True StoriesTrue story
133 Days Adrift
In 1942, a young ship's steward named Poon Lim found himself alone on a tiny raft in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. He would stay there for more than four months.
SportsBiography
Barefoot in Rome
A shepherd's son from Ethiopia was added to his Olympic team at the last minute. On a torchlit night in Rome in 1960, he ran the marathon with no shoes on.
MotivationBiography
Dancing Again
At sixteen, Sudha Chandran was a rising young classical dancer. Then an accident on the road took her leg. Everyone assumed her dancing days were over. She did not.
FoundersBiography
Sixty-Five and Starting Over
At an age when most people retire, Harland Sanders lost the roadside restaurant he had spent twenty-five years building. He had a pension cheque, an old car and a recipe for fried chicken. So he started again.
MotivationBiography
The Deaf Composer
On a spring evening in Vienna in 1824, a packed theatre heard a new symphony for the first time. The man who wrote it could not hear a single note.
SportsBiography
The Flying Sikh
A boy who lost almost everything in the Partition of India found his way to an army running track, and then to the fastest races in the world.
SportsBiography
The Girl Who Carried Firewood
As a child in Manipur, she lifted a bundle of firewood her older brother could not. Years later, after a painful failure at the Olympics, she lifted India's first medal of the Tokyo Games.
Life LessonsClassic retold
The Last Leaf
A young painter lies ill in a New York studio, counting the leaves on an ivy vine outside her window. When the last one falls, she says, she will go too.
KindnessBiography
The Mother of Orphans
Thrown out of her home at twenty with a newborn baby, Sindhutai Sapkal survived by singing for food at railway stations. Then she began to take in other people's abandoned children.
FoundersBiography
The Mouse That Saved a Studio
Walt Disney's first studio went bankrupt. His second lost its star character and nearly all its artists in a single meeting. On the long train ride home, he needed a new idea, and fast.
FoundersBiography
The Piston Ring
Soichiro Honda was a blacksmith's son who fell in love with engines. His first real product failed almost every test. Then the war destroyed his factory, and an earthquake finished what the bombs began.
For KidsClassic retold
The Ugly Duckling
One egg in the mother duck's nest is bigger than the rest, and the chick that hatches from it looks nothing like his brothers and sisters. Nobody wants him. Not yet.
MotivationTrue story
The Night Edison's Factory Burned
In December 1914, a fire tore through Thomas Edison's laboratory and factories. He was 67, and much of his life's work was in flames. What he did next is the story.
True StoriesTrue story
The 33 Under the Desert
In August 2010, a mine collapsed in Chile's Atacama Desert, trapping 33 men 700 metres underground. For seventeen days, nobody knew if they were alive.
MotivationBiography
Born Again on the Mountain
In 2011, Arunima Sinha lost her leg after being thrown from a moving train. Two years later she stood on the summit of Mount Everest.
KindnessClassic retold
The Bishop's Candlesticks
A hungry ex-convict, turned away by every inn, is welcomed by a kind old bishop, and repays him by stealing his silver. The famous scene from Victor Hugo's Les Misérables.
MotivationFable & folk tale
The King and the Spider
Defeated, hunted and hiding in a cave, King Robert the Bruce of Scotland was ready to give up. Then he watched a spider try, and fail, and try again.
MotivationOriginal story
The Day a Rejection Became a New Beginning
Anaya had planned her whole future around one letter. When it said no, she discovered that the door she'd been staring at was not the only one in the room.
For KidsOriginal story
Mira and the Experiment That Failed
Mira's seeds were supposed to grow faster with music. When nothing happened, she thought she had failed, until her grandfather showed her what a real scientist does next.