would you believe that Manya Sklodowska (that's Marie Curie, by the way) once hung all of a relative's furniture from the ceiling as a practical joke?  The latest installment of this popular series focuses on scientists, including Neil deGrasse Tyson, Temple Grandin, Nikola Tesla, and many more!