"Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha is a poet and essayist whose most recent book, the memoir Dirty River, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the Publishing Triangle's Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction. She is also a long-time member of the disability justice movement, which advocates for the rights of the disabled. In her latest book of essays, Leah writes passionately and personally about disability justice, on subject such as the creation...

January 1988, Martin Pistorius, aged twelve, fell inexplicably sick. First he lost his voice and stopped eating. Then he slept constantly and shunned human contact. Doctors were mystified. Within eighteen months he was mute and wheelchair-bound. Martin's parents were told an unknown degenerative disease left him with the mind of a baby and less than two years to live. Martin was moved to care centers for severely disabled children. The stress and...

The true story of the author's loss of vision as a young woman, and of her adaptation to blindness.

Describes the unbreakable bond between humans and canines through the story of a severely disabled woman who began training her own service dogs after she was deemed “too disabled” to receive one by every agency in the U.S.

"As an Oxford student, Stephen Hawking never expected that people across the world would know his name, or that his hobby of stargazing would lead him to be one of the world's greatest scientists. Stephen Hawking made cosmology, or the study of the universe, accessible to everyone. He was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis at the age of twenty-one, but didn't let that stop him from receiving a graduate degree from Cambridge and going on...

In the first comprehensive history of the links between autism and Nazism, prize-winning historian Edith Sheffer uncovers how a diagnosis common today emerged from the atrocities of the Third Reich. As the Nazi regime slaughtered millions across Europe during World War Two, it sorted people according to race, religion, behavior, and physical condition. Nazi psychiatrists targeted children with different kinds of minds-especially those thought to lack...

More and more people who are terminally ill are choosing assisted suicide. When is it Right to Die? offers a different path with alternatives of hope, compassion, and death with real dignity. Joni Eareckson Tada knows what it means to wrestle with this issue and to wish for a painless solution. For the last 50 years she has been confined to a wheelchair and struggled against her own paralysis. And she sat by the bedside of her dying father, thinking,...

At the ripe age of forty, when Alexis Paige was finally diagnosed with ADHD-Inattentive Type, she rolled her eyes even before the doctor could finish spelling out her new marching orders: "The goal now," he said, "is to learn how to work smart, not hard." "But that doesn't sound like any fun," she said. She was going to have to do this, too-ironically, inexplicably, comically-as she did everything else, the hard way. Part memoir, part craft guide,...

Presents the life of Helen Keller, who was left blind and deaf by a high fever as a toddler but, with the help of her teacher Anne Sullivan, overcame her disabilities to go to college and become an advocate, an inspiration, and a role model for blind and deaf people everywhere.