Disability Memoir

Beyond What You See is the eagerly awaited sequel to Confessions from Disability Limbo. Author Kevin Nuñez guides listeners through an active spiritual journey spanning from January 2022 to spring 2025, expanding from disability awareness to God awareness. Kevin uses a fun conversational style to lift others beyond their circumstances. After feeling lost for several years, Kevin realized there was more to his life than his physical limitations. His physical weaknesses revealed his strengths.

In this candid, humorous, and insightful book, author, political science lecturer, and “Dudeist Priest” Arch Grieve provides listeners with a first-hand account of the many lessons he has learned (often the hard way) as a person living with bipolar disorder. This guidebook is a must-listen for anyone who has recently been diagnosed with bipolar disorder or knows someone who has.

One fine April day, Mary Ann Kenny’s husband died suddenly while jogging near their family home. In the months that followed, Mary Ann – who had no history of mental illness – began suffering from depression, and then from a terrifying succession of physical and psychological symptoms, including the delusion that her young children had been harmed by her medications.

My Autistic Fight Song is a memoir that follows Rosie Weldon’s journey from a college drop out as she tries to achieve her dream of being a qualified accountant. With the odds stacked against her and the stakes high, she refuses to give up on her dream. Of two things Rosie was sure. First, she wanted to be an accountant. Second, she was destined to be alone. But when life threw at her an autism diagnosis and a mystery girl, she was left asking: Who would employ her and was she capable of falling in love?

When someone would tap along and rescue me from being sandwiched between these two hardbacks, sorry, did I frighten you? You never heard or seen a talking book. Well, me either. The majority of the time, I am the only one in the room, or shall I say, “on the shelf”? So many humans walk right past me, playing blind games by pretending not to see that the struggle is real. Talk about the lack of accessibility.

Rachel Kolb was born profoundly deaf the same year that the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, and she grew up as part of the first generation of deaf people with legal rights to accessibility services. Still, from a young age, she contorted herself to expectations set by a world that prioritizes hearing people. So even while she found clarity and meaning in American Sign Language (ASL) and written literature, she learned to speak through speech therapy and to piece together missing sounds through lipreading and an eventual cochlear implant.

Imagine if you were to lose your sight? Would it feel like the end of everything worthwhile? There is a way forward. Once you realise that blindness is a word and not a sentence, life takes on a new perspective. There are ways to thrive with vision loss. This book reveals how to turn such a life-challenge into a lifestyle you can fully manage and enjoy.

You are more than your limits. Choosing to see herself as more than a person with a disability and wheelchair user, Lolo chooses to live a bold and courageous life now because representation matters. She created this intersectional guide to provide tools for people with disabilities to thrive in personal growth, independence, and community building. Add this guide to your list of inclusion books!

Ruth's tribe are her lively children and her filmmaker husband, Simon, who has motor neurone disease and can communicate only with his eyes. Ruth's other tribe are the friends who gather at the cove in Greystones, Co. Wicklow, and regularly throw themselves into the freezing cold water just for kicks. The Tragic Wives' Swimming Club, as they jokingly call themselves, meet to cope with the extreme challenges life puts in their way, not to mention the monster waves rolling over the horizon.

Texas governor and rising star in the Republican Party - one of the first prominent politicians to govern from a wheelchair since Franklin D. Roosevelt - Governor Greg Abbott pens his deeply personal and inspiring life story and proposes a plan to restore America to greatness in what Newt Gingrich calls a "bold and compelling" read. Texas Governor Greg Abbott lost his ability to walk when a huge oak tree crashed down on his back, fracturing vertebrae into his spinal cord, leaving him forever paralyzed.

Embark on a powerful and inspirational journey with Dawn Green as she battles against the odds in a 35-year-long quest to uncover the truth behind her mysterious and life-threatening health issues. This gripping memoir takes listeners through the highs and lows of an extraordinary life marked by persistence, resilience, and unwavering hope. The book opens with the author's early years, when she first realized that her health was beginning to decline. In succession, a series of perplexing symptoms began to plague her.

CANCER WITHOUT FEAR–A YEAR TO LIVE is the remarkable unconventional story of Chuck Sirko's terminal cancer diagnosis. When Chuck refused mainstream's “Gold Standard of Care”, his wife Jacqueline dedicated herself to researching alternative methods of treatment. The goal: to make Chuck’s remaining time free from any repercussions of radiation and chemotherapy and to live life to the fullest.

Every dyslexic person has their own story. This is my story; my story of discovery. My story of taking ownership and realising that my so-called disability is my greatest gift This is not a conventional audiobook about dyslexia. This is an audiobook about you! You truly conquering your dyslexia, and not being totally reliant on a school, your parents, or other people, but being reliant on yourself. Not letting dyslexia hold you back but push you to become the best version of yourself.

In a series of beautifully textured stories, the author takes the listener on a fascinating journey as she travels with Teela, her lively "golden dog", through airports, city streets, and southwest desert landscapes, exploring these surroundings with changed sight. This unusual account of travel will inspire the sighted as well as the blind, offering pointed observations on processes of learning to work with a service animal and on coming to terms with a disability.

Medical aid in dying has been legal in New Mexico since 2021. This collection of stories about courageous terminally ill adults who have chosen medical aid in dying, is told with compassion and clarity. Dr. Sparks provides the service in New Mexico, one of 10 states, as well as Washington DC, where the practice is legal. NM currently has the most progressive law, and is the model for at least 17 other states seeking passage of similar legislation in 2024.

In Step Out on Nothing, Byron Pitts chronicles his astonishing story of overcoming a childhood filled with obstacles to achieve enormous success in life. Throughout Byron's difficult youth - his parents separated when he was twelve and his mother worked two jobs to make ends meet - he suffered from a debilitating stutter. But Byron was keeping an even more embarrassing secret: He was also functionally illiterate.

Defiant chronicles the remarkable life of Janine Shepherd, an elite ski racer whose bid to represent Australia in the Olympics was cut short by a tragic accident. She recalls the 10 days she hovered between life and death, faced with the difficult choice to let go or return to a body that would never be whole again. Defiant offers hope and encouragement for anyone facing a life challenge, sharing the author's hard-won wisdom and priceless advice for navigating one's way from loss to healing.

This is a story in Victorian England of how in 1884 Frederick Treves, Surgeon and Lecturer in Anatomy at the London Hospital arranged for the "Elephant Man" (whose distorted grotesque face and deformed body made him a "freak") to visit the medical college next to the hospital for the purpose of a lecture. They would later become friends and Treves the savior of the man named John Merrick. This is Treves' memoir.

Often used as a shorthand for tidiness or as the punchline of a joke, OCD is one of society’s most misunderstood disorders and it’s rarely spoken about with such honesty and openness. Beautifully written, moving and often darkly funny, Tuppence recounts what it feels like to share your mind with a nest of scorpions.

Born with cerebral palsy, Geri Jewell inspired a generation of young people when she became the first person with a disability to appear in a recurring role on prime-time television, with her groundbreaking character, Cousin Geri, on the NBC sitcom The Facts of Life. The book's title - I’m Walking As Straight As I Can - has a double meaning, referring to both Jewell's sexuality and her extraordinary struggle growing up with cerebral palsy.