Best of
Disability

2002

A Smile as Big as the Moon: A Special Education Teacher, His Class, and Their Inspiring Journey Through U.S. Space Camp


Mike Kersjes - 2002
    There was only one problem: this program had been specifically designed for gifted and talented students, the best and the brightest from America's most privileged high schools.Kersjes believed that, given a chance, his kids could do as well as anybody, and with remarkable persistence broke down one barrier after another, from his own principal's office to the inner sanctum of NASA, until Space Camp opened its doors, on an experimental basis, to special ed students. After nine months of rigorous preparation, during which the class molded itself into a working team, they arrived at Space Camp, where they turned in a performance so startling, so surprising, that it will leave the reader breathless. A truly triumphant story of the power of the human spirit.

Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities


Sharon L. Snyder - 2002
    They present 24 articles that seek to integrate (in the widest sense) the study of disability as a subject of critical inquiry and as category of critical analysis in teaching and scholarship and to offer strategies for integrating people with disabilities into the classroom and the profession. The articles are organized into sections that reflect those different goals. The CD-ROM contains XML and ASCII versions of the text, included for persons with visual disabilities. Annotation c. Book News, Inc.,Portland, OR

Miracles Happen: One Mother, One Daughter, One Journey


Brooke Ellison - 2002
    Written with her mother, Jean, her closest companion, Brooke's story starts on the day that changed her life. This inspiring story is not just about one person, but about the heroics of a family.

Turning Suffering Inside Out: A Zen Approach for Living with Physical and Emotional Pain


Darlene Cohen - 2002
    She shares her knowledge in her popular workshops and now in this book. Cohen, who has suffered from rheumatoid arthritis for eighteen years, was hobbling painfully to her local Zen center one day, when she made a discovery that changed her life: if she focused on the foot that was in the air rather than the one that was hitting the pavement, her stamina increased enormously. It was the beginning of a completely different approach to the crippling pain that had beset her for so long. As she demonstrates here, this approach can be expanded to all types of pain: physical, psychological, and spiritual. Cohen—a certified massage and movement therapist and Zen teacher—proposes a radically liberating alternative to the usual desperate search for pain relief: paradoxically, she says, release from suffering lies in paying closer attention to it. When we keep pain at bay, we keep pleasure at bay, too. The two are interdependent, and our ability to experience each is totally dependent on our understanding of the other. "Enrich your life exponentially," Cohen advises. If your pain is one of the ten things you are aware of, then it constitutes a tenth of your total awareness. Expand your awareness to a hundred things, however, and your pain is only a hundredth of your awareness. With stories, strategies, exercises, and an awareness born of long Zen practice, Cohen shows us how to tap into that enrichment—and how we can lead a satisfying and even joyful life in the very midst of pain. This book was published in hardcover under the title Finding a Joyful Life in the Heart of Pain.

The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment


Julia V. Douthwaite - 2002
    Julia V. Douthwaite recounts reports of feral children such as the wild girl of Champagne (captured in 1731 and baptized as Marie-Angélique Leblanc), offering a fascinating glimpse into beliefs about the difference between man and beast and the means once used to civilize the uncivilized.A variety of educational experiments failed to tame these feral children by the standards of the day. After telling their stories, Douthwaite turns to literature that reflects on similar experiments to perfect human subjects. Her examples range from utopian schemes for progressive childrearing to philosophical tales of animated statues, from revolutionary theories of regenerated men to Gothic tales of scientists run amok. Encompassing thinkers such as Rousseau, Sade, Defoe, and Mary Shelley, Douthwaite shows how the Enlightenment conceived of mankind as an infinitely malleable entity, first with optimism, then with apprehension. Exposing the darker side of eighteenth-century thought, she demonstrates how advances in science gave rise to troubling ethical concerns, as parents, scientists, and politicians tried to perfect mankind with disastrous results.

Love and Fatigue in America


Roger King - 2002
    Instead, on arrival, he is stricken with a persistent inability to stand up or think straight, and things quickly go wrong. Diagnosed with ME disease—chronic fatigue syndrome—he moves restlessly from state to state, woman to woman, and eccentric doctor to eccentric doctor, in a search for a love and a life suited to his new condition. The journey is simultaneously brave, absurd, and instructive.    Finding himself prostrate on beds and couches from Los Alamos to Albany, he hears the intimate stories offered by those he encounters—their histories, hurts, and hopes—and from these fragments an unsentimental map emerges of the inner life of a nation. Disability has shifted his interest in America from measuring its opportunities to taking the measure of its humanity. Forced to consider for himself the meaning of a healthy life and how best to nurture it, he incidentally delivers a report on the health of a country.    By turns insightful, comic, affecting, and profound, Roger King’s Love and Fatigue in America briskly compresses an illness, a nation, and an era through masterly blending of literary forms. In a work that defies categorization, and never loses its pace or poise, the debilitated narrator is, ironically, the most lively and fully awake figure in the book.“Remarkable. . . . [S]mart and funny. . . .[A]musing observations about everything American. . . . [T]his is not a traditional novel. . . . [T]his, as it turns out, is a brilliant perspective from which to view and write about life. . . . [G]reat reckonings unfurl in mere paragraphs.”—Jackson Newspapers.com“As the disease drives the narrator city to city, woman to woman, and doctor to doctor, it brings into relief many of America’s follies and excesses, most notably our health-care system, which King portrayed as antiquated, bureaucratic, and inhumane. After more than fifteen years, America brings the narrator ‘not aspiration realized, nor a largeness of life fitting to its open spaces, but the nascent ability to be satisfied with less.’”—The New Yorker

Winning Sounds Like This: A Season with the Women's Basketball Team at Gallaudet, the World's Only University for the Deaf


Wayne Coffey - 2002
    A reporter, not wanting to be insensitive, delicately broaches the obvious question: “How can you play so well despite your hearing impairment?” Nanette Virnig, a forward for Gallaudet, puts him at ease. “We’re not hearing impaired,” she says. “We’re deaf.”Winning Sounds Like This is the remarkable story of the nation’s most unique and inspiring women’s basketball team and its 1999–2000 season. It is the touching chronicle of players who don’t hear buzzers or cheers, a coach who has never used a whistle, and a university that is a mecca for deaf culture throughout the world. Wayne Coffey offers an intimate and unsparing look at the players’ lives on and off the court, their struggles to overcome mistreatment and misconceptions of the hearing world, and their deeply rooted connection to one another.

Between Gardens


Carol Graham Chudley - 2002
    Carol suffered from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, an illness that forced her to alter her active lifestyle. Despite chronic pain and sleep debrivation, she joined Dorothy in recording the cycles of their beloved gardens. She also kept a private record of her illness. A year later, the friends discovered that they had created something infinitely more rich than a garden manual -- they had written a joyous meditation on living with simplicity, faith and integrity.Carol died in the Spring of 1998. Her writing about her illness assumed new meaning, providing a poignant counterpoint to the garden letters. Excerpts were placed alongside the letters; Dorothy's beautiful, full-color artwork -- expressing her perception of the natural world -- was added to the manuscript.With keen observation, Between Gardens speaks of living in the garden's moment -- of tossing seeds, working the soil and reaping what the land loves to grow. It also speaks of friendship and of affirming the spirit. For Carol and Dorothy, this writing was an oasis; for readers it is a gift -- a tribute to life well-lived and the garden growing on.

Exposure Anxiety - The Invisible Cage: An Exploration of Self-Protection Responses in the Autism Spectrum and Beyond


Donna Williams - 2002
    To many it is an invisible cage, leaving the person suffering from it aware, but buried alive in their own involuntary responses and isolation. Exposure Anxiety: The Invisible Cage describes the condition and its underlying physiological causes, and presents a range of approaches and strategies that can be used to combat it. Based on personal experience, the book shows how people with autism can be shown how to emerge from the stranglehold of exposure anxiety and develop their individuality. 1000Practical advise for people with autism who are struggling with exposure anxiety based on the personal experience of the author0200Exposure anxiety is increasingly understood as a crippling condition affecting a high proportion of people on the autism spectrum. Based on personal experience, this book describes the condition and its underlying physiological causes, and presents approaches and strategies that can be used to combat it.0400Introduction: The Invisible Cage. Section 1 - The Mechanics: Faces of Exposure Anxiety. Exposure Anxiety and consciousness. Exposure Anxiety and intelligence. Exposure Anxiety and will. Exposure Anxiety and sensory flooding. Exposure Anxiety, overload, and information processing. Section 2 - Relationship to Self: Exposure Anxiety and body. Exposure Anxiety and emotional expression. Exposure Anxiety and sense of self. Exposure Anxiety and detachment. Exposure Anxiety and empathy. Exposure Anxiety and insight. Exposure Anxiety and personality. Exposure Anxiety and identity. Section 3 - Relationship to Others: Exposure Anxiety and the world. Exposure Anxiety and respect. Exposure Anxiety and trust. Exposure Anxiety and love. Section 4 - the Development of a Social Face: Being 'social': and the nature of 'simply being'. Exposure Anxiety and behaviour. Exposure Anxiety and language. Exposure Anxiety and friendship. Section 5 - Environment: Exposure Anxiety at home. Exposure Anxiety at school. Exposure Anxiety in the playground. Exposure Anxiety and work. Exposure Anxiety and independent living. Exposure Anxiety and adult relationships. Section 6. Ways forward. References. Index.01000301http://www.biblioimages.com/jkp/getim...

Creation of Psychopharmacology


David Healy - 2002
    Healy argues that the discovery of chlorpromazine (more generally known as Thorazine) is as significant in the history of medicine as the discovery of penicillin, reminding readers of the worldwide prevalence of insanity within living memory.But Healy tells not of the triumph of science but of a stream of fruitful accidents, of technological discovery leading neuroscientific research, of fierce professional competition and the backlash of the antipsychiatry movement of the 1960s. A chemical treatment was developed for one purpose, and as long as some theoretical rationale could be found, doctors administered it to the insane patients in their care to see if it would help. Sometimes it did, dramatically. Why these treatments worked, Healy argues provocatively, was, and often still is, a mystery. Nonetheless, such discoveries made and unmade academic reputations and inspired intense politicking for the Nobel Prize.Once pharmaceutical companies recognized the commercial potential of antipsychotic medications, financial as well as clinical pressures drove the development of ever more aggressively marketed medications. With verve and immense learning, Healy tells a story with surprising implications in a book that will become the leading scholarly work on its compelling subject.

Cracked: Recovering After Traumatic Brain Injury


Lynsey Calderwood - 2002
    Nothing felt right. Dazed. Paralyzed by fear, my first instinct was to run but I had nowhere to hide...Voices echoed, ricocheting across the room. I wished they sounded familiar.'At the age of 14, Lynsey Calderwood suffered a traumatic brain injury that left her physically unmarked but destroyed her memory. Thrust back into an apparently nonsensical world of which she had no recollection, Lynsey spiralled downwards into depression and eating disorders as she became socially ostracized.This is the story, in her own words, of Lynsey's quest to discover her identity and, eventually, to come to terms with her disability. She faces devastating setbacks and her sense of loss, grief and rage is movingly recalled. Courage and perseverance, coupled with her engaging sense of humour, see her through; and her tale will be an inspiration to anyone who has faced similar obstacles.

Damned for Their Difference: The Cultural Construction of Deaf People as Disabled


Don Miller - 2002
    Authors Jan Branson and Don Miller examine the orientation toward and treatment of deaf people as it developed from the seventeenth century through the twentieth century. Their wide-ranging study explores the varied constructions of the definition of "disabled," a term whose meaning hinges upon constant negotiation between parties, ensuring that no finite meaning is ever established. Damned for Their Difference provides a sociological understanding of disabling practices in a way that has never been seen before.