In accordance with her Sicilian Catholic family’s unspoken code, Paolina Milana learned at an early age to keep her secrets locked away where no one could find them. Nobody outside the family needed to know about the voices her Mamma battled in her head; or about how Paolina forged her birth certificate at thirteen so she could get a job at The Donut Shop; or about the police officer twenty-six years her senior whose promise to her Papà to “keep an eye on her” quickly translated into something s...
What happens to sibling relationships when your older sister, the budding poet you loved and admired as a child, falls prey to severe mental illness? When Deborah Kasdan’s sister returns from a gap year in Israel she seems to glow with health and beauty. In three years, however, Rachel is committed to a psychiatric hospital. The diagnosis: schizophrenia. In clear and vivid prose, and with the help of Rachel’s letters and poetry, Deborah provides a poignant look at a mid-century Jewish family und...
At the age of thirty, just as everything was falling into place for him, Lee Pesky died of brain cancer. For his father, Alan, grief came with the realization that he had lost the chance to love Lee as he was-not as he wanted him to be. Ambitious, successful, and always striving for more, Alan had a hard time relating to a son who struggled with learning disabilities at a time when there was little understanding or help for kids who had them. Their relationship was complicated, and now, Lee was...
In his twentieth book, most of which was first composed on the backs of medical forms while on break as a third-shift medical technician, Sean Thomas Dougherty brings us a memoir-like prose sequence reflecting on disability, chronic illness, addiction, survival, love, and parenthood. In Death Prefers the Minor Keys, Dougherty offers the reader collaged prose poems, stories and essays full of dreams, metaphors, aphorisms, parables and narratives of his work as a caregiver. Moving portraits of...
Henry David Thoreau and Two Other Autistic Lives
by Gilbert Wesley Purdy
Autobiography of a Face [Thirtieth Anniversary Edition]
by Lucy Grealy
With humor and openness she describes her denial of his deafness, her frustrations in dealing with family and experts, and her ultimate decision to put her son in a special school. Parents of all children will identify with both the joys and problems Forecki has experienced.
Janet Shaw was adopted as a baby. At thirteen months, she was diagnosed as having an inherited condition - a malignant cancer called retinoblastoma. While she was still a baby, she had one eye removed and had radiotherapy to her other eye. There was very little expectation that she would survive or ever lead a normal life. But the young girl never regarded herself as a blind person. She had partial sight and supportive parents so when the authorities insisted she go to Blind School (the Red Door...
This book tells the stories of nine disabled leaders who, by force of personality and concrete achievement, have made us think differently about disability. Whatever direction they have come from, they share a common will to change society so that disabled people get a fair deal. There are compelling biographies of:· Sir Bert Massie: public servant· Lord (Jack) Ashley: Labour politician· Rachel Hurst: activist and campaigner· Tom Shakespeare: academic· Phil Friend: entrepreneur and business cons...
An explosive book that exposes the abuses of institutionalization. "How many brothers and sisters do you have?" It was one of the first questions kids asked each other when Catherine McKercher was a child. She never knew how to answer it. Three of the McKercher children lived at home. The fourth, her youngest brother, Bill, did not. Bill was born with Down syndrome. When he was two and a half, his parents took him to the Ontario Hospital School in Smiths Falls and left him there. Like thousand...
Cabin 135 (Alaska Literary) (UAP - The Alaska Literary)
by Katie Eberhart
As a young adult, Katie Eberhart moved to Cabin 135, a house on a knoll in remote Alaska. Over the next decade, growing up and growing into her home, she found herself thinking through her ever-changing ideas about aging and place, a lot of which were wrapped up closely in her experience of living in the house itself. Cabin 135 provided shelter and security, and it also offered lessons on economic disruptions and how ideas of normalcy change. In these pages, we share Eberhart’s experience of dig...