Social Disabilities

A 25-year-old backcountry wanderer, a man happiest exploring wild places with his dog, Dan Bigley woke up one midsummer morning to a day full of promise. Before it was over, after a stellar day of salmon fishing along Alaska’s Kenai and Russian rivers, a grizzly came tearing around a corner in the trail. Dan barely had time for “bear charging” to register before it had him on the ground, altering his life forever.

Growing Up Disabled in Australia is the fifth book in the highly acclaimed, best-selling Growing Up series. It includes interviews with prominent Australians such as Senator Jordon Steele-John and Paralympian Isis Holt.

Keeping children bodies, minds, and emotions on task just got easier with this new book from self-regulation expert Teresa Garland. Featuring more than 200 practical and proven interventions, strategies, and adaptations for helping children gain more control over their lives. Each chapter provides rich background and theoretical material to help the listener better understand the issues our children face.

Fairy tales shape how we see the world, so what happens when you identify more with the Beast than Beauty? Amanda Leduc looks at fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm to Disney, showing us how they influence our expectations and behaviour and linking the quest for disability rights to new kinds of stories that celebrate difference.

What began as a work injury turned into a four year battle with Workmen's Comp. For those of you who have been fortunate enough to never have had the experience of a work injury, "You're lucky." But the rest of us weren't as fortunate. And, we never thought that our worlds would be turned upside down. Especially from a government agency that is supposed to help us. Well, help is a four-letter word, and they stay as far away from it as possible. At least it seemed that way for me. Injured workers deserve better, and something needs to be done. So, I took my anger, and I'm using it in a ...

Thirteen-year-old Nat Beacon loves a lot of things: her dog Warbucks, her best friend Chloe, and competing on her wheelchair racing team, the Zoomers, to name a few. But there's one thing she's absolutely obsessed with: musicals! From Hamilton to Les Mis, there's not a cast album she hasn't memorized and belted along to. She's never actually been in a musical though, or even seen an actor who uses a wheelchair for mobility on stage. Would someone like Nat ever get cast?

At first glance, Josh Hanagarne seems an improbable librarian. He stands 6'7", competes in strongman contests, and was diagnosed in high school with Tourette's syndrome. But books are his first love - Josh's earliest memories involve fantastic adventures between the pages of Gulliver’s Travels and a passionate infatuation with Fern from Charlotte’s Web. Everything in Josh’s life - from his Mormon upbringing, to finally finding love, to learning to control his tics through lifting - circles back to a close connection with books.

In this follow up to the #1 New York Times bestseller I Funny, middle schooler Jamie Grimm has big dreams of being the best stand-up comic in the world—and he won't let the fact that he's wheelchair-bound stand in his way. After winning the New York state finals in the Planet's Funniest Kid Comic Contest, Jamie's off to Boston to compete in the national semi-finals.

Jadie never spoke. She never laughed, or cried, or uttered any sound. Despite efforts to reach her, Jadie remained locked in her own troubled world - until one remarkable teacher persuaded her to break her self-imposed silence. Nothing in all of Torey Hayden's experience could have prepared her for the shock of what Jadie told her - a story too horrendous for Torey's professional colleagues to acknowledge.

In Brilliant Imperfection, Eli Clare uses memoir, history, and critical analysis to explore cure—the deeply held belief that body-minds considered broken need to be fixed. Cure serves many purposes. It saves lives, manipulates lives, and prioritizes some lives over others. It provides comfort, makes profits, justifies violence, and promises resolution to body-mind loss. Clare grapples with this knot of contradictions, maintaining that neither an anti-cure politics nor a pro-cure worldview can account for the messy, complex relationships we have with our body-minds.

I sincerely believe it is extremely important for legitimately disabled Americans to be cared for in a country that takes pride in helping those who are less-fortunate - not those who are looking for a free ride or for a chance to scam the system but who are truly and sincerely in need. There are policies practiced or enforced by the social security disability program for example that cause deserving applicants to be denied (the main subject of this audiobook) and in some cases, less-deserving or undeserving applicants to be accepted by the same benefits program.

In Imperfect, Jim Abbot retraces his remarkable journey. Born without a right hand, Jim Abbott as a boy dreamed of being a great athlete. Raised in Flint, Michigan, by parents who saw in his condition not a disability but an extraordinary opportunity, Jim became a two-sport standout in high school, then an ace pitcher for the University of Michigan. But his journey was only beginning. By 21, he’d won the gold medal game at the 1988 Olympics and cracked the starting rotation of the California Angels....

There Plant Eyes probes the ways in which blindness has shaped our ocularcentric culture, challenging deeply ingrained ideas about what it means to be “blind”. For millennia, blind­ness has been used to signify such things as thoughtlessness (“blind faith”), irrationality (“blind rage”), and unconsciousness (“blind evolution”). But at the same time, blind people have been othered as the recipients of special powers as compensation for lost sight (from the poetic gifts of John Milton to the heightened senses of the comic book hero Daredevil).

Behind our current caregiving crisis, in which a broken system has left parents and caregivers exhausted, sits a fierce addiction to independence. But what would happen if we started to appreciate dependency, and the deep meaning of one person caring for another? If we start to care about care? With a curiosity and desire to understand more fully one of humanity’s most profound and essential relationships, journalist Elissa Strauss she interrogates our societal obsession with going it alone and poses a challenge to let ourselves be transformed by the act of caregiving.

At age two, Helen Keller became deaf and blind. She lived in a world of silence and darkness and she spent the rest of her life struggling to break through it. But with the help of teacher Annie Sullivan, Helen learned to read, write, and do many amazing things. This inspiring biography is perfect for young middle-grade listeners.

This book addresses the question from theological, practical, and experiential perspectives, giving individuals and families with disabilities the opportunity to voice their needs and suggest some things the rest of us can do to make them welcome in the household of God.

My friend Zack has a disability called autism. But that doesn’t matter to us. We talk about airplanes, build models, and enjoy hanging out at each other’s house. I’m glad Zack is my friend!

Being unstoppable is about believing and achieving. It’s about having faith in yourself, your talents and your purpose and, most of all, in God’s great love and His divine plan for your life. Through stories from his own life and the experiences of many others, Nick Vujicic explains how anyone wanting a “ridiculously good life” can respond to issues to become unstoppable. What’s standing in your way? Are you ready to become unstoppable?

Sentirsi disintegrati è una sensazione che chi lavora con la disabilità conosce bene: la favola dell'inclusione, del non lasciare indietro nessuno, sembra ancora ben lontana dal diventare realtà. A volte bisogna avere il coraggio di "lasciare": cambiare lavoro, direzione, idea. Per far questo è necessario "morire": abbandonare i nostri attaccamenti, i ruoli che ci gratificano, le proiezioni sugli altri, le conferme. Lasciare e andare avanti, aprendosi al nuovo: questo itinerario è difficile perché è perdere se stessi, sentirsi lacerati.

The Awakening of HK Derryberry is the inspiring story of how one man was willing to step out of his upper-middle-class world into the life of a young, disabled boy with a dismal future but an amazing ability. Little did Jim Bradford know the transformational potential of that friendship - for HK and himself.